And Goddess help him, some part of him was delighting in his brutality, even as another voice raged at him to stop.
There was nothing more despicable than a man who hurt a woman for no other reason than the demons within himself. But those demons were hard upon him right now, and Anna was willing to give him shelter in that storm, as well as be the rocks he dashed himself against.
When his cock was gripped by her tightness, he belonged . . . somewhere. He dropped over her, burying his face in her neck, lips finding the pounding artery. Tried not to snap his teeth into it like a rabid creature.
No. He was a lord of the sky, always in control. He wanted her insane, as insane as he felt. He withdrew and pulled her legs over his shoulders, lifting her up to put his mouth between her legs. He banded his arms around her upper thighs as she lost the ability to hold on to anything, suckled her clit in his mouth, plunged his tongue deep inside her, tasting himself and her sweetness, feeling her shudders, hearing her mewling cries.
He worked her ruthlessly until she flooded against his mouth. But then he kept going as she cried out at the stimulation of her over-sensitized skin, squirmed. He could hold her effortlessly, while her struggle fired his blood. She was his. His. He didn't release her until she stopped struggling, and when she did, he saw she was weak, her eyes glazed, and her throat bared to him. Good.
He rammed into her again, no finesse or rhythm. He was pumping, pumping, impossibly hard now. But no release came. Sweat gathered on his shoulders, fury built like a storm, but it was a fever that wouldn't break, a battle rage that could only find release in blood. Bending, he sank his teeth into the top of her breast and heard her gasp, the cry she bit back. As he worked down to her nipple she tried to hold on to his arms, but he caught her hands and pinned them to the ground.
"Mine," he said fiercely.
"My lord, let me--"
"No." He snarled it. "Lie there. Take me. That's all."
"Stop."
She said it softly, so softly that it shouldn't have registered at all. But it was like the slight whisper of an unexpected gentle breeze during the fury of his storm. Jonah paused, panting, his hands gripping her wrists with bruising force, his body pressed down hard on her as if he was pounding on his tormented soul. As if he'd somehow given it to her and it was staring at him out of those eyes. Only not with the accusation he expected, but something harder to face.
Anna's heart was racing, her mind in shock at the vicious assault. He'd brought her to an intense climax with his mouth that had swept her away like a riptide. But then he'd bitten her so savagely, gripped her as he might an opponent. For just a flash, in his dark eyes, there'd been . . . evil. Hatred.
No. She refused to believe that of him.
While Mina had never said how old Jonah was, Anna had no doubt he'd been fighting Dark Ones for centuries. And now she knew he'd been around over a thousand years. The battles he'd waged had probably taken place in areas decimated by plague, in the clouds of smoke rising above the gas chambers of concentration camps, over slaughterhouses and mass graves dug by dictators and conquerors, over bare ground stripped of forests and the homes of all the creatures there . . . wherever human beings created such evil as couldn't be imagined. Not only did he have to see it below him, he'd faced the creatures that tore holes in the firmament and that were called by evil. The angels who followed him into those battles, those he trained, whom he came to care for like his own sons, often died.
While angels apparently took longer to reach a breaking point, they did have one. Physically immortal didn't mean emotionally immune.
She was out of her depth. No question. But the Goddess had made her as well as great and mighty angels, so there had to be a connecting thread between them.
"Ssshhh." She lifted her head from the ground. While she was sure he wouldn't release her hands, she brushed her mouth, then her temple against his heaving chest, her ear to his heart. "My breast. It hurts, my lord. Will you put your mouth on it?"
A quiet request, and when she laid her head back down, Jonah's gaze moved to that area where he'd bitten her. The imprint of his teeth was visible.
Staring at it a long moment while she held her breath, at last he bent, his grip easing without conscious thought, and pressed his lips there.
Light, gentle, the amazing quiver of flesh. As he relented to her need, Jonah found the soft silkiness of woman that he hadn't registered or savored in the haze of his fury. And as he gave to her, he remembered it was a much better form of pleasure than taking.
Her fingers turned to twine with his, held as she slipped the other hand free and threaded it up into his hair.
"Don't move, my lord. Simply . . . be."
When she lifted her hips, he slid deeper, into the wet, welcoming heat of her rippling over his organ. Tightening her muscles on him, she began to move. As he watched, curved over her, he stayed utterly still, mesmerized. Passion gathered energy with the slow glide of her hips, up and down, her lower body rippling like her mermaid form.
Now, instead of the relentless barrage of an electric shock, where no release from torture was forthcoming, the pleasure was building like a slow tide. The joy of feeling cool water running over his hellfire-scalded body, the slow approach to the promise of a waterfall.
"Little one . . ."
"Easy," she whispered. "Let me just feel you. Ride inside me, my lord."
Something was quaking in his lower belly, a remarkable reaction. She was so young, so much younger than he, but at this moment, the way her fingers passed over his face, it was as if that didn't matter. As if the blood didn't matter, as if she could see beyond it to something he couldn't see himself. The climax was intensifying to a level he'd never experienced before, and yet his grip was no longer bruising. He'd drifted down onto her, had his elbows on either side of her head, their foreheads touching, pressing together. His buttocks were clenching as he moved now, as unconscious and natural as breathing. Sliding in deep, withdrawing, thrusting in again, feeling her excruciatingly tight muscles holding him, stroking him. Her legs rose, clasped around him, and they were moving in one sinuous roll, perfectly synchronized like the sway of the tree branches above, the movement of wind, rhythm of the earth.
"Let me in, my lord," she said softly. "Don't deny me. I love you."
The words were simple, true and sweet. He had no defense against them. Her energy flooded into him, and while he could not bring himself to match it, create the synergy of healing that he knew she and her seawitch would find optimal, he could do this one thing for her. Passively and yet wondrously experience her energy moving through his body, clean and innocent, healing where it could. It even surrounded the deep blackness squatting balefully on top of his soul. Though it couldn't permeate it, the Joining Magic settled over it like a cloak offered to a shivering vagrant, a touch of kindness toward something lost and desolate, even as the creature spat and hissed halfheartedly at the offering.
His release came then, quiet, overwhelming. His body shuddering against hers, fingers digging into her fragile shoulders and slim upper arms. Pressing his face into her hair, he emitted the groan of a soul-deep release.
They lay silently that way for a while, his jaw pressed against her wet cheek, so that the tears on her face transferred to his skin.
When he rose to his knees at last, pulled out of her, his gaze drifted down to her thighs. Mixed with her fluids, he saw the smears of blood where he'd thrust into her. The tremble of her thighs where he'd pushed the muscles relentlessly.
He swallowed. He couldn't ask forgiveness for yet another unforgivable act. But he could offer her this. Bending forward from his knees, as if genuflecting before her, he kissed her inner thigh. One side, then the other, taking away the blood, soothing her flesh in between with his tongue while her muscles left impressions like butterfly wings against his jawline as she quivered, held her breath.
"I'm all yours, my lord," Anna whispered.
To destroy with my darkness. Bowing his
head and closing his eyes, a shudder rippled over his skin beneath her touch. "I should have David take you home," he said, his voice harsh. "You're not safe with me."
"I'm where I belong, my lord." Anna raised her chin as he lifted his head, met her gaze. "That is not a decision you can make for me."
Jonah gave her an ironic look, which indicated he was more than physically capable of making that decision for her. Her lips tightened. "It is not a decision you should make for me."
"Well, as you may have noticed, I am not necessarily making the decisions I should make these days."
The wry observation drained some of her tension, though she remained wary as he turned with a muffled grunt to lie down next to her. Gathering her close, he let her lie across his chest. "Did Lucifer and David tell you how best to handle me?"
"They respect you too much to do that, my lord. And I am yours to command."
"Oh, really?" The incredulity in his voice, the underlying humor, clear now, brought with it an overwhelming rush of relief to her. The worst had passed, for the moment. "Perhaps you'll tell me one command of mine you've obeyed thus far. Unless memory escapes me, you've ignored anything I've told you to do."
"I suspect you should be getting sleepy now, my lord," she evaded. "The human male form does tend to require sleep . . . after."
He squeezed her in light reproof. "You seem to have lost your terror of angels, little one. Standing up to Lucifer himself."
"You all are not so fearsome. A lot of grumbling and bluster for the most part. Much like blowfish."
That of course was a lie, on many different levels. Lucifer aside, Jonah had been fearsome during the battle with the Dark Ones. The way he'd taken their lives with such fierce, single-minded precision. It had been awesome and terrible to watch how he fought even as he got overwhelmed. It was obviously what he knew best. He was at home in battle, more comfortable than anywhere she'd seen him yet. Even in her arms.
But she hadn't truly feared him until he sank his teeth into her breast and she saw that trace of malicious light in his gaze. For that second, she'd wished Lucifer and David hadn't left.
No. She couldn't think that way. It wasn't Jonah. It was the darkness she feared, the emanations a cold echo of what she'd sensed from those terrible creatures tonight. That Jonah could succumb, become one of them . . . Was that what Lucifer had hinted the poison could do to him? No. She would get him to the shaman, and everything would be all right.
Winding her arms more closely about him, she buried her fingers in his hair, held his face to her throat, felt his breath there. She did love him. She didn't know if she simply loved the amazing idea of him, or the man himself, but it didn't matter. The man and the idea were the same. She believed in that, believed in him. She had to help restore him to that if she had any meager ability to do so. The two angels seemed to think that was the case. Even Mina had intimated it.
Okay, so Lucifer had said she was the only one who could do anything with Jonah, which was a little different. But she was going to take it as a bolstering thought.
He'd fallen asleep while Anna held him in her arms. She propped herself on an elbow, studied his face, traced the strong bone structure, the sensual fierceness of it. If David and Lucifer had stayed, traveled with them, the next time Jonah wanted her, would he have taken her this way before them, the way he implied that angels often did, sharing women together?
She remembered Jonah's possessive reaction when Lucifer had looked at her. But could what she'd interpreted as a protective, singular attitude been simply part of the poison gripping him?
"Mine," he'd said just now, as if she were a slave, his property.
For a moment she felt swamped by doubts again, terribly alone. But with him in her arms like this, how could she feel lonely? When she held him against her heart, a childish fantasy it might be, but she felt the clasp of the other half of herself.
Settling down next to him again, she held him as he muttered, called out in his sleep. Holding him in her arms and stroking him as needed, both for his comfort and her pleasure, her fingertips lingered on his broad shoulders. She followed the line of his chest down to his hard abdomen and remembered its weight pushing her own legs open. His cock, even in its replete state, still looked able to fill her. Perhaps angels weren't the only ones who craved this for grounding, for nourishment of the soul. She couldn't imagine what she was going to do without it when it was gone, but that would come whether she tried to prepare for it or not. Her task was before her.
It was time to rouse him and continue their journey. She had to get him to the shaman.
Sixteen
THE day's heat had long since passed oppressive. When Anna glanced at Jonah, she saw that, despite his human form, his core was still angel, for his skin barely gleamed with sweat. He seemed relaxed, walking and taking in the landscape around them, whereas she was certain every cell along her skin's surface was gasping for air.
As they moved deeper into the state, the occasional sign told them they were headed into the Mojave Desert, moving toward the Black Rock wilderness area. Even without the signs, their surroundings reflected the change in topography.
As if he'd picked up that she was having some difficulty adapting to their decidedly nonoceanic environment, Jonah was goading her natural curiosity about new things by pointing out features of interest. She was surprised to find that, while she didn't know the names of her own wildflowers, Jonah was a rich resource on the vegetation of the area, patiently telling her the names and histories of the different bizarre-looking plants. Joshua trees with their upraised limbs like a supplicant prophet, which had given them their name. Saltbush with tiny clusters of shell-like leaves and crusty surface. Thorny, tall greasewoods whose leaves had a salty taste. Yucca with their thick white blooms.
In the distance, smooth gray formations of what she thought of as mountains were the remnants of volcanic craters. Jonah noted they would find no vegetation in those areas. But he told her mammoths and saber-toothed tigers once roamed there.
"You were alive when . . ."
Jonah chuckled. "No, little one. Their time was far before mine. But angels do have very regimented occasions to move through time doors, and it was a period I was allowed a brief glimpse of."
She stopped, stared at him. "You've gotten to see and do so much. How . . ." She bit it off, realizing at once the error of going down that road, but he'd already sensed what the question was. He looked out at the volcanic formations, the remnants of volatile things.
"Because I have seen numerous wonders, little one. Experienced and learned every philosophy, seen the way they cycle into one another. And yet the nature of evil is never changed or healed by any of it. Never wishes to do anything but destroy the wonders of the universe. Believe me"--his lip curled in a bitter sneer--"blissful ignorance is the closest friend of faith."
She cursed herself for bringing the shadows back into his face. He'd seemed better today, the despair that had gripped him after their encounter with Lucifer and David going dormant behind his apparent enjoyment of her insatiable curiosity, her excitement over things that were so commonplace to him.
Resolutely, she turned her gaze back to the landscape. "It's like we're about to walk on the moon, isn't it?"
"Astronauts have trained in this area for just that reason."
Fortunately for her gasping skin, it was also the type of area where the sparse population and fierce conditions meant that the infrequent passing drivers automatically stopped to ask if they needed a ride. Jonah had therefore offered most of his explanations to her as they bounced along in the backs of the pickups or other off-road vehicles that were the predominant transportation for this remote area.
Anna was quietly relieved, for the area was also rife with breathtaking mountain ranges that would have made for difficult travels. Every step she took on the hot asphalt, even with the sunscreen and hat she now wore, and the ample supply of drinking water they carried, seemed to be dragging down her limbs
. She had no desire to show Jonah how the heat was affecting her. Just a little farther . . . Another day's travel at this pace, with these many helping hands, and they'd be there.
She saw the gas station as a paradise when their latest hitch dropped them there. The two surveyors turned off on a highway toward California, away from where she and Jonah were going. Anna went inside to buy something else cold and wet for both of them while Jonah stayed outside, still preferring open spaces.
As she went up the stairs of the wooden porch of the trading post, Anna noticed an old man sitting on a straight-backed chair at the end of it. There was a rocker next to him, but he'd chosen the chair that didn't move, which she thought was odd, when she would take any opportunity to increase the air movement around her. She couldn't tell if he was sleeping or just staring out at the desert landscape, but he was so motionless, she at first guessed the former. Then she realized his head was not touching the back of the chair, nor was it bowed forward.
Then Jonah passed her, his fingertips grazing her lower back, distracting her with his absent smile before he headed in that direction, apparently planning to take a seat in the rocking chair.
She wondered if he'd ever sat in one and if she should warn him about the unexpected motion. Suppressing a smile, she decided to let him make that discovery himself. Despite the heat, she couldn't help but take an extra moment to watch him. The way he walked, the invisible sense of those wings, though he was much steadier in his human form now. Shaking her head at her foolish crush, she made herself open the screen door to enter the store.
A middle-aged woman with tired eyes and a lined face but a pleasant smile was running the place. She introduced herself as Pat, offered Anna any help, then continued working on receipts. Anna wandered, finding some ironic merchandise options, including a T-shirt with the familiar saying, "Never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly." She utilized the restroom to change into it, as well as a pair of light cotton shorts and sneakers that she knew would be better for the area than her dress and sandals. There was also a bobble-headed angel she couldn't resist. She tied it to the top of the backpack, which she'd brought in with her to pack whatever supplies she bought.