A Mermaid s Kiss (Daughters of Arianne 1)

He gestured to the lodge. "The way to strong visions is through focus, and when focus is hard to find, great pain or physical stress can bring it. When the heat takes over your senses, robs you of consciousness, then you will catch up to your mind, find where it has been wandering inside the labyrinth of your soul."

Jonah glanced toward the tent, felt the heat coming from it. He spread his wings slightly, gestured toward them with a tilt of his head. "That's for your human victims, shaman. In this form, I'm not affected by heat. It will take much more than that for me to reach a state of great physical stress or pain."

Sam cocked his head. "Do you wish to find truth?"

Jonah knew the answer to that. The sullenness in his soul that made him care little for any of this was still there. But he could not push away his promise to Anna, the faith in her gaze, the sweet gentleness of her touch.

I cannot wait to see you well . . . flying . . . That will be your greatest gift to me . . . He'd heard her thoughts during her song, his mermaid likely unaware of how many things unsaid she'd sent from her mind to his.

Why he didn't resent her asking of him what he didn't want for himself, he didn't know, but his only sense of right and wrong, his only motivation, lay now in what she wanted.

"I'm willing."

Sam raised a brow, acknowledging that he hadn't received a direct answer to his question. Jonah stared at him, waiting. Sam spread his hands out. "So what will cause you enough suffering to send you into a vision state, if heat will not?"

It clicked then. His jaw clenching, Jonah moved his gaze to the sword.

"I'm really beginning to hate that witch," he muttered darkly, ignoring the flash of amusement in the shaman's otherwise somber face.

JONAH found the interior of the tent suffocatingly hot, but as he'd predicted, its impact on him was atmospheric only. Taking a seat cross-legged next to the hot rocks, he told the shaman what needed to be done. As he rolled his shoulders, laid his hands on his knees and adjusted his wings, he allowed Sam to lay lines of beads and shells over his shoulders that draped down to his stomach and knees. When the shaman began to chant, the lines became rigid, winding over his arms and holding them to his sides, immobilizing him. Jonah expected it, knew it was needed so the shaman's blow would be precise, striking him just below the heart to cause mind-altering pain, not death. However, he reflected it was the first time in his life he'd willingly put his life into a stranger's hands, let alone a human's. Whether that was intuition or loss of good sense, it was too late to change his mind now.

"If you're an agent of my enemies, shaman, then you're about to be in a position to take my life."

"I am not your enemy, angel," Sam replied. "But I am not your friend, either."

In the dim lodge, his dark eyes glittered, piercing. Jonah almost expected the shaman to spread wings of his own, glossy black and brown like the hawk he suddenly resembled. Shamans often traveled upon wings in their visions, leading some scholars throughout the ages to point to them as part of the mythology of angels. The ability to fly, to transcend.

"What do you mean, old man?"

But for the moment Sam had dropped into the hypnotic singsong chant used by wizards of this barren land for centuries, a rhythmic cadence that connected directly to the songs of the earth and the sky. Jonah turned his mind from the shaman's cryptic comment and focused on the chant instead, for he knew it was part of preparing himself. As he did, he modulated his breathing for the stifling atmosphere. His mind had almost started to drift off when he realized Sam was speaking directly to him again in the same hypnotic monotone.

"You paid attention to the lessons of the Dark Ones, to their words. You believe they say only what they mean, and they do. But what they mean may not be what you understand. Their ways are not our ways. They are closest to human ways, and there is an answer for you there, but you must listen closely for it."

Sam hefted the blade, used it and his hand to waft the steam over his face, closing his eyes as he spoke. "In battle, the Dark Ones destroy the heart of the angel to inflict a mortal wound. This is a physical matter. But in the spiritual realm, where the power they seek lies, they know the best way to defeat an angel is to take his heart. And so that is what they seek from you."

Jonah made a noise. "I know that."

"No, you do not. You listen with your ears still."

Jonah stared at Sam across the flickering firelight, through the clouds of steam. When the shaman shifted, Jonah did in fact see the shadow of dark wings thrown by the flame against the wall, and those images blurred. Hawk. Man.

"It has been in my dreams, and in those of the seawitch, that a great and horrible chance must be taken. By taking your heart from you, the Dark Ones may actually help you find it again. The physical and spiritual will come together there, such that there is no difference between the two. It is what we all hope and must risk. For the alternative is much darkness and the Great Mother's voice being silent forever." Sam's tone sharpened. "There is much more than you at risk here. And yet your pain, your confusion, is a mirror of what the whole world suffers. Your quest is the quest of us all."

"My heart is within me, old man. And no Dark One will take it. I will skewer it myself first."

"You gave your heart away. You could not bear the pain of its weight, and so you gave it to another to hold."

Your heart. The physical, versus the spiritual . . .

Oh, Goddess. Anna. Anna was his heart. They were coming for Anna.

The meaning hit Jonah as if the shaman had rammed the sword through his chest right then, though he still stood across the lodge. He struggled, but the weight of the ritual pieces with which the shaman had bound his arms to his body held him.

David. Anna. A force of Dark Ones would come, great enough to take Anna. David would fight them to the death. And here he was, in a temporal shift, unable to communicate with anyone.

"Let me go. I can't do this now."

Sam raised the sword. His gaze was sad, but implacable. "You must."

With that last directive, he drove the sword into Jonah's chest, between the ribs that were several inches below the heart.

HE'D prepared the damn blade himself, charged it with enough of his own power to help Sam knock him out of his own reality and into this far different one. Jonah roared his fury, but he was on fire. No, in fire, a place of black rock and orange flame. He turned on his heel, hemmed in on all sides, nowhere to go. Then, out of that darkness, a familiar figure materialized, the fire licking at his ebony wings.

The Goddess didn't create the humans, Jonah. She created all of what you see in the world and universe, including us, but not humans. Have you not asked yourself over and over why they are so different from any other creature on Earth?

"Luc, I have to go." Jonah said it desperately, even knowing it was futile. He wasn't really talking to the Lord of the Underworld but to an illusion of his own mind. "I can't be here. Anna and David are in danger."

But She is connected to them anyway. Lucifer took more corporeal form, his eyes red as bloodshed. That's important. Remember that.

Jonah shook his head. "Why are you here, Luc? What is this? What--"

But then the vision was gone and instead of fire, he was in deep water. Deep as the Abyss and colder. He struggled, swimming against the weight of his wings, which felt ten times heavier, though angel wings were usually supple as fins in water.

There were millions of sea creatures around him, swarms of sleek sharks interspersed with silver schools of fish, the swiftly pumping tentacles of squid, as well as floating man-o'-wars with their ethereal forest of legs. Their arms caught him, burning, stinging, as if trying to keep him from ascending.

An angel did not cause harm to a creature of the Lady if it could be avoided, but only the discipline of a millennium kept him from sending out a blast of electrical energy that would have scattered them from his path.

They rolled him, over and over, until he wasn't sure if he was going the righ

t direction, if he was even conscious.

Up, up. He had to get free. A whale struck him, hard enough that he heard bones creak inside his chest cavity as he tumbled along the creature's side. When he had the presence of mind to seize a fin, it dissolved in his hand. They could impede and touch him, but he could do nothing to them after all.

He thought of Anna in the waves. She seemed to get where she wanted to go by a curious mixture of not resisting and not losing sight of her destination. He tried it, letting the creatures carry him. Their drifting or turning at a key moment resulted in openings that let him be elevated upward in a slow spiral, rolling with them, feeling the silky passing of a dolphin's side, a blowfish's sudden startled expansion along his instep . . .