Archangel's Viper (Guild Hunter 10)

The recently emancipated vampire with quick dark eyes and dark hair had been cheeky in setting up shop so near Raphael’s stronghold, but he’d quickly created a number of high-powered fans. She’d seen angels swooping down to grab a pretzel before flying back up.

Today, she diverted from her course to grab one for herself. No bounty hunter was going to try to kidnap her with an entire angelic squadron within earshot of a scream; hair damp and expressions committed, they were seated on railingless balconies relatively low down on the Tower. A blue-winged angel with eyes of extraordinary gold and black hair tipped in blue—Illium—hovered in front of them.

Post-combat-training discussion, Holly thought, having seen the same sight multiple times since she’d moved into the Tower. The latter fact made her parents so proud they dropped it “casually” into any conversation with even a faint bearing on the matter.

Oh, our Mia? She’s a doctor now. And our Holly works for the Tower. She took her brothers to visit her apartment—she has an apartment right in the Tower, did I forget to mention that?—and well, the two couldn’t stop talking about it.

“My first customer of the day!” The pretzel seller beamed at Holly when she stopped in front of his cart. “Had to start late today—trouble with my cart, wouldn’t you know it, but here you are before I even finish my setup.” His hands moved quickly to half wrap the pretzel in greaseproof paper. “You get a free pretzel for being a good omen.”

Holly accepted the gift with a grin, reminded of her dad. Allan Chang had been known to give his first customer of the day a fifty percent discount. “Ready for the post-training rush?” That entire angelic squadron would soon descend on him.

“It never ends, cutie.” A wink. “It never ends.”

Holly bit into the soft, chewy pretzel as she waved good-bye and continued on toward the Legion building. Stopping halfway, she gave her dad a call to touch base, exchanged comments with her gorgeous little brothers—who, at five foot eight and five foot nine, weren’t actually so little anymore—over their favorite social media platforms, then messaged her mom. Daphne Chang loved the text app on her phone.

Is your hair still a rainbow? was the reply.

Yes, Mom.

You have such lovely black hair, Holly. I just don’t understand you girls.

I love you, too.

Her mom sent back five rows of heart emojis.

Laughing, Holly pocketed her phone. She’d talk to Mia later in the day, as her sister had done a night shift for her first day on the job and was probably asleep right now.

She made it to the Legion building without being stopped, though she had no doubts the Legion were watching. They sat like gargoyles on buildings a lot of the time, silent and unmoving. People often forgot they were there until they opened their batlike wings and flew off.

“Hmm.” She stared at the bottom of the building. If it had once had doors, those doors had long ago been sealed up. The bottom three floors had no exits or entrances that she could see, and were covered in green from the plants crawling up and down and growing outward from the wall itself, as if the walls had somehow been turned into vertical patches of soil.

She took another bite of the pretzel as she considered her options. Before she could put her plan into action, however, her skin prickled. But when she looked around, no one was there.

So she looked up.

10

Venom was standing high up on a railingless Tower balcony, so high up that she couldn’t see anything of his features, especially with the misty rain blurring her vision—but she knew it was him. The way he stood, the way his suit so impeccably fit his body, it was pure Venom. And she knew he had his eyes on her; the rainbow hair was pretty and it made her happy, but it wasn’t exactly good for blending in.

Holly thought about waking up on his stone floor, of the honey in her veins after their insane sparring session, and knew that way led trouble. Dangerous, deadly trouble washed in sin. She made herself look away, forced her mind back to the problem of how to get into the Legion building.

Her free hand tingled at that instant.

She looked down . . . and saw her skin fading in and out. “No,” she whispered, curling her fingers into her palm to hide what was happening as she deliberately continued to eat her pretzel.

Nothing strange here, people, just a woman staring at the Legion building while stuffing her face as tiny droplets of rain dotted her hair and skin. Perfectly normal. Lots of people stared at the Legion building. The tourist buses didn’t dare cross the Tower’s territorial boundaries, but the non-Tower buildings lucky enough to have a direct view of part of the Legion building made good money renting out their roofs so the tourists could gawp at the beauty of a building bursting with greenery in the center of one of the most cosmopolitan cities on the planet.

Pretzel eaten and her misbehaving hand fully visible again, she put the scrunched-up wrapper in her pocket, then walked over to the thickest-looking vine and, taking a strong grip on greenery turned slick by the rain, began to climb. Her bones went liquid, her instincts sharpened, and her breath changed. She climbed like this was what she’d been born to do—and it wasn’t the human part of her that was in charge.

Exhilarated by how easy it was to scale the building, she didn’t care.

I’m not strong because I leash my impulses. I’m strong because I use those impulses.

Maybe Venom was right when it came to certain aspects of who she’d become . . . but Holly knew there were also things inside her that should never be set free.

When she reached the balcony in front of the opening on the fourth floor that functioned as both an exit and an entrance—a large section with transparent hanging flaps of thick, heavy plastic that she figured must help maintain the temperature within—she straightened up and said, “Hello? Can I come in?” It wasn’t polite to just invite yourself into someone’s house.

If no one answered, she’d climb back down and try again another day.

But one of the Legion landed beside her in deathly silence. Her heart thumped. “Good afternoon.”

Rising up from his crouch, he looked at her with eyes translucent but for an outer ring of blue, his hair the same midnight as Raphael’s, and his face too flawless. He appeared . . . unfinished in some strange way. As if life hadn’t yet put a mark on him. And yet, paradoxically, the sense of age that clung to him made her bones ache.

Angling his head slightly to the left in a way that simply wasn’t human, he said, “What are you?”

Holly fought the urge to touch his face, discover if he was warm or cold. “That’s the million-dollar question.” Suddenly remembering that the Legion were meant to be thousands upon thousands of years old, she said, “Do you know the answer?”

A slow shake of his head, his utter calm unnerving. “We are losing memories as we exist in this time and this place, but it isn’t only memory that makes us. We have knowledge woven into our bones.”

“And what does that knowledge tell you?”

“That you are new.” He cocked his head deeper to the side—she was almost afraid he was going to do that thing owls did and turn his head upside down. “But you are old, too, though not yet fully awake.”

Holly swallowed hard. “The otherness inside me, what is it?”

“You and not you.” With that cryptic statement that made her want to shake him, the Legion being turned away, folding his wings neatly to his back. “You are new. You can come inside. My brethren will wish to see you.”

Though she suddenly felt like a science exhibit, Holly’s curiosity nonetheless compelled her to move forward. A wash of humid air hit her face the instant she walked through the flaps behind him. That made sense, if— “Holy crap.” She felt her mouth drop open, her eyes widen.

The entire building had been hollowed out except for levels that jutted out here and there. Thick vines twisted up the sides, ferns grew from impossible angles, flowers bloomed in giant clumps, and below her feet was the thickest moss she’d ever felt. When she looked down to the ground floor, she saw trees heavy with pink and orange fruit. There was no sense of rot, of fallen leaves or fruit ever left forgotten. The scent in the air was a fresh amalgam of green and light and growth.