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"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.
