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.

•   •   •

Venom swore as Holly crumpled in his arms, her body suddenly dead weight. Scooping her up, he backed out while yelling for the healer. The wide-eyed angel was beside them in a heartbeat. The man put his fingers to Holly’s throat, checked her pulse, listened to her breathing. “She’s alive,” he said definitively.

Venom went to tear open Holly’s black shirt to expose the wound . . . but there wasn’t a mark on her clothing. No burn. No tear. No bloodstain. He unbuttoned her shirt regardless, but there wasn’t a mark on the smooth cream of her skin, either. But he hadn’t imagined it. A substance or an entity had come out of the vampire on the bed and punched itself into Holly.

Yet Holly’s skin was warm and smooth under his fingers, her chest rising and falling in a shallow rhythm. “Explain this.”

The healer shook his head, his thin woven braids falling around his face as he examined Holly. “I can’t.”

Laying Holly on the carpeted floor of the observation chamber with conscious gentleness, Venom walked back into the much more medically spartan isolation room and toward the motionless body of the vampire they’d rescued.

Daisy wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing, her head having flopped to one side. Dark strands of hair obscured her face. When he got close enough to move that hair aside with care to ensure she didn’t sink her fangs into his wrist, he spotted a trickle of blood coming out of her nose. More blood dripped out of the corner of her mouth.

The scarlet stain on the white sheet below her was already significant.

It was often difficult to tell if a vampire was dead. They were almost-immortals, after all. Usually, the only way to be sure was to cut off a vampire’s head or take out the heart. Though Venom could easily survive heart loss, as could the other vampires in the Seven. He was also near-certain that Dmitri was strong enough now that separating his head from his body would take the strength of an archangel.

As Venom had told Holly, Dmitri had been a warrior through time—add his potent raw power to that, and the structural foundations of his body might as well be formed of iron at this point.

“Venom.” A senior healer’s voice. “Let me through.”

Venom stepped aside for the diminutive angel with wings of dark gray spotted with white. “Check her heart.”

The healer—Nisia—already had her small, narrow hands on Daisy’s chest. “The heart’s gone, exploded inside her chest cavity from what I can tell.” She frowned, as if peering deep within the sickly thin vampire’s body. “Her other organs are also liquid.” She indicated the slight swelling of Daisy’s belly as fluid built inside the body cavity. “The poor tormented child is dead.”

“She won’t heal?”

“No. She was too weak to ride out the damage—especially with the loss of her heart.”

Venom glanced back to make sure Holly wasn’t alone. Seeing that the other healer was still kneeling beside her, his hands gentle on her as he continued to check her for injuries, Venom focused his attention on Daisy. “Something came out of her and went into Holly.”

“I cannot sense an answer,” Nisia said. “But Illium suggested we monitor this room in new ways.” She waved vaguely toward the corners of the room.

Venom looked up.

Cameras.

“Do an autopsy,” he ordered, making an effort to keep his tone respectful. Nisia was a trusted member of the Tower team and one who’d earned Venom’s respect in the brutal aftermath of the Falling. “Don’t remove her from isolation. We’ll destroy her body here if need be.”

The healer’s soft brown gaze went to Holly. “That child should be in isolation, too.”

Venom thought of how Holly had known where Daisy was being kept, of how she’d felt the compulsion to go inside the isolation chamber, and shook his head. “It’s done now. Holly’s not going to infect anyone.” She’d been the target.

And he’d allowed her to walk in, believing he could protect her from all possible threats. Cold fury in his blood, directed at his own arrogance.

“No,” Nisia murmured, her eyes still on Holly. “Whatever this is, it is not, I think, about anything as simple as disease.”

Stepping out into the observation chamber to find that the healer had buttoned Holly’s shirt back up, Venom bent down to scoop her up into his arms. She was so small. Sometimes, he forgot that. He’d forgotten it when he threw her down the hall—when she was awake and aware, all he saw was the wild, inhuman energy of her. An energy that was the closest to his own that he’d ever glimpsed.

There is no one like me. But Andi sees inside me, and knows me, and we have secrets together. And one day, we’ll have cubs who’ll be half like me.

Naasir’s joy at his mating had made absolute sense to Venom, though he wasn’t sure his friend and fellow member of the Seven had understood how deeply the words resonated. To the world, Venom was a vampire. And there were millions of vampires. But he was the only one with the eyes of a viper and the deeper, less visible changes that shoved him far outside that well-defined box.

Like Naasir, he was and had always been alone among millions. Until Holly.

“Come on, kitty.” He cradled her higher against his chest. “You’ve said ‘fuck you’ to fate before. Do it again.”

But for once, Holly didn’t give him lip. She was silent and unmoving in his arms as he took her upstairs to his apartment. Ignoring the comfortable bed in his bedroom, he went straight to the heated stone floor in front of the windows. Placing her on there, he went to find a blanket . . . and by the time he returned, she’d curled into a tight ball, one hand spread palm down against the stone.

His entire chest expanded as he finally took a real breath.

Shaking out the soft cashmere blanket over her, he made a note to thank Naasir. It was the most primal member of the Seven who’d suggested the stone floor.

I make my lair outside the Refuge, because I like it out there. But my aerie is hot because I don’t like snow. A shiver, the metallic silver of his eyes wild in a way that was nothing human. You like the city, but you need your sunstone. Make one.

Venom had never thought of it that bluntly, but in his defense, he’d been very young and not used to the freedom to create his own home when Naasir had discovered him searching fruitlessly for the heated stone surface his body craved. His first sunstone had been just that—a large flat stone that he’d dragged over from a distant spot and kept in the wild gardens that had once surrounded the Tower.

As the Tower morphed into its current form and the gardens disappeared to be filled with the manic, beautiful life of New York, he’d worked with the architects to create this sunstone deep inside his home. Deciding Holly needed a little extra heat, he switched on the large lamp that covered the entire ceiling above the sunstone.

The square of ceiling blazed to glowing life.

She sighed in her sleep.

Crouching down, he undid her ponytail so she’d be comfortable, then removed her boots and put them aside. That done, he watched to make sure her chest was rising and falling, her pulse steady. Because Holly wasn’t a vampire. Not quite. She was human enough that such things were an absolute necessity for her survival.

When his phone buzzed in his pocket, he realized he’d become mesmerized by the rhythm of her, as if it spoke to the cobras that had been part of his Making alongside the vipers. That hadn’t happened to him for a long time. Venom was very aware of his weaknesses as well as his strengths. But this was his home and it was filled with people who’d protect him to their last breath.

They didn’t—couldn’t—truly understand the sinuous core of him, but they were his friends.

His family.

And so he’d lowered his guard enough to slip into a state that was deeply restorative.

Rising to his feet after running his knuckles over Holly’s cheek, he stepped away from her and the sunstone before answering the call. “Dmitri,” he said. “Nisia called you, didn’t she?”

“Inexplicable as it is, our competent and strong Nisia is intimidated by you, when she has been known to pat me on the cheek and ruffle my hair,” was the bone-dry response.

Venom took off his sunglasses and set them aside. His eyes reflected back at him from the sleek square mirror on the wall that had been a gift from Elena. The two of them weren’t exactly best friends, but the mate of his sire had owed him a forfeit after he beat her in a sparring session where they’d both had to fight using unfamiliar weapons.

She’d paid the forfeit with this mirror. At first, he’d thought it a somewhat unimaginative, though acceptable, payment. Then he’d noticed the delicate motif carved into the left white edge of the frame—a viper hanging off a tree. It was beautifully done. Aodhan’s work, he’d realized at once. Done specifically for him.

Sometimes Elena made it very difficult to be annoyed with her for the weakness she’d created in the archangel Venom chose to serve. She was the only chink in Raphael’s armor, and his Seven had come to terms with it—but that didn’t mean they were all okay with it.

“Holly isn’t infectious,” Venom said. “Whatever it was that came out of Daisy, it only wanted to go to Holly.” He felt the truth of that in his gut. “I don’t know of any disease that punches out of a person and into another.”

“I’m going to look at the footage. You want to meet me in the tech room?”

Venom glanced over at where Holly slept so peacefully. She’d been here before, wouldn’t be disoriented if she woke alone. “Yes.”

It was time to uncover the shape of the thing that had burrowed into Holly.

The same thing that had lived inside a vampire who’d gone utterly insane in the hours before her death.