Venom double-parked his vehicle knowing no one would touch it. If they did—well, they might just get stung by a viper’s bite. Getting out into the damp dark, he looked up at skies of heavy gray. “Have you been told of the Cascade?” Rain kissed his cheekbones.
• • •
“No. What is it?” Holly asked, trying not to watch the rain whisper across Venom’s skin. “I won’t share the information. I know not to talk out of turn about Tower business.” That way lay certain death—after hideous torture.
She’d already had her fill of both.
Venom didn’t answer until they’d crossed the street, his body moving with liquid grace. Holly couldn’t help it; she watched him. There was something deadly about Venom. Not just power, but him. She wondered if he’d been like this as a human, too, dangerous and beautiful.
She blinked, shook her head. Obviously, if she was starting to think Venom beautiful, it was time to break her self-imposed celibacy and go get laid. She had the primal rage inside her under control now, wouldn’t terrify the poor men she picked up in the bars.
Her mind flashed to that . . . thing with Venom last night, when she’d gone full weirdo crazy on him—and he’d laughed. Because he was nuts, too.
“The Cascade,” he said, once they stood in the rain-protected shadow of the building next to their target location, “is a once-in-an-eon event that causes massive power fluctuations and other changes among those who are Cadre.”
Holly’s fingers rose to her right temple. “Raphael’s mark?”
“Yes, that’s part of it. As are your new friends in the Legion.” Venom scanned the otherwise empty street with lethal focus. “The Cascade also has unknown effects on the weather. Today’s rain darkness could be a natural phenomenon, or it could be Cascade-linked.”
Holly had the sense of glimpsing a vast world of earth-shattering power far beyond her understanding—and perhaps that was as it should be. For an immortal, she was still only an infant. She wasn’t meant to consort with archangels . . . or with vampires as deadly as Venom. “Why are you telling me this?”
Taking off his sunglasses, he gripped her chin, held her gaze. “Because the Cascade most strongly impacts those with archangelic blood.”
And Holly had been force-fed so much archangelic blood that it had changed her on a cellular level. “My parlor trick with the hand, breaking Janvier’s arm,” she said without severing the eye contact, “they might be connected to this Cascade?”
A nod. “No way to know for certain, but it would explain why you’re developing abilities no one outside the Cadre should possess.” He ran his thumb over her chin, slow and deliberate. “Be careful who you trust, kitty. Many would pay far more than five million for a woman who possesses even a single droplet of archangelic power.”
Closing her hand over his wrist, his skin warm under her touch and his power curling around her so tightly that she felt it as a stroke across her skin, she tugged off his grip. “I appreciate the information—and the warning.” He’d given her a tool to understand a little of the craziness around her, and she was grateful, but she couldn’t have him touching her.
Not when her entire body seemed primed to respond.
His lips curved in a smile she couldn’t read. Then, sliding the sunglasses back on, he slipped out of the shadows and up the steps of their target building. Holly followed, the two of them pausing by the front door.
Venom’s body went inhumanly motionless. “It’s too quiet.”
Looking around, Holly saw no obvious signs of trouble. “They might just be crashed out after drugging themselves with honey feeds.”
“You sound very sure.”
“When you’re in a situation like this”—she indicated the dirty, graffitied environment, a blunt illustration that these vamps weren’t exactly living the dream—“escape, even illusionary escape, has a powerful draw.”
Venom pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head, the slitted green of his eyes smashing into hers. “Have you fed from a drug addict?”
“No,” Holly said flatly, not adding that, in the darkest depths of pain and despair, she’d thought about it, about the sweet oblivion of just letting go. It was the idea of the state she’d be in afterward—weak and vulnerable and unable to protect herself—that had stopped her.
Then there was the whole sucking-blood-from-a-living-being thing, which continued to turn her stomach.
So yeah, no thanks—but not for the best reasons.
“We going in or what?” she said when Venom continued to look at her with disturbing intensity, as if he saw her most terrible secrets.
Slipping his sunglasses back down over his eyes, he put his hand on the doorknob and turned. It offered no resistance and they slipped inside, shutting the door behind themselves.
The air that hung heavy inside the hallway leading to the chipped paint of the internal staircase was foul with the smell of unwashed bodies, urine . . . and more. “Old blood,” Holly whispered in a harsh undertone, her gut twisting and lurching as images of mutilated and decapitated bodies piled in a red-streaked pyramid, while a mad archangel drank from a wineglass filled with the blood he’d drained from a living victim, shoved into her brain.
Fingers touching her neck, gripping painfully tight when she would’ve slashed out in a panic. “Focus, kitty.”
The two words acted like a bucket of cold water thrown into her face. She froze, found her center as Honor had taught her, then breathed shallowly through her mouth. “Sorry.” Heat flooded her cheeks.
Releasing her, Venom said, “The smell would turn anyone’s stomach, much less that of a woman who was found coated in her own dried blood.”
Holly scowled, though his matter-of-fact judgment made her feel a little less like a child confronted by a nightmare come to life. But, because she had reacted like that child, she moved on ahead of him.
Do not act stupid because you’re scared and want to hide it. Do that and I’ll kick your ass black and blue for a week running.
Ashwini’s voice in her head.
And if you ever act like a horror movie dumb chick, I’ll personally lobotomize you.
Holly’s lips tugged up a fraction, her hunched shoulders straightening. She made sure she was cautious and alert, and not in any way driven by fear as she moved on down the hallway. Reaching the bottom of the steps that led up to the second floor, she stopped and glanced back at Venom, fighting an inexplicable urge from within that told her to climb, go higher.
“Up or down?” His sense of smell was more acute than hers; it made sense to ask rather than relying on her own strange compulsion.