A Mermaid's Ransom (Daughters of Arianne 3)

"Garden? I know what that is." He paused, a confused, lighter feeling leaping through his chest like one of the marsmas. "I have one."

WHEN she'd said the word garden, he'd flattened his hand, tightening it over her hip. Fortunately, he was so close, he blocked the dead female behind him, so it was easier to focus. Pushing aside guilt at her body's reaction to his touch, knowing survival was most important here, she reminded herself once again the one weapon she had was her mind. Her angelic light was still playing around them like mist, which also helped.

"You have a garden, here?"

"Nothing really grows here, but I made something like it. Like the pond." His face closed down. "But you won't like it."

His disappointment, anticipation of her rejection, swallowed the startling leap of excitement she'd felt from him. It was the widest range of emotions he'd displayed so far.

"Why do you think I wouldn't like it?"

"I created it out of what I had. Out of . . . what the others brought here."

She thought then of his "pond," and the hair he'd shaped into the grass surrounding it. He was right. She didn't want to see it. But she needed to.

"Take me to it. Please."

He met her gaze. "You know I can hear your thoughts. You don't want to see it. You're trying to figure out how to save yourself. Do you think you can trick or trap me? Even if you succeeded, you'd end up dying much more horribly here, without my protection."

"You can hear my thoughts, but my feelings confuse you." She forced her voice to stay steady in reaction to the cruelly impassive accusation. The resulting flicker in his gaze confirmed it: her emotions were a foreign landscape to him. While she couldn't block the thought that his lack of comprehension reassured her, there was more to it than seeking an escape. She could tell he was smart enough to sense that as well. "I'm trying to understand you."

"Why? What advantage does it give you?"

She'd already seen his cunning side. While his bald honesty could be just as unsettling, right now she found it useful. "Understanding you makes me feel more in control of an uncontrollable situation, and that keeps me from going crazy. But I . . . my gift is empathy, Dante. I feel what people feel, I know their moods, their darkness and light. And you have a strange combination. Very little light," she admitted, "but what's there, when it comes forth, it's a flame that burns so hard and strong . . ." I can't resist it, she almost said. Then she cursed as she realized she didn't have to, for the look in his eyes changed as soon as she had the thought. "It confuses me, and what confuses me, I want to understand."

"I feel that way about you as well," he said slowly. "You are here because I need you to be free of this place. But in the dreams, and here now . . . The way you make me feel . . . I do not understand it."

Why that should make her breath catch and her heart hurt, she didn't know. Perhaps more of the same confusion. She forced herself to push that aside, knowing they were on a roll, hopefully in a positive direction. Clara would be laughing her ass off right now--Lex, the eternal optimist, even in the bowels of the Dark One planet. "You must think I'm not a threat, if you're telling me that."

"Anyone has the potential to be a threat, Alexis." His answer surprised her. "The one who appears the weakest may be the most dangerous of all. The Dark Ones here learned that about me. I do not underestimate you, but I am in your head, and I sense no duplicity to you. Not yet."

His expression hardened, reflecting how quickly the darkness could swallow that burning point of light inside him again. It was like a beacon on a storm-tossed sea, only visible when the raging of the waves allowed a glimpse of it. The Beauty and the Beast fairy tale crossed her mind again. How simple Disney had made it, resolving the Beast's dysfunctions in just over ninety minutes.

"Beauty and the Beast?" His brow furrowed, which had the despairing effect of making him look even more handsome. He had to be a vampire, to live in a world of such violence and cruelty and not have a mark on him. Only on the outside, her mind whispered to her. You can see the inside. The inside was battered and torn, crippled and savage. Yet she was as drawn to it as the beauty on his outside.

"It's a fairy tale." There were books in the chamber, heavy tomes that appeared to be the magical grimoires he'd referenced earlier, belonging to the long dead Dark Ones Mina had destroyed. Did the Dark Ones create the books, or were these all stolen, scavenged?

"Stolen," he answered her thought. "The Dark Ones rarely create. They travel into other worlds and take. That is, until the witch made that very difficult for them."

"But wasn't that a good thing? They kill and destroy when they go to other worlds."

"It wasn't a good thing, because I could no longer see anything but this world. Do you know what it is like to be shut into a coffin, Alexis?"

"This world is much larger than a coffin."

"No." He shook his head. "It's not."

"How did you learn to talk like that?" She winced as her wing slid across the stone. Because of the break, it was painful to move it without help, and she couldn't reach behind her to do it. Goddess, she wished she could shift. First the tub, now this.

"Here, be still." Reaching over her, he brought his upper body close to her face. "Lean against me." When she hesitated, he slid a hand under her arm to her back, eased her forward so her forehead was touching his broad, bare shoulder. He didn't smell clean, not by a long shot, but it didn't seem to matter. His nearness affected her, and she had to suppress the urge to press her face into his shoulder, seek comfort from the very o

ne causing her distress. The craziness of it was going to . . . well, drive her crazy.

"Why do you deny yourself?" That velvet tone emerged, stroking her nerves further. "As I've said--"

"Yes, I know. Rather than indulging myself in mind-numbing fear about what may happen, I should go into carpe diem hypersonic mode," she snapped. "But I have to make sense of this. You, the way you act, is contrary to everything I know is right and good. Being attracted to you despite that is just a tad unsettling to me."

"Life is random chaos. Trying to make sense of it, by its nature, makes no sense." He slid his fingers through her feathers, below the broken area, and she tensed.

"I won't hurt you," he said. "Tell me what you need."

"Please help me ease it to a half-folded position."

Proving exactly why he unsettled her, the being who'd ripped the head off a powerful Dark One and just cut the throat of a female handled her with remarkable gentleness, causing minimal discomfort.

"You still haven't told me about Beauty and the Beast."

"Tell me why you talk like a Harvard graduate . . . like you're well educated."

"My mother was well educated." He sat back on his heels again. She'd noticed he didn't necessarily always meet her eyes when he spoke, preferring to gaze at her wings, her tail, all the area in between, with a rapt attention that would have been flattering if it didn't spread disturbing warmth over her skin and make her nerve endings tingle.

Goddess, Alexis. Dead woman, right behind him. Cap-tor, two syllables.

She wanted to smack him for the sparks in his eyes, revealing her wayward hormonal thoughts had caught his male interest. But he answered her question. "If they use up the energy of their soul, a vampire may transfer all their knowledge into another right before they die. It took some assimilating. I was quite mad for a while." He lifted a brow, reading her thoughts. "Even more than you perceive me to be now. As you have said, everything here is different from what you've ever known. For me it was the same, understanding the images of her life, the thoughts she had. Some parts of it are still unclear, particularly things that were more intuitive to who she was than conscious knowledge, things about being a vampire." His gaze swept the chamber. "There was a time I cursed what she gave me. My desire to escape became that much greater."