"No magic, Anna. I forbid it."
Darkness coursed through her gaze, but Jonah brought her up to him for another rough kiss, plundering the softness of her mouth, and increased his grip on her buttock to sheathe himself in her welcoming heat. "Just us," he muttered, even as he knew part of it was a flatterer's lie to avoid the truth of why he didn't want her to use the magic.
She moaned against his mouth, her body spasming against him. Goddess, he couldn't bear it. He drove into her, harder, harder, knowing she was delicate but needing to lose himself, needing to just shatter into flecks of foam on the waves. Reduce his life to the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of sliding along the sides of her body as she passed his way, caressing and teasing the pink tips of her breasts, getting trapped in the salty, wet crevice of her sex, playing with those lips as she rolled beneath the ocean's surface.
From the clutch of her hands on his forearms, he could tell she was close. He kept that rhythm and bent his head to her breast again, taking the nipple in, sucking on it hard, and was rewarded. Her hands seized his hair, tugged ruthlessly and she came, her legs clamped over his hips, heels digging into his buttocks.
When she cried out, he moved up to her throat, bit down like a possessive animal and let himself go, wishing the darkness of his thoughts wouldn't follow him over the edge. But as she held on to him with her fists, like the little girl who had held on to his hair, he wondered if the fiercest gestures were desperate ones. The hope that something solid wouldn't slip away, leaving them yearning. Girls learned early there were no guarantees.
As his climax ebbed, the vision of the broken woman in the diner came again, as well as the black desolation her husband's soul had become. One night, that woman had turned over and found the face of her lover had become that of a stranger.
Her angel had become a monster.
Eleven
DAVID paused, hovering. The Abyss yawned below, murky and forbidding, as he was sure it was intended to be. Lord Lucifer took pains to discourage sea creatures from stumbling into the graphic realities of redemption, which could certainly sear a memory forever.
However, there was something here. Close by. Watching. It wasn't the careful but benign curiosity of a sea creature. Not exactly. He waited, listening.
He'd kept returning to this yawning crater, for it was the most likely place for Jonah to have sought refuge from a pressing enemy. But the maze of caverns was limitless, also making it impossible to find Jonah. And if he'd been strong enough to make it into the caverns, why wouldn't he keep going until he reached Luc's realm where he'd be protected, his wounds treated?
But still, David knew he wasn't off base. Even Luc, before other responsibilities called him away, had sensed there was something to the theory and left David to pursue it.
There. A shadow. He would have missed it if he hadn't been looking in that direction at a lucky moment. He didn't twitch a muscle, his whole energy and concentration tuning him in to the exact position of . . . there. He had it.
Angels of Jonah and Lucifer's caliber could move beyond the speed of light if they chose, circumnavigating the world in a blink if it was needed. David couldn't achieve that speed and remain in control yet. He'd hurtle out of orbit and bounce off an asteroid. They'd teased him about the bumps and bruises before. That was all right. The teasing of the angels never bothered him, because their love and protection of him and each other was absolute. They were connected in a way that kept him from feeling lonely. Many times he needed to draw from that energy to forget his mortal life and what he'd had to leave behind, unprotected. But he wondered when was the last time Jonah had drawn on that energy. David had an uneasy feeling that at some point Jonah had cut himself off from it and lost the vital reassurance.
Now was not the time for distracting thoughts like that, however. He could move faster across a few hundred yards than any mortal creature, and he used that now. He flipped back, his wings arcing over him in the water for balance and propulsion and shot toward where he'd seen the motion. He arrived directly before the creature, intercepting its retreat into the recesses of a cave to seize a bundle of rags that exploded in his face, striking at him with sharp nails, shrieks and . . .
He sucked in a breath. Dark One. It was a Dark One . . . wasn't it?
As he took the precious second to process the confusing signals, a serpentine tail coiled around his thigh, spinning him into a nasty bed of fire coral. Leaving him cursing and holding the rags, the creature hurtled away from him.
Dropping the garment, David pursued his quarry into the cave and caught it again, slamming it up against the wall. It earned him a shocking, feminine cry of pain.
There were no Dark Ones with female energy. But their energy was pulsing off her, making it hard to fight down his automatic reaction to kill.
Focus. If she was connected to the Dark Ones, she might have knowledge about Jonah. By the Goddess, if she did, she would tell him, even if he had to cause more of those terrible shrieks to tear out of her throat.
He had one of his daggers out and against her neck, holding it close enough the creature could not move forward without decapitating herself. All he could see was a dark swirl of hair, a pale chin, a bare shoulder. Without the bundle of rags, the creature wore nothing but raven black hair that almost hid her features as she leaned against the shadowed rocks of the wall. But her Dark One energy outlined her to him like the illumination of a nightmarish sunrise.
"Show your face."
"Kill me and be done with it. I do nothing at your command."
David grasped a handful of hair, pulling it from her face, and yanked her head back.
A girl. Younger than him. One side of her face was severely scarred and embedded with one red eye, the crimson signature of a Dark One. Which only enhanced painfully how beautiful the other side was, so much so it stunned him for a key moment.
What he now recognized as a tentacle lashed around both of his ankles, slammed them together. She struck him across the face with a piece of pipe she'd had hidden on a ledge in the shadows, likely scavenged from a shipwreck.
Yes, Jonah would say he deserved that. David managed to hold on to her, fought past
the throbbing pain and flipped her, breaking free of the hold of her unusual appendages with the flex of his legs. She scrabbled for the dagger he'd dropped, which had fallen on a lower outcropping. It got kicked off and disappeared in the murky waters as he yanked her back against him, arms pinned to her sides. Sleek as an eel, she slipped out of his grasp again, tangling his arms in her hair of all things, a more effective net than expected, leaving him holding a handful of strands and nothing else.
It might be a holdover from his days as a human, but he knew he would not live it down with the others if he had his ass whipped by a girl. Catching the slender whip of one tentacle around his wrist--Christ, she had stingers--he yanked hard, jerking her off balance and making her flail. As she tried to recover, he propelled himself out the cave entrance and up, jolting her body back into his arms as he did so, spinning up, up, up, knowing her mortal equilibrium couldn't handle it the way his could. Churning through the water like a rising tornado, he heard her garbled cry as she realized what he was doing, where they were going.
Time to take this one out of her element. It was an acknowledgment he grudgingly gave her--she was a hell of a fighter.
Emerging into a world domed beneath a night sky, he shot up in an arc over the sea as she snarled and shrieked, raked him with her nails, taking a stripe of skin off his neck. When he dropped her at that height, she howled in surprised fear, cut off a second later as he caught her in his arms, floating them down onto a narrow sandspit that existed only at low tide, about a mile out from the nearest substantial landmass. She scrabbled back toward the water, and he caught her again, flipped her to her back.
"Stop," he commanded. Then any sense of indulgence disappeared as he registered what was caught in her hair. A pure white feather, limned with silver.
Jonah. Every angel had a unique color pattern to his wings upon reaching maturity. David's wings still had the cream color and brown tips of a fledgling, as all angels had in their first fifty years.
Rightly sensing his change of mood, she made another attempt at the water. David drew a second dagger from the strap across his chest and speared flesh and muscle, pinning one tentacle to the sand and rock beneath.