A Mermaid's Ransom (Daughters of Arianne 3)

"I don't need to be taught, Pyel. I feel it." Alexis lifted her hands, tangling her fingers in his feathers as she had when he'd whirled her through the sky, only a few short days ago.

JONAH closed his hands over her wrists. As he held her, he saw the brief flash of anguish in her eyes. She did understand the pain she caused him. She always had. Children had to be immune to their parents' feelings in certain areas to become self-reliant. He knew that, as well as he knew that Alexis had never been anything other than a loving, devoted daughter. She'd known how difficult it was for him and Anna to let her have more freedom, find her own way, particularly when the battle to have their only child had been so hard. There was no way they could have felt or done anything differently, because they never could have stopped loving her. He loved her now.

"You did good, Pyel," she whispered, a smile curving that beautiful mouth. It looked the same as it had to him the first time she'd smiled as an infant. "I love you. Don't worry. He won't hurt me. But the next few minutes may be a little scary. You might not want to look."

Thirty

WHEN Jonah at last withdrew, Alexis noted David shifted to the left of his commander's shoulder, Marcellus to the right. Mina stood off to the side, her focus on the circle she'd cast. The aura of power emitting from it with the smell of sulfur and burning flesh caused an uneasy ripple from the Fen, a narrowing of Seneth's gaze. "How do I release him?" Alexis asked, fighting to keep her voice steady.

Instead, Seneth nodded to two of his men and they approached the X. Seneth began to chant, an Undoing Spell, as they loosened the wires and then swiftly removed themselves from the circle's enclosure. Alexis gave a brief beat of her wings, taking her into its perimeter as the green light of the Bentigo's binding power on the X shimmered and then died. Closing her eyes, she shut herself off from everything but Dante, and reached out to his mind.

This time she moved fully into it, no hesitation. There was a sense of darkness, a brief stillness as she transitioned through her reality into the core of his emotions, then all Hell broke loose. Literally.

It was the Dark One world again, but worse, for there was no sense of up and down. She was in a sphere of pain and burning that rolled over and over, no ability to orient herself inside of it, or escape the lick of that torment. Helpless. She was helpless again, and she couldn't stop whatever they might do to her. She would become beaten down again, mindless, scurrying across the ground like the lowest scavenger. Mocked, beaten, sodomized. She'd be the sole toy of cruel children with no other diversions.

With no point of reference, she grasped at the first thing that came to her mind that belonged to her alone. The rapid rolling, the fiery descent. Minus blue sky, white clouds and pulsing waves of rage, it was the first time her father had dropped her out of the sky.

You have to find yourself, your center, to right yourself.

These feelings of helplessness and pain were not her thoughts, they were Dante's. He was here. No. This was his soul, eaten up by hellfire and rage. That was why she couldn't find his physical manifestation. She was inside of him.

Dante, I'm here. It's all right. They've released you from your bonds. You need to come to me. Don't fight.

Fire roared over her, disrupting her mind again, spinning it loose into terror and fear. Mental agony now had a physical component. Something had struck her, sent her spinning and slamming to the ground, trampled her. She used her wings to twist back up into the air, though her tail didn't quite clear the ground, the fronds scraping the grass. She sought him again, using her voice as well this time.

"Dante, please stop. Come to me. Calm, be calm. I'm here."

Come to you? His voice was savage, the hiss of a serpent, raking across her nerves. I come to no one. I will destroy all of them.

No, you won't. You don't want that. That's not what you want, remember? You want to sit in a park, under a tree. Watch birds fly, the wind move through the trees.

She cried out as fire slashed over her back, and she rolled again, this time to put out the flames in her wings. Opening her conscious mind briefly, she saw her father pressing forward with Seneth. They would have charged the boundary, but they ran into a wall that knocked them both back. The power at the circle's edge shuddered. Mina, her blue and red eye gleaming, focused on balancing it. She wasn't going to permit anyone through, even as Jonah turned on her. David assumed a protective stance in front of her and unsheathed two daggers. His face was resolute, dangerous, though the conflict was tearing inside him, trying to serve his commander and protect his mate at once.

That was not her fight. This was. And it couldn't be a fight. She returned her full focus to her goal. Dante.

This is another prison. I am trapped here.

No. It's just to protect them until you calm down. You aren't yourself.

"I am Dante." The ground below her shuddered. The smell of burning flesh increased. The thunder of his words tore out of his throat, reverberating through the circle and beyond, a howl that echoed throughout the Fen world. "This is what I am. Utter destruction to those who would try and stop me."

The energy blast bent the circle outward, she was sure of it, like an explosion inside of a metal box. She hit the ground again, instinctively covering her head as the earth erupted around her. Trees with limbs overhanging the circle snapped and speared the ground. Lightning forked, but all of it from the sky above the circle, so the shards of it struck near her, the electrical force blasting her upward so she slammed against the circle's edge.

Holy Goddess, this was raw Dark One power, pulled together with his vampire immortality to underscore his point. He would obliterate them. They would never get that wire on him again. Except Mina knew how to draw this circle around him, isolate and then incinerate him. Though she was inside of it now, Alexis had no doubt the witch could simply lift the sphere above her when it was needed, leaving her bereft on the ground like this. She'd have failed him. And herself.

Alexis tightened her chin and rolled back up onto her hip. Getting back into the air took some awkward movements, thanks to the shudder of electric current still sloshing back and forth in the circle like water in a jostled fish tank. She did it, though, her feathers standing on end from the static.

She focused her physical vision, keeping her psychic senses wide open, despite the strain of doing both. Perching on the top of that wooden X like a vulture, he gripped the wood with his bare toes. He'd shed the hood and gag, of course, but he was still stained with black blood and sweat, his hair hanging in his face so all she saw were the glowing eyes. Likely because of the adrenaline coursing through him, he was also fully, impressively erect, his cock brushing his bloody abdomen. He looked like a virile demon from a sensual nightmare, where mayhem and utter surrender were a double-edged sword.

A double-edged sword. Focusing on that, shoving away the weariness trying to close over her, she moved forward, forcing her wings to engage and pull her to the center of the circle. When this was over, she was giving herself the mother of all naps. Telling herself she might not move out of a bed for a month, she stilled the quivering that was threatening to take over her whole body.

He was watching her approach with t

hat eerie, unapproachable stillness, but she could feel all the things pouring from him. Most were frightening, dark, an impenetrable tunnel surrounded by that fire, but she stepped into that tunnel again, reached out a hand.

Please, Dante. Come to me. Come kneel here at my feet so they understand what you wish to be. What you want.

Like a starving, groveling beast. His lip curled back. His claws scraped the wood. Surrender like a slave.

"No," she said quietly. As she moved forward, she realized one of her wings was no longer working properly. Swiping at hair in her face, she realized it wasn't hair at all, but blood trickling from her brow. "That's the surrender you've always known. This is different from submitting to hatred and fear. This is surrendering to love."

A sharp pain dropped her to the ground, telling her the wing she'd broken in his world had snapped again. She didn't have the resilience a full angel had, her hollow bones far more like a bird's brittle extremities. But she managed to pull herself up on her arms, move a few more feet, though the grass slicing under scales was painful. She met his gaze and despaired at the loathing she saw there, the need for violence.

Please, Dante. Please. Surrender to me. To who you really want to be. So you can be under that tree again. Think of everything we've shared together. Every thought you've had while you were with me.

How much time passed? She wasn't sure. The heat inside the circle was stifling, and flames continued to crackle on the edges, shooting high along the wall of the binding and curving inward, telling her the circle of power Mina had cast was a sphere for Dante's death, just as she'd suspected.

His gaze met hers and coldness grabbed her vitals as she remembered his ability to read her mind, not just hear the thoughts she directed to him. No, Dante. It doesn't have to be your death. Not if you come to me. Please. Mina and Pyel wanted to protect me, that's all. My fate matters to you, too. Remember?