A Witch's Beauty

by A Witch's Beauty (lit)

  She backed away. "I don't want your help, and if you insist, I'll just disappear and you'll have to find me again."

  "You won't shake me, Mina. We share blood, remember?" Before she could get too far, he reached out, grasped her arm, the heat of his palm closing over her marble-cold flesh. "Get used to me being here."

  She shook her head, denying that, but there didn't seem to be anything she could do at the moment. She needed space to gather her thoughts. "I have a potion to prepare, and you said you'd be useful," she said shortly. "Do you know anything about plants? Sea plants?"

  "Yes."

  She rattled off the names of several she knew would take him a while to locate and gather in the proper manner. The sea lily she mentioned only opened at one time of day, and it had to be plucked at that time. As she explained that, she added, "I need a handful of each of those."

  Of course, he was an angel. He could be back in a blink of time, even if he went to a different ocean in another time zone to pick them. Maybe he wouldn't be clever enough to think of that, though. Even as she had the thought, her mind scoffed at her.

  "When you come back," she said tersely, "I'll be here. You can sense me, as you said, so there's no need to seek me out. I'll come out when I'm ready. That should satisfy your self-imposed guard duty."

  "I appreciate you promising that you'll stay here."

  "I didn't-"

  As he reached out this time, she reached up at the same moment, her arm blocking his wrist, but he simply stretched out his fingers, grazed them across her cheek. "Do they hurt? The scars?"

  She'd been braced for "How did it happen?" Though of course everyone knew how it had happened. Or figured they knew, through a thousand different interpretations. She'd even overheard one version that said the evil of the Dark Ones' blood was eating its way outward over time and eventually would consume her mermaid features. That story was as good as any other.

  David had asked a question no one ever had, not even the reluctant healers Neptune had assigned to treat her, to atone for the error that led to her scarring. An error most felt had been the right course of action, even if done for the wrong reason.

  "Do your bones ache when it's cold, Mina?" That soft, persuasive voice was tormenting her in a different way. "I bet they do, and yet you made your home over the cold waters of the Abyss. Is that why you don't go on land? Because even with legs, it hurts to walk? And the sun reminds you of your scars, so you stay in dark places?" The tips of his fingers kept sliding along her face, her nose, the bow of her lips, while her forearm, now trembling, stayed up against his wrist, as if that could hold back his devastating assault. "When your muscles cramp, do you have to rub them yourself? Do you ever get a full night's rest, or have a day without pain?"

  "Stop it." She backed away from his touch. "And stop touching me."

  "I like touching you. And I want to protect you, Mina. You'd best get used to both of those things." He turned away before she could say anything to that astoundingly arrogant declaration. "I'll go get your plants. If you need me, I'm only a thought away. You know how to call me."

  Glancing back over his shoulder, the tenderness became a measured glance. "Don't hesitate to do so, or I'll be extremely pissed off."

  Mina managed to keep an indifferent, unimpressed stance until he was gone from her sight, his wings aiding him in a gliding flight through the water. Only then did she think to draw in an unsteady breath.

  He might be young, but there was no denying he'd acquired the irritating tendency all angels had to think they could order everyone around. She shoved aside the fact that his measured look had made a shiver run through parts of her that were not supposed to be affected by him in any way at all.

  It was going to take more than a bat wing to get rid of this latest emissary. But she had to figure out something. Not only was he more of a danger to her than the Dark Ones, he threatened the tenuous thread of control that protected him from her.

  Three

  WHEN David returned, he didn't find her in the same spot. While she'd implied he should wait until she emerged, he reasoned that she might want the plants, as well as the food he'd brought for her.

  David tracked her to the looming shadow of a freighter, the largest of the edifices in this odd place she preferred. He couldn't argue with it as a strategic location. It would be difficult for an enemy to get a clear bead on her here, and if she knew the terrain as well as she seemed to, she could employ it as an effective maze to slow a pursuit.

  As he stroked toward a gaping hole in the pilothouse, he turned in a graceful spiral with his wings coiled around him. He was surprised to see the skeleton of a captain still at the helm, one hand locked to it. His other hand floated free. After this amount of time, scavengers should have left nothing to keep the bones together, but here they were, waving gently in David's wake in serene, eerie movement, as if dancing in time to unheard music, a slow sway to some torch song melody.

  He drifted past. However, as he descended through what had once been four stories of offices for the freighter, he found there were other skeletons. Three of them playing cards, hats still in place, one of them wearing gloves with the fingers open to show the bony clutch of the digits on the cards he held. David reached out to touch them and the cards dispersed, fluttering through the water, then they came back together in his hands, exactly the same way. Only now the skull tilted the other way, the chin jutting out at David as if in challenge.

  "Holy Goddess," he murmured. Not a ghost. An enchantment.

  He swam even more slowly now, finding skeletons at mess, in their bunks holding magazines, taking showers, doing laundry, running diagnostics on a ship long inert. All silently posed and yet moving in that rhythmic motion that was soothing, as if something were rocking them, babes in their mothers' arms.

  If Mina was doing this as an idle pastime, assembling, preserving and animating a shipload of what appeared to be well over fifty crewmen, then she might be more tapped into her full powers than Jonah had realized. When David reached the belly of the ship, he was sure of it.

  First off, there was no water. The hold was as dry as if he were sitting on land. Second, the cargo apparently had been horses. Over a hundred of them. All that was left, as with the crew, were their skeletons. Skeletons that were circling the hold area as if in a paddock, but in planned, geometric circles. Like a concentric dial, there was an inner circle trotting in counterclockwise rotations and an outer circle trotting clockwise, hooves just above the metal bilge so there was no sound to their movements. His dark-haired witch squatted in the center of the circle.

  Mina had shifted to her human form, her feet bare, and was bent over, studying a pattern of shells she'd laid out before her on a flat tablet formed out of a cinderblock base and what might have been an oil drum lid. There was a foal, or rather a skeleton of one, that kept dropping its head-it was impossible to tell the sex-while she absently pushed the intruding nose away when it tried to disrupt the shells. There also had been a cat on the ship, because its skeleton was sitting on the opposite edge, staring down at the shells as intently as Mina was.

  She still wore the cloak, but she'd pushed back the cowl. The side facing him was the unscarred side, and with her raven hair tumbling over one shoulder, her beauty managed to make the horses just... disappear. It was unearthly, how breathtaking that unscarred side was. The sooty dark lashes, the precise, delicate features. He could see the concentration, the wide range of thoughts going on behind the blue eye. Seeing this half of her face, without the other to detract from it, he wondered what she would look like if she smiled, and realized in the same unsteady breath that it would tear a man's heart right out of his chest.

  The outer circle changed gait at the sight of him, wheeling at one time, same as the one inside, a perfect dressage maneuver that hid her for several seconds. When he could see past them again, she was gone. A very effective alert system.

  Patiently, he waited for her to ascertain who had set off the alarm a
nd reappear. Sure enough, he felt her pass behind him several moments later and then step out of the shadows to his left.

  "Why did you come find me? I told you to wait."

  He turned. She'd pulled up the cowl and now all he saw was the terrible scarring that at first glance would make someone think he was talking to a much older woman. Since the first time he'd met her, she'd always preferred to reveal the damaged part of her, not the perfect side. Of course that also was the side with the crimson eye. So much like the ones that burned in the skulls of the Dark Ones, that at her sudden appearance, he had to make a mental effort not to react as he would to his sworn enemy.

  "I wanted to see what you were doing." He handed over the plants. The horses had stopped, frozen like a picture taken of them standing idly in a field. No heads were down, though, as if they knew there was no grazing to be found in this metal ground. "You removed the water in here."

  "It's easier to mix potions and prepare spells that way," she explained impatiently.

  "The horses are a brilliant protection plan." He ignored her curt tone. "But what purpose do the cat and foal serve?"

  "I despise you. Do you understand that?"

  "You don't despise me. I bother you. That's different. Do the cat and foal serve a purpose?"

  "No," she said flatly. "Can you go somewhere else, where I don't have to see you?"

  "No," he said, mimicking her tone.

  A muscle in her jaw twitched. "I don't want you this close."

  "How close?" Cocking his head, he took a step forward, spreading his wings a few degrees for balance. "This close?"

  It put about a foot between them, making her tilt her head back. She didn't want to talk about anything at all. Didn't want him around. So she said. But either he was too thickheaded to believe it, or his intuition was telling him a different truth. He was hedging his bets on the latter.

  "You're flirting with me."

  "Giving it a try. I didn't get much practice as a human. How am I doing?"

  Mina closed her mouth into a thin line. "I don't like to be teased." She moved around him, back through the horses, weaving her way to the center of her enchanted circle.

  "Mina, I wasn't making fun of you." When he stepped forward and the horses closed ranks, he set his jaw and went over, a light movement that landed him squarely in front of her.

  "Then why would you do it? It serves no purpose."

  "Like the foal and the cat?" At her obvious discomfiture, he shifted the subject, nodding to the plants still clutched in her hands. "Did I get the right ones?"

  "Yes," she said, grudgingly. "You have a decent eye. I'll mix these and then pack them for my cave. I have someone picking them up."

  "At your cave?" David shifted his attention to his first priority. "I don't think that's wise."

  "You chose to provide me protection," she snapped. "I didn't ask for it; I don't want it. If you don't wish to accompany me, it means nothing to me."

  The seawitch who just wanted to be left alone. Pushing away his guilt, David sent a mental message to several of his platoon who'd been willing to lend reconnaissance support to the protection detail, asking them to run surveillance on her cave area to ensure he and Mina weren't walking into a trap. It didn't mean one couldn't be sprung after they got there, though. He didn't like it, but he preferred it to destroying the fragile trust he might be building with her by forcing a physical confrontation over her movements to and from her home.

  Putting out a hand, he followed the nose bone of a tall stallion, feeling the residual energy. "It's no wonder the Dark Ones keep finding you. Maybe you should tone it down a little."

  "They don't frighten me. If that overgrown bat hadn't gotten in my way, I could have taken care of the last attack. If nothing else, I could move with stealth. With an angel entourage, you might as well put a neon sign over my head that screams 'something worth protecting.' "

  "Neon sign? How do you know about those?"

  "I'm not ignorant of the land ways," she said shortly.

  His brow furrowed. Anna had felt fairly certain Mina rarely, if ever, went on land. "Well, perhaps we're learning," he said at last. "This time Jonah did send just me, one lowly lieutenant."

  Giving him a deprecating look, she produced a clean square of cloth from a closed container and spread it out on the oil drum lid, clearing the shells away. Then she drew a cutting knife from the folds of her cloak and began severing the plants into pieces with disconcerting precision, barely looking at them. "Jonah cares for you like a son. You probably had to nag him for days. He'll wear a hole in the Citadel, pacing and worrying about you."

  "I'm sure he has a couple other things to keep his mind occupied. Mina, why don't you think you're worth protecting?"

  The knife stilled and she looked up at him. "My opinion is irrelevant. The only reason the angels want to protect me is because of the power I could wield on their behalf."

  "That's not why I'm here."

  "I know that." She surprised him with the quiet response and began cutting again. "That's the only reason I haven't turned you into a bat as well."

  David bit back a smile. Taking a seat on an oil drum near her, he watched her work and idly stroke the foal's nose when it became animated again. The horses started to move, as if a carousel had started up around them.

  Was it excess energy? Did she have so much she had to occupy it? Or was it to create a world safe for her to inhabit, creatures to keep her company?

  Mulling on that, he watched her cut. Swift, sure slices, making the plants the lengths she desired, then mixing them in a kettle she had next to her now at her makeshift table. He suspected the kettle and cloth might be relics of this ship or ones like it. Most merpeople were creative scavengers, having enough interest in their human cousins to gather what they left behind in the sea, whether by carelessness or mishap. Glancing into the kettle, he saw she'd already had some ingredients gathered, and apparently had been waiting for one of his contributions, the white sea lily.

  "What's the potion for?"

  "It's a love potion." She gave him a dismissive glance.

  "You don't strike me as the romantic type."

  She sighed. "It doesn't work like that. The merman drinks the potion, believing it will make the object of his desire fall in love with him. In reality, it neutralizes his sexual urges, taking that out of the equation. Now the potion drinker will only act on his true emotions, thinking sensibly and calmly, and proceed that way. He has a better chance of winning his target's affections, if there's any chance at all. If he doesn't, it won't matter as much anyway. Until the potion wears off."

  "That seems to take something out of it."

  She gave him a disparaging look. "Easy for you to say. Angels have no need of potions. They can just command anyone to love them."

  David raised his brows. "That's news to me. Unless Jonah hasn't told me something."

  She rolled her eyes. "Have you looked at yourselves? Your aura pounds out a fall-at-my-feet vibration that could knock any female down at fifty paces."

  "Oh, really?" His lips curved.

  She narrowed her eyes. "Any idiot female. That's why this type of potion is one I make only for males. Women's infatuations tend to be driven more by emotion than lust. Their potion is different."

  "Either way," he reasoned, "to really fall in love with someone takes time. Getting to know them. Getting past the hormones..." At her ironic look, he grimaced. "All right, so your potion makes sense, in a way. But it still takes some of the joy out of it. It's part of the mix... the ingredients of love itself, if you will. Even if an angel could use otherworldly power to overwhelm someone, command her affections, he'd miss out on the excitement and uncertainty of falling in love. Physical attraction is part of that."

  "For some people, that's just a torment, particularly if the other person doesn't reciprocate. It makes them do insane, ridiculous things that might put themselves or others at risk."

  "You're far more conservative than I ex
pected you to be." Cocking his head, he reached out to examine a plant with an interesting seedpod, and got his hand smacked by the flat blade of the knife.

  "Don't touch," she snapped.

  Knuckles stinging, David nevertheless kept his hand where it was, raised his gaze to lock with hers. "Would you like to try that again?"

  Though her lips pressed together, she waited until he removed his hand at his own pace, and then she scraped up the plant, tossed it in. "I'm charging it with intent as I'm preparing it. Your energy could unbalance that intent."

  "Wouldn't it have been more courteous to tell me that before assaulting me?"

  "Wouldn't it have been more courteous for you to ask before putting your fingers where they don't belong?"

  "You practice this," he decided. "Being disagreeable." Unfortunately, it didn't stop her words from planting a provocative double entendre in his mind.

  "There's no need to practice or exercise it if I'm left alone," she said.

  David settled back. "So I guess you don't want the snack I brought you." At her indifferent look, he rummaged through the waterproof sack he'd put at his feet and withdrew the orange and several foil-wrapped chocolates.

  He looked up to find her staring at the food. "You didn't get those in the ocean."

  "No." He held up the orange. "Do you know what this is?"

  "It looks like a fruit. Anna described the land food sometimes. She never brought me anything. I never asked," she added quickly, but her attention stayed on the objects. "No one's ever brought me anything. From there."

  "This is an orange. You're right; it's a fruit." When he offered it, she shook her head, circled around the table and gestured to him to put it down. Curious, he did, and watched her kneel, pushing a loose lock of her still-damp long hair behind one ear to lean forward and take a long sniff. Apparently some of the chocolate he'd put down next to it managed to filter into the aroma, for she adjusted her attention to it, then back to the orange. Carefully, she lifted the fruit in both palms, feeling the weight.