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"Fortunately, I know you're an opportunistic liar." Putting his hands to her waist, he drew her up with a flexing of his arms, a careless sweep of his wings that sent water out in elegant swirls around them. He held her there for a second, studying her. "But I'm not. You can count on that, Mina. Even if Jonah had suggested I seduce you to gain compliance, I wouldn't have agreed to it, not as a strategy. Whatever I feel, I feel honestly. Besides which"-a wry look crossed his face-"he would have sent someone else for that. I don't have that much experience in seducing women."
He turned away as she blinked at his broad back, her body still vibrating. "So we need to go deliver this potion, then?" he asked.
She couldn't do this. She really couldn't. And in that moment, she threw the detonation spell at his back.
"WHY won't you understand?" She held pressure on the wound. As she checked his pupils, she noted with relief the burned area on his side was healing on its own. His head had rammed the metal wall, but apparently his skull was as hard as he'd demonstrated it to be with his unwise persistence.
"I don't want to hurt you. I just want to be left alone. Have to be left alone."
When he began to wake at last, she was smart enough to back off. She floated all the way across the ship's hold so she was well clear when he started up, his hand already on one dagger grip. As David felt the wound and obviously oriented himself, he shot her a narrow glance. "It will heal on its own, you know."
"Yes. But the water-resistant oil I smeared on it will help the pain until it disappears."
"Why do you care?"
"I don't." It was a ludicrous thing to say, but she stuck with it. "If I'd left you unconscious, unprotected down here, something bad could've happened to you. Then Jonah would send hunters after me. All I want is for you to be gone. Leave me be."
"Throw your worst at me, Mina." David drew himself upright, hovering, and took out two of the daggers.
"What?" She stared at him.
"You heard me. You think you can kill me? Try it."
"I've never tried to kill any of you." As she pushed down the fear his words evoked, it pushed back, becoming something far more disturbing than fear. "I could have killed you while you were unconscious, couldn't I? I just want you to leave me alone. I can't be around you."
"I just want to help."
"Then leave me alone." The scream tore out of her before she could stop it. Her head exploded with pain, a berserker's violence surging through her. An absence of pain lay on the other side of death and killing. When blood was on her skin, the taste of it in her mouth, the screams of others would drown out the screams in her own head. It might take a thousand lives to do it, but somewhere at the end, when death reigned, there would be nothing to feel.
David stood frozen, watching as the scars shifted. Something lived beneath her flesh, struggling to get out. Her eyes snapped toward him, both red now. As her lips drew back grotesquely, she revealed fangs as long as his fingers, a mouthful of them, the skin of her face drawing tight, outlining her skull even as her arms elongated, became more skeletal, fingers now talons.
Dark One. He was looking at a Dark One, struggling to get out of her body. No, to take her body over.
Shrieking, that high-pitched shrieking he knew too well. His hands tightened on his weapons. He knew how to destroy a Dark One this size hand-to-hand, could cut its throat in a heartbeat.
The writhing creature dropped swiftly to the hold floor, apparently possessing a gravity far heavier than water could bear. Convulsing, it fought with an unseen assailant. Amazed, he watched it roll back and forth, clawing at itself, water churning around it. Words spat from its mouth, like the musical language of the merpeople, reminiscent of dolphin and whale speech, but guttural, as if its throat were being strangled. He made out the chant of containment, which galvanized a raw shriek of rage, answered by another shriek from the same throat, defiant, equally as furious. Two entities in the same skin, vying for control.
Both seemed to know they had to get the upper hand quickly, for the battle was swift, brutal and merciless. Then it was just Mina rocking in the turbulent current, holding to the metal floor. Her gills were working hard, but she was struggling to get herself upright. Her hair had come loose from its tie and was drifting in a swirl around her face, giving him brief glimpses of the scarred and unscarred sides, an ironic montage of what he'd just witnessed.
Throughout those tense few moments, he'd struggled with himself as well. When it came to fighting Dark Ones, pausing to question or think was a dead angel waiting to happen. He was prepared to kill. Trained to do it.
It must have shown on his face, for when he moved forward, her gaze lifted, focused on the daggers he'd drawn.
"If you kill me, kill me as I am. Don't kill me as one of them." Her voice was hoarse, but she managed to float upright, though she was unsteady even against the current inside the ship. "I'm Mina, daughter of the seawitch Inanna, descended from five generations of seawitches of Neptune's realm. If I die, I die as that, not as the filth that raped my mother."
As her stiff lips moved, one eye went from red back to blue, while the other remained crimson. David forced himself to take a breath, his violent reaction settling into a backseat. Deliberately sheathing the daggers, he started toward her. She had courage, for she didn't move, just tilted up her chin as he drifted closer. Her hair continued to float around her features, giving him a steadying desire to gather it. He could remember how it had felt, blooming with the fullness of water, passing over his fingers. That moment was separate from what he'd just seen. Just as that beast was separate from her.
"I'm not going to kill you, Mina," he said at last. "However, if you ever do something like that detonation spell again, I'll do something far worse."
"What?" Her brow drew down when he leaned in. He noticed she couldn't keep her attention off of his mouth, making him want to do all sorts of absurd things to her with it. Absurd, since she'd just tried her best to maim him, and demonstrated that there was more Dark One in her than any other angel would tolerate. But she could have left him, and she didn't. She'd treated his wound, watched over him and waited for him to wake. He didn't think it was because she feared the retribution of the Dark Legion, as she'd said.
This was Mina, with the perpetual frown line between her brows and a suspicious, wary look he found a challenge to replace with other expressions, like the faint flicker of panic as he got closer to her face, her lips. A lock of her hair floated over his cheek, caressed his shoulder, and her eyes followed it as if she wished it could be her fingers. Or maybe that was just his wish.
"I will put you over my knee and spank you."
Her gaze snapped up to him, shock coursing over her features. "You're... not teasing me."
"No." He was satisfied to see he'd come up with a threat that had caught her off guard, but captured her attention. He was tempted to do it right now. "So don't forget. Now, you said we needed to deliver a potion. Tell me about that."
Five
"THIS is going to be a bad idea," David commented as they set out from the Graveyard some time later. Mina carried her potion in a carefully prepared packet she had strapped beneath her cloak.
"You're welcome to stay here and preen," she pointed out. "I can handle a Dark One attack."
He shot her a look. The irritability and disdain were back in full measure, as if the trembling and uncertain female with soft lips and eager body had never existed.
"Preening? If your opinion of angels gets any higher, I might blush."
"If you don't blush from wearing that excuse for clothing, I doubt any flattery from me will cause it."
"I was going to go for the ghoulish cloak look, but apparently there was a run on them. This was all they had at the mall."
When she narrowed her gaze at him, he noted she understood what a mall was. She'd taken in stride several of his comments that would have baffled his fellow angels. Somehow, she had a fairly good grasp of what occurred on land, and it didn't
all come from Anna.
"So if you're such an accomplished one-woman Dark One Destroyer"-he changed direction-"why haven't you asked Jonah to sign you up for the Dark Legion?"
"I don't look good in red." She glanced at the battle skirt. "And I'm afraid of heights." Turning away, she swam through a defile between two ships that would take them out of the Graveyard. "Most of your fights are in the sky, you know."
"Afraid of..." Feeling a sixth sense prickling at his neck, David turned. He caught a movement at the porthole of the freighter. Blinking, he realized it was the skeletal cat. It disappeared at his regard.
"Did you forget to turn something off?"
