"It requires the ability to hold power outside the body." Turning, he rubbed a thumb over her lower lip. "As yet, you have very little power so the point is moot."
She caught his wrist, looked up. "Raphael, am I going to have to Make vampires?"
"You're an angel Made, not born." He caressed her with his thumb once more. "Even Keir doesn't know the answer to that question."
And Keir, she knew without asking, was an ancient. "But if I do - "
"It'll not be anytime soon." A rock-solid answer. "Your blood was free of the toxin when you woke. You'll be tested several times a year now that you're awake."
"Is it hard? To Make someone?"
Raphael nodded. "The choosing is difficult. It's to the Cadre's benefit not to select those who're weak, who'll break, but mistakes happen."
Hearing what he'd never enunciate, she pressed a kiss to his palm.
"However the act itself," he said, his voice dropping, "is as intimate as you choose to make it. For many, it's a clinical process akin to giving blood. The human is put into a medicated sleep during the transfer."
Relief made her shudder. "I thought it would be like when you kissed me." The intimacy of it had shaken her to the soul.
Cobalt flame. "Nothing will ever be like our kiss."
Heart thundering, she rose to stand on the bed, her hands on his shoulders. He looked up the na**d sweep of her body."Elena."
She kissed him. His response was an inferno, but she felt the tension beneath the surface.
"We have to leave soon don't we?"
"Yes." His hands smoothing over her butt, slow and easy. "We'll take mortal means of transportation to Beijing."
"Wouldn't it be more impressive to fly in?"
"Endurance flying requires muscle strength you don't have yet." A practical answer, but his hands slid lower . . . lower. "It's to our benefit that she consider us weak going in. It'll make her careless. We'll need every advantage if she truly has crossed the line into irrevocable madness."
"Raphael . . ." She shuddered, thrust her hands into his hair. "Galen's right. I do make you vulnerable. And she knows my weaknesses."
So did I, Elena. And yet you hold my heart.
Two hours later found Elena back in the beaten earth ring that had become as familiar to her as her own face. Probably because she'd been up close and personal with it more than once.
"So," she said, staring into the slitted, inhuman eyes of her sparring partner, "you do occasionally lose the suit."
Venom smiled, displaying the canines she'd seen weep poison, his face at once starkly beautiful and unalterably alien. He'd not only lost the suit, he was dressed only in a pair of flowing black pants that shifted like liquid as he moved, his body as sinuous as the snake that looked at her out of those eyes.
And that body . . . yeah, it was definitely worth a second look. But she was more concerned at the ease with which he played with the foot-length curved knives in his hands. They reminded her almost of some short swords she'd seen, but they were a littletoo short, a little too curved. Not sickle-curved, but more of a soft, smooth flow.
Blades meant for lethal grace.
Of course, identifying them didn't matter. It was what he could do with them that counted. She met his smirk with one of her own. "You didn't catch the knife I threw at you in New York."
He shrugged, gleaming dark gold skin over pure, lithe muscle. "I caught it."
"By the sharpest edge." She tested the long, slender blades Galen had handed her.
Shorter than the rapier he'd started her on, they were weighted so she could throw them, too. If Venom's blades were made for grace, hers were made for power and maximum damage, both edges razor-sharp - she could gut someone with surgical precision if necessary. "Sloppy of you."
"I guess I'll have to make up for it today." Lowering his body into a semicrouch, he began to circle her, his movements almost painfully slow.
She moved in the opposite direction, wanting to get a handle on his style. Most people telegraphed their next move with some type of a tell. She was very aware of her own tell - her feet. It had taken years of training to ensure they never pointed in the same direction she intended to move. Venom didn't telegraph with his feet.
She shifted her attention to the next most common tell - the eyes. All the air rushed out of her lungs at the contact. Her brain continued to have trouble accepting what she saw when she looked into Venom's eyes. Just then, the slitted irises contracted and she took a startled step back.
A soft laugh.
Bastard was playing with her. Gritting her teeth, she kept her gaze locked to his as they continued to circle each other. It was on the second complete rotation that she felt herself blink, stagger a little.
Fuck!
She threw one of the blades without warning. He moved aside with snake swiftness but still ended up on his back on the ground with a nasty gash in his arm.
Galen was beside them in a single instant. "What was that?" he snapped, his jaw a hard line. "Throwing away your weapon before the fight starts isn't exactly going to keep you alive."
Elena didn't take her eyes from Venom. The vampire held a hand over his bleeding arm, but his smile . . . Slow. Taunting. Daring her to call him on it. Dropping her head, she lunged . . . and slammed the second blade right between his legs.
"Fuck!" He scrambled backward, flowing to his feet in a way that was simply not human. Normal bodies didn't move with that kind of liquid fluidity.
Galen was looking at Venom now. "Did you try to entrance her?"