A Witch's Beauty (Daughters of Arianne 2)

DAVID feared the conversations he'd left in the wake of their swift departure, but there was nothing he could do about that now. One focus. At this moment, that was exhausting Mina. He went up, down, and when she appeared to be giving up the chase, he'd get close enough to rake her scales with a dagger or taunt her by flying just beneath her nose. Once, he was able to yank a scale from her sensitive underbelly. She was impressively quick, enough to get in a couple swipes that raked off some more skin, divested him of a few handfuls of feathers. In the harrowingly close maneuvers, he knew he risked the potential of being knocked unconscious and having himself eaten like a bucketful of chicken. Since he was immortal, he wasn't sure how he would be digested until she got to the crucial heart organ that could end his life, but he imagined it wouldn't be pleasant.

Thank Goddess, she was tiring. Once he fell into a rhythm of keeping her moving and chasing him, he'd worked on their destination. So now, as he maneuvered her closer and closer to the surface, they were over the Nevada desert, the long stretch of barren area Jonah and Anna had traversed on foot months before. It was unpopulated enough that an aerial display by an angel and a dragon might go largely unnoted in the fading afternoon light.

He'd explored the area during sweeps for Dark One activity after the Canyon Battle and found himself curiously drawn to the strange land. It had hidden pocket canyons with streams and lush greenery as well as long stretches of sand and scrub, populated by various unusual animal species and only a scattering of eccentric human inhabitants and infrequent structures.

There.

Nevada, like a handful of the western states, had ghost towns dating back to the 1800s. One in particular he'd explored was too far off the beaten path to be a preserved historic attraction. He knew, because it had become a favored haunt for him for meditation, a familiar touchstone to the Westerns he'd preferred as a teen. The only people who'd been here recently were a lone group of hikers who'd moved on after a day, and a film crew, who'd used it for about a week to gather stock footage.

As he landed on the ground on the main road through the town, he watched the dragon circle. At a certain point, she'd stopped trying to kill him and just followed. A hopeful sign that she was back in control. She hadn't spoken to him, though, and he hadn't pressed it, knowing her remaining energy was being put into flight.

Mina. All angels had the power to speak within the mortal mind, though he'd always found Mina's a very difficult mind to navigate. While the blood link helped, he still couldn't hear her thoughts unless she spoke to him directly. But he was hoping... Mina, are you with me?

The dragon came down on top of the building that had been the saloon, then made a quick but clumsy leap to the sandy main strip as the roof groaned alarmingly. They faced each other, about sixty feet between them. All they needed were six-shooters, he thought.

Her sides were heaving, mouth foam-and blood-flecked. However, in a surge of relief so fierce it seized his heart in a squeezing grip, he saw that the dragon's eyes were once again bicolored. One red. One blue.

"Mina, I'm so sorry. Please forgive me for not understanding."

The jaws pulled back in a bitter snarl that was disconcerting, but she didn't move.

How could you understand? You're an angel. You know nothing of my kind of darkness. The only ones that understand my true nature are those you revile. Those you will destroy, as you'll have to destroy me in the end.

"No."

You can't understand unless you are evil. Even in her thoughts, he could hear how tired she was. Soul sick. Stretching out her long neck, she laid her large head on the sand. Her body rolled to the side, like an animal hit by a car.

"You're not evil." He surged across the ground to her, heedless now of any potential danger, but even as he began to move, she was metamorphosing, diminishing. When she was done, her hair stuck to her face and bare body, slick with sweat. Her cloak was probably lying on the ground at the Citadel like some dark tarantula, the angels poking their blades at it to figure out what it was.

She was the human Mina again, lying crumpled in the dirt, so small and deceptively defenseless compared to the dragon form. Only at this moment, he suspected she was defenseless. Or rather, past caring.

He was wrong. When she registered his advance, by some miracle she struggled to her feet, swaying, and backed away from him. Her eyes were still wild, hands clenched for battle, even though she was staggering. She made a noise of protest. "No, don't touch me. I can't bear it."

He stopped, his heart in his throat. As she stumbled and fell, he wanted nothing more than to move forward, but he saw the flash in her mind, a rough concept she was still too disoriented to put into words. Even his muddled light was too much for her raw senses right now.

So he stopped, spread his hands to show her he understood and would come no farther. Taking a cross-legged position on the ground, he put his hands on his knees, though meditating was the last thing on his mind. Goddess, had he screwed up. Nearly gotten her killed by the only ones with any motive to protect her. The condition she was in was because of him.

But he'd been an angel long enough to know self-flagellation was pointless. It was done. Savagely, he told himself he'd gained invaluable knowledge she wouldn't have shared with him. He could use it to keep from making a mistake that would be fatal next time. Then he watched her, his heart breaking.

Letting her body sink to the ground again, she put her cheek to the dirt, lips clotting with sand she didn't bother to wipe away. She'd lain on her unmarked side, tucking it beneath her so he had an eerie impression of what she might have looked like embedded in the rock in the Abyss. She appeared to be struggling with something going on within her, and he couldn't think of how to help her.

Or could he? Slowly, he drew the dagger, studied the blade. Not going to her and pulling her into his lap, cosseting her, was against everything he was. Just like it was to give her an object that could cause her further pain.

You don't know me...

Knowing someone meant not denying the truth of who they were. Which dovetailed into the corollary of being what she needed him to be. He looked toward her, a disfigured woman coated in dirt, gasping like a horse down with a broken leg. Suffering.

Tossing the dagger with an oath, he embedded it in the dirt above where her hand curled and uncurled.

At first, he thought she hadn't seen it, for she didn't flinch. But then, her hand moved forward. An inch, then another as he waited, all muscles tense, fighting the overwhelming urge to take it back.

Only by your hand?

It was whispered in his head, a question. He clenched his teeth. She could bear the bite of the unforgiving steel, but not his freely offered touch? Or with my permission. You have it.

Evil is a choice, and only the one making it can unmake it. Jonah understands that in a way you don't. Her voice echoed in his head, distant, wandering, as if she spoke to herself, more than to him. Good has to fight evil until that decision happens, to keep it from harming others.

"Which is exactly what you do, Mina. You're not evil." He spoke it aloud this time.

Her fingers closed on the grip, rested there for a while. The sun continued to disappear, a day ending, like all others the Goddess had created. Wondrous, strange, normal. The sandstone strata of the rock hills that formed the backdrop of the town were pink and brown in the deepening twilight. He wondered if she'd passed out, for she'd bowed her head so he couldn't see her face. Maybe she had, for it was a long time before she stirred.

David?

I'm here.

He sensed her twinge of relief, like an ache in an old wound. Familiar. Then she raised her head, lifted the dagger and drove it into the open, loosely curled palm of her three-fingered hand. The one on which she'd broken the middle finger only hours before. Her dragon form had destroyed the splint.

Her scream echoed and bounced off of the silent buildings, the hills beyond, the long expanses of desert and scrub that reflected sound and yet swallowed it at once.

His own hand was clenched into a hard fist on his knee. She was destroying him. Was she right? What if he and the angels were making a difficult life even more so? For the past sixteen years, he'd vowed no cry of help that reached his ears would go unanswered, that he would never cause harm to an innocent.

Would his winged brethren scoff at him, because he thought of Mina as an innocent? Savagery is not nobility... She was both. The dichotomy as well as the synthesis.

She'd left her hand pinned, and now she had passed out. Cautious, he rose and went to her, taking slow steps to see if anything appeared to be repelled by his proximity.

When David squatted down at her side at last, he immediately shielded her face from the harsh glare of the sun with the angle of his wings. The blood on her hand, the slight twitch of her fingers, made him feel a fury he hadn't felt in so long. A fury he thought he'd vented time and again in the battlefield until he'd purged it for good.

Apparently not.

As he slid the blade free, he held her wrist to make it a steady motion. So thin, so fragile. And yet he vividly remembered the hot breath of the dragon singeing him several times, the way her mermaid tentacles yanked his feet from beneath him. How she'd nailed him with that pipe in the jaw the first time they'd met.