A Mermaid's Ransom (39 page)

Dante moved to the edge to gaze down over the area, obviously scoping it for anything threatening. Jonah and Marcellus began to discuss the safety of the town house, alarming Alexis. She wondered if they intended to stay the night in her small place. All she wanted was to get to bed, with Dante curved around her, and let the tranquility of the night temporarily heal all things, in that magical way the late hours of the night could.

But before she could tactfully try to steer them toward that end, the roof maintenance door opened. The three males glanced that direction, but it was Clara.

"I knew you were coming," she whispered.

The way she looked Lex over, lingering worry in her gaze, suggested she knew more about what had happened to them in the past few hours than Lex would have liked her to experience. Then Clara sighted the others. "Oh. Okay, I didn't sense everyone else. Is this a meeting? Do I need to--"

"No, you're fine." Alexis couldn't quite suppress a smile when her friend's gaze latched onto Marcellus. The angel was quite aware of her attention as well, his response an amusing mixture of lust and exasperation, and something else . . .

"Oh my God. That's your father?"

When Alexis nodded, Clara's eyes got rounder. "How . . . how old is he?"

"Over a thousand years. He doesn't remember exactly."

"And your mom is immortal, too?"

"No, not exactly. She'll live until she's three hundred. But she won't age the way humans do, not until she gets close to that age."

"So your dad looks like a fireman's calendar pinup after a thousand years, and your mom pretty much gets to always be drop-dead gorgeous. God, remind me that we can only be friends until I start getting wrinkles and my boobs droop. Then I'm cutting you out of my life entirely. It would be too depressing to see you wearing minis when I'd be looking for control top panty hose."

Alexis's brow rose, but then Dante spoke, returning her attention to him. Only he wasn't speaking to her.

"You stood with me." He had turned to face Jonah.

Jonah glanced at Marcellus, then squared off with the vampire. "I stood with my daughter."

Dante shook his head. "The tide had turned. You could have taken her out of there and left me to my fate."

"Yes." Jonah's gaze flickered to Alexis, then came back to the vampire. "But she was right, as much as I didn't want her to be. However, like the Fen, I have far to go before I feel your life might be worth the suffering my daughter and so many others have endured to preserve it."

His aversion to the conversation obvious, Jonah turned toward Alexis, but Dante wasn't done.

"No. That's not all of the truth."

Alexis stepped forward, but Marcellus drew her back, shaking his head in warning.

"You are pushing your luck, vampire," Jonah said, low.

Dante cocked his head. "You could have killed me, when I first arrived in your world, before you knew about the third mark. You wanted to. Even the witch's barrier wouldn't have stood in your way."

Jonah inclined his head. "Yes, I could have. If you had not done what you did during those first few moments, I would have."

Alexis drew in a breath, but neither male looked her way. "And what did I do?" Dante said, when Jonah didn't volunteer further information.

Jonah gave him an even, measured glance. "You took one vital second to move my daughter behind you, so she would not be between you and danger. In battle, a second is the difference between life and death. You protected her on instinct."

He stepped forward then, bumping toes with the vampire. Dante's fangs bared, but the light in Jonah's gaze was no less aggressive. "Bear in mind, vampire, it was the
only
thing that saved your life. I trust from this second forward you will always put her well-being first. Reconsidering my decision, and acting on it, would take far less than one vital second. Count on it."

"God, every male's nightmare of a father-in-law," Clara murmured.

The humor eluded Alexis, for she felt something else from Dante then, something that had her moving forward in protest even as Marcellus tried to stop her again.

"Alexis is now home safely," the vampire said. "If you will take me there, I intend to stay in Hell."

DANTE saw the stark shock in her face, the painful betrayal. He had surprised all of them, but she was the one who closed her hand on his forearm, tugging him around to face her alone. "What? You're leaving?"

"It is better for me to be there for now." Dante didn't know if she understood how hungry he felt looking upon her gentle face, but his hands had a mind of their own, sweeping hers aside to draw him to her, his grip possessive on her hips. He wanted her, needed her, and yet he had to leave. Her body leaned into his, wanting to change his mind. He wanted to share his thoughts with her, but he hadn't sorted them out for himself yet, and she couldn't make this decision for him. In her mind, she was pleading. She could take care of him, help him . . .

"You have. But there are things . . ." He switched to her mind, because it was easier.
It is not because I don't want you. But I need to go there. I need to think.

"You won't come back." Her hands curled into his bare chest. "You'll get all stupid, the way males do, and think I'm better off without you."

"I can't think around you," he said. "I won't destroy you through ignorance or blind need."

"But I--"

"No," he snapped. "You will stay here, and I am going. That is all. This is my decision, not yours."

She whitened at the anger in his voice. Yes, he was not used to someone disobeying his will, actually arguing with him, but it wasn't that which made him curt with her. The last thing he wanted to do was leave, which was exactly why he needed to do so. Jonah had stepped back, giving them some space, but his expression for once wasn't condemning. Though Dante was doing what Jonah had warned him not to do, hurt his daughter, Jonah understood.

Despite that, he saw the father's eyes dwell on her with a trace of the same regret he had aching in his chest. An unfamiliar emotion, and one he didn't like at all. There was nothing more he could do or say to change what must be done. As he'd done all his life, he made his decision and acted upon it.

"Let's go," he said brusquely, and turned his back on her.

Thirty-two

WHEN evil becomes something good, the weapon has two edges . . . One day, you will know what you took from us.

He hadn't understood their language in his own world. To him, they'd been no more than rough, primitive tools for his needs. Yet that judgment haunted him with its ominous, profound clarity.

Because all worlds are just, it is when you love her the most that Fate will take her from you . . .

He'd gone back to that stone platform in Hell, to stare down into fire. To listen to the distant weeping of those facing judgment, striving for redemption to start again.

He was alone for a while, but in time he felt the presence of the dark-winged angel. Dante kept staring downward. "Could I be one of those?"

"No. Your path to redemption doesn't lie in Hell's chambers. I told you this."

Dante turned. Lucifer squatted on the point of rock above him like a magnificent sculpture, his muscular body marked with those finely lined symbols that emanated power. The dark wings swept low along his back, trailing down the side of the rock. His black eyes rested on Dante, red flame flickering in their depths.

"Then what is my path to redemption?"

"You will find it, if you truly desire it. But I fear the Fen are right. The price you pay is commensurate with the crime you committed. You are likely to lose her at the moment you learn how to love her with your entire soul."

"Then I will have nothing more to do with her. I will stay here, or go somewhere else." He swallowed. "I will go back to the Dark One world, where I cannot hear her, see her . . ."

But he
could
hear her. He could hear her thoughts, touch her soul whenever he wished, because he'd third-marked her. Beyond that, he'd created a connection that would reach through worlds, over any distance. He wouldn't be able to resist it.

"There is such a thing called a gift, Dante," Lucifer said. His deep timbre resonated against the rocks, vibrated in Dante's bones. "It is something given freely, with no expectations. It is rare, because what people often call a gift comes with conditions, whether conscious or unconscious. She has given you a true gift, and wishes to keep offering it to you. She has accepted the risks. Do not make the mistake of thinking she doesn't understand."

Lucifer cocked his head as if listening to something, then turned his gaze to Dante again. "Her father made that mistake with her mother as well. Purity of heart is not innocence or gullibility. There are exceptional souls who understand every life stands at the fulcrum of a scale, between living in that moment, cherishing it for everything it is, and realizing that life is a journey. Sacrifices and pain have a purpose, as much as laughter and joy do. That kind of soul has a faith that eclipses all else, and it is so rare, it might break the universe itself if it was darkened."

"Which is why I should--"

"You don't darken it with death. You darken it by not accepting the gift. That's the only thing that could truly destroy Alexis."

He rose to his full, intimidating height, and jerked his head toward the other side of the rock. "You have a visitor."

Dante spun, surprised, for he'd heard and sensed nothing. Surprise was quickly replaced by wariness and more than a little hostility when he saw it was the seawitch.

"One of your quieter arrivals," Lucifer noted to her. "Jonah would be less than amused to know you can do that."

"He knows I arrive in his precious Citadel precisely the way I do to annoy him," she responded, her one blue and one crimson eye glinting up at the Lord of the Underworld.

Lucifer made a noncommittal grunt and departed with a nod to Dante. His outcropping of rock was only briefly vacant, however. David landed there, taking a silent perch in the same watchful posture.

They still didn't trust him. He didn't blame them for that, particularly when it came to the seawitch. Facing her in this place of solitude with no other distractions was dangerous. It made his violence boil forth anew. He'd imagined ending her a hundred times, a hundred ways. The vulnerable neck beneath his hands, breaking it, twisting it, ripping into heated flesh, hearing her strangled cry.

He told himself he remained where he was because he'd seen the witch's power. A fool would think her vulnerable. If she had any weaknesses, her sharp-eyed angel mate covered them. But it wasn't that which stayed his hand. He couldn't say what it was yet, but something had changed within him since he'd been around Alexis.

Unfortunately, while it harnessed his hatred, it didn't abate it. Logically, he knew there was no reason to hate her more than any other. Since his mother and until Alexis, no one had done anything for him. Why should the witch incur his special wrath?

"I've given it a great deal of thought," she said, jerking his attention to her. "I think your mother did name you."

When he said nothing, she paced the stone, glancing over the edge. "She never told you, because your true name holds power. She never wanted that power to leave you. It became another reservoir under which to put the core of yourself, hold it inviolate. You sought that reservoir in yourself unconsciously. She would have whispered the name to you as a baby, marked you with her blood to set it."

"I will never know what that name is."

"One day you may remember it, but it doesn't matter. It added to the power you have now." Fishing about inside her cloak, she took out a slim volume, placed it on another protrusion of rock. "Since you seem determined to sit down here and brood, I brought you a way to pass the time. Dante's
Divine Comedy.
It's about a man who travels through Hell to get home, because he is denied the usual road. You chose an apt name."

"What do you want?" he asked, his brow furrowing.

"I shouldn't have left you there," Mina said. "I'm sorry."

Dante wasn't entirely sure he'd heard her right. He barely restrained himself from asking her to repeat herself. In a blink, her usual sarcasm had vanished like a Fading Spell. Her steady look showed compassion, an emotion he could identify, thanks to Alexis.

"I was new to hope then," she continued quietly. "My own soul has struggled between good and evil all my life, even being here. I had no room to believe that someone who'd been trapped in a Dark One world would have the strength to keep up that battle for as long as you had. I should have realized that there was still hope for you, and sixty-two lives might have been spared. What remains to be seen is if there will be a sixty-third casualty, or if my lack of judgment is irreversible."

"My decisions were my own, witch. I know what I am."

"Do you?" She cocked her head. "I'm not so sure of that."

"I know what Alexis is. And I know what I am not. That tells me who I am."

"Hmm."
Crossing the distance between them, she sat down on the edge of the rock several paces away and dangled her feet over the side as if she was dipping them in a pond. She leaned back on her arms, studying the view in front of her. "If you push me, I'll take you with me. And it's a long fall."

He set his jaw. "I don't need you in my head."

"I wasn't. I share your blood. It's what I'd think of doing." Cocking her head, she glanced up at him. "Why are you hiding here, away from her? The battle for good and evil is comprised of choices, but for those like us, we have to have someone to help us. We can't do it alone. Not indefinitely."

"She loves me."

"Believe me, greater miracles have rarely happened." Mina turned her gaze to her mate. "Maybe once or twice."

"I do not know what love is. There is no way I can ever deserve her."

"Probably not. But that's irrelevant." Mina pinned him with her bicolored eyes. "You did what you had to do to survive. There was nothing in your life to tell you what you were doing was wrong, until she came. Since you can live for a few thousand years if you manage not to piss someone bigger off--another major miracle, I might add--you can spend a lot of that time making up for what you've done. You do have a debt to pay, but denying yourself the thing that inspired you to be better, particularly when she wants you as well, isn't the right thing to do."

"Why do you argue this with me? You, of all people, should know." He pointed at David. "He is strong. An angel. A male. He can handle what is inside of you. She can't."

"Really?" She arched a brow. "Chivalrous chauvinism exists even in the Dark One world. How reassuring. You're probably right. She's a merangel who survived two days in your world, who backed you down when your temper was fully unleashed, who convinced a group of males who had every reason to kill you in a hundred different ways to let you go. She's obviously not strong enough to handle anything."

"I have shortened her life," he snarled. "She thinks I do not know this, but I do. I've already killed her."

Mina didn't blink. "We all die, vampire. It isn't how long we have that matters."

When he set his jaw, she shook her head. "You're not even willing to try. The same being who spent decades working on one weak dream portal is averse to working his ass off to deserve her."

"Witch." He set his teeth. "You are goading me."

"What gave it away?" She sprang to her feet and stabbed his chest with a finger as sharp as a talon. "You've been brave enough to survive that world. Be brave enough to learn how to live in this one. Which means loving as well."

"None of you want me around her." He wrenched away from her. "Why do you come now to argue with me about it? My soul is stained. How do you remove or change or alter a permanent stain? There's too much darkness in me.
I'll infect her
."

Moving away, he circled the perimeter of his temporary home, trying to escape the rush of emotion, but it became too much. He fell to his knees and roared, the echo of it coming back upon him, a wild beast, untamed, unwanted, unsure of its place or its prey. He wanted the witch gone, all of them gone, so that he could stay here in this stasis where the aching emptiness in his chest at least was soothed by the sounds of fire and torment, a mirror image of his own substance. He'd come here thinking to find answers and he'd found only silence, something important missing. Something he couldn't have.

But when he rose at last, his fists clenched and eyes blazing, Mina was still there, regarding him impassively.

"You're surrounded by those who know there is often a wide chasm between what we want and what is right, Dante." She stepped forward. "But you can straddle both, if you know the way."

Before he could jerk back, she'd grasped his hand and put it on her chest, over her heart. A tremor of energy coursed beneath his feet, then shot upward through his body. He was flailing, dropping through darkness, into an abyss of pain and fear, desolation. It was Dark One energy, only instead of being in that world, he was merely inside the head of the seawitch. A light pierced the fog, reaching for him. Panicked, he clawed toward it, but he was not in charge of anything. Instead, he was being pulled, as if held backward and forward by tethers that moved him at a controlled pace toward it. As it drew closer, it grew too bright. It was going to illuminate the darkness of his soul, destroy that nocturnal, damned creature and leave nothing of him, because that was all there was. He cried out and bucked as his body began to glide into that light.

Then it stopped. He hovered there, his body bisected between his familiar darkness and the light that created such yearning and fear both. But as he drew deep breaths, struggling for control, he began to feel something different. Tendrils of . . . tranquility. It was how he'd briefly felt, sitting under the park tree in Alexis's arms, puzzled and yet warmed by her every action, her smile and love.

He broke out of the vision. Mina stood before him, still holding his hand to her heart, her eyes swirling with the darkness he knew far too well. It had taken over her features, turned both eyes red, elongated her fangs and turned her fingers into talons in truth. Her Dark One side. But he still felt that tranquility emanating from her. As he focused, he realized why. David stood next to her, his hand resting on her shoulder, his one black and one white wing spread, the feathers fluttering in the breeze created by her magic. His gaze was intent on the seawitch.

As Dante struggled to absorb what he was seeing, Mina spoke in a sibilant whisper, the Dark One language. "Balance implies more than one side, Dante. Do not deny yourself that."

With another blink, she was herself again, her eyes bicolored once more. David was back on the perch above him as if he'd never left.

Dante stared at her. She was beautiful now, but he remembered, back when he'd first seen Mina, she'd been scarred. Something mesmerizing about her had existed even then, powerful and frightening. She was the clean breath of another world, another way of living. He'd told himself he never believed her promise to release him if he proved himself. And yet, during the Mountain Battle when the curtain had drawn back fully, he'd been inundated by those many images of earth. Green, blue and colors of all kinds. He'd been close enough to see blades of grass, the stalks of flowers and trees . . . He'd wanted to be a part of it, burned to be a part of it, and then she'd slammed the door in his face.

Wanting wasn't an affordable luxury in the Dark One world, but when his anger had ignited, sweeping away fear, he'd realized desire--true, gut-level desire, a desire that gripped the soul--could not be denied.

Mina was watching him. As if she could hear his every thought, the realization that swept through him, she inclined her head. "Your intent is noble," she observed. "But noble idiocy serves no one."

With that acerbic comment, she left, David casting him a wry and almost sympathetic glance before he launched himself to follow in her wake.

HE wanted to see her, but he expected her to come to him, in Hell. As if he was Lord of the Underworld himself. Alexis was sure he expected her to come eagerly, because she couldn't bear to be away from him. Because she'd been aching with need for him ever since he left, not just due to the third mark, but because of what he'd said, that they were somehow part of one another.