Opening the book, he discovered one of his feathers pressed in the pages. She had to have found it after their fight that day of their first meeting.
Replacing the book, he let the waters turn him, floated as he took it all in, the dichotomy of items, the different insights they offered about the same witch. Woman. He'd never gotten out of the habit of referring to humanoid life-forms such as angels and mermaids as men and women. Even knowing it was one of the quirks that amused his fellow angels, he liked thinking of Mina that way. Woman. But as he passed the spell books and drifted back into the cavern with the dark-magic items, he couldn't ignore the other images he'd seen of her. Dark One. Seawitch.
He also couldn't ignore something else. The central column of solid rock around which the caverns were arranged was not solid. As he brushed his hand along it, power vibrated beneath his palm. A warding here, extremely powerful versus the lighter touch of the other cavern protections. But when he concentrated on it, impressed by the complexity, the command of knowledge demonstrated by the magic wielder who had cast it, it slowly unwound itself, as most magics would at an angel's touch, to reveal a narrow doorway. The waft of energy that came from within reminded him of a door creaking inward on its hinges in one of the old horror movies, beckoning the teenager into the cellar.
Though the water had shaped and smoothed the edges, this doorway had not been created as long ago as the whole cave system had. Moving into the narrow opening, he kept his fingers along the wall line. While he could see in the dark, this was a pitch-black. Taking another step, he suppressed the urge to jump back when the blackness closed around him in reality, as if fingers had curved over his shoulders, pulling him forward.
He could no longer hear Mina's voice, patiently going over things with Gerard. Earlier, he'd been impressed with her patience with the boy, her desire to have him use the potion correctly. Despite her studied indifference, her claimed intention of doing the potions only for what they might bring her, she had an integrity. He'd seen it in her. If he was in a cave that had been shared by her ancestors, he reasoned many of these items might not be hers. The lore, the knowledge, had been shared, and she would preserve it. But she'd enhanced it, learned from it, used it. Perhaps exceeded it.
He could be rationalizing the hell out of things, not wanting to accept that the woman to whom he was so attracted could in fact be as dark as Marcellus and the other angels feared. He was still missing too many pieces.
Even so, there was an alarm going off in him and gaining strength, telling him he didn't want to know what was ahead. But he'd promised to protect her. To do that, he had to understand whom or what he was protecting.
But was he forging ahead as an angel dedicated to a mission, or as the male who needed the key to her, needed it now, for he'd touched his mouth to hers and found himself hungry for more? Felt her body rise to his, seen the confusion in her eyes. Both of them. The crimson eye of the Dark One and the blue eye of the woman.
That thought slammed out of his mind as he was hit by a wave of pure Dark One energy. Bile rose in his throat, his fingers closing on his daggers. But oddly, he didn't sense Dark Ones ahead. Taking a deep breath, he made the final step and passed through a wall of water into a small, bone-dry chamber, where the water beading on his body evaporated before it hit the ground. Drawing back like a curtain, the darkness was dispelled by the dim light cast by blood red stones embedded into the rock wall. The stones' glow came from what appeared to be a high-level binding charm carved into their surfaces. They were arranged in an arc pattern, as if over a doorway, though he only saw an unbroken line of rock wall beneath them. The vibration of energy was so strong he had to strain to step toward that wall, using the propulsion of his wings, such as was possible in the cramped space.
The warning hum in his head was becoming painful, the pressure of a migraine, something angels didn't get. He needed to get out of here. But first he had to feel what was behind there. What was locked in this room. Clenching his teeth, his muscles bunched, he lifted one arm and brushed the rock beneath the binding stones with his wet fingertips.
When he first became an angel, he'd experienced gales, hit wind pockets that sent him somersaulting. Still clinging to his mortal, earthbound memories, he'd panicked, then realized it was like riding a wave in to shore, as he had as a boy at the beach. He'd learned to laugh at the buffeting, the wild spin of it, and recover from it unscathed.
There was nothing of the Goddess's creation to this. What struck him was beyond the comprehensible power of ocean or wind, slamming him into a maelstrom of chaos and all its terrifying despair. There was no beginning or end. He was tumbling, flat on his back, being crushed under its weight, a weight that didn't promise darkness. Only terror, hopelessness without an end.
He knew that Hell, Lucifer's Hades, was about redemption, justice, payment. Not the Hell of eternal damnation and torment he'd learned about as a mortal. But now he knew that place wasn't a myth. It was here, hidden in the tiny chamber of a seawitch's cave.
Seven
NIGHTMARISH images assailed him from all sides, slashed at him, laughed at his fear, turned an apathetic eye to his existence. We are your future. She will deliver you to us soon, angel. Your wings do not exonerate you for your sins. Your failures.
"David."
His name. Someone heard him after all. But he couldn't reach out. The maelstrom shrieked. It grasped at his vitals, repulsive as a rapist's touch. Death was a gift they wouldn't offer, not until every ounce of pain had been milked from him, until his throat bled from screaming and nothing was left of his soul to rescue.
When a chanting cut through the shriek, a wave of fury roared over him like fire, burning his flesh but cleansing it, too. Freeing it from the Dark Ones' touch, so that he embraced the pain, crying out in relief. The physical drove away the emotional, and the emotional was a far worse torment. As both faded, there was water again, the darkness of the short tunnel, and then a sense of a wider area. Floating.
"David." Urgently now, a hand on his face. Cooling. Stroking.
The burns were receding, for of course they would. He could heal. He was an angel, and most all physical wounds could be healed. But he still couldn't move on his own, as if a pike had been driven through his chest, below the layers of physical matter, to the wound that mattered the most, the one that would never heal. Evil had ripped away the illusion that it could be ignored and managed.
"You angels think nothing can harm you. Just because you can untangle a warding doesn't mean you should. I bet you didn't even think to protect yourself. Arrogant idiot."
Mina. It was her irritable, familiar voice, but there was fear under it as well. Was it fear for him, or because of what he'd seen? "David. Open your eyes."
There was a tinge of desperation behind the demand. He was distressing her. It helped orient him, bring him back to a world where there was some semblance of civility, order. Those things could be illusions as well.
He'd fought so hard to believe he could forget, thinking that the higher he piled Dark One bodies, the faster he flew, the farther it would be from him. In the end he'd discovered the only way to handle the memories was to stay still enough to accept their presence. Meditation. Gods, he'd never expected that meditation would be the hardest thing for him to learn, but there it was. It was easier to kill than to face what the stillness inside of him held.
His nightmares had been waiting for him there, and he'd had to get through them, to learn that there was meaning and purpose, despite his firsthand knowledge of evil beyond the comprehension and endurance of any living being.
But he'd done it. He'd figured it out, in a way that had no words, and that understanding was here now. He forced back the fear and gripped her slim fingers, which were gripping his back. Maybe for the same reason. Need. Connection. That magic, even when elusive, which existed inside every heart. It would be there until there were no hearts left to beat, because that was the simple truth of existence. It had to be. He couldn't
afford to believe otherwise.
David opened his eyes. Her face was over him, an ironic map of the fight between good and evil, the way it had been mapped over his heart, leaving it a scarred battlefield like hers. Maybe they were the mirror of each other, after all.
She closed her eyes briefly, as if she was dealing with some great emotion, before her lids sprang back open, her mouth going to a thin, firm line. Here it comes, he thought. The unexpected surge of humor was a gift straight from the Lady, he was sure, providing a beam of warmth, which shattered the hold of the lingering despair.
"What, in all the names of Hades, were you thinking? I told you to stay, not go roaming about and searching through my personal things."
"You..." He cleared his throat of whatever ash it seemed had burned there. They were back in her library. She'd apparently formed an air bell to lay him on a dry ledge of rock. When he struggled to one elbow, he'd intended the gesture to be an attempt to retain some authority over the situation, but since she had to help steady him, it lost some of its impact. "You have a rift to the Dark Ones' world."
His chest felt as if the cavern had collapsed and the debris was sitting on it, but once he made it to that elbow, he got from there to an upright position, tested his wings. The world reeled, and he would have toppled again, except she braced herself against his shoulder, his wing dropping limply over her like a cloak. When he swiveled his head drunkenly to make sure the other one was there, he had to look down, for it was wilted onto the rock as well.
"Let me get something to help." She made sure he was all right to sit up, staying within watchful eyesight of him as she moved out of the air bell, swam into the adjacent cavern and began to rummage through her stores. "Sit still a moment. And it's not a rift. It's a doorway."
"What?" He'd thought his wits were returning, but her remarkable statement made him rethink that.
Mina turned from the wall, the vial of restorative clutched in her hand, and surveyed him. He was still paler than the white on his wings, and his skin was blackened in places. If he hadn't somehow managed to call out, if she hadn't sensed the energy shift... Gerard had just taken his leave; otherwise, she might not have paid attention in time. She didn't want to think about what she would have found if she came a couple minutes later. A creature of an angel's purity standing in that chamber, let alone touching the doorway, as he'd started to do, barely a fingertip brush...
She returned to the small air bell she'd manufactured. He'd been choking when she dragged him out, so she'd assumed air would help. Gliding in between his knees, her lower body still in the sea's embrace, she brought the glass to his lips. "Drink this. It will help bring back your energy."
"I don't want-"
"Damn it, do it."
His gaze snapped to her. While she knew he was hardly the type to meekly obey orders, maybe he'd caught the embarrassing catch in her voice. He still had enough pride to take it from her hand, but his was trembling. Reaching out, she steadied it with both of hers as he tipped the bottle and took the mixture in three grimacing swallows.
If he'd been there much longer, the long and graceful fingers gripping the bottle would have been stripped of flesh.
"Mina?"