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