But they’d be back soon.
He threw Holly over his shoulder, wincing at the damage he was doing to her already wounded abdomen, and pulled the door shut behind himself. He’d used the wait to fix it from the inside so that it would lock behind him, but he checked to make sure. Then he made his way in quick silence to where they’d entered the stronghold.
The area was still empty and the window was still open.
After placing Holly against a wall, he slid off his pack, removed his hook and rope, then anchored the hook as strongly as possible. They’d already left a few marks. Others were unavoidable, but hopefully, no one looked too carefully at this window ledge at the end of a distant hallway.
Climbing down with Holly wasn’t going to be easy, but he finally decided on moving his pack to the front and tying her to his back with an extra rope. It wouldn’t be the most comfortable position for her and she’d probably wake with one hell of a backache, but she’d be alive. Pack and Holly in position, he waited for a time when there were no wings in the sky close enough to spot him.
Ten excruciating minutes passed before the sky was clear.
Venom swung out the window.
With the weight on him, the rope tore at his palms. He barely felt it. His Making had hardened him to many other types of pain. When you were tied down, then had angry vipers and cobras thrown onto your body, their fangs sinking poison into your unguarded flesh over and over again until agony and horror were all you knew . . . Well, there weren’t many nightmares that could terrify Venom and little pain that even came close to destabilizing.
He moved with preternatural speed.
His feet landed on the grass without an alarm being shouted. Untying Holly and placing her on the grass, he swung his backpack into the correct position before flicking the rope in a hard ripple designed to dislodge the hook.
It held.
He tried again, the motion one he’d practiced and practiced and practiced again over the centuries. The stupid thing didn’t budge.
Venom took a deep breath, reached for the ice coldness of the creatures who’d marked him, and flicked again.
The rope slithered down, the hook falling.
Catching it, he wound up the rope and hooked it onto his backpack, careful to do so in a way that wouldn’t hurt Holly when he threw her over his shoulder. Which he did the next minute. She groaned partway through his run through the orchard but he didn’t stop. And when he ran into a guard, he mesmerized the vampire without thought, giving the male much the same instruction Holly had the other guard: You saw nothing but a cat. There were no intruders.
He was gone a heartbeat later, lost in the darkness. He made it to the treeline using viper speed, timing his bursts of movement to avoid sweeps by the angels flying overhead. He didn’t stop even once under the tree canopy. Though he usually only used his speed in sporadic bursts, tonight he ran full tilt for as long as his body could bear it.
It wasn’t an endless period. He was only three hundred and fifty or so years old and yet growing into his power. When he finally came to a standstill and looked back, he could see the stronghold, but it was a toy castle now, the distance he’d put between the unbeing in the crib and Holly a significant one.
“Venom.”
Releasing Holly from over his shoulder at that sluggish sound, he sat her down with her back to a tree and cupped her face in his hands. “Talk to me, kitty.” It came out a plea.
She lifted her hand to weakly close over his wrist. “Where . . .” Her voice was a rasp.
“Wait.” Shrugging off his pack, he took out a bottle of water, helped her wet her throat. “Is that better?”
A faint nod, her head turning in the direction of the stronghold. “I can still feel it.” Her chest glowed.
“Can you fight?”
A taut moment before she nodded. “Yes. He’s not in my head as much.” Another breath that sounded too rough, not quite right, the damage to her throat obvious.
Cold deep inside in a way that had nothing to do with his Making, Venom stroked tendrils of hair off her face. “We need to check your chest and stomach.” He’d known he was hurting her further by carrying her over his shoulder, but it had been the only way to get her to safety.
Holly didn’t fight him when he unzipped her jacket and gently pulled up the black top she wore underneath. The only mercy was that the blood hadn’t dried, so he wasn’t ripping the fabric off her. He didn’t need a flashlight to see the damage—her chest glowed acid green, illuminating her skin.
Cracks spread out across that skin.
Her heart was the epicenter of the bloody quake.
Venom’s fangs shoved against his lower lip, not because of the scent of her blood—though Holly did smell very good—but because seeing her hurt, in pain, it did things to him he hadn’t permitted anyone to do for centuries. She was fragile, Holly.
Venom didn’t hang around fragile people.
He lifted his wrist to her mouth. “Drink.”
Her eyes met his, the pain in them searing. “I’ve taken blood from you more than once already.” A scowl that made her seem herself again. “You can’t be weak if we’re going to survive.”
Venom chuckled, the knots of his muscles easing slightly. “It’d take more than a couple of bites from you to weaken me.”
When she continued to hesitate, the stubborn line to her jaw one with which he was intimately familiar, he reached into his pack and pulled out a bottle of blood in an insulated carrier. “Courtesy of Ashwini. She said I might need it.” Elena’s hunter friend—and Janvier’s wife—had what Venom’s mother would’ve called “the third eye,” so Venom hadn’t fought the extra weight created by the two insulated bottles.
“Drink it first,” Holly ordered, her breathing uneven. “I’d rather . . . I don’t like drinking like that.”
Not about to waste time arguing when she was hurting, Venom screwed the top off the bottle and began to gulp it down . . . only to rip it from his mouth with a curl of his lip. “It’s flavored.”
Holly’s lips curved, a spark in her eyes. “What flavor?”
He brought the hideous thing back to his lips, took a sip. “Spiced.” And, he grudgingly accepted, the taste wasn’t so bad. He drank more. And thought of home. Of the warmth of the inn’s large kitchen as his mother threw cinnamon and cloves and cardamom into the pot during Diwali. The Festival of Lights, full of color and joy and the sweetest of scents, had always been his favorite time of the year.
Holly reached out to clasp her hand over his, her grip weak but steadfast. “What is it?”
Venom didn’t talk about his past. It was long buried and turned to dust. But at that moment, with the spices lingering on his tongue and the memories uncurling with warm stealth inside him, he couldn’t stay silent. “Home,” he whispered. “This blood reminds me of home.” His smile was a thing formed of equal parts sadness and happiness. “Long ago.”