by Nalini Singh
I'm not strong because I leash my impulses. I'm strong because I use those impulses.
Maybe Venom was right when it came to certain aspects of who she'd become . . . but Holly knew there were also things inside her that should never be set free.
When she reached the balcony in front of the opening on the fourth floor that functioned as both an exit and an entrance--a large section with transparent hanging flaps of thick, heavy plastic that she figured must help maintain the temperature within--she straightened up and said, "Hello? Can I come in?" It wasn't polite to just invite yourself into someone's house.
If no one answered, she'd climb back down and try again another day.
But one of the Legion landed beside her in deathly silence. Her heart thumped. "Good afternoon."
Rising up from his crouch, he looked at her with eyes translucent but for an outer ring of blue, his hair the same midnight as Raphael's, and his face too flawless. He appeared . . . unfinished in some strange way. As if life hadn't yet put a mark on him. And yet, paradoxically, the sense of age that clung to him made her bones ache.
Angling his head slightly to the left in a way that simply wasn't human, he said, "What are you?"
Holly fought the urge to touch his face, discover if he was warm or cold. "That's the million-dollar question." Suddenly remembering that the Legion were meant to be thousands upon thousands of years old, she said, "Do you know the answer?"
A slow shake of his head, his utter calm unnerving. "We are losing memories as we exist in this time and this place, but it isn't only memory that makes us. We have knowledge woven into our bones."
"And what does that knowledge tell you?"
"That you are new." He cocked his head deeper to the side--she was almost afraid he was going to do that thing owls did and turn his head upside down. "But you are old, too, though not yet fully awake."
Holly swallowed hard. "The otherness inside me, what is it?"
"You and not you." With that cryptic statement that made her want to shake him, the Legion being turned away, folding his wings neatly to his back. "You are new. You can come inside. My brethren will wish to see you."
Though she suddenly felt like a science exhibit, Holly's curiosity nonetheless compelled her to move forward. A wash of humid air hit her face the instant she walked through the flaps behind him. That made sense, if-- "Holy crap." She felt her mouth drop open, her eyes widen.
The entire building had been hollowed out except for levels that jutted out here and there. Thick vines twisted up the sides, ferns grew from impossible angles, flowers bloomed in giant clumps, and below her feet was the thickest moss she'd ever felt. When she looked down to the ground floor, she saw trees heavy with pink and orange fruit. There was no sense of rot, of fallen leaves or fruit ever left forgotten. The scent in the air was a fresh amalgam of green and light and growth.
Holly stared and stared, wonder filling her heart to overflowing.
"This is so beautiful." So much a thing of pure, unadulterated life.
Whispers surrounded her, coming from so many throats that she couldn't separate one from the other. It was creepy, but this was the Legion after all. Creepy was their normal modus operandi. But then they started landing around her on wings of silence and she thought, Oh shit.
"You are new," said the Legion being who'd brought her inside. "They have never seen you."
It was a strange way to put it. Not something like you, but you. "You've seen Venom," she said. "He's like me."
"He is a one being, too," her guide said, as the others continued to whisper . . . without moving their mouths. "Like you but not you. Different."
Since the Legion was staring full-out at her, Holly decided to stare back. She'd heard it said that when they'd arrived during the climactic battle of the fight between Raphael and Lijuan, they'd all looked exactly the same. Dusty gray hair without color, eyes utterly translucent, no sense of sunlight to their skin, wings as devoid of pigment as their hair.
These beings, however, while as similar as brothers, weren't identical. Hair colors varied in subtle shades, skin tones were beginning to diverge in minute increments, and their otherwise still-translucent eyes bore rings of pale blue and pale green and pale brown and pale hazel. Only the one she'd first met had a more vivid ring, the color closer to Raphael's intense blue.
"Why are your eyes so freaky pale?"
"We are becoming, too," said a hundred voices, maybe more. "You are an echo who is not an echo. You are new."
Holly was starting to understand why Elena looked as if she wanted to pull out her hair after she'd been talking to the Legion. "What does that even mean?"
But the Legion had gone quiet. A motionless, silent second later, they flew off on their batlike wings to settle all over the inside of the building--or to fly straight up to the roof exit that sat open to the misty rain and portentous clouds of darkest gray.
Only one was left, and it was the one who'd led her inside.
"Tell me what that means?" Holly asked softly. "Please?"
"That you are an echo who is not an echo. You are new." He flared out his wings and was gone before she could reply.
"You guys are like the worst possible version of some inscrutable guru!" Holly shouted up.
They kept looking at her with that strange and oddly innocent curiosity. "Come back," a hundred voices said. "We will be new together. After you are not an echo."
Throwing up her hands, Holly stomped out--to slam into Venom's chest. He caught her by the upper arms. She broke the hold and scowled, her face reflected back by the lenses of his sunglasses. "Do you know how to speak Legion?"
A slow smile. "Did our friends turn cryptic on you?"
"I asked a question." She just barely stopped herself from tearing off the sunglasses and stomping on them.
"No one speaks Legion except the Legion," Venom said, his dark hair glittering with tiny jewel-like drops of rain. "The sire and Elena are still attempting to work out the meaning of something the Legion said to them when the Legion first landed in New York."
Holly looked over her shoulder, where the plastic flaps disturbed by her passage had already gone still. "Do you think they get off on messing with people's heads?"
"No." A pause. "The Legion aren't anything human or understandable. Try to imagine having an eon of knowledge inside you, of knowing so much that explanations are redundant. I think, in their own minds, they're being perfectly clear."
You are an echo who is not an echo.
Holly didn't want to think about that word: echo. She was scared she knew exactly what it meant. "Are you stalking me?"
"No need. I just followed the blinding glare of your hair."
"A man who wears the same outfit over and over has no room to criticize my fashion choices." Never would she tell him that he looked beautifully dangerous in the gray suit and white shirt that had survived the rain unscathed but for the odd droplet here and there.
Protected by the partial overhang above this railingless landing area, he'd soon dry off. Holly had done so inside the warmth of the Legion building.
"Look at this," Venom said now that the exchange of insults was over. "It's a faked photo of you."
She frowned, took his phone. It was a shock to see herself looking so beaten. "I'd never look like that," she said, ice crackling her words. "Even if they beat me to a pulp."
"The individuals behind it clearly didn't research their target." Venom took the phone back. "This one's the best manipulated image but there were two others. Vivek was able to track down physical addresses for all the fraudsters--I thought we should pay them a visit, see if any of them got a bite back via a channel we can't monitor."
"Let's go." Holly felt like kicking some ass.
Not waiting for Venom, she began to make her way down the vine. She heard him laugh, and then he was moving beside her. They landed at the same time, tiny droplets of rain glittering on their skin and clothing. "You don't climb like me," she said, curious desp
ite herself. He was fluid like her, but his bones didn't move in the same way.
"We can compare techniques later." Striding across to where he'd parked his distinctive Bugatti, he got in, waited for her to take her seat. "I've sent you the files on the ones who said they'd caught you. See if you recognize any names. All are vampires."
Holly took out her phone, brought up the list he'd sent her. She didn't really expect to see any names she knew, but-- "Son of a bitch. That asshole."
"Which one?" He turned away from the Tower, the world beyond washed in gray.
"Marlin Tucker. Low-level scumbag who deals in information when he can't deal in honey feeds. Vampire. Hundred and seventy years old."
"Perhaps your relationship will make him cooperative."
"We don't have a relationship. He's one of Ash's contacts--she thinks he's an asshole, too, but he's an asshole who belongs in the gray and people talk to him." She went through the other names. "I don't know anyone else and these addresses aren't likely to be real if they're the official ones on their driver's licenses or whatever."
"Vivek dug deeper." A sideways glance out of eyes she couldn't see. "Nice outfit. Taking fashion advice from Dmitri?"
Holly narrowed her eyes at him. She'd chosen skinny black jeans today, paired them with a three-quarter-sleeved and fitted black shirt that she'd tucked into the jeans; the outfit was completed by boots that laced up to midcalf. Not spike boots. Work boots. "I haven't seen Dmitri wear daisies anytime lately." Those daisies decorated her boots.
Venom's grin was a wicked, wild thing. Real. "Definitely not Sorrow anymore."
Holly wasn't so sure. She'd changed her name back to Holly because of the sadness on her family's faces each time they called her Sorrow, but the girl she'd once been was gone forever . . . and deep in the night, when she was alone and the world was distant and no one could see her vulnerability, Holly mourned for her. For that hopeful, color-drenched girl who'd loved fashion and who'd had a crush on one of her lecturers.
With his sandy blond hair, a smile that creased his cheeks, light blue eyes, and a habit of wearing cardigans over his shirts, he'd made her heart flutter. Shelley and Maxie had dared Holly to make a move on him after they graduated and she'd laughingly taken the bet. Because back then, her life had been like that. A bubble of joy and possibility. A weightless, gossamer thing.
"Do you ever miss who you were?" The words were out of her mouth before she could think about what they might betray.
Venom didn't ask her what she was talking about. "It was a long time ago," he said. "Another few decades and it will be four centuries since I was Made."
"Janvier isn't that much younger than you and he still talks about his sisters, still goes to see their descendants." He and Ashwini had ridden to New Orleans a month earlier for a fais do-do, which Holly had worked out meant a party; the two had come back with joy written on their skin and colorful beads hanging off the handlebars of Janvier's motorcycle.
"People make different choices." Venom's voice was cold in a way she'd never heard from him--he might have the eyes of a viper, but for the most part, Venom was mockingly amused at the world. "What do you plan to do? Stay in touch with the next generation and the next, or fade away?"
Holly frowned and looked out at the gathering darkness, the clouds so heavy at this point that the world looked closer to six P.M. than just after one. This wasn't about her. But an inherent sense of fairness made her answer his question because she'd pushed him to answer hers. "I lost my family once," she said. "I'm never going to do it again." Turning back to face him, she saw the tightness in his jaw.
Venom never acted like this. This mattered. It wasn't to be taken lightly.
"I want to be like Janvier," she said. "I want to have those ties, have that sense of being rooted in humanity. He's the most . . . human vampire I know aside from Honor and Ash--and they just got Made, so it doesn't count. I think it's because he's maintained strong ties to his family through the centuries." A year ago, his great-great-multiplied-by-who-knows-how-many-greats-grandnephew had stayed with him and Ashwini for six months while the boy attended a theater workshop in Manhattan.
Venom shot her a look made unreadable by the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses. "Fighting the inevitable, kitty?" It was a murmur, the last word almost affectionate.
Her eyes burned, her throat suddenly thick. Turning to stare out the window again, she watched the passing traffic. Streetlights began to flicker on, their systems triggered by the lack of light. "I know I'm not human," she said when she could speak again, her voice caustic because otherwise, she might cry. "Bit hard to miss with the glowing green eyes and the ability to break people's bones without touching them."
"What?" Venom's tone was hard.
"It's a new development," Holly said, her voice as colorless as the landscape around them. "I was sparring with Janvier and he was showing me how to move and I was thinking that if I could get the angle exactly right, I'd probably break his forearm."
Bile burned her throat. "I wasn't planning to do that--I was just thinking of how it might be helpful in a real fight if I could take my attacker out of commission." She swallowed, the sickening sound of the bone cracking loud in her head. "And then his arm was broken."
"He'd have healed quickly," Venom said. "He's old and strong enough."
That didn't change that Holly had harmed someone who'd only ever been good to her. Janvier had even invited her along on the most recent visit to his family. She'd said no only because she'd wanted to spend the time with Mia before her sister's move to Boston.
Venom's power slid around her, a sinuously graceful thing. "Did he ask you to do it again?"
11
"How did you guess?" An edge of surprise in Holly's question.
"Because that's his job." Venom turned down a dingy street with several broken-out streetlights just as the rain thundered down in truth, but though he saw everything despite the acutely low visibility, the alertness part of his nature, his mind was on Holly's revelation. "That ability isn't vampiric."
"No. It's closer to angelic."
"No, kitty. You know as well as I do that it's closer to archangelic." The idea of that much power in her fragile body . . . "How are you still alive?" It was a serious question. Archangels were built to handle the violence of the power that lived in them. Even Illium, the strongest angel among the Seven, had nearly died when the Cascade forced extraordinary power into his flesh.
Holly continued to stare out the window. "It's only a droplet of power," she said in an eerily toneless voice. "It builds, then releases in sudden violence or . . ."
"Or?" Venom should've already had a briefing about her, but other events had overtaken the normal order of things when one of the Seven returned to the city after a long absence.
"Want to see a cool trick?"
Venom glanced over to see Holly holding out a hand . . . before it faded out of view only to flicker back in. He sucked in a breath as he turned his attention forward again. Glamour, the ability to walk unseen among the populace, was a strictly archangelic ability. "How long can you be unseen?"
Holly laughed as the rain transitioned from downpour to steady drizzle. "You mean how long can my hand be unseen? Because that's the only body part with which I can do my parlor trick."
A droplet of power.
Suddenly her words made more sense. "But you can summon the power on cue?"
"Depends on the day of the week. It comes and goes." She shifted slightly forward, pointing to their left. "That's the address of the idiots who think I'd cower. That three-story building with the graffiti of a flying dinosaur. Creative."
Venom double-parked his vehicle knowing no one would touch it. If they did--well, they might just get stung by a viper's bite. Getting out into the damp dark, he looked up at skies of heavy gray. "Have you been told of the Cascade?" Rain kissed his cheekbones.
*
"No. What is it?" Holly asked, trying not to watch the rain whisper across V
enom's skin. "I won't share the information. I know not to talk out of turn about Tower business." That way lay certain death--after hideous torture.
She'd already had her fill of both.
Venom didn't answer until they'd crossed the street, his body moving with liquid grace. Holly couldn't help it; she watched him. There was something deadly about Venom. Not just power, but him. She wondered if he'd been like this as a human, too, dangerous and beautiful.
She blinked, shook her head. Obviously, if she was starting to think Venom beautiful, it was time to break her self-imposed celibacy and go get laid. She had the primal rage inside her under control now, wouldn't terrify the poor men she picked up in the bars.
Her mind flashed to that . . . thing with Venom last night, when she'd gone full weirdo crazy on him--and he'd laughed. Because he was nuts, too.
"The Cascade," he said, once they stood in the rain-protected shadow of the building next to their target location, "is a once-in-an-eon event that causes massive power fluctuations and other changes among those who are Cadre."
Holly's fingers rose to her right temple. "Raphael's mark?"
"Yes, that's part of it. As are your new friends in the Legion." Venom scanned the otherwise empty street with lethal focus. "The Cascade also has unknown effects on the weather. Today's rain darkness could be a natural phenomenon, or it could be Cascade-linked."
Holly had the sense of glimpsing a vast world of earth-shattering power far beyond her understanding--and perhaps that was as it should be. For an immortal, she was still only an infant. She wasn't meant to consort with archangels . . . or with vampires as deadly as Venom. "Why are you telling me this?"
Taking off his sunglasses, he gripped her chin, held her gaze. "Because the Cascade most strongly impacts those with archangelic blood."
And Holly had been force-fed so much archangelic blood that it had changed her on a cellular level. "My parlor trick with the hand, breaking Janvier's arm," she said without severing the eye contact, "they might be connected to this Cascade?"
A nod. "No way to know for certain, but it would explain why you're developing abilities no one outside the Cadre should possess." He ran his thumb over her chin, slow and deliberate. "Be careful who you trust, kitty. Many would pay far more than five million for a woman who possesses even a single droplet of archangelic power."