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Lucifer shook his head. "The Lady sends Her grief and comfort, but you know She cannot touch the Dark One domain. Mina is your gateway." The Lord of the Underworld was the only angel with crimson lights in his dark eyes, and he shifted them now to the seawitch. "Though She said if you need additional energy to shore up your own, you need only call. Like all of us, She loves the merangel."
A strangled sob escaped Anna, and Jonah laid a hand on her hair. "Is there somewhere she could rest, Mina, until this--"
"No." Anna caught an edge of Jonah's wing, mopping her eyes in the feathers before tears could fall. "I'm fine. Alexis needs me to be fine. I'm not crying." She set her jaw and locked gazes with Mina. "Do what you need to do to get my daughter away from this bastard, so my mate can end him once and for all."
The harsh mother's anger that rolled through the cave was so unlike Anna's gentle voice, a shiver rippled up David's spine. But Mina simply nodded. "Let's get to work, then."
WHEN Alexis roused from her postcoital doze, her limbs felt heavy. It was strange to feel unwell and sexually sated at once. The buzzing roar was louder in her head, and she had a hard time lifting her upper body. But she pushed herself up, wrinkling her nose at the stench of blood, which seemed more pronounced than it had been when she was distracted by Dante's seduction, or perhaps--
"Stop," she cried out, but it was too late.
The humanoid, who reminded Alexis of the early Neanderthals she'd seen in pictures, was female. It was obvious because she was naked, and she'd been raped, her sensitive flesh torn, thighs and buttocks stained with blood too plentiful to be otherwise. Her breasts had been bitten, torn open. Where she lay on her stomach next to the ritual circle, her head was over the shallow basin. As a result, she was struggling, trying to keep her face out of the blood.
Dante had a knee on her back. When Alexis cried out, he'd seized a hank of the female's hair, pulling up her head at a hard angle. The knife made his intent clear. Lex was already off the bed and moving, pulling herself by her arms, flapping her wings despite her weakness.
He was far quicker. The efficient slash cut the female's throat open. Blood spurted into the circle, replenishing the pool. Alexis stopped, frozen, as life died out of the woman's eyes. She held Alexis's horrified gaze to the end though, as if she knew that was the only source of mercy in the room.
Even as her body jerked, the soul struggling to free itself, Dante shoved a cloth in the wound, soaking it. When he dropped the head with a liquid thunk, the face landing in the blood, Alexis flinched. Moving to the door without further attention to either female, he began to refresh the broad slashing marks there, muttering another chant.
Alexis scrambled to the female's side and lifted her head in both hands. With difficulty, she held her in one arm and used the fingers of the other to wipe the blood from the eyelids so the woman could see her. Alexis placed a trembling hand on the smelly, bloodsoaked hair, feeling the woman's terror and pain slowly ebb away with her life. She must have been brutalized out in the Dark One world, during the hours while Alexis slept. Bring me more blood, Dante had said. He hadn't specified how it was to be treated. That didn't matter to him at all.
"I'm sorry. Go in peace." As she murmured the prayer of passage taught to her by King Neptune himself, the heart made its final beat, the woman's eyes now empty glass.
Dante knelt on the other side of her, dipping the cloth in the fresh blood again. With a snarl, Alexis launched herself at him, using the wings to take her up and over the body. Weak as she was, she didn't get the clearance she needed, so she rolled the body like a log against him. But that added to his surprise as she plowed into him.
She'd never been a violent creature. She'd dutifully learned to protect herself through Jonah's teachings and that self-defense course she'd taken with Clara, but she had no killer instinct. No plan propelled her, no thought of escape, just fury at what she'd seen. Self-revulsion galvanized her attack. Goddess, she'd felt bonded to him, connected. She hated this place, she wanted to go home, she never wanted to dream again. She wanted to bathe for days. She wanted to close her eyes, curl in a ball in her bed, surrounded by her stuffed animals, and not think until all the terrible memories of this place went away. And she never, ever wanted to smell blood again in her life.
While Dante was much faster and stronger, she had the satisfaction of knocking him on his ass and getting in several swift, if ineffectual, punches in his face, one of which caused his fang to stab his lip and created a flow of blood.
"Why did you kill her?" she wailed at him. "She didn't do anything to you."
In a flash of movement he shoved her off him, lifted and slammed her against the stone wall. Several of the slender bones in her right wing broke, crushed beneath her. She snarled in pain, but the adrenaline carried her through it with barely a blink. She bared her teeth. "You're a monster. Mina shouldn't free you. You should be locked in a cage."
"I am in a cage." He dropped her, so she fell to the stone at his feet, her wings limp around her shoulders like a blanket. Her scales scraped the rough stone. When he stepped back, his crimson eyes were orange and yellow flame, his mouth a hard slash. He pointed at the door. "Those symbols protect you from what's out there. That, and me, are the only things that protect you from what happened to her, and from you dying sooner here than you would otherwise."
"I'm not going to thank you when you're the one who pulled me over here in the first place," she retorted, blinking back tears. "I would never want you to kill someone."
"Even to preserve your own life?"
"I don't have that right. No one has that right."
A muscle flexed in his jaw. "That's incorrect, Alexis. In your world, lives are taken every day as a choice. Animals, because they cannot fight you. People, in wars, or in self-defense."
"That's different."
"Yes, it is." He pinned her with that hard glance. "Here you only live if you kill. You only survive if you kill. You only gain something of your own if you kill. I won't allow them to harm you."
"What about her?" She looked back at the woman. Because she didn't want to be near him, she dragged herself back across the ground. The woman had blue eyes, like Anna. Like Alexis. "What about her family, where she comes from? Why did you let the Dark Ones hurt her first?"
"Because there is a balance here," he said flatly. "You were awake to see it. I give them as much as necessary in order to maintain control ove
r them. I may be more powerful than they are, more clever, but if they all turn against me at once, there is little I might do against them. Now be still and let me finish this."
He resumed his gruesome task, turning his back on her as if she mattered as little as the cooling corpse. A tool for him. Alexis stroked the woman numbly, studying her hard so she didn't have to look at anything else. This will be me soon. Painfully and slowly . . . She didn't know what was more difficult for her mind to process, what he'd just done, or what he knew they'd been doing to her while he'd been caressing and arousing Alexis's flesh.
"Did you think of her at all? Feel any remorse?"
He stopped, his arm poised over his head. The cloth was so wet blood dripped down his forearm, but he didn't appear to notice it. "Remorse, regret, sadness. Mercy and compassion. You want me to feel all these things. Have you ever raped someone to prove you could hold power over them? Killed them in cold blood because they stood between you and survival?"
She swallowed. "No. I can't even imagine such a thing."
He turned then, pinned her with his gaze. "Then you have the answer to your question. You cannot feel what you've never known. Nor can you pass judgment on it."
He returned to the door. Alexis drew a trembling breath, her fingers digging into cold rock as she tried to breathe through her mouth so she wouldn't inhale the blood smell anymore. She should go curl up on those rags, shut down and wait for the resolution of this without speaking to him further. Jonah and Mina, the whole heavenly host, would rescue her, or she'd die, and it would be over.
But she didn't sit around and wait for people to take care of her. Her parents had wanted her to stay in the safety of the Heavens or sea for at least another decade, but she'd chosen to go out on her own, take a human form and live a human life.
Holy Goddess, it was ridiculous to compare that kind of bravery to this. One moment she was deep inside his soul, touching something indefinable but worth understanding, an elusive knowledge that called to her. The next moment he was a brutal monster she couldn't fathom.
