Archangel's Viper

by Nalini Singh

  She was exquisitely beautiful and brilliantly powerful and she did nothing for Venom. This same archangel had once thrown him so violently against a wall that she'd broken his spine, fractured his skull, one of his ribs piercing his lung to collapse it. But that wasn't the reason he wasn't drawn to her. From the instant he first met her, he'd known there was something wrong with Michaela. A vital piece missing.

  His eyes went to his sire. Raphael was descending directly behind Michaela, clearly having realized the roof wasn't big enough to allow the two of them to enter at the same time. His wings were white gold and powerful, the Legion mark on his right temple a violent blue lit with incandescent white fire against the midnight shade of his hair.

  When Venom looked over to Holly, he saw that her eyes, too, had turned skyward.

  The smile on her face was a mix of pride, love, and rage.

  Overlaying it all was unadulterated arrogance.

  Venom had never once witnessed that particular fault in Holly. If anything, she wasn't as conscious of her strength and skills as she should be. And that depth of arrogance? It took eons of unchallenged supremacy to develop.

  A wash of wind buffeted his face as Michaela landed, snapping her wings shut behind her. She'd seen Venom but ignored him in favor of facing Holly over the lattice of power that protected the crib, a lattice that had flickered to bronze life before Venom ever entered the room. The archangel's eyes grew wide, her lips parting, but Raphael landed before she could speak.

  The small room hummed with so much power that Venom's bones ached with it.

  "My love." Holly's mouth but not her voice, the acid glow of her eyes locked with Michaela's. "You betrayed me."

  Michaela's hair blew back in a wind that affected no one else in the room. "You are not him." It was a flat statement . . . but a hidden and oddly fragile note sang underneath.

  Need? Want?

  Was it possible the Archangel of Budapest had truly loved the archangel who had taken over Holly's body? The same man whose territory she'd claimed a large part of in the aftermath of his death?

  Holly responded in a language Venom didn't recognize. Michaela clearly did, her cold expression crumbling into a shock so harrowingly naked that it could only be real.

  Sire. Venom reached out to Raphael with his mind.

  Do not intercede, Venom, Raphael ordered, the pristine blue of his gaze focused on the disturbing tableau being played out in front of them. We must understand what this is to know how to end it.

  Venom couldn't see anything that a rational being would ever understand, but he'd trusted Raphael with his life for centuries. Now, he trusted the sire with Holly's. She would rather die than live as Uram's puppet, he said. If that is the only choice, we must end her. The words were like shards of glass in his throat.

  I have promised your Holly this, Venom. I will not forget.

  Because this was Raphael, an archangel forged in honor and tempered by a love that had shoved back the ice of immortality, Venom held his silence. And forced himself to listen to a dead and insane archangel's words coming from the mouth of the woman to whom Venom had handed his heart with full knowledge that she would soon break it.

  *

  Raphael had killed Uram above the ruined skyscrapers of Manhattan, building after building falling during their battle, the wreckage crashing to litter the streets below. He knew the archangel was dead. But the man Raphael had once called a friend had also been six thousand years old and had spent over half of those years as an archangel.

  A member of the Cadre could come back to life even after being blown into a million small pieces . . . but only if he hadn't been killed by angelfire utilized by another archangel.

  Raphael's angelfire had obliterated Uram. His heart. His mind. His body. Whatever inhabited Holly Chang's body, it wasn't Uram. But as he'd told Venom, they had to watch first. Even as he thought that, he knew what he was asking from this member of his Seven. In all the years that he'd known Venom, he'd never once seen the other man look at anyone as he looked at this small woman Raphael had first met as a brutalized victim.

  It was the same way Raphael looked at Elena.

  "Are you certain?" Uram's voice asked from Holly's mouth. "You feel me." She turned her gaze to the crib. "You kept a part of me safe until I could retrieve it."

  Michaela shook her head, her wings spreading and beginning to glow. "You are dead."

  "Then why do you keep this piece of me?" It was a sinuous whisper, Holly running her fingers along the power lattice without being affected by it. "Why do you protect it?"

  Raphael's healing gift had confirmed that Michaela wasn't pregnant the time she'd tried to fool him that she was, but it appeared she'd . . . birthed the thing in the crib at some point afterward. So either his gift hadn't recognized what Venom called the "unbeing" as life, or Michaela had been playing games back then and the seed Uram had left hidden in her had begun to grow much later, fed by the rising power of the Cascade.

  "You are dead!" With that shaken shout, Michaela raised a hand ringed with deadly energy. Before she could release it, however, Holly spoke again in a language Raphael didn't immediately recognize. It was old. Very old. And had been used only in a small area of Europe over a thousand years earlier. Raphael hadn't spent enough time there to have learned it well, but he'd picked up just enough during his friendship with Uram to translate the words.

  "We danced above Szeged the first time."

  Michaela's fire died.

  Trembling, she stared at Holly. "Uram?" The whisper held so much hope it was a keen of sound.

  Raphael was near certain it was Michaela's poisonous whispers that had either encouraged or pushed Uram to make the decision that had led to his madness. But at that moment, he was also sure that part of Michaela had loved the fallen archangel with whom she'd been for five decades.

  Uram said a word Raphael couldn't translate, but the caressing tone of it was unmistakable. Michaela just stared, her chest heaving. "Uram?" she whispered again. "Have you returned to me in truth?"

  Her eyes went to the crib and its monstrous inhabitant that still did not register as alive to Raphael's healer senses. "I thought this was all I'd ever have of you. I hoped you'd grow under the influence of the Cascade, become yourself in time."

  "You were right to wait," said the being inhabiting Holly. "It is time for me to be whole." Slender fingers running over the power lattice once again. "Undo this, my sweet."

  Swallowing, Michaela raised her hand.

  *

  Holly felt as if she was struggling through molasses. Her mind was heavy and slow. Her limbs heavier and impossible to move. But she fought. If she died, it wouldn't be because she'd goddamn given up. This was her body, her mind. And her fucking heart!

  That heart loved her siblings, her mother and father . . . Venom. As that heart had once loved five girls a monster had tortured and murdered.

  Shelley.

  Cara.

  Maxie.

  Rania.

  Ping.

  The bastard who'd butchered them didn't deserve a second life, a second chance, even if he had somehow found a way to return from the grave. He didn't get to live happily ever after with his lover while her friends rotted in their graves, their last moments on this planet full of horror and pain.

  Her rage and grief gave her strength enough to grab hold of a little more of her mind.

  "You were right to wait," the ghost of Uram was saying through Holly's mouth. "It is time for me to be whole." Her fingers caressing the power lattice, neutralizing its power but unable to breach the obstacle. "Undo this, my sweet."

  The words came to Holly's ears through a thick barrier that dulled the words to a flat monotone, but she understood their meaning. She had to keep listening, had to keep learning. Because she was inside him. Or he was inside her. She didn't know. She had to know.

  Holly fought desperately for a foothold that would keep her from sinking into the darkness again, but she was battling
the echo of an archangel. Even far less than whole, he was powerful. And--

  Oh, that was the answer. She'd had it all along. Uram wasn't coming back to life. He couldn't. Raphael had destroyed all the essential parts of him. She'd watched the footage of that destruction--caught by countless amateur videographers--over and over. She'd talked to people who'd been there that day, who'd seen Raphael wipe Uram out of existence.

  Nothing had remained of the Angel of Blood.

  This otherness that was trying to steal her body and mind was exactly what she'd thought--an echo, a lost fragment. Glimmers of memory, flashes of thought, bursts of impulse . . . but, now that she was paying attention and looking carefully, she got no sense of an actual whole person. If he had been whole, Holly would be erased by now. An archangelic mind was simply too powerful for anyone but another archangel to resist.

  Which all meant this echo could never exist as a whole being outside of Holly and that terrible thing in the crib, no matter what it thought in its ghostly madness. But it looked like Michaela was ready to believe in the same madness.

  Holly could forgive her that, even understand it.

  Love had a way of making you a little insane.

  Viper green eyes in her vision, Venom staring at her from near Michaela. He hadn't been standing there earlier. He must've moved while Uram totally controlled her vision, to put himself in her direct line of sight, exactly as she'd asked him to do.

  No one had eyes like Venom.

  No one was Venom.

  And Venom was hers.

  The reminder she'd spoken over and over through the night, the mental foothold she'd created using her emotional response to him--always, she'd responded to Venom--gave her a touch more strength.

  Light flashed, a glittering bronze shower that was astonishing in its beauty. Wonder tried to catch Holly in its shimmering grasp. Michaela really had struck the jackpot when it came to the beauty stakes. Horror soon curdled the wonder. Because the lattice was down and she could feel acid-green energy gathering inside her, as the echo of Uram prepared to leave Holly to merge with the part inside the fleshy receptacle in the crib.

  Should that happen, Holly would die just like Daisy had died. Uram would steal all her energy, all her life force to make himself stronger. Holly thought furiously as Michaela turned to Raphael, slamming out a palm laced with power. "Do not interfere here, Raphael. If he's powerful enough to have survived angelfire, then he's powerful enough to fully regenerate from a stump of flesh."

  You're wrong, Holly wanted to say. This echo would never be anything but a madness stuck in a moment of time. It didn't even know why it wasn't whole. It didn't remember dying. Because that death had taken place after Uram transferred--whether purposefully or by accident--fragments of his energy into Holly and Michaela and Daisy. It did remember loving Michaela because Uram had loved her as he went into his insanity, the emotion imprinted into every fragment of him. And it slyly remembered the craving for blood, for violence, for torture.

  Whatever grew out of that thing in the crib would be nothing but a horror.

  She was conscious of Raphael replying to Michaela, but she wasn't listening to the archangelic conversation any longer. She had to have a critical discussion of her own.

  Is that what you want to be? she whispered from deep inside herself, as Uram's echo had whispered to her. That twisted piece of flesh that has no life to it? Inside Uram, she understood that it was literally just meat. Created of Michaela's cells and Uram's tainted energy, it was an external host meant to act as the core for Uram's resurrection. It hadn't rotted away only because . . .

  My sweet dripped her blood over that which will become my flesh.

  Which Michaela hadn't been able to do while at the Cadre meeting, explaining the putrefaction Holly had glimpsed during her first visit. A few more days and there'd have been maggots crawling in that crib.

  Holly's stomach lurched, but she didn't lose the precious control she'd regained. You will be totally dependent on Michaela.

  Her body moved closer to the crib, looked down. "I will soon grow strong," the Uram echo said aloud, capturing the attention of everyone in the room.

  Are you sure? Holly whispered. Do you have enough power? Or will you be trapped in that hunk of toxic meat forever?

  Rage in her muscles, a burning pain her body wasn't designed to handle for long. "I am an archangel."

  Tell me when you and Michaela first met, Holly said through the agony.

  "Silence!" The voice that wasn't her voice boomed into the air.

  36

  Raphael, Michaela, Venom, they all watched without interrupting, as if aware something was taking place that they couldn't perceive. Luckily for Holly, she didn't have to be silent. The echo of Uram could do nothing more to her.

  You don't remember, do you? she murmured. Do you remember coming to New York?

  A deadly silence.

  You are not an archangel. You are an echo, a mad ghost created of fragments of energy left behind before your death. Holly felt an unexpected sadness spear her heart. You must've been an incredible power to do that, to leave behind energy that survived for so long.

  "I am an archangel!" It was a roar that shuddered against the walls of the turret that Michaela had turned into a nursery and a prison both. "I am Uram!"

  "My love." Michaela reached out a hand across the crib, her face a thing of power softened by grief. "Become whole."

  The power inside Holly coalesced into a tense knot, ready for the transfer.

  If you go into that flesh, Holly said in a voice she forced to be calm, you will be sightless and without hearing, without voice, the entire time it'll take you to recover. You'll be helpless in Michaela's hands, a child she has to raise. She stopped herself from saying anything more, from pointing out that Michaela could use any such opportunity to shape Uram as she saw fit.

  The truth, of course, was that Uram would never be a child. Would never grow. There wasn't enough of him left. Even now, his few memories were less sharp than they'd been before, as if having degraded once brought out into the light. If he went into that lump of flesh, however, then Michaela would fight for him to be allowed to exist. And, given Michaela's love for Uram and for the meat host in the crib, sooner, or later . . . Oh, that wasn't it at all.

  The knowledge was a faint whisper at the back of her mind, but it came from the echo that was part of her. And it told her the echo would try to take over Michaela the instant it had bathed in enough of her blood.

  Would it succeed?

  Holly didn't think so, but the risk was too horrific to chance. For if the echo did succeed in maddening Michaela, Uram's blood reign would begin all over again.

  Take this body, she whispered. At least until you are strong enough to create a full adult body in which to transfer yourself.

  This time, the answer was internal . . . and thoughtful. I will have to leave a splinter of energy in the other to make sure it grows.

  You know you need all of you to return to greatness.

  A long pause before Holly's hand reached into the crib and spread over the lump of flesh below. A single touch and she knew it was wrong. There was no warmth to that flesh. It was cold. Dead. Animated only because Uram's energy, fed by Michaela's blood, ran in its veins.

  *

  Venom watched Holly's hand spread on the lump that was the unbeing, acid green wings continuing to glow behind her. He wanted to tear that acid green from her, set her free. But to do that would be to kill her.

  He refused to believe she was already gone, that this was now a matter between archangels. When the Holly/Uram hybrid looked up without warning and said, "I will keep this body," Venom knew he was right. Holly had done something, changed the script.

  Sire. Venom didn't look at Raphael as he spoke. I think we should let this, too, run its course.

  There's little choice. Raphael's voice was a storm of power in Venom's head, so much of it that Venom sometimes wondered how the sire could bear it. I
f there is even the slightest chance that Uram can come back, I cannot strike without it being an act of war. To attack an archangel rising from a long Sleep is to breach all the rules that keep the Cadre from destroying one another and the world. We have already had one such incident; I will not be responsible for a second.

  Venom stared directly at Holly, willing her to look at him. Just one second, that was all he needed. A heartbeat.

  *

  Holly's eyes scanned the room. "Do not interfere," her mouth said before she frowned and shook her head. "I do not remember how I came to this place, but this is my resurrection."

  *

  Even as Holly's mouth moved, her eyes were processing what she'd seen in the echo's scan. Venom's hand had moved so quickly that most people wouldn't have caught it. She did, because she was a little like him. And-- Why am I like Venom? she asked the echo inside her. Did you have an affinity for snakes? Except . . . I'm not all like him.

  A buildup of pressure. Quiet, mortal!

  Holly forced herself to sound subservient. Please. I'll be gone once you come to power. Answer this one question before you take my flesh for your own. Did you have an affinity to snakes? Like Neha.

  Holly's head fell back, laughter pouring out of her mouth. When the echo stopped laughing, it said, I am not Neha with her poisons. I am Uram.

  And she realized the echo didn't know. The echo didn't remember what powers it'd had that had fed into Holly. It couldn't tell her the "why" of her, couldn't explain if she was the way she was because the toxin that had fueled his madness, had twisted the abilities he'd had as an archangel. She'd have to do her own research . . . if she survived this. Yes, you are an archangel, she said, setting her endgame in motion. Because she'd recognized that move of Venom's hand.

  It was part of a silent language he'd taught her during their sessions while he'd been away from New York. He'd made her practice the rapid hand movements until she could use them without thought. Similar to sign language, but much faster, it could, Holly had originally thought, be utilized only by people who had their reflexes. Which would've made it pretty useless.