"What . . . is . . . your . . . name?" she gasped.
Darkness coated his gaze for an instant before it was swallowed by the red and orange again. His body tensed everywhere it touched her, but in reaction she strained upward against his hold, toward his lips. While he drew back, denying her, his gaze settled on her bare breasts, the hungry upward tilt of the nipples. Dropping his head, he nuzzled her there, his mouth covering one and suckling hard, causing another cry to rip from her throat as he kept moving in her body. He licked and teased her so thoroughly, though his pace inside her body kept stopping just short of completion, taking her up higher and higher. She was on fire, dying, trembling, gasping tiny pleas to a man whose name she didn't know.
"Dante," he answered her at last, lifting his head to lock gazes with her once more. Then he surged over her, clamping down on her mouth, seizing possession of her mind, and thrust hard, deep. The tissues he'd abused earlier complained, but the rest of her body absorbed it, scrabbling for that peak his friction, inside and out, now brought into reach. "Say my name," he muttered into her lips. "Tell me you surrender to me."
"Dante," she managed, and repeated it, a caress, a reassurance, because she sensed he needed both. Her empathic gift was wide-open to him, no more restrained than her body's need. His expression did not change, though, and while he became even more intent on her response, he seemed more distant at the same time. The fire was closing in, bringing their time to an end. She didn't want it to, even though something felt wrong. She couldn't determine what, because there was too much swirling around her. Magic, dreams, emotions and her own physical response were too tangled together.
"Say my name, too," she pleaded. "Please."
Something shifted in his gaze, but his mouth remained hard, implacable. "Give me your surrender, Alexis."
"I surrender to you, Dante. I'm yours."
The blood marked on both their bodies burst into flame, matching the leap in his own eyes. Startled, she inhaled blood and heat, but it didn't burn her flesh. His body and the fire surrounded her, a cocoon shutting out everything except Dante's weight upon her, his demand between her legs. They were turning, spinning now, and the pinnacle was reached. The climax ripped a scream from her throat, the first of her life she'd had while a man was inside of her.
The spinning lost symmetry, became a flailing, like an uncontrolled fall from far up in the sky. She had no wings. The climax stuttered, leaving her body vibrating and needy, wailing for its loss, but something was so wrong her alarmed brain cut off the sensual response, far too late.
Dante was gone. She was alone in the fire, and it clamped down like the lid of a flame coffin, burning her flesh again. Screaming, she thrust outward, seeking him. Instead, her fingers disappeared into the leaping orange flames. Ice touched them somewhere on the other side, a cold that invaded her hands, seizing her arms and freezing them in place, even as the fire continued to burn her flesh.
"Help! Dante, please help me."
She'd never had a childhood friend who was cruel to her. Never been lost where she hadn't been found by a kind stranger and returned. Even the times she'd brushed too close to those too lost for her to ease, help had been there to draw her from harm. The fear of what might happen to her had always been her parents' fear, never her own.
Surrounded and nurtured by love and the best in peoples' hearts all her life, it was hard for her to wrap her mind around what this was. A betrayal. And not a minor one. This was major league, oh god-what-have-I-gotten-myself-into betrayal.
Breath for screaming was snatched from her. The fire roared over her like a blanket covering a corpse. She smelled her own flesh burning, saw the ends of her hair catch fire as her fingers and arms turned whitish blue from cold.
"Dante, don't do this. Help me." I'm so afraid . . .
HUMANS were often oblivious to the delicate balance on which their world rested, but angels and other creatures were wired to it, such that a minor shift could be felt in the blood. The feeling that shuddered through the firmament now, shaking Heaven, Hell and the Earth caught in between, brought every angel to a full stop. Particularly one Legion Commander, his hand automatically gripping his sword, fury and fear twisting in his gut.
At the bottom of the ocean, a mermaid seeking shells to make a necklace for her daughter froze, her heart thudding up in her throat.
And deep in the Nevada desert, a seawitch who rarely visited the sea anymore erupted out of her porch swing, her gaze narrowed on something no one else could see.
"Oh, bloody, fucking hell," she snarled.
Five
DANTE squatted in his locked chamber at the top of the tower. Hidden behind a screen of tattered cloth pieced together, he studied the merangel lying in an unconscious, crumpled heap in the circle of blood. The edges were marked with symbols that would keep her inside of it, but it was the symbols now burned on her flesh from throat to pubis that would keep her invisible and beyond the reach of those attempting to retrieve her.
By releasing a serum in his back fang during his first blood taking, he'd made it impossible for her to escape him. He could find her, no matter where she was. This time he'd used the second serum, which opened her mind so he could read anything there. He'd heard her voice in his head. I'm afraid. Help me . . .
He possessed a third serum as well. It had an ethereal blue color to it. Before his mother could teach him more about that one, she'd descended into madness. She'd mumbled that the other two serums had to be administered first, and there'd been something about the third being used to bind someone's soul, but even her memories hadn't been able to offer much more than that.
As an experiment, he'd tried injecting it into one of his Dark One feedings, when he'd been strong enough to force his meal to await his pleasure, but nothing different really happened, though he'd had a tingling sense something was supposed to. Of course, his mother was long dead, so vampire peculiarities weren't something he could explore, except in the sketchy memories she'd left implanted in his mind. Those, along with the windows provided by the rifts before the seawitch had closed them, had helped him understand many things about the blue and green world that should have been his home.
It was this world he'd had to survive, however. His Dark One half had helped with that, but the cunning, speed and strength of his vampire blood had brought him to this point. He hadn't needed whatever that third mark did. And until now, he'd had no interest in binding someone's soul to him. He wasn't even certain if Dark Ones had souls, which might explain why it hadn't worked.
As Alexis moaned and turned over, her bloodstreaked face damp with sweat and tears, his thoughts returned to her. Perhaps he could have stretched it out to one more dream, taken it slower, but the ritual was draining, and he couldn't afford to be weak too frequently in his world, even behind closed doors.
His lips curled as he recognized that as a lie. He should despise what he'd done because it was a loss of control. He hadn't wanted to wait, and could have missed his chance irreparably by rushing himself. He'd certainly felt bloodlust before, and knew how to manage that. But when he put his mouth on her flesh, his cock had become a monster with a mind of its own, demanding he rut on her like he was a lower echelon Dark One with no control at all over his urges. Once he was inside her, it had gotten worse. He'd wanted to take her again and again, in all sorts of twisted ways, mark every part of her with his claim.
It had nothing to do with her, of course. He'd snapped because he was so close to his goal, after planning and waiting for so long. Inside her body, it was bliss, sheer bliss, cool and heat at once, but not like the ice and fire of his world. Different, like her world.
"My lord?" Epherius, possibly the most advanced of the remaining Dark Ones, spoke through the closed doors. "May we see your victory?"
We. More than one of them, always a situation to be approached with caution. But this would confirm he was supreme over all of them, and the ongoing possibility of challenge might lessen. Not that he intended to be
here for much longer.
"Enter," he said brusquely, going to his throne.
Epherius was accompanied by eight of the others, the nearest to him in intelligence and strength, obvious because of their similar height and upright stance. The lower echelon was often commanded by these when they went on scouting expeditions in the primitive worlds Dante had been able to access. They all had the deceptively skeletal arms and legs, leathery wings that slapped against the stone as they pushed into the room. All were naked, their genitals hanging between their legs in grotesque bobbing display. Dark Ones had unrelenting carnal urges, which they relieved upon any weaker Dark One who could not repel them. At one time, they had relieved them on him.
Sometimes, just the sight of those naked organs incited a cauldron of simmering rage in him. He'd unleashed it before, incinerated a few with the powers he'd cultivated in the Dark One texts none of them knew how to read. It had gone a long way toward making them wary of him. No one touched him now. If they did, it was an attempt to kill, not subdue or sodomize.
They hissed excitedly at the sight of the female in the circle. She'd asked him to call her by name, and he'd done it that one time, but it disturbed him, almost as much as having her say his name had wrenched something inside of him. Names meant nothing and everything. He didn't want to think of her name.
She had roused at their knock on the door, as he suspected she might, with so much evil gathered close to her sensitive mental receptors. With them crowded around her, he knew she would see all of their hideous faces first. It would disorient and terrify her further. She might try to get out of the circle, but without him releasing the wards, she would simply burn herself further. He heard her startled scream as she caught her first glimpse of their world. Should he revel in that? If so, he was as dead and empty as he often felt. It didn't matter. He needed to get out of here, and she was the way to that. That was all. Nothing else was required of him but that objective.
One of the Dark Ones surged forward, apparently intending to enter the circle, and was flung back, light strobing over his thin flesh, illuminating the skeletal contents within it.
"Do not touch the circle's edge," Dante said, dark satisfaction in his voice.
"But we want to touch her. Play with her."
"No. You may look, and then you will go. I will need more blood to hold her here as long as I want her to be."
"What if we insist? She is the first like her we've ever had here. We should touch. Taste. Feeellll." The words drew out as the creature's fangs were exposed, and his eyes turned with malevolence on Dante. His claws cupped his sizeable genitalia. "Many of us. One of you. Why you want her? What you be doing? You have toy and we do not. We take her and give her back when we're done. You always let us do that before."
AS Alexis woke, she became aware she was in some kind of shallow basin filled with cold, slimy liquid. The metallic, sickening smell drove the first nail of fear into her heart, for she knew it was blood. Opening her eyes, she had a brief impression of gray stone all around before she tried to scramble out of it. She yelped as she hit a shielding that knocked her to her back with a wet splat that soaked her feathers. The basin was a ritual circle. She couldn't shift. She tried, with mounting terror, but she was stuck in her merangel form. On land.
Her stomach and chest hurt. Looking down, she swallowed another terrified noise as she realized the symbols she'd seen on Dante, and glowing on herself, were now burned into her flesh, explaining the raw pain throbbing there. Her clothes had been shredded during whatever had happened, so she pulled their remnants away from her, so tattered they were only a hindrance to her movements. Where was she? This was no dream. But then, she'd known Dante was real all along, hadn't she? That's why she'd been unable to deny him, deny his pain. He'd used it to trap her, take her wherever this was.
The air was stifling, heavy. It was difficult to draw air into her lungs, and for a frightening moment, she thought she was somewhere there was no oxygen, no way to breathe with gills or lungs. But realizing she had oxygen was a short-lived relief. There was something wrong here, something draining the energy from her like a punctured gas can. It buzzed in her head like a continuous headache, made her organs strain to do their work. Her heart rate was accelerated, and she didn't think it was only terror. As an empath, she could sense the rightness or wrongness of her surroundings, and this place was extremely wrong. She wasn't meant to be here. No one was supposed to be here.
Trying to orient herself, she saw she was in a chamber at the top of a round stone tower. The flat and mostly barren landscape outside an open arched window suggested they were high up, perhaps fifty feet or so. Naked black trees were scattered over ground that appeared to be oddly symmetrical areas of fire and dull gray ice. The smell in the air was death, pain . . . suffering. Winged creatures, far distant in the sky, still made her shudder.
Then her head snapped around at the sibilant voice behind the door. Dante answered from behind a black-draped panel she hadn't yet examined, thinking she was alone. She sloshed around in her macabre bath to face it, but then he was striding from behind the ragged cloth, taking a seat on a large black wooden chair. He ignored her as he called out a command to enter. The door swung open.
A blast of desolation, hopelessness, fear and torment hit her directly between the eyes. She scrambled for her filters, but it was like using a paper napkin to stop a bullet. Her palms slipped, and she was writhing in that shallow pool of blood again. No, no, no . . .
She heard their words, saw what they wanted, felt it, but even more terrifying than the threat of violation was being sucked into the abyss of what these things were. There was no escape from it. Once there, she would wander forever, lost, just as she'd remembered from the last dream. A place where babies screamed, but no mother came. She grasped for Anna's image in her mind desperately. Oh, Goddess, help me. Did the Goddess even have sway over this place? How could She? The Goddess, Mother of Earth and connected to life in all ways . . . no. There was no way She had a part of this.
Holy Mother, she was in the Dark One world. How could she not have recognized it? He'd even reminded her of Mina, and Mina was the only living Dark Spawn in her world, half Dark One, half mermaid. But in Lex's dreams, she'd only seen the trappings of fire and darkness, and Dante. Even from him she hadn't felt this utter lack of hope or light. It was incomprehensible, beyond any understanding she had in her world. The darkest soul she'd ever met there didn't come close to this.
She struggled to hold herself back up on her arms. Though she knew she had nowhere to go, a wild animal's mindless panic closed in, seeing all those leering faces around her, that terrible energy. She flung herself at the circle's edge, toward the creatures, hoping to break through them. The boundary blasted her again, hard enough to knock her into the opposite side. She would have ricocheted back to the floor, writhing with pain, except one of the creatures dared to shoot a claw through that boundary. Talons dug into her breast as he howled, for the circle's binding was an electric current, locking them together in the brutal grip of its barbed protection. Alexis screamed thinly, no air to give voice to the pain and horror of feeling as that dark poison invaded her. Help me, help me . . .
She was dropped, and now the cool wetness of the stone was welcome, though her muscles jittered in the aftermath of the voltage. A snarl, a thudding of bodies, another howl. She saw a flash of something that might have been steel, then magic surged through the chamber. Like gunpowder, it tickled her nose. More shrieks, sharp talons scraping stone as the creatures beat a hasty retreat. But when they hit the door, it was obvious from their panicked shrill grunts they were not able to get it to open.
The one who'd grabbed her was lying on the ground, trying weakly to make its way to its other companions. Dante stood over it, his lips peeled back from lethal fangs. The others froze as his gaze pinned them. Still watching them, he dropped to his knees, wrenched the creature up from the floor and sank his fangs into its neck. The Dark One hissed and gurgled
as Dante ripped into flesh as well as blood. Alexis was frozen in horror, unable to look away as blood trickled down its throat, splattered the narrow chest. Dante's powerful back muscles rippled as he took a long, deep draught, then rose. Before she could hide her eyes, he tore the creature's head free of his body and hurled it at the cowering group at the door.
"Get this out of here, and get out of my sight. I will have whatever I wish to have. You have what I give you. Be satisfied with that or become like him. Go get me more blood. Now."
They scrambled forward, staying as far from Dante as possible as they caught their dead comrade by a loose arm. Hauling him out the now open door, they closed it on his leg in their haste, so they had to reopen it, jerk the leg through and then slam it. The reverberation was loud in the silence.
Alexis could hear her own laboring breath. At least with their departure, that suffocating desolation eased from unbearable to intolerable. But she was covered in blood. It was in her wings, her hair, the crevices of her scales. She wondered that her mind had not shut down at the ghastliness of it, but there was no mercy in this place, such that ruthlessness permeated even brain function.
Dante stood exactly where he'd killed the creature, his eyes pinned on the door. She realized his lips were moving, and that terrible feeling was lessening even further. It had come in with those creatures, and left with them, so he had this room warded from whatever it was they emanated, at least enough to make it manageable.
While she'd never been so frightened in her life, she had to think. Though she'd never anticipated needing such a thing, she'd taken a self-defense course with Clara. Grasping for anything to calm herself, she remembered the most important thing the instructor had emphasized. You may not know how to get out of a situation, but if you keep your wits about you, something may present itself. It's probably the hardest thing, but you have to stay calm. Above all else, protect your ability to think.
That community college course was hell and gone from where she was now. But she supposed a woman pursued by a mugger into a dark alley felt the same way. Her father, who'd fought Dark Ones for centuries, said the same thing about being in battle. She'd heard him instructing new recruits. "You always stay levelheaded. That's the most important thing."