Holly couldn’t think about her brothers and sister without emotion overwhelming her in a crushing wave. And when it came to Venom, she simply couldn’t think about it, full stop. She’d done a terrible thing. She’d brought him out of the self-protective cocoon in which he’d existed for three hundred and fifty years only to teach him that he should’ve stayed deep within it.
The woman who came after her would have one hell of a job getting through the carapace he’d grow around himself. Because Venom’s dirty secret was that he loved too long, too hard, too much. “Promise me,” she whispered.
“What?”
“That you’ll love again.”
A deadly stillness in his muscles. “Focus on the glamour, kitty.”
Holly went to respond when a large angelic squadron flew right overhead. She froze despite herself, only continuing forward when they didn’t so much as glance in her direction. The sleek Abyssinian cats did, however, prowling up and hissing from a distance, but those cats were too far below the squadrons for the angels to hear and become suspicious.
Her arm began to tremble around Venom as they walked into the stronghold through the open front entrance, her entire body taut enough to snap and the hard-faced guards on either side blind to their passage.
His own arm came around her waist, strong and warm and unwavering.
Hold, girl.
Gritting her teeth at the aristocratic command, Holly fought not to throw up. Whatever part of Uram lived in her, it was growing stronger inside her, becoming more and more a separate personality.
The walk up the stairs to the mezzanine floor was an exercise in brazen confidence. She and Venom passed within inches of a tall vampire so powerful she made the hairs rise on the back of Holly’s neck. The well-built blonde woman frowned, stopped, and looked around, her hand on the hilt of her sword . . . before finally shaking her head and continuing on down the stairs.
Holly had been aware of Venom going dead silent beside her, even as he reached back a hand to close it over the hilt of one of the two blades he wore on his back.
Now, he relaxed his ready stance and they carried on without bloodshed.
Only to enter the mezzanine and find an angel standing directly in front of the turret door. The angel, his wings white streaked by gray, wasn’t looking at them, couldn’t see them. But Holly could feel the pulse of his power buffeting her even from halfway across the floor.
Venom spoke right against her ear. “He’s mine.”
Removing her arm with exquisite care once they were only a foot away from the suddenly tautly alert angel, Holly tapped Venom’s back once to let him know she was about to drop the glamour . . . and then she did. The angel’s hand moved with predator speed to the hilt of his sword, his body reacting even before his mind understood what it was he’d seen. Venom, however, had already mesmerized him.
It wasn’t, Holly quickly realized, in any way an easy capture.
Venom’s opponent was strong—and he was fighting the compulsion. It was there in the rigid line of his jaw, the locked fury of his muscles. A vein pulsed in Venom’s temple. She could tell he was using every ounce of his power to force the angel to move away from the door step by single excruciating step.
There. Just enough of a gap to get to the door.
Breaking the lock with a pulse of power, Holly stepped inside. Venom slipped in viper fast behind her; shutting the door, he held the broken lock in position. “I managed to cloud the guard’s mind,” he murmured to her. “He shouldn’t remember us, but he was too strong to fool totally. He’ll feel—”
The doorknob was tested right then from the other side. Venom made sure it moved only as much as it would have had the lock been unbroken. The angel stopped, as if satisfied the lock was as it should be. But Venom didn’t step away, despite the urgency of their task. Three painfully slow minutes later, the doorknob was tested again.
Only after that test was over did Venom release the doorknob and nod at her to go ahead. Holly had had to fight the compulsion to race up the entire time they’d stood waiting for the guard to be satisfied. No way had she been about to leave Venom alone to face an angel who had to be a couple of thousand years old at least and powerful with it.
But the defiance had taken everything she had.
The otherness in her an icy rush through her veins, she flowed up the steps as if she were made of living acid. Even Venom, fast as he was, couldn’t keep up with her. She’d broken the foolish padlock and was in the turret room almost before she was aware of taking the first step.
The host inside the crib glowed in time with the beat of her heart and that was as it should be. It was part of him. And he was an archangel.
He was Uram.
35
Venom had never seen anything move like Holly had just moved. She’d been untrackable with the eye—and he had better tracking senses than most beings on the planet. He was out of breath when he reached her.
Horror slammed into him like a concrete fist.
She stood staring down at the crib; behind her glowed acid green wings spread wide. Those serrated wings made of illusion and power reached the floor, were angelic in size. And they were held with warrior control.
Her head jerked toward him at that instant. “You,” she said, and her voice wasn’t hers. It was deeper, masculine, the tone arrogant with age and power. “Open the roof.”
Open the roof?
Venom looked up, and spotted what he hadn’t during their first incursion. The entire ceiling came together like a jigsaw, with locks designed to fall in place. Now the narrow staircase made sense. Michaela had never come up those stairs. Looking around, he quickly found the control—it was easy to see once you knew it must be present in a position Michaela could easily access once inside. Before, he’d dismissed it as just another light switch.
Michaela must have a remote to open it from the outside.
He glanced at Holly as he reached the switch and, though it enraged him to see her swallowed up by a mad being who should be long dead, he played the game. For better or worse, this would finish here today. That was what Holly wanted, and Venom would do anything for Holly, this strange, wild, beautiful creature who’d come into his life and taught him that it was all right to be weird and different. That you could be loved not in spite of it all, but simply because you were you.
“Should I do it at once, Archangel?” He made his tone respectful, as it should be when addressing the man he served. Uram wasn’t his sire, would never hold that position of respect and honor in his heart, but he was talking to a madness. And that madness gave him a pleased smile and an incline of the head.
Venom pushed the button, turning his face skyward.
He glimpsed Raphael and Michaela at the same time that they became aware of the roof splitting apart like a huge metal flower, the “petals” slowly rising up and away from the central point. The two archangels were almost directly above, though some distance up. Michaela dropped first, spreading out her stunning wings to control her rapid descent; her hair flew up in a tumble of mahogany and dawn-kissed gold behind her.
She was exquisitely beautiful and brilliantly powerful and she did nothing for Venom. This same archangel had once thrown him so violently against a wall that she’d broken his spine, fractured his skull, one of his ribs piercing his lung to collapse it. But that wasn’t the reason he wasn’t drawn to her. From the instant he first met her, he’d known there was something wrong with Michaela. A vital piece missing.
His eyes went to his sire. Raphael was descending directly behind Michaela, clearly having realized the roof wasn’t big enough to allow the two of them to enter at the same time. His wings were white gold and powerful, the Legion mark on his right temple a violent blue lit with incandescent white fire against the midnight shade of his hair.
When Venom looked over to Holly, he saw that her eyes, too, had turned skyward.
The smile on her face was a mix of pride, love, and rage.
Overlaying it all was unadulterated arrogance.
Venom had never once witnessed that particular fault in Holly. If anything, she wasn’t as conscious of her strength and skills as she should be. And that depth of arrogance? It took eons of unchallenged supremacy to develop.
A wash of wind buffeted his face as Michaela landed, snapping her wings shut behind her. She’d seen Venom but ignored him in favor of facing Holly over the lattice of power that protected the crib, a lattice that had flickered to bronze life before Venom ever entered the room. The archangel’s eyes grew wide, her lips parting, but Raphael landed before she could speak.