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His hold on her tightened, and his nose and mouth touched the crown of her head, nuzzled her hair. "Like you. You smell so different. Not of death and fire, decay and hatred. I don't even know what scents cling to you, but I could . . . I want . . ."
He stopped, lifted his head. "I did my best to re-create it, physically. The rose."
For lack of anything else to say, unnerved by his mercurial moods, Alexis turned her attention to the roses. She couldn't imagine how many hours it took him to fashion the layers of petals, figure out how to put the material together. She reached out toward a branch and touched the edge of one, amazed at the soft texture. Then she swallowed and closed her fingers, drawing her fist back to her chest.
"They're human."
"Human skin. I tried it with scraps of paper, and cloth, but they'd all rot away. Metal worked for some things." He nodded to the flat-petaled flowers that gleamed in the dull light. "But I wanted the softness I remembered. I figured out how to preserve it, make it hold its shape."
Leather. He'd figured out how to make leather. And spent hours re-creating a flower he'd held once, until he could perfectly duplicate it out of the remains of the terrified victims Dark Ones had brought here. Nausea gripped her.
"You don't like it."
"It's not that." She tensed as darkness roiled through him at what she couldn't conceal. "Dante, I feel their deaths. Do you understand that? Their pain and terror."
Alexis made herself look up into his face, and something twisted in her, hard, at the flash of pain in his eyes. He'd brought her here because he thought she'd like it. He wanted to offer her something beautiful, something like her world, show her that he was different.
It was such a quick, staggering flood of emotion, she reeled from it. Instinctively, she reached toward the hideous flower again, intending to take it in her hand, make up for her reaction. Instead, he stepped back, taking her out of reach.
"I can read your mind, Alexis," he reminded her in a dull monotone. "Do not pretend what you do not feel." He set her down on a bench created of the black tree branches, blissfully without any embellishments using body parts, or remains of clothing. He returned to the tree, and stood with his back to her, looking at it.
Whether he could read her mind or not, Alexis had never been one to hold back her feelings about any situation. Sadness, laughter, anger, whatever the moment required, feelings were a natural flowing river through her heart, because she received them so clearly from others. She was horrified by this, but it was tempered by him. He'd tried to be more than what his environment demanded of him, and used the materials at hand. He'd thought this garden a way to connect to her, which meant he wanted something more from her than ransom leverage.
From the very first, she'd felt his loneliness, and it swamped her again now, so strongly it clogged her throat, leaving her anguished and confused, uncertain how to proceed.
"May I have a part of you?" he asked at length.
He didn't move, still staring at the macabre blossom he'd created and grown out of death and despair. For some reason she recalled a piece of artwork depicting a flower growing out of a tiny crack in the concrete. In this instance, Dante was that flower, wasn't he? Her mind struggled to solve the mystery of it. "I don't understand," she said.
Turbulence hovered around him as thickly as an impending storm. "If somehow I am unsuccessful, I would like to have something of you here, to remember you."
It was unwise to agree, not that she could really refuse him. He'd said he'd used Mina's hair to reach the dream world. But he'd asked Alexis, not demanded. When he looked around at her then, she made her decision.
"What . . . would you like?"
Watching the grace and power in his walk, the way his hair fluttered back over his bare shoulders, the firm set of his mouth, she recalled the Christian idea that Satan was the most beautiful of all the angels. Reaching her, he knelt again, and put out a hand. She made herself lay her own in his palm without hesitation, despite the trepidation fluttering in her belly.
"Not going to take one of my fingers, are you? I'm pretty partial to having ten."
"No." He shook his head. He stared down at her fingers, lying so tentatively in his grasp. His thumb moved, banding over them, sliding over her knuckles.
"Why did you ask me all those questions, on the way out here? About my eyes, and genetics?"
He didn't lift his gaze. "My mother made me do that--it was a way to keep me from giving in to my childhood fears. When they didn't drive me off, I'd sit by her leg, which of course was chained, and she'd ask me questions. Teach me to reason, until she lost the ability herself. I don't know why it was important to me, for you to like this."
Alexis couldn't help it. She turned her hand over, slid her fingers in the spaces between his, drawing his eyes back up to her. "Because when you create something, you want to share it with someone. No one is solitary, Dante. Everyone needs someone."
"I don't care about any of them. I've never felt anything for those they brought here to die." Though she flinched at his words, Alexis made herself stay still as his gaze sharpened on her. "So why do you matter?" he mused.
"You might have cared, if caring and compassion had a place here. They don't. There's nowhere for it to exist."
"They do, inside of you. And you are here."
"Yes. But that's because I've known caring and compassion." Drawing a deep breath, she swept the garden with a thoughtful look, knowing her mind and heart were open to him. "I think you've created a place where your hopes had a place to hide. I think you brought me here, because some part of you knows that. You're allowing yourself to care, maybe for the first time."
"Is that what you know, or are you simply hoping?"
Because her father had the same solid-colored eyes he had, she could tell the conflict within the crimson depths of Dante's, with or without her gift. So instead of answering, she looked down. In his other hand, he held one of the roses he must have drawn off the tree when he had his back to her. Right now he was clenching it in his hand as if he wished he could crush it. He'd wanted to offer it to her. She felt his quenched desire. But then he'd realized it had no smell, no beauty, nothing of the world she'd left, and that its material revolted her.
His anger and violence, his desire to tear it to pieces, to tear everything around him to pieces, was spiraling outward like a slick black oil spill. Just as his muscles tightened, she reached down, and cupped both her hands around his, around the rose.
Empathy was her gift, but she was not unskilled in other arts. She just had to pull deep for it from a body already weakened by the suffocating despair of this alien environment, so far from the magical energies of the Earth and the Goddess. But she dove into what reserves she had, though a sickly tremor swept her limbs, her neck cording with the effort as she murmured the enchantment. As she did, she punctured her finger on the thorn he'd created on the flower's stem, a rusty metal tip that allowed her to touch the flower with her blood.
"Alexis, what are you--"
"Look," she gasped. "Smell. Quickly."
Letting her hands drop, she pushed his up, pulling at his fingers so he opened in reflex. The rose had transformed, shimmering with the temporary nature of the magic, a soft pink that stunned him enough she had to push further, carry his palm to his nose. His nostrils flared, and she caught the scent herself, that sweet, haunting fragrance that could never be inhaled too deeply, but intoxicated the senses. It made her want to weep for home. For lazy meadows and afternoons on the beach, for the freedom of sky and water, and all the earth in between, as different from this place as the difference between Heaven and Hell.
IT was a heady combination. The wafting, brief fragrance of a sun-drenched flower and the temptation of her blood, so close. Her quick frown at the puncture, the pain making her tired face look more haggard, bothered him. The track of her tear as she recalled her home, the quivering of her body that said her time was growing shorter, bothered him. As did the constant tu
