The small room hummed with so much power that Venom’s bones ached with it.
“My love.” Holly’s mouth but not her voice, the acid glow of her eyes locked with Michaela’s. “You betrayed me.”
Michaela’s hair blew back in a wind that affected no one else in the room. “You are not him.” It was a flat statement . . . but a hidden and oddly fragile note sang underneath.
Need? Want?
Was it possible the Archangel of Budapest had truly loved the archangel who had taken over Holly’s body? The same man whose territory she’d claimed a large part of in the aftermath of his death?
Holly responded in a language Venom didn’t recognize. Michaela clearly did, her cold expression crumbling into a shock so harrowingly naked that it could only be real.
Sire. Venom reached out to Raphael with his mind.
Do not intercede, Venom, Raphael ordered, the pristine blue of his gaze focused on the disturbing tableau being played out in front of them. We must understand what this is to know how to end it.
Venom couldn’t see anything that a rational being would ever understand, but he’d trusted Raphael with his life for centuries. Now, he trusted the sire with Holly’s. She would rather die than live as Uram’s puppet, he said. If that is the only choice, we must end her. The words were like shards of glass in his throat.
I have promised your Holly this, Venom. I will not forget.
Because this was Raphael, an archangel forged in honor and tempered by a love that had shoved back the ice of immortality, Venom held his silence. And forced himself to listen to a dead and insane archangel’s words coming from the mouth of the woman to whom Venom had handed his heart with full knowledge that she would soon break it.
• • •
Raphael had killed Uram above the ruined skyscrapers of Manhattan, building after building falling during their battle, the wreckage crashing to litter the streets below. He knew the archangel was dead. But the man Raphael had once called a friend had also been six thousand years old and had spent over half of those years as an archangel.
A member of the Cadre could come back to life even after being blown into a million small pieces . . . but only if he hadn’t been killed by angelfire utilized by another archangel.
Raphael’s angelfire had obliterated Uram. His heart. His mind. His body. Whatever inhabited Holly Chang’s body, it wasn’t Uram. But as he’d told Venom, they had to watch first. Even as he thought that, he knew what he was asking from this member of his Seven. In all the years that he’d known Venom, he’d never once seen the other man look at anyone as he looked at this small woman Raphael had first met as a brutalized victim.
It was the same way Raphael looked at Elena.
“Are you certain?” Uram’s voice asked from Holly’s mouth. “You feel me.” She turned her gaze to the crib. “You kept a part of me safe until I could retrieve it.”
Michaela shook her head, her wings spreading and beginning to glow. “You are dead.”
“Then why do you keep this piece of me?” It was a sinuous whisper, Holly running her fingers along the power lattice without being affected by it. “Why do you protect it?”
Raphael’s healing gift had confirmed that Michaela wasn’t pregnant the time she’d tried to fool him that she was, but it appeared she’d . . . birthed the thing in the crib at some point afterward. So either his gift hadn’t recognized what Venom called the “unbeing” as life, or Michaela had been playing games back then and the seed Uram had left hidden in her had begun to grow much later, fed by the rising power of the Cascade.
“You are dead!” With that shaken shout, Michaela raised a hand ringed with deadly energy. Before she could release it, however, Holly spoke again in a language Raphael didn’t immediately recognize. It was old. Very old. And had been used only in a small area of Europe over a thousand years earlier. Raphael hadn’t spent enough time there to have learned it well, but he’d picked up just enough during his friendship with Uram to translate the words.
“We danced above Szeged the first time.”
Michaela’s fire died.
Trembling, she stared at Holly. “Uram?” The whisper held so much hope it was a keen of sound.
Raphael was near certain it was Michaela’s poisonous whispers that had either encouraged or pushed Uram to make the decision that had led to his madness. But at that moment, he was also sure that part of Michaela had loved the fallen archangel with whom she’d been for five decades.
Uram said a word Raphael couldn’t translate, but the caressing tone of it was unmistakable. Michaela just stared, her chest heaving. “Uram?” she whispered again. “Have you returned to me in truth?”
Her eyes went to the crib and its monstrous inhabitant that still did not register as alive to Raphael’s healer senses. “I thought this was all I’d ever have of you. I hoped you’d grow under the influence of the Cascade, become yourself in time.”
“You were right to wait,” said the being inhabiting Holly. “It is time for me to be whole.” Slender fingers running over the power lattice once again. “Undo this, my sweet.”
Swallowing, Michaela raised her hand.
• • •
Holly felt as if she was struggling through molasses. Her mind was heavy and slow. Her limbs heavier and impossible to move. But she fought. If she died, it wouldn’t be because she’d goddamn given up. This was her body, her mind. And her fucking heart!
That heart loved her siblings, her mother and father . . . Venom. As that heart had once loved five girls a monster had tortured and murdered.
Shelley.
Cara.
Maxie.
Rania.
Ping.
The bastard who’d butchered them didn’t deserve a second life, a second chance, even if he had somehow found a way to return from the grave. He didn’t get to live happily ever after with his lover while her friends rotted in their graves, their last moments on this planet full of horror and pain.
Her rage and grief gave her strength enough to grab hold of a little more of her mind.
“You were right to wait,” the ghost of Uram was saying through Holly’s mouth. “It is time for me to be whole.” Her fingers caressing the power lattice, neutralizing its power but unable to breach the obstacle. “Undo this, my sweet.”
The words came to Holly’s ears through a thick barrier that dulled the words to a flat monotone, but she understood their meaning. She had to keep listening, had to keep learning. Because she was inside him. Or he was inside her. She didn’t know. She had to know.
Holly fought desperately for a foothold that would keep her from sinking into the darkness again, but she was battling the echo of an archangel. Even far less than whole, he was powerful. And—
Oh, that was the answer. She’d had it all along. Uram wasn’t coming back to life. He couldn’t. Raphael had destroyed all the essential parts of him. She’d watched the footage of that destruction—caught by countless amateur videographers—over and over. She’d talked to people who’d been there that day, who’d seen Raphael wipe Uram out of existence.
Nothing had remained of the Angel of Blood.
This otherness that was trying to steal her body and mind was exactly what she’d thought—an echo, a lost fragment. Glimmers of memory, flashes of thought, bursts of impulse . . . but, now that she was paying attention and looking carefully, she got no sense of an actual whole person. If he had been whole, Holly would be erased by now. An archangelic mind was simply too powerful for anyone but another archangel to resist.
Which all meant this echo could never exist as a whole being outside of Holly and that terrible thing in the crib, no matter what it thought in its ghostly madness. But it looked like Michaela was ready to believe in the same madness.
Holly could forgive her that, even understand it.
Love had a way of making you a little insane.
Viper green eyes in her vision, Venom staring at her from near Michaela. He hadn’t been standing there earlier. He must’ve moved while Uram totally controlled her vision, to put himself in her direct line of sight, exactly as she’d asked him to do.
No one had eyes like Venom.