The goon’s eyes didn’t even flick to her as he said, “She drives like a maniac.”
Venom laughed. “In that we agree.” His laugh had the thick-necked goon flinching. “Now, the rest.”
The man spoke so fast his words rolled into one another. “We lost her right after the main airport and, after fifteen minutes of searching, decided to pull over at a gas station, get some coffee, make a new plan. We’d just got back in the SUV when we saw her car fly past.”
And the goons had figured it was their lucky day, too hyped up on the hunt to think about why Holly wasn’t already in Manhattan when she’d taken off so fast that they’d lost her. Not bothering to shake her head at their incompetence, she said, “How were you supposed to contact the person who put out the bounty?”
“I think Mike has an address to e-mail a photo to.” He swallowed, licked his lips. “You know, for proof.”
Going to the goon whose head was crushed in on one side badly enough that she could see brain matter leaking out—gross, but far from the worst she’d seen—Holly searched his pockets until she found his phone. She unlocked it using his thumbprint, then scanned his text messages.
Nothing.
A reminder popped up onto the home screen before she could check his e-mails: Kidnap Holly Chang. E-mail photo. An e-mail address followed.
Taken aback at the idea that this vampire had needed a reminder of his intention to kidnap a woman—I mean, it didn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d forget—she showed Venom the note.
He met her eyes. “Can you pretend to look beaten and defeated?”
No. She was never going to look that way again.
“No,” he said softly, “I didn’t think so.”
Shoulders unknotting when he let it go, she thought quickly. “I can look unconscious.” She pulled a few random hunks of hair out of her ponytail, then climbed into the backseat of the SUV and slumped her head to the side—one of the goons had torn her brand-new top, so with that and the messy hair, she looked appropriately bedraggled.
Venom took the shot using Mike-the-forgetful-goon’s phone, e-mailed it through. They still didn’t have a response by the time a Tower team arrived to take the bounty hunters into custody. A tow truck followed, to haul away the SUV—Venom had damaged the engine when he’d thrown one of the goons on top of the hood.
“Whoever put out the bounty might have people watching the ones most likely to succeed,” he said once they were back in the car and on their way to the Tower, the silent phone in the cup holder. “If so, the lookout would’ve seen us take down the bounty hunters.”
Holly snorted. “If those three were judged the most likely to succeed, it’s a seriously low bar.”
“Not a surprise, kitty. Only the stupid or the desperate would go after a woman who belongs to the Tower.”
Holly tapped a finger on the steering wheel. “Goons might not know that,” she murmured. “I’ve only had a room in the Tower for seven months, and I try to keep my connection low-key.” The weakest immortals, the ones who haunted the shadows, were aware she knew powerful vampires and angels and could get their concerns heard, but Holly wasn’t considered a threat in her own right.
What a con I’m running.
She wanted to tear the steering wheel off its housing, wanted to scream out her rage. Too bad that super strength wasn’t one of the abilities bestowed on her courtesy of her tainted blood . . . or that she couldn’t forget the nightmare of her creation. She hated the emotions that had hit her during the kidnapping attempt, emotions that yet pulsed in her body.
Uram had taken her while she’d been heading out to the movies with her friends, the six of them laughing and talking about grabbing mint chocolate frappuccinos. She’d been wearing a flirty little yellow dress, and strappy high heels in an effort to make herself taller, and her makeup had been immaculate—it had taken an hour to apply.
Mia had helped her with her eyeliner.
Then had come the horror.
That feeling of utter helplessness, it was a stone in her gut, a memory she couldn’t wipe after it had surged its way to the surface some two and a half years after the abduction, as if her mind had decided she hadn’t faced horror enough.
More than eighteen months on from that searing instant of recall, and the nightmare echoes refused to fade. She’d screamed until she was hoarse, had fought to save her friends, but Uram had gutted them one by one in front of her, as if displaying his art to an appreciative audience. Holly had been the only one left, a bloody, naked, half-mad mess when Elena found her.
Often in the days afterward, she’d wished that she, too, had died in that charnel house. It was so much harder to be alive and to know Shelley would never again laugh her breathless and giggly laugh, that Cara and Maxie would never again dither over a shade of lipstick, and Rania and Ping never again gossip about the men in their lives.
There had been two other victims in that Brooklyn warehouse, women already dead and drained of blood by the time Uram took Holly and her friends to his house of horrors. It was much later that Holly had discovered their names: Kimiya and Nataja.
She’d been in no state to go to any of their funerals . . . and she couldn’t bear to visit their graves. It hurt so much to think of her friends and those two strangers she’d never known—and never would know—lying cold in the earth.
“What I don’t understand is why anyone would want to kidnap a kitty with tiny baby vampire teeth.”
3
Venom’s musing statement snapped her out of the loop of grief and loss and horror and rage. “Come closer and I’ll show you exactly how helpless those baby teeth are.” Her fangs dispensed an acidic green substance the Tower scientists had tested and declared a deadly poison.
“Sorry, kitty. Biting me will do you no good . . . though I have been told my blood is the best women have ever tasted.”
Holly made gagging motions with the hand not on the steering wheel, incredibly glad right then for his aggravating and distracting presence—though she’d cut off her own head before she admitted it. “Some women will do anything to get into the Tower.”
“You play mean, Hollyberry. Like poison.”
Coming from anyone else, the latter words would’ve been an ugly insult. From Venom . . . “Did you just compliment me?” she asked, her mouth falling open. “Take it back!” She couldn’t deal with Venom being nice to her in any way, shape, or form.
“Of course,” he said, “your poison is nowhere near as venomous as mine.”
She went to snap back a retort about men always thinking their package was bigger, when the import of his words penetrated. “Did the Tower compare the two?”
“We’re the only two venomous members of the Tower. The sire needs to know our exact strengths.”
“How much stronger are you?” she asked through gritted teeth, though his potency wasn’t a surprise. Venom might look like he was maybe twenty-seven, but he’d lived a lot more life than she could imagine.
And he’d look that way forever, a sexual creature no one would ever dare call a “boy.” Holly, in contrast, was stuck with the face of a twenty-three-year-old who’d still had a youthful softness to her when Uram altered the shape of her existence. The softness would’ve disappeared in another year; she knew because she’d watched Mia’s transformation.
But Holly never got that extra year to grow into her skin and her womanhood.
Vampirism—or whatever it was that ran in her blood—would probably refine her features to something more adultlike in the future, but she’d never look anything but young. Not even if she lived to be five hundred years old. Of course, a long, near-immortal life was the best-case scenario.