Archangel's Viper by Nalini Singh

  "Just anti-Uram." Even saying his name made the scream build in her throat. "I fantasize about bringing him back to life in a way that means he's paralyzed, able to feel what I'm doing but unable to stop me." The latter was very important. Even in her fantasies, Holly knew she was no match for an archangel. "Then I want to sit there and pluck off each and every one of his feathers." Gray with flecks of amber, those feathers had been far too beautiful for the ugliness they hid. "After which I want to stab and stab and stab at him until he's nothing but a piece of meat."

  She exhaled loudly. "Go ahead, call me a psycho."

  Venom shrugged. "I have high standards for the psycho call. You barely brush the surface." A glance out of mirrored sunglasses.

  "Take those off!" Moving with that strange speed that lived in her, Holly tore off the sunglasses and threw them behind their seats.

  Venom hadn't jerked the steering wheel despite her unexpected act. "Those are expensive," he said calmly. "You can't afford to replace them, kitty."

  "Fuck you."

  "Sorry, the line's too long for you to get to the top."

  Her fangs dripped, poison filling her mouth.

  And it was too much. The kidnapping attempt. Losing what little freedom she'd earned after years of teeth-gritted hard work. Having her genesis shoved into her face. Venom's provocation. She hissed and dove for his throat, not thinking about the danger of attacking him while he was driving, not thinking at all.

  8

  Venom slammed out a hand to grip Holly's jaw, keeping it away from his neck while he controlled the car with his free hand. She clawed at him, but he could take a few scratches. He could take her bite, too, but it'd affect him for a split second that could cause a crash. Gripping her jaw hard, he pulled the car over to the side of the street.

  They were in a dark part of town, an area filled with business workers in the day and homeless people at night. None of those people would dare come near the well-known viper green of his car.

  So he released Holly and sucked in a breath as her fangs penetrated his skin. Her poison burned for that split second before it was neutralized, but she didn't let go. Her nails dug into the other side of his neck, her fangs impaling him.

  But she wasn't feeding, wasn't doing anything but holding him in place.

  He lifted his hand, put it on the back of her head and pushed slightly. "Drink," he ordered in a voice that not many people would dare disobey. "Drink."

  Holly dug her nails in deeper but refused to do as he'd asked. So he squeezed the back of her neck. Hard. "Or would you prefer that I drink from you, kitty?" he said in his coldest, silkiest tone. "I wonder what Uram's blood--" That did it.

  She drank.

  And fire raced through his bloodstream. That, he hadn't expected. Feeding could be erotic, but this was Holly, not a woman he planned to fuck. Gritting his teeth against the unexpected reaction that went straight to his cock, he pulled her off when her body began to go lax. "Enough. You're gorging now."

  Eyes glowing acid green, she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, smearing a droplet of blood across her cheek, and just stared at his neck.

  Venom smiled. "Drop the act, Hollyberry. I know you're back in control." Angling his body, he gripped her jaw again before she could move. "You've also been a very bad girl."

  Baring her teeth, she licked her tongue over her fangs. And his goddamn cock grew even more rigid, though he knew she was trying to get a rise out of him. "You haven't been drinking your quota of blood." Holly had been placed on a strict blood regime because she disliked the vampirish side of herself so much that she often "forgot" to feed. "What have you been doing to the bottles of blood that are delivered to you?"

  Holly jerked her chin, but he wasn't about to let go. Reaching out, he used his thumb to wipe away that smear of blood she'd created deliberately as a distraction. With another woman, he might've sucked his thumb into his mouth, turned the act sensual. But this wasn't another woman. "Answer the question or we'll be here all night."

  Smiling that sweet fake smile, she said, "Why drink bottled blood when I can have it fresh from the vein?"

  "You haven't fed in at least three months." Most vampires couldn't go that long--but Holly wasn't quite a vampire. "And you just went into bloodlust."

  She blinked, frown lines forming on her forehead. "No, I didn't. That was . . . the other thing."

  Uram's taint. "Trust me, Holly. I know bloodlust when I see it." His voice turned cold, like the blood of the vipers who'd been part of his Making. "If I wasn't here to stop the bloodlust before it took full hold, you could've ripped out multiple throats today. And humans don't come back from the dead."

  Her skin went pale. "I'm going to be sick."

  Releasing her, he reached over and pushed open the passenger door. "Do it outside."

  But though she hung out the side and retched in harsh pulses, nothing came out. Her body had been too parched for the blood to reject it. Finally slumping back in her seat with the passenger door open to the cool night air, Holly said, "I hate the taste of blood."

  "You liked mine just fine." If he'd let her, she'd have gorged herself into a purring stupor--and fuck, that image of her lushly sated looked too good in his mind.

  Her shoulders grew tight. "Like you said, I'd starved myself. I didn't taste it."

  That might even be true. "Why would you risk going into bloodlust?" he asked in the viper's tone that was as much a part of him as his eyes. "You want to become your Maker?"

  "Fuck you," she said again, but her hands were fisted and her voice trembled.

  Reaching across to pull the passenger door shut, Venom began to drive. He went straight to the Tower garage. Once there, he got out and went around to pull open her door. Uncharacteristically, she'd stayed inside. "Let's go."

  A grim-eyed look. "Are you going to turn me in to Dmitri?"

  "I don't tattle, kitty." Holly had always been his to train--but he'd been reassigned to the Refuge because his duties to the Tower came first. He'd only had a single session with Holly per week--and that had been long-distance, making it difficult for him to gauge her development. That was no longer an issue. And it was becoming clear to him that, regardless of their skill and affection for Holly, the people who'd trained her on a day-to-day basis hadn't understood what it was they were training.

  She got out, her heels making click-clack sounds on the floor as they walked to the elevator. He pressed the button for his floor. When Holly went to press the button for the much lower floor where she had a room, he stopped her. "We're not done yet."

  Her small hand fisted again, her body all but vibrating next to his.

  He knew the only reason she wasn't defying him was that she understood how bad things could've gone tonight: Holly was terrified of herself. That had always been part of the problem. She wasn't like that bouncer at the club. For him, fear would save his life. For Holly, fear could either cripple her--or turn her into a deadly threat who had to be executed.

  They rode up in silence, exited in silence. He got lucky that no one else was up on the floor right then. Venom took Holly straight into his apartment--a massive sprawl with floor-to-ceiling windows and a large empty space in the center of his sitting area. There was no carpet there, only a square of highly polished stone that appeared to be a design feature that echoed the electric fire set into the opposing wall.

  Shutting the door behind him, he locked it, then took off his suit jacket. Holly had gone motionless on entering, seemed to be taking in the apartment. He could tell it wasn't what she'd expected. But she could have the tour later. "Take off your shoes." He pulled away her clutch and threw it on a nearby chair.

  Holly bared her fangs at him, but she was still shaky. She actually obeyed an order, kicking off her heels. "Now what, master?"

  Having folded up the sleeves of his shirt and kicked off his own shoes and socks, Venom waved her forward to the stone section; it was just big enough to act as a sparring ring. "Now," he said, "I wan
t you to release the otherness inside you." He knew it lived in her because the vipers and cobras who'd been part of his Making lived in him.

  Holly didn't move. "Why? So you can tell me I have no control?"

  "Control isn't the same for us as it is for other people, kitty." That was what no one else understood, what Holly herself didn't understand. "I'm not strong because I leash my impulses. I'm strong because I use those impulses. So use it." Still, she didn't take action. "Fine." He moved, aiming to sink his fangs into her throat.

  As he'd expected, she reacted out of pure self-preservation. And then the fight was on--but it was a normal fight. She wasn't releasing the thing that lived in her. Venom scraped his fangs over her throat. She hissed and swayed for a moment before shrugging off the touch of venom.

  "Bastard." Eyes glowing, she jumped on him without warning.

  The movement wasn't human, not anywhere near. But it was her.

  Grinning as she clawed his chest, half ripping off his shirt, he pulled her off and threw her aside. She gave an "oof" as she hit the wall, but she was up and running toward him a second later when she should've had multiple broken bones. Venom knew her exact tolerances, knew that her delicate-appearing bones were far stronger than normal vampire bones, even the bones of vampires hundreds of years older.

  Holly's bones were closer to angelic bones.

  He slashed his nails tauntingly across her stomach as she tried to get to his throat again. It made her move with a speed even he couldn't avoid. He was facing her, and then suddenly, her fangs were sinking into his shoulder from behind and her nails were clawing at his chest. He reached back and ripped her off.

  Blood dripped down his back. "No more blood for you, kitty." Holly might have been starving, but he was dangerously potent. She could drink herself into a coma. Oh, she'd wake up, but it'd take days or weeks.

  Hissing, she jumped on him again.

  He laughed in pure joy.

  Because the way they fought now was nothing human, nothing vampire, utterly other. Their bodies were liquid, sinuous, bending in ways that shouldn't have been feasible and striking so fast that had anyone been watching, the movements would've seemed impossible. Exhilaration filled his bloodstream. He loved sparring with the Seven and Raphael, Janvier, even Elena, but this . . . No one else fought this way. Like he did.

  She was young and untried and more instinct than thought--but the latter was the point.

  Gripping her throat at one point, he pressed a kiss to her cheek that was more taunt than anything sexual. She twisted out of his grip in a liquid movement and shredded his back, hissing poison at him at the same time. He laughed and twisted around her to grab her thigh--visible through the torn skirt of her dress--holding on hard enough to bruise.

  She smiled and kicked up in a way that had her bones going inhumanly fluid.

  He avoided the hit, but not the nails across his face. Licking at his own blood, he grinned, and they were at it again.

  *

  Holly lay on her back on the stone in the middle of Venom's living area, her brain at absolute and blinding peace for the first time in years. She had no idea what had just happened. The damn viper had goaded her until she'd decided to let him have it. But rather than yelling at her to shut it down, he'd just grinned . . . and the rest was a haze of acidic green across her vision, a sense of exhilaration, and the thumping beat of her heart.

  She raised her leg at the knee, felt a brush of air where there should be no air. "My dress is ripped." That particular fact didn't seem important, even though this was one of her favorite dresses, a piece she'd saved hard to be able to afford.

  "So's my shirt," said the man who lay on the floor beside her, his breathing far more even than her own. "You're fun to play with when you let yourself off the leash."

  Holly inhaled, exhaled. It felt good to have the air expanding her lungs, even better to release the slight tension. Everything felt good, her entire body liquid. "Weren't you the one who gave me a lecture about possible bloodlust?"

  "Two different things." His voice was different . . . lethargic. Satiated. "You don't drink enough blood to remain stable, you turn into a murderous monster. You let yourself off the leash while stable, you fight with a speed and a natural fluidity that's extremely difficult to counter."

  Holly tried to think that through, found it too much work. "I'm drunk."

  "No, you're just lazy after a good workout." He flowed up into a seated position, moving in a way that was so boneless, she wondered if he even had a skeleton.

  Letting the frivolous thought float away, she sighed. "I don't remember most of what we did."

  "You will," Venom said, flowing to his feet with that same liquid grace. "This was the first high. The more you do it, the more you'll begin to maintain rational thinking even while surrendering to your prana."

  Holly couldn't make herself get up, even though she knew it was ridiculous to keep lying on the floor when Venom was walking around doing things. "I don't know that word," she said after several minutes. "It sounds like a yoga word."

  A low chuckle. "It's Sanskrit. It has a complex depth of meaning, like all Sanskrit, but the easiest way to describe it in this context is the primal life force that lives in us." He knelt beside her. "I made you a cookies-and-cream shake."

  Holly turned her head; it felt deliciously heavy. "Can I drink it lying down?"

  "No. Up."

  Exhaling again--and really wanting that shake--she managed to get herself up into a seated position. It was only after she'd taken two long draws of the shake through the wide straw that she realized one thing. "How do you know this is my favorite?" She shot him a suspicious look.

  "Starting to come out of the haze, I see." He sat down on the floor, his hands braced behind him. "I know everything, kitty."

  Holly thought about hissing at him, but the shake was delicious and he looked strangely delicious, too, with his shirt half-ripped to reveal smooth skin and rippling muscle overlaid with skin of honeyed brown. She was obviously more dopey than she realized, but right now, she felt too good to care. "Tell me about prana."

  A shrug. "Many use the word to describe the energy that is life, but I've always chosen it to describe the part of me that came into being during my Making." His eyes nictitated.

  Setting aside the shake, Holly went to crouch beside him on her hands and knees. She stared at his eyes. "Do it slowly."

  A smile. "I can't." There it went again, that membrane that turned his eyes into a shattered stained-glass artwork.

  "Pretty," she murmured, raising her fingers to his cheek.

  He nudged her gently back. "Drink your shake."

  Realizing that she was still acting drunk, Holly did as ordered. "So," she said after several more gulps, "what was this about?"

  "Teaching you that you'll have better control if you stop fighting yourself."

  Holly frowned and sucked up even more of the shake that was a rush of sugar and fat and all those yummy things her body was craving. She was so glad she wasn't a full-on vampire. "The only good thing about Uram attacking me is that over the past four months, I've developed the metabolism of an Olympic athlete."

  Venom yawned, his eyes slits of green behind lids gone heavy.

  Rolling his shoulders, he lay down on the part of the floor that was stone. That seemed perfectly normal to her right then. Finishing off the shake, she put the glass carefully aside, then lay back down in the same stony area herself. And realized it was sumptuously warm. "Do you have a heated floor?"

  "Just this part."

  Yawning, she curled onto her side. "It's nice."

  A pillow softly hit her face just as she was about to drop off. Squeezing it to her chest, she snuggled in.

  *

  Venom woke first. He'd known he would--Holly wasn't used to what they'd done last night, would take time to recover. She was curled up like the kitten he so often called her. In sleep, she'd made her way closer to him, so that his heat blazed on her back, whil
e the floor's heat blazed into a large part of the rest of her body.

  She slept with her head half on the pillow, was hugging the rest of the pillow to her front. Her right leg was pulled up to lie partially on the pillow. The torn sides of her dress fell on either side of her leg, revealing a sweep of creamy skin marked by a few small bruises and scratches from their tussle. He'd been very careful not to badly hurt her, but some wounds were inevitable.

  She'd heal relatively quickly.

  His eyes skimmed her leg again--"Rein it back," he ordered himself. "She really is a kitten." Small and new and finding her feet. He wasn't about to take a bite out of her.

  Finding a soft, silky blanket, he threw it over her. She immediately tugged it right up under her chin and snuggled in for a longer sleep. He felt his lips kick up. When she wasn't awake and snapping at him, she was pretty cute. Though he had to admit he liked the snappy, snarky side of her.

  A softer woman would've been crushed that first day of horror.

  Leaving her asleep, he went and stripped off his torn clothes before stepping into the shower. He turned up the heat, let it sink into his bones. He tried not to act too "snakey" as Holly would put it, but he couldn't give up these burning hot showers. And why deny himself this one pleasure when there was so much he could never have?

  He didn't step out of the shower until a long twenty minutes had passed. Drying off, he hitched the towel around his hips and went to check on his houseguest.

  9

  She was moving a little but was still on the floor. Her eyes half opened at sensing him. A big yawn before she snuggled back down, her body soon going motionless in a way that told him she'd fallen back into deepest sleep.

  He went and got dressed in a dark gray suit paired with a white shirt, then spent a couple of hours on the sofa in the living area going through security reports and other Tower data that Dmitri had forwarded him to bring him up to speed with current events. Regardless of any other calls on his time and attention, he was one of the Seven and he'd taken a blood vow to protect Raphael and his territory.

  That vow was a thing of honor, not compulsion. Venom could walk away at any time. He chose not to do so, chose to lend his strength to the reign of an archangel he respected with every fiber of his being. As he respected Dmitri and the others in the Seven. He'd already updated himself on most of this data on the flight from the Refuge, but he wanted to ensure he'd absorbed every detail.