Archangel's Viper (Guild Hunter 10)

Thank God the elevator doors were opening. Because the cold reminder to her psyche wasn’t exactly working to calm the electric response of her body. Stepping out in front of him, she began to stride her way to the end of the corridor.

“Hollyberry, where are you going?”

She threw him a frowning look over her shoulder. “Daisy’s in the isolation ward at the end.” The Tower had built that ward after the Falling.

“How do you know?” Venom angled his head to the side in a way that wasn’t human.

Holly parted her lips to reply . . . and had no answer. “Where else would they put her?” she said through a suddenly parched throat, her heart pounding.

“But you’re not guessing, are you? You know.”

“I can feel her,” Holly admitted, realizing it was pointless to try to hide her reaction if she wanted to get to the bottom of the connection between her and the emaciated vampire.

“Smell? Sound? How?”

Shaking her head, Holly lifted a hand to a point between her heart and her stomach. Fisting it, she bumped that spot. “Here. I feel her here—like she’s calling to me.”

“I go first.” Venom’s face was hard. “If there is something wrong with her, you’re the more vulnerable.”

Holly didn’t even think about what she was doing—it wasn’t a conscious decision at all. It was driven by the thing inside her. She pivoted on her foot and she ran. She had to get to Daisy first. Had to—

A strong arm around her waist, lifting her off her feet. Then Venom threw her harder than Ashwini or Janvier or Dmitri ever would. Hard enough that she flew back down the corridor . . . and connected with a wall in a liquid slide. None of her bones broke, nothing bruised, her body ending up in a crouch on the carpet in a way that had her blinking as she snapped back into control.

“What just happened?” she whispered half to herself, half to the man who was watching her from the other end of the corridor.

His fangs flashed. “Don’t try that again or I’ll really throw you.”

Holly rose to her feet, and it felt as if she was melting her bones back into place. “This is seriously weird. Why am I not in pieces?” She moved gingerly toward Venom, afraid she’d imagined the whole thing.

“You trusted your instincts.” Turning his back to her, Venom began to stride toward the isolation chamber.

Deep as Holly’s confusion was about what had just occurred—both her mad flight in Daisy’s direction and her subsequent liquid fall—she ran to catch up. But this time, she stopped a footstep to Venom’s left. She had no desire to be thrown again when she didn’t know how she’d saved herself the first time.

Not sure the thing inside her would behave, however, she took Venom’s hand.

He didn’t question why she was reaching out to him voluntarily, just wrapped his fingers firmly around hers. Warm and strong, his hand held a power that told her she wouldn’t be breaking free; for once, Holly was glad of a leash. Losing her mind and acting erratically because of the whispering otherness inside her wasn’t exactly high on her to-do list. “How did you know I’d make it?”

A shrug. “I didn’t. But you wouldn’t have died.”

Holly punched him on the arm. “Asshole.” But she was more astonished than angry—because Venom, of all people, was the only individual who never treated her as broken. He expected her to take care of herself.

Showing no reaction to her hit, his body undoubtedly sleekly muscled, Venom squeezed her hand. And because he’d thrown her down the hallway, expecting her to survive it—because he believed she had the capability to do so—she didn’t fight the connection. The palm-to-palm touch felt peculiarly intimate, the essence of him pulsing through his veins and speaking to a craving inside her.

It wasn’t vampiric hunger. Deeper than that.

Then he was opening the door to the outer unit of the isolation chamber by punching in a code on the electronic keypad and they were walking through.

17

The door closed automatically behind them, leaving them in front of a large window that provided a view into the isolation area beyond: Daisy lay strapped down in a white hospital bed. She’d been given a bath, her hair appearing clean and dry, but she was clearly not doing well.

As Holly watched, the other woman wrenched up off the bed and twisted hard enough that she’d have broken bones if she hadn’t been strapped down. Holly continued to feel a tearing sympathy for the abused vampire, but even she could tell that the twisting wasn’t simply the scrabbling panic of a woman who’d been made helpless in a strange place.

Her teeth were bared to reveal small fangs just a little bigger than Holly’s, inhuman growls and grunts erupting from her throat and filling the observation chamber when Venom pushed a button to the side of the window.

“It’s like she’s possessed.” Nausea churning inside her, Holly stepped closer to the window. “She doesn’t look like the scared but sane woman we saved.” Daisy’s face was viciously contorted, her eyes swirls of rampant madness.

Was this what lay in Holly’s future?

A healer entered the observation chamber even as the chilling thought iced Holly’s blood. “She has no indications of disease,” he said in that gentle healer way, the wings that arced behind his shoulders to nearly touch the floor a rich cream interspersed with feathers of sparrow brown. “We’re keeping her inside because it’s the easiest way to control her—and keep her safe—if she finds the strength to break those straps. The entire floor can be locked down with the flick of a switch.”

“Is that a possibility?” Venom asked as Holly pressed her hand to the glass in a vain effort to calm Daisy.

The healer sighed. “She’s emaciated and even the blood you fed her shouldn’t have done much more than ease her hunger. It shouldn’t have given her any kind of strength. But as you can see . . .” A wave toward the wrenching, twisting woman on the bed. “Yet her madness doesn’t feel like bloodlust to healer senses. We’ll need to monitor her longer to have any hope of working out the demons that hold her captive.”

Holly’s fingers clenched around Venom’s palm. “I need to go in there,” she said, the healer’s words just a background buzz by the end.

Venom didn’t stop her when she released his hand and walked to open the inner door, but she was aware of his prowling presence at her back, ready to intercede should Daisy break her bonds. Her heart pounded, her skin hot, the mad whisper silent in her head. She turned the knob, stepped inside.

Daisy stopped twisting. Her head snapped toward Holly.

And the thing inside Holly, it spread its jagged wings with so much force that she slammed back into Venom, her hands reaching back to claw into his thighs. Panic gripped her throat in a brutal hold, cutting off her air as the otherness tried to shove out through her skin. In the hospital bed, Daisy fought her straps to strain toward Holly, her eyes pleading and red-rimmed with insanity at the same time.

Venom’s arms came around Holly, bands of heated metal that shoved her back into herself, crushing the strange, serrated wings that scraped at her insides. One of his hands closed over her shoulder, his arm across her body, and then his lips were at her ear. “Fight.” It was an order.

Holly wanted to tell him she wasn’t exactly hula dancing right now, but she was trying too hard not to come apart at the seams. When her head dipped, when her fangs shoved against her lips, water lining her tongue, she didn’t even think about it. She sank her teeth into Venom’s upper forearm.

It wasn’t a good place for blood, but the taste was enough.

Power punched through her, a power so deadly and arrogant that it immediately cleared her head.

Releasing him, she breathed harsh, deep breaths, her eyes locked with Daisy’s. The other woman’s cracked lips parted, the whites of her irises suddenly awash in crimson. “It’s calling to you,” she said in a guttural tone. “It wants to be together.” Her back arched in a spinal curve so brutal that Holly reached out a hand, wanting to push her down before she broke her back.

And a . . . what-the-fuck exploded out of Daisy, moving so fast that not even Venom’s speed could save Holly. It slammed straight into her chest and burrowed in.