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She shook her head, denying that, but there didn't seem to be anything she could do at the moment. She needed space to gather her thoughts. "I have a potion to prepare, and you said you'd be useful," she said shortly. "Do you know anything about plants? Sea plants?"
"Yes."
She rattled off the names of several she knew would take him a while to locate and gather in the proper manner. The sea lily she mentioned only opened at one time of day, and it had to be plucked at that time. As she explained that, she added, "I need a handful of each of those."
Of course, he was an angel. He could be back in a blink of time, even if he went to a different ocean in another time zone to pick them. Maybe he wouldn't be clever enough to think of that, though. Even as she had the thought, her mind scoffed at her.
"When you come back," she said tersely, "I'll be here. You can sense me, as you said, so there's no need to seek me out. I'll come out when I'm ready. That should satisfy your self-imposed guard duty."
"I appreciate you promising that you'll stay here."
"I didn't-"
As he reached out this time, she reached up at the same moment, her arm blocking his wrist, but he simply stretched out his fingers, grazed them across her cheek. "Do they hurt? The scars?"
She'd been braced for "How did it happen?" Though of course everyone knew how it had happened. Or figured they knew, through a thousand different interpretations. She'd even overheard one version that said the evil of the Dark Ones' blood was eating its way outward over time and eventually would consume her mermaid features. That story was as good as any other.
David had asked a question no one ever had, not even the reluctant healers Neptune had assigned to treat her, to atone for the error that led to her scarring. An error most felt had been the right course of action, even if done for the wrong reason.
"Do your bones ache when it's cold, Mina?" That soft, persuasive voice was tormenting her in a different way. "I bet they do, and yet you made your home over the cold waters of the Abyss. Is that why you don't go on land? Because even with legs, it hurts to walk? And the sun reminds you of your scars, so you stay in dark places?" The tips of his fingers kept sliding along her face, her nose, the bow of her lips, while her forearm, now trembling, stayed up against his wrist, as if that could hold back his devastating assault. "When your muscles cramp, do you have to rub them yourself? Do you ever get a full night's rest, or have a day without pain?"
"Stop it." She backed away from his touch. "And stop touching me."
"I like touching you. And I want to protect you, Mina. You'd best get used to both of those things." He turned away before she could say anything to that astoundingly arrogant declaration. "I'll go get your plants. If you need me, I'm only a thought away. You know how to call me."
Glancing back over his shoulder, the tenderness became a measured glance. "Don't hesitate to do so, or I'll be extremely pissed off."
Mina managed to keep an indifferent, unimpressed stance until he was gone from her sight, his wings aiding him in a gliding flight through the water. Only then did she think to draw in an unsteady breath.
He might be young, but there was no denying he'd acquired the irritating tendency all angels had to think they could order everyone around. She shoved aside the fact that his measured look had made a shiver run through parts of her that were not supposed to be affected by him in any way at all.
It was going to take more than a bat wing to get rid of this latest emissary. But she had to figure out something. Not only was he more of a danger to her than the Dark Ones, he threatened the tenuous thread of control that protected him from her.
Three
WHEN David returned, he didn't find her in the same spot. While she'd implied he should wait until she emerged, he reasoned that she might want the plants, as well as the food he'd brought for her.
David tracked her to the looming shadow of a freighter, the largest of the edifices in this odd place she preferred. He couldn't argue with it as a strategic location. It would be difficult for an enemy to get a clear bead on her here, and if she knew the terrain as well as she seemed to, she could employ it as an effective maze to slow a pursuit.
As he stroked toward a gaping hole in the pilothouse, he turned in a graceful spiral with his wings coiled around him. He was surprised to see the skeleton of a captain still at the helm, one hand locked to it. His other hand floated free. After this amount of time, scavengers should have left nothing to keep the bones together, but here they were, waving gently in David's wake in serene, eerie movement, as if dancing in time to unheard music, a slow sway to some torch song melody.
He drifted past. However, as he descended through what had once been four stories of offices for the freighter, he found there were other skeletons. Three of them playing cards, hats still in place, one of them wearing gloves with the fingers open to show the bony clutch of the digits on the cards he held. David reached out to touch them and the cards dispersed, fluttering through the water, then they came back together in his hands, exactly the same way. Only now the skull tilted the other way, the chin jutting out at David as if in challenge.
"Holy Goddess," he murmured. Not a ghost. An enchantment.
He swam even more slowly now, finding skeletons at mess, in their bunks holding magazines, taking showers, doing laundry, running diagnostics on a ship long inert. All silently posed and yet moving in that rhythmic motion that was soothing, as if something were rocking them, babes in their mothers' arms.
If Mina was doing this as an idle pastime, assembling, preserving and animating a shipload of what appeared to be well over fifty crewmen, then she might be more tapped into her full powers than Jonah had realized. When David reached the belly of the ship, he was sure of it.
First off, there was no water. The hold was as dry as if he were sitting on land. Second, the cargo apparently had been horses. Over a hundred of them. All that was left, as with the crew, were their skeletons. Skeletons that were circling the hold area as if in a paddock, but in planned, geometric circles. Like a concentric dial, there was an inner circle trotting in counterclockwise rotations and an outer circle trotting clockwise, hooves just above the metal bilge so there was no sound to their movements. His dark-haired witch squatted in the center of the circle.
Mina had shifted to her human form, her feet bare, and was bent over, studying a pattern of shells she'd laid out before her on a flat tablet formed out of a cinderblock base and what might have been an oil drum lid. There was a foal, or rather a skeleton of one, that kept dropping its head-it was impossible to tell the sex-while she absently pushed the intruding nose away when it tried to disrupt the shells. There also had been a cat on the ship, because its skeleton was sitting on the opposite edge, staring down at the shells as intently as Mina was.
She still wore the cloak, but she'd pushed back the cowl. The side facing him was the unscarred side, and with her raven hair tumbling over one shoulder, her beauty managed to make the horses just... disappear. It was unearthly, how breathtaking that unscarred side was. The sooty dark lashes, the precise, delicate features. He could see the concentration, the wide range of thoughts going on behind the blue eye. Seeing this half of her face, without the other to detract from it, he wondered what she would look like if she smiled, and realized in the same unsteady breath that it would tear a man's heart right out of his chest.
The outer circle changed gait at the sight of him, wheeling at one time, same as the one inside, a perfect dressage maneuver that hid her for several seconds. When he could see past them again, she was gone. A very effective alert system.
Patiently, he waited for her to ascertain who had set off the alarm and reappear. Sure enough, he felt her pass behind him several moments later and then step out of the shadows to his left.
"Why did you come find me? I told you to wait."
He turned. She'd pulled up the cowl and now all he saw was the terrible scarring that at first glance would make someone think he was talking to a mu
ch older woman. Since the first time he'd met her, she'd always preferred to reveal the damaged part of her, not the perfect side. Of course that also was the side with the crimson eye. So much like the ones that burned in the skulls of the Dark Ones, that at her sudden appearance, he had to make a mental effort not to react as he would to his sworn enemy.
"I wanted to see what you were doing." He handed over the plants. The horses had stopped, frozen like a picture taken of them standing idly in a field. No heads were down, though, as if they knew there was no grazing to be found in this metal ground. "You removed the water in here."
"It's easier to mix potions and prepare spells that way," she explained impatiently.
"The horses are a brilliant protection plan." He ignored her curt tone. "But what purpose do the cat and foal serve?"
"I despise you. Do you understand that?"
"You don't despise me. I bother you. That's different. Do the cat and foal serve a purpose?"
"No," she said flatly. "Can you go somewhere else, where I don't have to see you?"
"No," he said, mimicking her tone.
A muscle in her jaw twitched. "I don't want you this close."
"How close?" Cocking his head, he took a step forward, spreading his wings a few degrees for balance. "This close?"
It put about a foot between them, making her tilt her head back. She didn't want to talk about anything at all. Didn't want him around. So she said. But either he was too thickheaded to believe it, or his intuition was telling him a different truth. He was hedging his bets on the latter.
"You're flirting with me."
"Giving it a try. I didn't get much practice as a human. How am I doing?"
Mina closed her mouth into a thin line. "I don't like to be teased." She moved around him, back through the horses, weaving her way to the center of her enchanted circle.
"Mina, I wasn't making fun of you." When he stepped forward and the horses closed ranks, he set his jaw and went over, a light movement that landed him squarely in front of her.
"Then why would you do it? It serves no purpose."
"Like the foal and the cat?" At her obvious discomfiture, he shifted the subject, nodding to the plants still clutched in her hands. "Did I get the right ones?"
