Venom took a deep breath, reached for the ice coldness of the creatures who’d marked him, and flicked again.
The rope slithered down, the hook falling.
Catching it, he wound up the rope and hooked it onto his backpack, careful to do so in a way that wouldn’t hurt Holly when he threw her over his shoulder. Which he did the next minute. She groaned partway through his run through the orchard but he didn’t stop. And when he ran into a guard, he mesmerized the vampire without thought, giving the male much the same instruction Holly had the other guard: You saw nothing but a cat. There were no intruders.
He was gone a heartbeat later, lost in the darkness. He made it to the treeline using viper speed, timing his bursts of movement to avoid sweeps by the angels flying overhead. He didn’t stop even once under the tree canopy. Though he usually only used his speed in sporadic bursts, tonight he ran full tilt for as long as his body could bear it.
It wasn’t an endless period. He was only three hundred and fifty or so years old and yet growing into his power. When he finally came to a standstill and looked back, he could see the stronghold, but it was a toy castle now, the distance he’d put between the unbeing in the crib and Holly a significant one.
“Venom.”
Releasing Holly from over his shoulder at that sluggish sound, he sat her down with her back to a tree and cupped her face in his hands. “Talk to me, kitty.” It came out a plea.
She lifted her hand to weakly close over his wrist. “Where . . .” Her voice was a rasp.
“Wait.” Shrugging off his pack, he took out a bottle of water, helped her wet her throat. “Is that better?”
A faint nod, her head turning in the direction of the stronghold. “I can still feel it.” Her chest glowed.
“Can you fight?”
A taut moment before she nodded. “Yes. He’s not in my head as much.” Another breath that sounded too rough, not quite right, the damage to her throat obvious.
Cold deep inside in a way that had nothing to do with his Making, Venom stroked tendrils of hair off her face. “We need to check your chest and stomach.” He’d known he was hurting her further by carrying her over his shoulder, but it had been the only way to get her to safety.
Holly didn’t fight him when he unzipped her jacket and gently pulled up the black top she wore underneath. The only mercy was that the blood hadn’t dried, so he wasn’t ripping the fabric off her. He didn’t need a flashlight to see the damage—her chest glowed acid green, illuminating her skin.
Cracks spread out across that skin.
Her heart was the epicenter of the bloody quake.
Venom’s fangs shoved against his lower lip, not because of the scent of her blood—though Holly did smell very good—but because seeing her hurt, in pain, it did things to him he hadn’t permitted anyone to do for centuries. She was fragile, Holly.
Venom didn’t hang around fragile people.
He lifted his wrist to her mouth. “Drink.”
Her eyes met his, the pain in them searing. “I’ve taken blood from you more than once already.” A scowl that made her seem herself again. “You can’t be weak if we’re going to survive.”
Venom chuckled, the knots of his muscles easing slightly. “It’d take more than a couple of bites from you to weaken me.”
When she continued to hesitate, the stubborn line to her jaw one with which he was intimately familiar, he reached into his pack and pulled out a bottle of blood in an insulated carrier. “Courtesy of Ashwini. She said I might need it.” Elena’s hunter friend—and Janvier’s wife—had what Venom’s mother would’ve called “the third eye,” so Venom hadn’t fought the extra weight created by the two insulated bottles.
“Drink it first,” Holly ordered, her breathing uneven. “I’d rather . . . I don’t like drinking like that.”
Not about to waste time arguing when she was hurting, Venom screwed the top off the bottle and began to gulp it down . . . only to rip it from his mouth with a curl of his lip. “It’s flavored.”
Holly’s lips curved, a spark in her eyes. “What flavor?”
He brought the hideous thing back to his lips, took a sip. “Spiced.” And, he grudgingly accepted, the taste wasn’t so bad. He drank more. And thought of home. Of the warmth of the inn’s large kitchen as his mother threw cinnamon and cloves and cardamom into the pot during Diwali. The Festival of Lights, full of color and joy and the sweetest of scents, had always been his favorite time of the year.
Holly reached out to clasp her hand over his, her grip weak but steadfast. “What is it?”
Venom didn’t talk about his past. It was long buried and turned to dust. But at that moment, with the spices lingering on his tongue and the memories uncurling with warm stealth inside him, he couldn’t stay silent. “Home,” he whispered. “This blood reminds me of home.” His smile was a thing formed of equal parts sadness and happiness. “Long ago.”
“Let me taste.”
He didn’t give her the bottle. Leaning forward, he pressed his lips to hers. Her free hand coming up to lie against his cheek, she accepted his gentle kiss and when they drew apart, her eyes were wet. “You miss it.”
“Yes. Sometimes.” New York was his home now. It was where his family lived—the Seven, Raphael, Janvier, even a few of the younger idiots, but part of him would always be that boy who’d come to adulthood in an inn on the Silk Road. The hot air, the sound of voices raised in conversation in a thousand distinct dialects and languages, the color and chaotic wildness of it, the piercing starlight so far out from the smoke and dust of a large city, the memories would live in him forever.
“Can you go back?”
Holly had no idea what she was asking. He shook his head. “Not home. I can’t go home.”
Her fingers tightened on his.
“But I can go to India,” he said, brushing back her hair again. “Neha likes me. She calls me and Janvier her Charm and Guile. We have never figured out which one of us is which.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to India,” Holly said on another shaky breath. “And to China. My great-grandparents came from a place called Xi’an.”
“We’ll go.” With that promise, Venom brushed his fingers down her bruised throat. “I’m sorry.”
Catching his hand, she pressed a kiss of unexpected sweetness to his palm. “I’m not. Thank you for helping me stay Holly. Now drink.”
Venom finished off the bottle of blood that held some magic that had made him speak of the past—and thought deliberately of the future he wanted, the future he’d fight to the death to win. “On our trip to India,” he said, “we’ll ride a motorcycle through the streets of Delhi, dodging bullocks pulling carts, and spindly rickshaws, and pretentious vampires in town cars, and we’ll surprise Neha with you. We’ll just have to be careful she doesn’t try to keep you.”
Holly’s fangs sank into his wrist when he held it up. She cradled that wrist as if it was a precious thing that could be hurt. So strange, was Holly. She made his heart hurt in ways that he’d have thought were impossible. But as she drank, he saw the cracks in her body begin to heal inch by inch.
She drank more than she normally would, and when she flicked her tongue over the wound to help it heal, she did so with utmost gentleness. He smiled. “Careful, kitty. You start being nice to me and I’ll begin to think you like me.”
“I’ll consider it, Viper Face.”
Grinning, because she was back, he rose and held out a hand. “Can you move?”
She accepted his help and slowly got up, then flexed as slowly. “Yes,” she said at last. “I feel bruised and the flesh on my chest and abdomen is new and fragile, but I’m not weak. I’ll just have to be careful not to tear open the wounds.”
He’d been going through the pack as she spoke. “Here,” he said, having found the long-sleeved black T-shirt she’d brought along as a change. “We need to clean the blood off you, too.”
Taking off her jacket, she stripped off her bloody top. Then she used water from a nearly empty bottle to sponge off the dried blood. “Am I clean?”