When she could go no farther, she spiraled down to a large, uneven stalagmite of rock that split the floor of this part of the cavern. She clung to it, letting it press into her aching side, waiting for the spasms to pass. It would take time, for the muscles had worked themselves into a fine knot. But more alarming to her was that the visions were continuing, spinning through her mind like a whirlpool, building in power, not lessening. As her now taloned fingers dug into the rock, she imagined them gouging into flesh, gleefully taking it off in ribbons, leaving a bare skull, empty sockets.
She rocked against the stone, moaning, and then with a snarl, she jammed the middle finger of the three-fingered hand against the unyielding stone, breaking the bone.
The pain was blinding, driving darkness from her vision with a glaring whiteness that threatened unconsciousness. She pressed her forehead against the rock, which even through the water smelled of the dank things that lived in a cave like this, like her. Is that what David smelled when he touched her damp flesh? Mold and stagnant, trapped water. And she was supposed to believe he was attracted to her, like she was some type of idiot?
No one would use her. No one. Not even the dark blood inside her.
Then she felt his hands. The bloodlust in her roared in fury. Trying to twist, she snapped at him, taking a swipe. When he caught her wrist, she cried out, her lower body rolling upward, the tentacles wrapping around the rock to protect her side.
"Ssh..." Gingerly, he guided her arm back around his neck, as if she didn't have six-inch claws capable of ripping his head right off.
Since she'd expected him to yank her off the rock, demand some response from her, it was confusing to realize he wasn't doing either of those things. Instead, his touch ran down her hair. The other hand sought her broken-fingered one. She tucked it against her, evading him.
"No healing." She gasped it. "No."
She could tell it bothered him, that he was set to overrule her, and she knew at this moment he easily could. But then he surprised her again. He nodded, his jaw pressed against the side of her head, and took his hand lower, to her side, where he found the knotted muscle and began to explore it.
"Can't heal it. Don't," she repeated.
"I won't," he promised. "I'm just going to rub it, make it feel better. Just relax."
"This is all your fault," she said. "I wouldn't have cared about their stupid shell necklaces or who gave them to them if it wasn't for your oranges and chocolate and stupid attempt to protect me."
"I know," he said, though she was sure he had no idea what she was babbling on about, sounding even to her own ears like an irritable, immature teenager.
He'd known what she meant about the healing, however. They'd gone down that road before. He'd given her his blood to heal her that very first time and as a side effect, he could track her anywhere. She couldn't escape him.
But that deed was done. What made her fear his healing touch was what else had happened. He'd not only managed to heal one of the fresh wounds, his energy had spilled over and begun to heal the scars on her face, something no angel should be able to do.
But apparently he had some practical skills, for his fingers had found the snarled muscles along her scarred side and were kneading them, applying pressure where needed, alternating between the fingers and heel of his hand. With his other hand, he was massaging her undamaged one, using pressure points there to ease what was going on in her side. More importantly, it was helping to calm her mind.
She made herself focus inward, use the unexpected assistance to drive back the darkness once more, find that equilibrium point. As the pain slowly began to recede, taking the whirling darkness with it, she became hyperaware of his body pressed behind her, holding her between his chest and the rock, another steadying influence. Water moved around them, buoying them and providing an additional familiar constant.
Her fingers were her fingers again, the bite of her nails no longer capable of deep gouges, though when he guided her hand back over her own shoulder to rest on his, she could feel the torn skin she'd caused in her internal struggle. It would heal, of course. She likely wouldn't even be able to see the wound on him by the time she turned, but she knew he experienced pain like any other creature. Yet he hadn't even flinched when she'd done it.
"Easy," he said softly, but when he tried to continue to massage the individual finger joints of the hand by his neck, she twined her fingers with his to make him stop. That, too, he seemed to anticipate. He simply let their interlaced grip rest there while he turned his full attention to the kneading of her side. When his probing became easy, full strokes, she couldn't stifle the relieved sigh that settled her body in the curve of his.
His hand drifted to her hip. With his mouth on the crown of her head, her hair would be moving in the water's grip, strands brushing against his jaw and cheek again. It made her uninjured hand itch to do the same, just as it had earlier. She closed her eyes. This was an impossible situation.
"Can I help you splint that finger?" he murmured.
Six
MINA raised her head from his shoulder and faced his expression. Their bodies were tangled together against the rocks like seaweed in a Gulf Stream current, and his expression was concerned. Maybe even angry with her, but in a way that made something lurch in her chest, tighten her lower abdomen, despite the throbbing in her finger. Gods, it hurt.
They were in the portion of her cave system that had her stores, so she directed him to where the proper supplies would be. When she laid her hand with some trepidation on the rock, he surprised her once again by setting the finger capably, needing little guidance. His hands were gentle, firm, unhurried, but he didn't rush as someone would who was nervous about causing additional pain, or go too slowly, which would prolong it. She wanted to ask him how he knew about mortal, non-magic healing practices, but she couldn't afford to show curiosity.
Plus, the pain was overwhelming enough to make breathing difficult, let alone speech. Her gills were fluttering when he was done, her vision gray at the edges. It took effort to stave off the faint, and she realized he was holding her upper arms, steadying her.
"Seawitch?"
The voice filtered down from the cave mouth. David stiffened, but Mina shook her head. Shook herself. "It's the merman who requested the potion."
"You can't do this right now."
"I can." Loosening her grip on the rock at last, she got away from him with a slithering move and drew her cowl back over her head. Gerard's voice helped her remember herself. Push back her pain, clear her mind, get back on track. After all, she'd had situations where she'd had to recover far more quickly, with far more serious injuries.
The pain would ebb. The important thing was the hold of the darkness had been broken again, and she had to make it clear she'd have been perfectly capable of handling the situation herself. So glancing at David's all-too-knowing gaze, his taut mouth, which looked on the verge of issuing another high-handed order, she said, in a reasonably steady tone, "This won't take long. Stay here. Else you're going to destroy my reputation entirely."
"Your reputation?" David bit back his overwhelming urge to order her to stay right where she was. She was pale, paler than he'd expect even a merperson living out of sight of the sun to be, and there was still a tremor to her limbs. He forced himself to focus on her barbed comment, since he could tell she was desperate for him to do so. "What does that mean?"
"If I have an angel guardian, what does that look like? That I'm not only interesting, but approachable. An angel would never approach anything wholly evil except to kill her," Mina pointed out. "So if they see you, it will start speculation. And part of why they get the potions from me is because they think I draw from dark forces, which they feel lends the potion greater potency."
"So those who come for your potions are seeking evil?"
"No. Those who come for my potions have that perverse mortal desire to feel they've dared to grasp at darkness, when in fact they've only brushed it without th
e danger of actually realizing what it is." Her red eye glinted.
"So my goodness and purity is bad for business?"
"Exactly. Another reason you shouldn't have interfered earlier with the merpeople. Stay," she repeated in a sharp tone, as if to a mongrel dog she expected to disobey. "Gerard is nineteen years old, weighs less than I do and would soil himself if I looked at him sideways. I think I can manage."
She swam off, leaving David staring after her. One moment she was berating him for defending her honor. The next she was gasping, leaning against his body, reluctantly accepting his help to manage her pain. Now she was treating him as a mere annoyance, and an easily managed one at that. Grimly, he remembered the scrambling panic of the merpeople earlier at just the sight of him, but after getting a glimpse of what Mina appeared to be fighting within her, he was beginning to understand why she had little fear of the angels.
Typical Fate. Jonah had a millennium of experience with the nature of all beings, including females, and he got Anna. A gentle, mild-mannered spirit of golden light and air. David was thirty, and drawn to a female who would make a wounded, constipated badger look appealing. He could tell himself he was punishing himself for past sins, but he didn't think anyone was that masochistic. Even a reformed suicide.
He didn't often make jokes about that time in his life, but he realized he was enjoying the challenge of Mina. Maybe Marcellus was right, and he was an idiot.
With his heightened senses, and the fact sound traveled faster through water than through air, he could hear her, as she'd said. The stammering merman did sound barely out of puberty, utterly terrified and thrilled with his own bravado, daring to meet with the mysterious seawitch. Those who had never truly been in the grip of darkness were the only ones foolish enough to want to brush against it, and Mina was certainly not the first to take advantage of that.
She was taking time to explain to him how the potion should be taken for maximum effectiveness. She didn't describe its mechanics the way she had to David. She simply noted that Gerard would get the results the Higher Powers desired.
Satisfied with her safety for the moment, David glanced around, realizing he hadn't been this far into her cave before. The last time he'd been here, he'd been intent on capturing her for information, which hadn't allowed time for impressions on her interior decorating choices.
The key is understanding her...
Sea glass. He moved into a cavern where seaweed and scavenged fishing line had been used to string all manner of glass pieces. The water currents moved them together, as the wind would if he was in a garden. Underwater, there was a sound, more muted, but still pleasing to the ears.
Sinister movements along the wall behind the chimes turned out to be additional cloaks pieced together with scraps of salvaged fabric. Pushing the fabric of one aside, he discovered a necklace, perhaps rescued from a sunken ship. A silver collar embedded with emeralds and diamonds, like an Indian princess's wedding dowry piece.
Money and treasure had no value to merpeople, but like most sea life, they were attracted to shiny things. A light smile touched his lips, even as he suspected there was more to this than an interesting light catcher, worth a fortune in the human world.
"But what if the Higher Powers don't let it happen? I'll just lose my mind if she doesn't fall in love with me."
"One could argue you've already lost your mind," Mina said dryly. "But the point, Gerard, is what is meant to be. Take the potion, see where it leads, but understand-"
"What if I give you more? I know where there's plenty more of these plants you wanted than what I brought."
"It doesn't have to do with that." There was a snap to her voice that David was sure would whip Gerard's tail between his legs, figuratively speaking, so fast it would slam into his balls. Remind him he was bickering with a witch.
When he'd arrived in the cave and touched her, wrapped hard against the rock, there'd been a powerful energy rushing in her veins, so close to the surface of her skin it felt as if it might spear through the flesh to free itself.
As David glided with the currents into the next cavern, he discovered a statue garden. Various figureheads from old ships: lions, mermaids, goblins. A statue of Venus held the artful curl of her hair across her groin area as she stood on her seashell. Next to her was Artemis with her bow and hounds. The eye of Osiris, from the planking of a ship, was propped in a crevice.
Turning, he faced a statue of a lovely woman, probably just a concrete form intended to be part of an estate's garden. A sapphire blue dress sparkling with intricate beadwork had been fitted over her sculpted body. The sleeves, long and flowing, moved in the water, making her into a riveting ghost. The statue wore a long black wig, a dark choker of onyx at her throat. Narrowing his eyes, he drew closer. When he examined the face, he realized it was a mermaid's hair, assembled into a wig with the help of a tightly woven mat of sea material, reinforced with some type of enchantment to preserve it, along with the dress and jewelry.
Thinking on that, he moved back into the cavern that held her stores. Hundreds of bottles, likely collected by her ancestors as well as herself, had ingredients that ranged from recognizable and relatively fresh vegetation and oils to things that appeared to be parts of previously living creatures. The farther he moved along this wall, the more menacing the ingredients became, until he knew he was seeing the unborn young of various species, human body parts and more. Then there were the tools of her trade. Cutting tools, pincers, pestles.
The muscles in his shoulders tightened as he found a host of items he knew. Things he'd seen in wretched, hellish places where he and other angels had been sent to fight dark magic.
Grateful to enter what appeared to be the final cavern, he discovered a vast wealth of spell books and magical texts dating back centuries. If she knew them, her command of her craft was impressive, perhaps the level of the Thrones in the Heavens. Like the dress, they were carefully maintained in an enchanted stasis.
As he turned his gaze from them, he discovered why Mina had such a familiar grasp of human society. She had their books. A library of literary classics, paperbacks, hardbacks, coffee table books. Apparently everything that survived wrecks, or what she could get her clientele to bring her in trade.
She'd never asked Anna to bring her anything. Never showed an inordinate interest in the human world. Yet Anna had remembered Mina rarely interrupted her or drove her off when she spoke of the land world.
His mind moved over all of it, thinking. He wanted to reject what lay behind him, those disturbing corners of her stores, the magical texts that delved into unthinkable areas. Cleanse the dark magic out of the place with a fire that would overwhelm the water and her protection spells. But it would also take her books, the chimes, the statues. Spell books and grimoires that reflected generations of magical study.
Perhaps the potions maintained her tenuous acceptance by the mermaid community. They threw rocks at her and drove her to their outskirts, but used her for her knowledge. And she tolerated it, because that way she could call someplace home.
The key is to understand her...
Probing, he determined that her protection spells went mainly into disguise, not deterrence, which would leave a more noticeable energy signature. To any non-angelic life-form who disregarded the pervading uneasiness about entering the cave, an illusion spell would make the caverns appear empty.
Many mortal magics didn't affect angels. Unfortunately and unexpectedly, some of her spells did, and therefore, it would be wise to cast a standing Inert spell over himself to give him a supernatural bulletproof vest of sorts. However, he did want to make a serious attempt at the trust issue, and that had to go two ways.
Village idiot. He could almost hear Marcellus scoffing at him. Jonah as well.
The stalagmites told him this cave, like much of this area of the ocean, had once been above ground. As he considered the layout of the five caverns, he realized they were in a circular arrangement, the tunnel entrance leading i
nto the stores area first. The five caverns were formed around a wide column of solid rock. Each cavern was triangular in shape. Visualizing it in his mind, he realized it was a pentagram. The sign of the Lord and Lady, a symbol of power that, like all symbols of power, could be used for good or evil. But which held sway over Mina?
The common wisdom was that no creature was perfectly balanced. That the struggle between good and evil went on throughout every life, and the best that could be done was to try to stay on the light side of the line. But in these caverns, even in Mina herself, he sensed a strange battle not toward either side, but to straddle the middle exactly. To create her own axis around which everything else turned.
Musing, he ran his fingers along the spines of the books on the wall, coming to a halt on a cheerful pale yellow binding. Withdrawing it, he found he'd discovered a children's picture book. The Littlest Angel. There were few coincidences in life, he knew. As he noted a gap on this portion of the shelf and ran his fingers along it, he discovered something even more remarkable. An angel's personal weaponry had a strong connection to its owner, carrying some of the angel's aura. One of the reasons it had struck him so hard in the gut-and other lower extremities-when he'd taken the dagger and determined the sensual use to which Mina had put it.
So now as he ran his fingers over that shelf, he realized this was where she'd laid his dagger, kept it. It made him think again about those self-inflicted thin lines, the way it had aroused her when he'd licked the blood away from her flesh. As a surge of the same desire shuddered through him like a minor quake, he wondered if, angel or not, he was little different from Gerard when it came to Mina. Willing to brush close to the darkness for the thrill of being near her. But not because of her darkness. Because of what lay beneath it all-a fascinating mix of both light and dark.
Remembering his early teens, how he'd played fantasy role-playing games, he'd been most intrigued by the "morally neutral" characters that were supposed to make their decisions based on logic, opportunity and survival only, not conscience. He wondered if the Goddess had been training him for this, even then.