by Joey W. Hill
As soon as the vehicle had cleared the gate, Matt reached to cut the engine. The weeping Maggie ducked under his arm, tumbling to the sand. When she fell, she didn't notice the impact, digging at her face and writhing, her cries escalating. The man leaped out, going to one knee next to her as Jonah surged forward.
"Maggie."
"Help her . . ."
Jonah's head snapped around, hearing Anna's weak voice from the front seat. She was fully morphed back into a mermaid. Her tail was over the gear shift, body canted at an uncomfortable angle against the window because of her length. Her beautiful purple and blue colors were a mottled, sickly gray, her face sunken, her breath wheezing. The seawater hadn't had time to take effect. "Jonah, help her . . ."
"Water," he called out desperately. "Matt, do you have a tub . . ." But of course Matt was focused on his wife, who was shrieking and trying to get away from him, for all she'd be seeing was darkness. Utter darkness.
Anna reached out to Jonah, scraped his chest urgently as he leaned over her in the open door of the truck. "Only the ocean can save me now, Jonah, and it's too late to get me there. Help her. Fix her. Help her now. You can't leave her like that."
With a curse, Jonah straightened and moved quickly to kneel by the two. Anna struggled to the driver's side so she could look down upon them.
"Stop it. Stop it now." Maggie was wailing, trying to get away from Matt's helpless grip. "Kill me. Don't . . . I can't bear it . . ."
Jonah met Matt's gaze in warning. "I'd give this more time, but the poison will settle in too fast if we wait." By then, the damage to her mind would be irreparable.
"It's okay, Maggie." Matt used his strength to pull her out of her fetal curl, held her back against him despite her struggles. Adjusting so his legs were stretched out on either side of her, he formed a stalwart brace at her back. "You're the bravest girl I know. You're going to be fine."
"I'm never going to be fine again. I don't want to live like this. I can't bear it." When her wildly seeking eyes turned to her husband, seeking comfort from the source Anna was sure she'd always been able to depend upon, she could tell the woman hit a wall of desolation, standing in the way of all he had to offer. She began to scream again, and Anna didn't know what was worse, the sound of Maggie's pain or the reflection of it on Matt's face.
"If you're going to help her, goddamn it, do it. Anything's better than this."
Jonah laid his hands on the inside of Matt's, against Maggie's throat on either side.
The healing light was immediate, reassuring at least to the observers, but then the sickly black and bloodred charged poison rushed out and over her skin, as if Maggie's blood vessels had erupted all along her sternum, revealed by the open neck of her shirt. It ran away from her, though, and over Jonah's hands. When it met his skin, Anna had to bite back a cry as it burrowed in with the eagerness of leeches seeking blood. It stained his skin the same color, strengthening in his pigment as it started to fade from Maggie's. It was alive, writhing under his flesh like living snakes, moving rapidly up his arms to his chest.
"Jonah--" She leaned out, trying to take hold of him.
"Don't touch me." It was a sharp command, obviously done with attention he couldn't spare, so she pressed her lips together hard. His white and silver wings started to turn the same bloodred, the black of decay. He flinched as it injected itself into the base where they joined with muscle and cartilage to his shoulders. Something escaped from his lips, low and guttural, a growl that startled her, particularly when his gaze snapped up and the wholly dark irises had become red. Matt stared up at him, his expression obviously warring between holding on to his wife or reaching for the gun several feet away.
Anna wished she knew if it was usually this difficult for an angel as powerful as Jonah to absorb and transform Dark One poison. Somehow, she doubted it. He was already carrying some of that poison within him. Plus, they'd hit Maggie particularly hard, perhaps for this very reason, knowing it would take more of his energy to fight his own poison to save her. Despite their macabre, monstrous appearance and berserker methods of attack, they were sentient, thinking monsters. She'd thought they couldn't be more terrifying, but now she knew she was wrong.
Maggie slumped against Matt, her eyes rolling back as she went limp. Matt's grip on her tightened, holding her steady as Jonah stepped back at last. "Maggie . . ."
"She should be all right." Jonah's voice was low, hoarse. While his wings were white again and the poison had decreased from the size of snakes back to wriggling maggots, Anna still had to quell the urge to struggle out of the cab and clap her hand around his arm. As if such a weak tourniquet could prevent them from inching upward toward his chest, again, where so many vital organs rested, like his heart.
In truth she didn't know what was vital in an angel's body, since they were immortal. But since many of Jonah's soldiers had died fighting these things, she didn't have the comfort of believing that immortal meant invulnerable.
A glance toward Maggie showed her expression had eased, her fingers even in unconsciousness curling over her husband's arm. Jonah had succeeded. He'd repaired the rift torn in her soul by the Dark Ones, driven out the blackness they'd poured into it. Anna had the suspicion, however, that he'd trapped it in himself, given it a much more attractive host to inhabit. When she turned her attention back to him, disturbed by that thought, she found he'd gone.
She had no strength, but managed on will alone to drag herself out the driver's open door. She tumbled to the ground, feeling the thud through her body. It took a moment for the world to right itself again and the haze of pain to clear from her eyes. Then she started struggling after him on trembling arms, ignoring the painful rasp of sand and brush against her sensitive, brittle scales.
Fortunately, he hadn't gone far. He'd circled the truck, strode the few feet to the gate and gone over it, just outside of the boundaries of the property. As soon as he got there, he'd dropped to his knees and begun to retch, expelling wave after wave of dark, foul-smelling discharge with the disconcerting odor of blood. Blue traces of his own life fluid were in it, an ethereal light she didn't want to see mixed in that evil brew.
Since the fence was split rail, she managed to pull herself beneath it and came up on him quietly, praying she wouldn't pass out. He needed her. She held on to that thought, wielded it like a weapon against the fading light of her own body. While she had breath and a heartbeat, she'd give it to him. Though he'd told her not to touch him, she reached forward and gathered his hair on one side, where it had fallen forward on his face. Gently, she pulled it out of the way as he bent forward, obviously concentrating on the purging. She wished he could remove it from himself as he had from Maggie, but she suspected what she was seeing on the ground was from Maggie. The blue blood was the only thing that came from within him.
When he stopped, his head down, sides heaving, she tugged on his elbow. "Let's move you away from this."
"No. Need to bury it, burn the ground."
"Let me help."
"No--"
"I won't touch it, but you're not doing it alone."
While he dug the hole, she carefully pushed sand over the stinking mess, adding in a few dried sticks from the vegetation around the gates. All that was once living around the front of the gate was dead. She wondered if the Dark One's presence had done that instantly, or if it was just evidence of how often evil clustered outside the entrance to Matt and Maggie's property, testing the power of the circle.
He set fire to it with merely a glance, and the smell of it had her covering her mouth. Jonah glanced her way, and with a flicker of his fingertips, a breeze lifted, taking the stench downwind from her. But then he returned to staring at the insidious funeral pyre.
"You know it's growing in you, don't you?" she asked softly. "You know that's why you don't care about the shaman. It wants to win."
"It merely came at an opportune time," Jonah said, without shifting his gaze. "The poison had to have something to attach i
tself to. You understand?"
"I do." She used her fingers to wipe the moisture from the corners of his eyes, a result of his exertions, not sentiment. She doubted he'd ever taken the easy way out of anything. Perhaps the best way to defeat a warrior was to take away his belief that what he was fighting for meant something. How would a male like him ultimately deal with such a black despair? Fighting itself might become the only answer. That thought brought a shiver of apprehension with it, recalling that hideous brief moment when his eyes had been crimson.
"You have a great deal to live for," she managed. "Just think of the women, far and wide, who would line up to hold your hair out of your face while you throw up."
When he focused on her, pulling out of whatever horrors were battling within him, she attempted a smile, even as she felt something in her chest stutter, send a bolt of pain through her. Hold on just a little longer, she pleaded to whatever god might be listening. "It's a human joke."
"I'm familiar with it." Reaching down, he closed one hand on hers. "Anna."
With his hand on her, she was steady enough to cup his jaw, relieved when he didn't stop her. She traced the firm smoothness of his perfect skin, even if what roiled below the surface was far from perfect. Making her stiff lips move again was a vital effort. "The shaman will help. I know you don't care, that you don't know why all of us are bothering, but I have faith that you are meant to live, my lord, and what's more, to take joy in it again."
"Anna . . ." When her body swayed forward, Jonah moved his touch to her shoulders, holding her steady.
"Ronin made you laugh when you forgot how to do it on your own," she said, breath starting to labor. But this was important; she knew it. She clamped her hand over his on her arm, her nails digging in to hold his attention. "But his laughter is still out there. And there's your own laughter and passion inside you still. I've . . . seen it. You've given it to me, as a gift. I wanted to live long enough to see you reclaim it. You're a gift to all of us, a treasure beyond price. Please try. We all need that. We need to know you're there, protecting us. I need to know it. Promise me you'll go to the shaman."
Her head was so heavy, she needed to lay it down. So she did, sinking to the ground and laying her forehead on his knee. "You go on. Dawn's almost here. Be what you're meant to be."
The convulsion rippled over her, taking her words, seizing her internal organs, squeezing, making things blur, even the outline of his face, his pale wings like clouds. This is the way it would end, and that was fine. But, oh, she would have liked to have him a bit longer. She hadn't anticipated leaving him before he left her, and she'd wanted to remember him as happy, whole. That was okay. In a week, the Goddess had given her more than she'd ever expected.
"No. No." Seizing her shoulders, Jonah tried to lift her up, rouse her, feeling desperately for the faint flutter of a pulse. He would make his wings work, even if it destroyed his ability to use them ever again. He would get her back to her beloved sea. What had he been thinking? He could . . .
The rising sun hit his back and he snarled. "No!"
He tried to resist it, but the transformation shoved him over her body, made him press his chest down hard on her laboring one. The wings were gone in a blink, like mortal remains into dust, the small handful of feathers that always seemed to survive the process drifting across the ground. As he was held there, temporarily paralyzed by the transformation, he watched them tumble over the ground, under the truck, to Maggie on the other side. They stopped there, lying at various points against her body.
"Matt . . ." She was conscious, and now she was trying to struggle to a more upright position. When Matt tried to stop her, she batted at him, caught a lock of his brown hair and yanked, hard, to get him to pay attention. "Cellar. Take her there. Quickly. The spring."
Jonah snapped his attention to them. "The spring has magical healing properties." She coughed. "It might help." As Matt hesitated, her voice rose. "I'm in the circle now. I'm safe. She needs our help, Matt. She's dying. Go!"
He gave her a rough, desperate kiss, and then wrenched himself from her side to come to Jonah's. "I'll help you lift her. She's right. The spring might help."
Maggie was weak and helpless, lying on the ground a mere handful of feet and one gate away from the remains of the Dark One who'd almost taken her from Matt. As Jonah looked down at Anna, thought about how he felt about her, he made his decision.
"Tell me where to go," Jonah said. "Stay and care for your wife."
Twenty
IT was the second cellar they'd visited this week, though their cellar dweller might have preferred this one to his current abode. Jonah opened the door in the kitchen floor with the key Matt had given him, and took Anna down the steps, into a world of red rock and the not-too-distant but unexpected smell of salt water.
He hated he had to carry her over his shoulder like this, knew it was uncomfortable, but the stairwell was too narrow and her body as a mermaid too long to carry cradled in his arms. He tried to keep his steps even. Her lack of response put a cold fear inside him. How many dead had he carried like this, knowing the feel of lifeless weight over his shoulder? He quickened his step.
Even the first, truly deep breath of saline couldn't give him reassurance. Just when he was sure he was going to have to put her down to make sure she was still with him, she stirred weakly, her fingers brushing the back of his thigh. "Ocean?"
"Something like that. You hang on, Anna. Hang on. You hear me?"
Relief flooded him when he heard the gurgle of water, the tumbling sound of the underground water source Matt had indicated was fed by the ocean in some mysterious manner, another of the Schism's secrets, a confluence of all the elements. What more powerful representation of water could there be than the ocean?
It'd been nearly a week since he'd met his mermaid, and of course Mina had said it would wear off in a week, this detested spell. Before he'd sent them toward the cellar, Matt had said he couldn't cross the Schism's threshold into the shaman's domain as an angel. He should go today, then, but he'd felt no haste to meet the shaman from the beginning, and he certainly wasn't going to leave Anna now. Somewhere deep in his lethargic consciousness, he knew she was right about the poison. But he just didn't seem to have the will for anything but to take care of her.
"Jonah ..."
"Here we are." He didn't hesitate. It was broad, nearly a dozen feet across. As he maneuvered down the bank and walked directly into the flow of the water, he found it quickly went past his waist, lapping at his chest. Her tail was immersed first, and then he shifted her into his arms to lower the rest of her, holding on to her body as she dropped her head back. Following her impulse, he took her beneath, immersing her in the precious salt water, the smell reminding him of the aroma off the shores outside of her cottage. The echoes in the cavern caused by the flow of the water were even similar to the sound of the waves washing up on the sand.
The gills along her neck were working, soft ripples of movement. Her eyes were open and she was studying him, gazing upon him with that soft, wistful look that was so unfeigned, so scaldingly pure. Her hands held on to his biceps as the water soaked into his battle skirt.
Her color was getting better, the purple and blue shimmer of her tail becoming more luminescent, losing its brittle texture. Her cheeks filled out, their normal light pink blush returning, like the pearlescent interior of a shell. But as he watched her eyes he knew to keep her beneath the flow. She'd come far too close to the end. The strength of her body was not the only thing that had almost left her.
"You must go," she mouthed. He shook his head.
"I'll go tomorrow morning. I'm not going until I know you're all right. Besides, we need to care for our new friends."
He knew that would convince her where attending to her own welfare would not. And it wasn't a lie. Even with the healing, it would be good for him to have Maggie under observation one more night. Not for the first time, he wondered if angels were male because Dark Ones had such a devas
tating effect on female energy. Plundering their sacred balance, the well of strength that kept the Earth strong because it directly linked to the Goddess. Something shifted in his mind at the thought, a secret there he felt he should know, but didn't. He shook it off. He had no time for mysteries right now.
"You should have told me about the three days," he reproved. "I thought we agreed from the beginning that you were always supposed to tell me the truth."
Her lips curved in that smile, unapologetic but silent, for they both knew why she'd risked it.
The Dark Ones had seemed very determined that he not get here. This last attack had been the most aggressive yet. He had enough will in him to want to resist their desires, but because of hatred of his enemies, not for some higher good. He doubted the Schism would be interested in opening up for that purpose. And why should it?
As he saw the salt water restore some of Anna's strength, he couldn't ignore the stark image of her out there, a mermaid in the desert, helping him bury the vestiges of evil, willing to die for him, when he had done nothing to protect her from the beginning.
He deserved Randall's contempt.
Even as he had the despairing thought, she surfaced, holding on to him. Her expression wrenched something in him. He thought of the desolation in Maggie, created by the poison. All the Dark Ones had had to do to infect him was ride upon the despair he'd created in himself.
"Where does your joy come from, little one? Does it never flag?"
"It does, my lord. But there are always moments like this to take sadness away from me." When she smiled again, it took his breath, the way it seemed to place a balm on the aching pain in his chest.
"Every merman in that damn ocean should have been fighting for the right to love you, cherish you."
She looked startled, then that mischief he seemed unable to dampen crept into her eyes. "And what would you have thought of that, my lord? Would you willingly turn me over to their hands? Their lips? Their . . ."