A Witch's Beauty Read online

  Opening the book, he discovered one of his feathers pressed in the pages. She had to have found it after their fight that day of their first meeting.

  Replacing the book, he let the waters turn him, floated as he took it all in, the dichotomy of items, the different insights they offered about the same witch. Woman. He'd never gotten out of the habit of referring to humanoid life-forms such as angels and mermaids as men and women. Even knowing it was one of the quirks that amused his fellow angels, he liked thinking of Mina that way. Woman. But as he passed the spell books and drifted back into the cavern with the dark-magic items, he couldn't ignore the other images he'd seen of her. Dark One. Seawitch.

  He also couldn't ignore something else. The central column of solid rock around which the caverns were arranged was not solid. As he brushed his hand along it, power vibrated beneath his palm. A warding here, extremely powerful versus the lighter touch of the other cavern protections. But when he concentrated on it, impressed by the complexity, the command of knowledge demonstrated by the magic wielder who had cast it, it slowly unwound itself, as most magics would at an angel's touch, to reveal a narrow doorway. The waft of energy that came from within reminded him of a door creaking inward on its hinges in one of the old horror movies, beckoning the teenager into the cellar.

  Though the water had shaped and smoothed the edges, this doorway had not been created as long ago as the whole cave system had. Moving into the narrow opening, he kept his fingers along the wall line. While he could see in the dark, this was a pitch-black. Taking another step, he suppressed the urge to jump back when the blackness closed around him in reality, as if fingers had curved over his shoulders, pulling him forward.

  He could no longer hear Mina's voice, patiently going over things with Gerard. Earlier, he'd been impressed with her patience with the boy, her desire to have him use the potion correctly. Despite her studied indifference, her claimed intention of doing the potions only for what they might bring her, she had an integrity. He'd seen it in her. If he was in a cave that had been shared by her ancestors, he reasoned many of these items might not be hers. The lore, the knowledge, had been shared, and she would preserve it. But she'd enhanced it, learned from it, used it. Perhaps exceeded it.

  He could be rationalizing the hell out of things, not wanting to accept that the woman to whom he was so attracted could in fact be as dark as Marcellus and the other angels feared. He was still missing too many pieces.

  Even so, there was an alarm going off in him and gaining strength, telling him he didn't want to know what was ahead. But he'd promised to protect her. To do that, he had to understand whom or what he was protecting.

  But was he forging ahead as an angel dedicated to a mission, or as the male who needed the key to her, needed it now, for he'd touched his mouth to hers and found himself hungry for more? Felt her body rise to his, seen the confusion in her eyes. Both of them. The crimson eye of the Dark One and the blue eye of the woman.

  That thought slammed out of his mind as he was hit by a wave of pure Dark One energy. Bile rose in his throat, his fingers closing on his daggers. But oddly, he didn't sense Dark Ones ahead. Taking a deep breath, he made the final step and passed through a wall of water into a small, bone-dry chamber, where the water beading on his body evaporated before it hit the ground. Drawing back like a curtain, the darkness was dispelled by the dim light cast by blood red stones embedded into the rock wall. The stones' glow came from what appeared to be a high-level binding charm carved into their surfaces. They were arranged in an arc pattern, as if over a doorway, though he only saw an unbroken line of rock wall beneath them. The vibration of energy was so strong he had to strain to step toward that wall, using the propulsion of his wings, such as was possible in the cramped space.

  The warning hum in his head was becoming painful, the pressure of a migraine, something angels didn't get. He needed to get out of here. But first he had to feel what was behind there. What was locked in this room. Clenching his teeth, his muscles bunched, he lifted one arm and brushed the rock beneath the binding stones with his wet fingertips.

  When he first became an angel, he'd experienced gales, hit wind pockets that sent him somersaulting. Still clinging to his mortal, earthbound memories, he'd panicked, then realized it was like riding a wave in to shore, as he had as a boy at the beach. He'd learned to laugh at the buffeting, the wild spin of it, and recover from it unscathed.

  There was nothing of the Goddess's creation to this. What struck him was beyond the comprehensible power of ocean or wind, slamming him into a maelstrom of chaos and all its terrifying despair. There was no beginning or end. He was tumbling, flat on his back, being crushed under its weight, a weight that didn't promise darkness. Only terror, hopelessness without an end.

  He knew that Hell, Lucifer's Hades, was about redemption, justice, payment. Not the Hell of eternal damnation and torment he'd learned about as a mortal. But now he knew that place wasn't a myth. It was here, hidden in the tiny chamber of a seawitch's cave.

  Seven

  NIGHTMARISH images assailed him from all sides, slashed at him, laughed at his fear, turned an apathetic eye to his existence. We are your future. She will deliver you to us soon, angel. Your wings do not exonerate you for your sins. Your failures.

  "David."

  His name. Someone heard him after all. But he couldn't reach out. The maelstrom shrieked. It grasped at his vitals, repulsive as a rapist's touch. Death was a gift they wouldn't offer, not until every ounce of pain had been milked from him, until his throat bled from screaming and nothing was left of his soul to rescue.

  When a chanting cut through the shriek, a wave of fury roared over him like fire, burning his flesh but cleansing it, too. Freeing it from the Dark Ones' touch, so that he embraced the pain, crying out in relief. The physical drove away the emotional, and the emotional was a far worse torment. As both faded, there was water again, the darkness of the short tunnel, and then a sense of a wider area. Floating.

  "David." Urgently now, a hand on his face. Cooling. Stroking.

  The burns were receding, for of course they would. He could heal. He was an angel, and most all physical wounds could be healed. But he still couldn't move on his own, as if a pike had been driven through his chest, below the layers of physical matter, to the wound that mattered the most, the one that would never heal. Evil had ripped away the illusion that it could be ignored and managed.

  "You angels think nothing can harm you. Just because you can untangle a warding doesn't mean you should. I bet you didn't even think to protect yourself. Arrogant idiot."

  Mina. It was her irritable, familiar voice, but there was fear under it as well. Was it fear for him, or because of what he'd seen? "David. Open your eyes."

  There was a tinge of desperation behind the demand. He was distressing her. It helped orient him, bring him back to a world where there was some semblance of civility, order. Those things could be illusions as well.

  He'd fought so hard to believe he could forget, thinking that the higher he piled Dark One bodies, the faster he flew, the farther it would be from him. In the end he'd discovered the only way to handle the memories was to stay still enough to accept their presence. Meditation. Gods, he'd never expected that meditation would be the hardest thing for him to learn, but there it was. It was easier to kill than to face what the stillness inside of him held.

  His nightmares had been waiting for him there, and he'd had to get through them, to learn that there was meaning and purpose, despite his firsthand knowledge of evil beyond the comprehension and endurance of any living being.

  But he'd done it. He'd figured it out, in a way that had no words, and that understanding was here now. He forced back the fear and gripped her slim fingers, which were gripping his back. Maybe for the same reason. Need. Connection. That magic, even when elusive, which existed inside every heart. It would be there until there were no hearts left to beat, because that was the simple truth of existence. It had to be. He couldn't
afford to believe otherwise.

  David opened his eyes. Her face was over him, an ironic map of the fight between good and evil, the way it had been mapped over his heart, leaving it a scarred battlefield like hers. Maybe they were the mirror of each other, after all.

  She closed her eyes briefly, as if she was dealing with some great emotion, before her lids sprang back open, her mouth going to a thin, firm line. Here it comes, he thought. The unexpected surge of humor was a gift straight from the Lady, he was sure, providing a beam of warmth, which shattered the hold of the lingering despair.

  "What, in all the names of Hades, were you thinking? I told you to stay, not go roaming about and searching through my personal things."

  "You..." He cleared his throat of whatever ash it seemed had burned there. They were back in her library. She'd apparently formed an air bell to lay him on a dry ledge of rock. When he struggled to one elbow, he'd intended the gesture to be an attempt to retain some authority over the situation, but since she had to help steady him, it lost some of its impact. "You have a rift to the Dark Ones' world."

  His chest felt as if the cavern had collapsed and the debris was sitting on it, but once he made it to that elbow, he got from there to an upright position, tested his wings. The world reeled, and he would have toppled again, except she braced herself against his shoulder, his wing dropping limply over her like a cloak. When he swiveled his head drunkenly to make sure the other one was there, he had to look down, for it was wilted onto the rock as well.

  "Let me get something to help." She made sure he was all right to sit up, staying within watchful eyesight of him as she moved out of the air bell, swam into the adjacent cavern and began to rummage through her stores. "Sit still a moment. And it's not a rift. It's a doorway."

  "What?" He'd thought his wits were returning, but her remarkable statement made him rethink that.

  Mina turned from the wall, the vial of restorative clutched in her hand, and surveyed him. He was still paler than the white on his wings, and his skin was blackened in places. If he hadn't somehow managed to call out, if she hadn't sensed the energy shift... Gerard had just taken his leave; otherwise, she might not have paid attention in time. She didn't want to think about what she would have found if she came a couple minutes later. A creature of an angel's purity standing in that chamber, let alone touching the doorway, as he'd started to do, barely a fingertip brush...

  She returned to the small air bell she'd manufactured. He'd been choking when she dragged him out, so she'd assumed air would help. Gliding in between his knees, her lower body still in the sea's embrace, she brought the glass to his lips. "Drink this. It will help bring back your energy."

  "I don't want-"

  "Damn it, do it."

  His gaze snapped to her. While she knew he was hardly the type to meekly obey orders, maybe he'd caught the embarrassing catch in her voice. He still had enough pride to take it from her hand, but his was trembling. Reaching out, she steadied it with both of hers as he tipped the bottle and took the mixture in three grimacing swallows.

  If he'd been there much longer, the long and graceful fingers gripping the bottle would have been stripped of flesh.

  "Mina?"

  She'd closed her eyes again and realized she was squeezing those fingers tightly. "I was so stupid to leave you alone," she said low, vicious. "You don't belong here. This is why you shouldn't be doing this. You can't understand my life. You can't protect me."

  He freed a hand to touch her face. It seemed light, tentative, which of course could have been because he was still recovering, but she wondered if it was because he wasn't as sure of her as he'd been before.

  Months ago, she hadn't wanted him to see her dragon form. Now he'd seen a far worse side. Fine. She shouldn't care. Maybe it would revolt him and he'd turn away. Leave her be. Best that way.

  "I know I don't understand you," he said. "That's what I was trying to do by looking at your home."

  She stared into his brown eyes, which were getting back that steady, intent look. She wanted to pound on him. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and feel his heart beat against her chest, know the strength of his limbs around her, inhale the fresh, warm smell of him. And that deep, dark part of her wanted to rip at his wounded skin, have him fight her until he overwhelmed her, took her to oblivion.

  "I don't want you to understand me." Why did he make her blurt out these things that were going to lead to further conversations she didn't want to have?

  "Why?"

  See? She couldn't explain that. For the answer was the same as everything with her. A paradox. He was an angel, and the angels were her enemies. But for inexplicable reasons, she didn't want to see this particular angel become repulsed by her, even though there was nothing else he could be. Shamefully, she'd prefer his tentative acceptance of her pathetic facade than his rejection of the truth, and she knew the despairing futility of that.

  She shook her head. His hand slid up her arm, over the curve of her shoulder to the side of her face, his thumb finding the line of her throat. Trying to tip her face to an angle where he could see her eyes.

  "Mina, tell me what that place is."

  "It's a doorway, as I said. My mother created it. Opened it by accident when she was studying the Dark Ones' powers. She got it sealed again, but not before one got through."

  "That was how you-"

  She nodded, quick, cutting off his words.

  "Why haven't you destroyed it? Do you need help? It must be destroyed. You know that."

  "No." Her head came up in alarm. "You can't destroy it." She pushed away from him now, retreating into the familiar cold grip of the sea, in order to position herself between the defile and him. "It's mine. Mine to decide to destroy or keep."

  Like hell. David could almost hear Jonah's voice. The water was rising around him now, a deliberate action to weaken his position and strengthen hers, he was sure. He let himself slide back into it as the air bell disappeared. As he moved, she tensed.

  "Will you try to kill me over it?" he demanded. "Seal your Fate, so there are no choices left to be made?"

  When something flickered in her eyes, he blinked, startled. "That's the key to it, isn't it?"

  She moved back farther, so she was now directly in front of the defile.

  "Mina, please don't."

  "It calls to me. If I go through, you can't follow me there."

  David made himself stop. That glint was rising in her eyes. Bloodlust eager to take over, force this into a fatal confrontation. "Mina." He spoke softly, and saw it bank somewhat. "Will you tell me something? What kind of day have you had?"

  He couldn't see her blue eye at all now. That part of her face was shadowed in the cowl of her cloak she'd pulled back up and tied. It was just the crimson and scars, and with the emanations behind her, it was too easy to imagine he was facing a Dark One, such that his fingers again rested on the grip of one dagger, even as he moved forward. Tension thrummed off her, amplified by his own, by that ready battle stance. If one of them struck, it would be over.

  She was a formidable fighter when she considered herself cornered. While he couldn't deny the spear of admiration, it came with fear-for her. No matter how formidable she was, he could defeat her if he fought her as he would fight an enemy, and they both knew it.

  "See?" she said softly. "Even you feel it. All I have to do is turn it up, just a little, and I look more and more like your enemy. Until you wouldn't hesitate to strike me down."

  "Is that what you want?"

  Did she want the fight? The death? The end of fighting? He'd been in that state of mind for a few years. She'd been there all her life. With that startling realization came the thought that, while he might be physically more powerful, she might have him out-matched in other ways. The outcome, who would win or lose, wasn't as certain as he'd first thought, but David knew one thing. One of them would die, and the ramifications of that might take them both down.

  "Answer my question. What was t
oday like? Answer it, for both of us." He forced himself to focus. He'd instinctively slipped one of the daggers half out of its scabbard. Sliding it back home in its sheath, he made himself let go of it one finger at a time. Lowered his arm to his side, though everything in him screamed at the folly. Well, it wouldn't be the first time today. His survival and gut instincts were two different animals, and with Mina he was following the latter, probably more than was wise.

  "Mina, I don't want us to do this. Please answer me."

  Her eye was the color of fresh blood; her scarred skin stretched too tightly over her skull. She looked like a creature of death and destruction, no trace left of the mermaid who'd eaten slices of an orange from his fingertips.

  But something flickered in her face. "Confusing," she said at last. Her tentacles twitched, a quick spasm, where they'd fastened her against the rock wall to give her a good propulsion point. "Hateful. I wanted to kill those mermaids. Thought how easy it would be. Remembered kissing you."

  "Well, I'm glad you chose the latter." He dared to get closer. "Did you like the orange? We didn't even get to the chocolate."

  "I kept it." She made as if to search for it, then stopped, casting a glance at him.

  "We can't stand at a stalemate forever," he observed.

  "No. One of us has to strike, or back down."

  "I will never back down from you, Mina. You don't want me to do that." And to prove it, he moved forward again. If he reached out, he could touch the floating edge of her cloak. "There is another option. Why don't we call a truce and talk about this instead? I promise I won't try to seal the doorway until we've discussed it. If that's what I decide I must do, I'll give you time to get in a position to defend it. Then we can do our best to kill each other. Sound civilized enough?"

  "Like gunfighters. Ten paces and all that." She studied him a long moment. "All right. Promise me."

  "I did. If I say it, it's a promise."

  "Most of your kind don't consider a promise to me worth anything."