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.
“I’ve grown strong enough to take down a large number of the angels in the city,” Venom said lazily. “It’s a secret the Tower will execute you for speaking, so never share it—but I can shock the youngest ones into an intense involuntary sleep that the healers believe could lead to death, incapacitate the older with severe pain.”
Holly scowled and said, “Bull,” wincing inwardly at using language for which