Smile wiped off, the vampire just looked at her, unblinking. Holly stared back, not about to be intimidated, even if he was at least five hundred years old according to the internal chronometer she’d developed over the past year.
A tingle ran behind her eyes.
Shit.
Though backing down was against her personal religion, Holly lowered her eyelids and took a deep breath. When she lifted them back up, the vampire was smirking. Gritting her teeth and refraining from pointing out that she’d been a second away from mesmerizing him into clucking like a chicken, she carried on inside. It was a relatively small area with a glass wall that looked out onto the airfield.
Air traffic control was high above in their own little aerie.
That had always struck Holly as funny: angels flew wherever they wished, but if they traveled in an airplane, they needed to obey the rules of airspace. Not that the man she was here to pick up had wings. Venom was a vampire. One of the Seven, Raphael’s private guard. That, unfortunately, also meant he was far, far stronger than he should’ve been for his three hundred and fifty or so years of age.
All of the Seven were violent powers.
“Tower Airways Flight Three on final approach.”
Holly looked up at the speaker system with a startled grin. “Very funny, Trace,” she said, having recognized the voice at once.
Male laughter came through those same speakers. “I thought, my fellow adventurer into the wonders of worlds unseen, you might need a little entertainment,” the vampire said in his warm tenor. “Would you like to come up?”
She caught sight of the plane heading in to land. Her heart began to beat faster. In preparation. Because with her and Venom, it was always a war. “No, but thanks. And since when are you an air traffic controller?”
“I’m keeping Andreja company.”
Trace signed off with a line of poetry that made her heart soar.
Her and Trace’s friendship was based in words, in the poetry in which they found wonder and comfort.
Then there was the man about to get out of the plane that had come to a smooth stop on the tarmac. He’d been part of her life almost since the hellish day when she’d watched helplessly, her body paralyzed by poisoned blood, as an insane archangel tore a screaming Shelley’s arms from her body as if he was pulling the wings off a butterfly, then paused to kiss Holly with his red-rimmed mouth.
“Shh.”
Hands curling at her sides as the hairs on her nape rose, she shoved away the past to focus on the man she was here to pick up, a man who’d irritated and angered her from their first meeting.
When the Tower had reassigned him away from New York just over two years earlier, she’d said good riddance. Only to realize that with Venom gone, no one in the city truly saw the part of her that was cold and deadly and eerily inhuman. The immortals who surrounded her were powerful and deadly, but no one else was so strangely other.
Venom was both immune to her capacity to mesmerize prey and the only person who could teach her how to deal with the ability. Which meant she’d had to have his annoying voice in her ear once a week over the time that he’d been away—in a place no one would mention by name to her. He’d been meant to return to work physically with her, but a strange, taut tension had gripped the immortal world in the interim, and Venom had made no visits to New York.
He stepped out of the private jet.
Of course he was wearing a flawlessly tailored suit in black, paired with a black shirt and no tie. Wraparound mirrored sunglasses obscured his eyes. Holly still hadn’t figured out if he wore the sunglasses because his eyes were sensitive to light, so people wouldn’t freak out, or simply because he was an asshole who liked to look impenetrable.
She’d bet on the last.
After striding down the steps of the plane with a battered brown—in an elegant way, of course—leather hold-all slung over his shoulder, he turned to look back at the plane, raising a hand toward the cockpit. The early-afternoon sunlight caught on the clean line of his jaw, the burnished brown of his skin glowing in the light. His slightly overlong chocolate-dark hair was brushed neatly, not a strand out of place.
The damn man looked like he’d stepped out of an ad for fine whiskey or luxury watches.
She was scowling when he met her eyes through the glass. She knew he was looking at her despite the mirrored sunglasses. Arms folded and feet set apart, she stared back.
He smiled and slid off the sunglasses.
Eyes slitted like a viper’s met hers, the color a bright astonishing green. I see you missed me, kitty, he mouthed.
Holly gave him a sickly sweet smile . . . followed by the finger.
2
Sliding the sunglasses back on, Venom laughed. He was inside the waiting area moments later. The raw power of him crashed into her. Violently. Despite her earlier thoughts, she’d forgotten just how incredibly strong he was—she knew this was no power play; he wasn’t trying to overwhelm her on purpose.
This was simply who he was: a vampire a hundred times more deadly than the guard outside.
“Damn,” she said with a downturned face. “I was hoping you’d fallen into a crevasse.” He’d mentioned in their last call that he was about to go out on a climb. “Too bad, I guess.”
“I see those little kitten fangs of yours are still just as cute.”
She wanted to hiss at him, controlled the urge only because it would amuse him—and because in the time that he’d been gone, she’d achieved iron control over the most obviously inhuman aspects of her nature.
As for the ugly voice that kept whispering inside her when she was distracted, she’d strangle that, too. “Where’s the rest of your luggage?”
“This is it.”
Rolling her eyes, Holly put her hands on her hips. “Yeah, right. What did you wear for the past two years?” Venom had a suit for every day of the month.
“You don’t know everything you think you know, kitty.”
The world became tinged in acid green.
His smile was slow and satisfied. “There you are.” He took off his sunglasses again to reveal those eyes even more eerie than her own. “Boo.”
Getting her temper in check through sheer teeth-clenched grit, Holly looked up toward the speaker mounted on the wall. “Bye, Trace. Hope you and Andreja have a good day. Oh, I may be arrested for homicide soon. Please come visit me in prison.”
“Adieu, my beautiful girl,” Trace said with cheerful gallantness. “And, old friend, while you may provoke sweet Holly to homicidal rage, it is a pleasure to have you home.”
“It’s good to be back.” Sliding his sunglasses back on, Venom looked at Holly. “You my chauffeur?”
“I’m the woman you don’t want to piss off unless you plan to walk all the way to the Tower,” Holly said before striding out to the car.
Venom paused to shake hands with the guard, then dropped his hold-all in the trunk. Coming around to take the passenger seat, he pushed it all the way back to accommodate his legs. He was whipcord lean, but he had wide shoulders, long legs, a lot of muscle. He could also move as fast as a cobra strike.
“They let you drive now?” he said in a wondering tone of voice calibrated to get under her skin. “I leave for a couple of years and miss kitty’s first steps. Did anyone take photos for the baby album I sent you?”
“It’s full of pretty pictures.” Holly bared her teeth at him in a caricature of a smile. “Honor is a little concerned about how I keep drawing you with your head cut off,” she said in a deliberately thoughtful tone, “but an artist must follow her instincts.”