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.