“It wasn’t me,” he said absently, his attention on his phone. “Ashwini turned up with all of it.”
Exhaling quietly, Holly headed out. Venom came with her, and the two of them were soon in the testing area. The sweet-faced angel who drew her blood also took her blood pressure and did a couple of other tests, “since you’re here anyway.” The healers loved getting their gentle—but intensely curious—hands on her, the people she dealt with all senior Tower staff who knew her history.
“It’s like you get a hard-on when I’m around, Lucius,” she said to the angel with wings of softest yellow that children couldn’t resist. Angels generally didn’t like getting their wings touched by strangers, but many seemed to make an exception for the littlest mortals.
She’d once seen Lucius sitting quietly in a sun-drenched corner of Central Park, his wings spread out behind him, while a group of five tiny children patted his feathers with their baby-soft hands.
“We all have our vices, sweetheart.” He threw her a wink over his shoulder. Built tall and strong, with blond hair and sparkling gray eyes, he was handsome and kind and funny—but she didn’t want to jump his bones.
It wasn’t the wings; she’d gotten over her phobia of those.
Lucius was just too old, too much from another time.
Problematically, she was beginning to experience the bone-jumping urge when it came to a vampire who’d lived more than three centuries and counting. This attraction laughed in the face of her earlier justification about Lucius. But then, Venom had always been an outlier when it came to Holly—he’d made her react, made her fight, even when she’d been at her lowest.
“Timeline, Lucius?” Venom asked.
“It’s going to take a while longer. All the samples you sent us are . . . odd.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “That is not scientific and I strive to be so, but there it is. It’s all as odd as Holly’s blood, and our lovely Hollyberry has set a high bar for oddness.”
Holly threw a forgotten lab glove at his head. “I’ll see you in a month, you bloodsucker,” she said when he laughingly caught the glove out of the air. She had to turn up for a regular monthly checkup until her blood stopped being so mutable.
Who knew how long that could take?
“Highlight of my calendar, sweet girl.”
Venom spoke after they’d closed the door to Lucius’s lab behind them. “I didn’t realize you were close to Lucius.”
“He’s been my lab tech pretty much from the start.” Though it seemed strange to call Lucius that—he was so much more. Like Kenasha, Lucius had only a little innate power in angelic terms. But unlike the deadbeat angel, Lucius had spent his three thousand years of life learning endless medical techniques.
This decade, he was content practicing his skills doing bloodwork and other tests.
“What’s our next stop?” Even as she spoke, she fought the urge to rub the knuckles of her fisted hand against her chest, to quiet the pulsing that had begun within. It was very low, barely detectable, and it had the rhythm of a heartbeat.
Holly tried not to hear it, tried not to feel it . . . because that wasn’t her pulse.
21
Choking down that chilling realization because there was literally nothing she could do about it unless she wanted to confess and end up with her head on the chopping block—or her body caged in an isolation room—Holly said, “I’m wide awake and it’s only one thirty in the morning.” In immortal terms, the night was just beginning.
A sudden thought hit her before he could speak. “What about you? Have you had enough sleep?”
“I don’t need as much as small kitties.” Unaffected by her scowl, he said, “We still have to track down the individual behind the bounty on your head.”
Holly had nearly forgotten that with everything else that had happened. “What we know so far is that the buyer is deadly serious and doesn’t appreciate his or her time being wasted with false reports.” She bit down on the side of her lower lip, frowning at the idea of the hours she’d lost. “Anything else come to light while I was napping?”
Eyes on her mouth, Venom shook his head. “Your phone did ring several times while you were out. No one spoke when I answered.” He handed it over. “Fully charged.”
“Thanks.” Holly pulled up her call log, saw several familiar numbers. “These are pay phones in Zeph and Arabella’s patch.” She called one.
No answer.
The second one was picked up by Big Irma, a human who was an unlikely mother figure to a number of down-and-out vampires. “Holly!” she said in her energetically overloud voice. “Zeph was wanting to talk with you!”
It took a couple of minutes for Holly to narrow down where she’d be most likely to find Zeph and Arabella tonight. “Thanks, Irma.”
“Just remember who helped you next time you’re down here!”
“I never forget.” And she knew Irma’s poison of choice—menthol cigarettes.
Venom’s eyes glinted after she hung up. “You have a scent?”
“Maybe. Let’s go see.”
And all the while, the quiet, stealthy pulse continued to beat in her.
• • •
The streets felt eerie and treacherous tonight, the squathouse to which she tracked Zeph and Arabella using Irma’s information looming out of the night like an inanimate monster. Senses jacked up and the long knife she’d signed out of the Tower armory safe in the spine holster she’d hidden under a bright pink hoodie, Holly glanced at Venom and sucked in a breath.
“Don’t kill anyone,” she said. “No one in the squat is capable of being a threat to you.” Certain serious powers did hang out in the shadier parts of the city, but they had better things to do than prowl the dirty, graffitied dens claimed by squatters.
“I kill only those who need killing,” was the non-comforting answer.
He parked the Bugatti right in front of a group of skinny vampires with black scarves tied around their heads who were smoking outside the ramshackle building—the tobacco didn’t do anything to vampiric bloodstreams, but the taste and oral addiction seemed to work the same as in humans.
Prowling up to them, he said, “A single scratch and I’ll be extremely disappointed.”
The entire group had frozen at his appearance.
Now, one of the vampire gang found the courage to squeak, “Yes, sir.”
Not bothering to wait around, her gut churning at the heaviness in the air, Holly went straight to the doorway of the squathouse. The door itself was lying on the asphalt of the footpath, but that didn’t signify anything: Holly couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen the door—tagged with multiple gang signs—in place.