Often in the days afterward, she’d wished that she, too, had died in that charnel house. It was so much harder to be alive and to know Shelley would never again laugh her breathless and giggly laugh, that Cara and Maxie would never again dither over a shade of lipstick, and Rania and Ping never again gossip about the men in their lives.
There had been two other victims in that Brooklyn warehouse, women already dead and drained of blood by the time Uram took Holly and her friends to his house of horrors. It was much later that Holly had discovered their names: Kimiya and Nataja.
She’d been in no state to go to any of their funerals . . . and she couldn’t bear to visit their graves. It hurt so much to think of her friends and those two strangers she’d never known—and never would know—lying cold in the earth.
“What I don’t understand is why anyone would want to kidnap a kitty with tiny baby vampire teeth.”
3
Venom’s musing statement snapped her out of the loop of grief and loss and horror and rage. “Come closer and I’ll show you exactly how helpless those baby teeth are.” Her fangs dispensed an acidic green substance the Tower scientists had tested and declared a deadly poison.
“Sorry, kitty. Biting me will do you no good . . . though I have been told my blood is the best women have ever tasted.”
Holly made gagging motions with the hand not on the steering wheel, incredibly glad right then for his aggravating and distracting presence—though she’d cut off her own head before she admitted it. “Some women will do anything to get into the Tower.”
“You play mean, Hollyberry. Like poison.”
Coming from anyone else, the latter words would’ve been an ugly insult. From Venom . . . “Did you just compliment me?” she asked, her mouth falling open. “Take it back!” She couldn’t deal with Venom being nice to her in any way, shape, or form.
“Of course,” he said, “your poison is nowhere near as venomous as mine.”
She went to snap back a retort about men always thinking their package was bigger, when the import of his words penetrated. “Did the Tower compare the two?”
“We’re the only two venomous members of the Tower. The sire needs to know our exact strengths.”
“How much stronger are you?” she asked through gritted teeth, though his potency wasn’t a surprise. Venom might look like he was maybe twenty-seven, but he’d lived a lot more life than she could imagine.
And he’d look that way forever, a sexual creature no one would ever dare call a “boy.” Holly, in contrast, was stuck with the face of a twenty-three-year-old who’d still had a youthful softness to her when Uram altered the shape of her existence. The softness would’ve disappeared in another year; she knew because she’d watched Mia’s transformation.
But Holly never got that extra year to grow into her skin and her womanhood.
Vampirism—or whatever it was that ran in her blood—would probably refine her features to something more adultlike in the future, but she’d never look anything but young. Not even if she lived to be five hundred years old. Of course, a long, near-immortal life was the best-case scenario.
“I’ve grown strong enough to take down a large number of the angels in the city,” Venom said lazily. “It’s a secret the Tower will execute you for speaking, so never share it—but I can shock the youngest ones into an intense involuntary sleep that the healers believe could lead to death, incapacitate the older with severe pain.”
Holly scowled and said, “Bull,” wincing inwardly at using language for which her mother would threaten to wash out her mouth with soap. Daphne Chang didn’t care what Holly was; she did care that her daughter comport herself like the lady she’d been raised to be. Holly tried, she really did. But only when her mother was in the vicinity to bear witness.
Never again would Holly willingly cause pain to the mom who’d never, not once, looked at her as anything but her child. Her dad was less demonstrative, but he was the one who kept aside certain pieces of clothing for her in his dress shop, pieces that were always colorful and quirky and Holly.
Love came in many different forms.
“It’s all true.” Venom’s hair lifted up in the wind coming through his open window, his profile so astonishingly perfect that her breath caught for a second. “I’m deadlier than the deadliest snake in the world, with the ability to impact strong immortals. But you’re not too far behind.”
“Try being used as a chew toy by an insane archangel,” Holly said with a grim smile. “It does wonders for your poison, I hear.”
No one knew exactly what Uram had done to her beyond making her drink his blood—that sickening memory, she’d finally recovered. But much of the time he’d spent with her after murdering her friends remained a blank. Either she’d been unconscious or he’d made sure she wouldn’t remember, and it was just great to know that a bloodborn archangel might have been digging around in her mind.
Who knew what he’d left behind.
What Holly did have was a lot more information about angelic biology than even the majority of older vampires—she’d needed that information to understand what was happening to her.
“But,” Venom continued, “as I was saying. I’m immune to your poisonous bite.”
Holly scowled. She’d bitten him once or twice, back during her psycho-PTSD phase, and he’d shrugged it off, but those bites had been mere scratches—and her toxic kiss hadn’t yet settled into its final form. “The scientists tested our venom against each other?”
Reaching over, Venom played with strands of her hair, which she’d scraped neatly back the instant after he’d taken the photograph. “You look like that pony toy with a unicorn tail.”
She slammed up an arm to knock him off. “Answer the question. And unicorn hair was the point, Mr. Designer Cut and Dry.” Every so often, Holly had to fight the urge to jump on Venom and mess him up.
“Complete neutralization.” Venom turned slightly in his seat to face her profile—and the prickling over her skin turned into a swarm of stinging bees. “My venom cancels out yours and vice versa.”
Holly stared straight ahead. “Is my venom the same as yours?” It was a question she didn’t want to ask. “Like a viper’s or a cobra’s or another snake’s?”
“No.” His answer made her heart slam into her rib cage. “Mine tracks that way—though it’s a unique mixture, but yours is unlike anything on the planet and it’s growing in virulence.”
Holly felt her muscles lock. The thing inside her, the psychic tumor she couldn’t outrace, was getting stronger. She knew it, had felt it. Where would it end? In death? In psychotic madness like the archangel who’d been her blood sire? Worse?
“We could test it,” Venom said in that languidly sensuous tone she’d heard him use on the women who panted after him. “Share our venom.”
Holly found her feet again. “Oh, gosh, let me think about it,” she said with a flutter of her eyelashes. “The answer is . . . A Big. Fat. No.” She knew he was jerking her chain. He thought she was a spitting baby. She thought he was a conceited ass. That was the extent of their relationship.
“Why does someone want you enough to put a bounty on your head?” His tone was serious this time. “It was very definitely you they were after. Holly Chang, also known as Sorrow. That was the brief and it included a photo of you.”
Holly nodded. “I saw.” The photo had been stored on the chief goon’s phone. It had been of her striding out of a café where she’d taken her mother for a cup of tea and cake. Daphne Chang had a weakness for cake that Holly fully exploited as she weaseled her way back into her mother’s good graces.
“The instigator must know how you were Made,” Venom continued, his power a sinuous wave that wrapped around her before sliding away. “Or they suspect.”
Holly fought to keep her breathing even. Venom hadn’t been messing with her just then—he played games, but not like that. Not in ways where they weren’t on equal ground. She was sensing his power so vividly either because her own sensitivity had increased as a result of the ongoing changes in her body—or because Venom had grown stronger in the two years since she’d last seen him in person.