“Is there a risk that Charisemnon or another archangel will attack?” she asked, her mind overflowing with images of blood and death from the last battle, a battle that had forced a mass evacuation of Manhattan.
It was Dmitri who answered. “No. They’re all at the same meeting.”
“Wow.” Holly couldn’t imagine the entire Cadre in one place. “Even Lijuan? I read online that no one’s seen her for two years.”
“Zhou Lijuan is AWOL,” Dmitri confirmed.
That, Holly realized, was why the city was on high alert, why all the warrior angels and vampires had an edginess about them that wasn’t normal. If the Archangel of China wanted to take New York, now was the best possible time. Its citizens, mortal and immortal, would all fight to the very end, but Zhou Lijuan was one of the Cadre—and only an archangel could kill or defeat another archangel.
“Clear up this situation with Holly as fast as you can,” Dmitri told Venom. “We don’t need groups of bounty hunters thinking they can come after a woman under the Tower’s protection.”
He pressed a kiss to the top of Holly’s hair before releasing her. “As for Kenasha—he’s always been a lazy waste of space, but your report on the condition of his wings concerns me. We need to make sure the vampire you rescued isn’t a carrier of disease.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of it,” Venom promised. “Let’s go, kitty.”
“I’d be delighted, Viper Face.”
Lips curving slightly, he slipped on his sunglasses as they left Dmitri’s office. “Daisy’s our first stop.”
“Why are you wearing your sunglasses in the Tower?”
“Because we’re going to the infirmary level and the junior healers there don’t often come into contact with me.” His fingers brushed her lower back. “I try not to scare baby healers.”
Her hand still itched to rip them off his face. “Do you think the healers will have a result on Daisy’s bloodwork by now?”
“They haven’t messaged me to say so, but that might be because they know I’m in the Tower and are expecting me to drop by.”
The two of them stepped into the elevator side by side, rode down in silence. Every hair on Holly’s body prickled, her skin suddenly acutely sensitive to Venom’s presence. His face was pristine in profile, his skin glowing with health even under the artificial light. She wanted to touch it, rub her cheek against his like the kitten he called her.
Viper Face, Viper Face, Viper Face, she repeated mentally to snap herself out of the startling desire. Yes, he’s pretty. But he’s also lethal, and I might yet become his prey if he discovers the mad, whispering voice inside me.
Thank God the elevator doors were opening. Because the cold reminder to her psyche wasn’t exactly working to calm the electric response of her body. Stepping out in front of him, she began to stride her way to the end of the corridor.
“Hollyberry, where are you going?”
She threw him a frowning look over her shoulder. “Daisy’s in the isolation ward at the end.” The Tower had built that ward after the Falling.
“How do you know?” Venom angled his head to the side in a way that wasn’t human.
Holly parted her lips to reply . . . and had no answer. “Where else would they put her?” she said through a suddenly parched throat, her heart pounding.
“But you’re not guessing, are you? You know.”
“I can feel her,” Holly admitted, realizing it was pointless to try to hide her reaction if she wanted to get to the bottom of the connection between her and the emaciated vampire.
“Smell? Sound? How?”
Shaking her head, Holly lifted a hand to a point between her heart and her stomach. Fisting it, she bumped that spot. “Here. I feel her here—like she’s calling to me.”
“I go first.” Venom’s face was hard. “If there is something wrong with her, you’re the more vulnerable.”
Holly didn’t even think about what she was doing—it wasn’t a conscious decision at all. It was driven by the thing inside her. She pivoted on her foot and she ran. She had to get to Daisy first. Had to—
A strong arm around her waist, lifting her off her feet. Then Venom threw her harder than Ashwini or Janvier or Dmitri ever would. Hard enough that she flew back down the corridor . . . and connected with a wall in a liquid slide. None of her bones broke, nothing bruised, her body ending up in a crouch on the carpet in a way that had her blinking as she snapped back into control.
“What just happened?” she whispered half to herself, half to the man who was watching her from the other end of the corridor.
His fangs flashed. “Don’t try that again or I’ll really throw you.”
Holly rose to her feet, and it felt as if she was melting her bones back into place. “This is seriously weird. Why am I not in pieces?” She moved gingerly toward Venom, afraid she’d imagined the whole thing.
“You trusted your instincts.” Turning his back to her, Venom began to stride toward the isolation chamber.
Deep as Holly’s confusion was about what had just occurred—both her mad flight in Daisy’s direction and her subsequent liquid fall—she ran to catch up. But this time, she stopped a footstep to Venom’s left. She had no desire to be thrown again when she didn’t know how she’d saved herself the first time.
Not sure the thing inside her would behave, however, she took Venom’s hand.
He didn’t question why she was reaching out to him voluntarily, just wrapped his fingers firmly around hers. Warm and strong, his hand held a power that told her she wouldn’t be breaking free; for once, Holly was glad of a leash. Losing her mind and acting erratically because of the whispering otherness inside her wasn’t exactly high on her to-do list. “How did you know I’d make it?”
A shrug. “I didn’t. But you wouldn’t have died.”
Holly punched him on the arm. “Asshole.” But she was more astonished than angry—because Venom, of all people, was the only individual who never treated her as broken. He expected her to take care of herself.
Showing no reaction to her hit, his body undoubtedly sleekly muscled, Venom squeezed her hand. And because he’d thrown her down the hallway, expecting her to survive it—because he believed she had the capability to do so—she didn’t fight the connection. The palm-to-palm touch felt peculiarly intimate, the essence of him pulsing through his veins and speaking to a craving inside her.
It wasn’t vampiric hunger. Deeper than that.
Then he was opening the door to the outer unit of the isolation chamber by punching in a code on the electronic keypad and they were walking through.
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.