A Witch's Beauty

by A Witch's Beauty (lit)

  "It is best never to use such words. Whether you are certain of her intent or not, your witch is already a part of this."

  Jonah met Lucifer's gaze, nodded and turned to Marcellus. "You and ten of your battalion will come with me. We go to that cave." He shifted his glance to David. "You go ahead of us. We will set our strategy for patrolling the rifts first. I'm giving you a half an hour to see what you can find out from her, because I know she will not speak in front of us without difficulty. And to see to your dead."

  David knew he was being dismissed. It was not a shunning, but it was clear that, beyond his knowledge and connection to Mina, Jonah felt he had nothing to offer to this strategy session. Not until the inevitable battle occurred and his platoon would be called upon-as would the whole Legion-to defend the world from the destruction that the Trumpet could bring upon it.

  ELI. Mark. Vincent. Those were the three angels he'd left to defend the cave. He was certain they'd accounted themselves well, but as he flew swiftly toward his destination, he thought of them, felt their loss. He could not be grateful for what might be ahead, but he didn't know an angel in the Legion who didn't eagerly embrace anything, even battle, to avoid the sharp pain of losing one or more of their brethren. And the Legion lost them often.

  Based on his assessment of his three men, he knew it would have taken a raiding party of at least ten Dark Ones to take them. When he posted the trio, he hadn't anticipated a group that large coming to the cave, because he hadn't thought of the Dark Ones having a higher purpose to their discovery of the relatively small portal than routine escape by small clusters. But of course his and Mina's battle had alerted them to the presence of angels, so they'd come back prepared. Rift openings left by Dark Ones were typically guarded by no less than a platoon until they were sealed. He might as well have thrown out a welcome mat.

  I'm sorry. He knew he would find only the physical shell of them in the cave, so he offered his useless prayer to the winds and sky now, where their energy would be, rejoining the Lady. I'm sorry, to all three of you.

  He felt a savage desire to howl, rage against nothing but the still air, the lap of water against the rocks far below as he cut across a shoreline. Things of the Earth that simply went on, indifferent to everything else that happened.

  He'd been an idiot, and maybe for reasons more than he'd first thought. He'd been focused only on Mina herself, and how she was handling her powers. As he sped through the sky, Jonah's words rolled through his head, along with Mina's dreams, her life, the Dark Ones' interest in her...

  They'd assumed all along the Dark Ones' intent was to take her, use her power. But they hadn't considered the fact they might be recruiting her for a specific, strategic purpose. How would she feel, knowing that all the years she'd spent studying, increasing the range of her abilities, was something they'd monitored so eagerly, for something like this?

  David's head start was giving him time to think, regroup and be able to contribute something more to the recovery effort than he'd first thought. He'd like to think perhaps that was Jonah's purpose, but he wouldn't be surprised if the commander just wanted him out of his sight for a while.

  It calls to me... All I have to do is turn it up, just a little, and I look more and more like your enemy. Until you won't hesitate to strike me down.

  He increased his speed. I'm not wrong about her. I'm not. Even though everything Jonah and Marcellus said made perfect sense, that didn't matter. But he should have overridden her objections and closed the portal. Her safety was important, but Lucifer was right. The protection of the Lady and Her Earth from Dark Ones was the most important thing of all, the umbrella over everything else that would ultimately serve both objectives. He'd led with his heart instead of his head.

  Not a crime in matters of love, but in matters of war, it was fatal.

  That was likely another reason Jonah had given him the head start. To do what he should have done in the beginning, even if Mina hated him for it.

  MINA couldn't reattach the angel's head, but she did align it with the neck as much as possible. She'd found the three dead angels still in her caves, ironically kept there by the wards on the cave's opening, protected from scavengers as they floated in a ghostlike, repetitive cycle through the five interconnected caverns. Fortunately only one of the angels had been decapitated.

  While she'd seen things more horrible in her dreams than the sight of those three corpses drifting through her home, there was no denying it shook her, the way those wings moved with the currents, curving around the lifeless bodies as if forming a loving shroud for the pure spirit that had inhabited the flesh. She could have just disintegrated their matter, but she didn't know what death rituals angels performed. David would need to see them, perhaps care for them in that way. She didn't want to just destroy them, as if they'd been debris.

  It mattered what he thought of her. That was something she now accepted. More surprising was the fact she realized she did care about more than that. She cared enough to run a scarf around the decapitation point, tuck it in to cover it and steady the skull, touch the auburn hair on the angel's head and wish he weren't dead.

  The problem is you feel too much. He was going to be right about that, too, wasn't he? Damn him. Now that he hated her, she supposed it was a moot point. It didn't matter what you felt or didn't feel, if no one cared.

  She'd dissipated and lowered the water level below the ledge in the section where she kept her books so she could bring the angels to that flat surface. She'd been able to float the first one to the ledge, but once the water level was below it, getting the other two on it had been difficult work, and she was covered in blue blood that seared her skin. She didn't care much about that. She just didn't want David to get here, as she knew he would when he found her gone from the desert house, and see his men the way she'd found them. She noted the wings had started to stiffen in their curves around the angels' bodies, so rigor mortis affected those, too. She tried not to think about how David's would feel, if it were his lifeless eyes staring at her.

  "I told you to stay in the Schism."

  She turned then. He emerged from the water, stepped onto the ledge, water sluicing down his body, his wings gleaming with the drops. His gaze was only on her for a curt acknowledgment before it shifted to his dead. The angels beneath her touch were older than him, she knew. One of them probably well over a hundred.

  "I thought it best to come back here."

  He squatted and looked down into their frozen features, the staring, dark eyes. "Move back," he said quietly.

  As she withdrew, he passed his hand several feet above the bodies. Silver light gathered beneath his palm in a sphere, then unfurled like a blanket that drifted down upon them, sinking into their wet, cold flesh. Slowly, the light became a pale fire that took them away with a quiet beauty, removing death from their faces, illuminating the tips of their feathers, fingers, the lengths of their limbs. When it was done, only silver ash patterns were left on the damp rock. He sang a soft chant during the process, a prayer of peace and rest, but in the roughness of his voice she could tell how responsible he felt. That he would miss them. The words of the chant revealed they were being sent back to the life force of the Mother until such time as they would be born from that energy again, centuries in the future. It reminded her that angels didn't have a guarantee on individual rebirth, a separate resting place for their souls. So he didn't know what awareness he would have in his afterlife, either. Another yin and yang comparison between them.

  He was quiet for a bit afterward, then he glanced toward her. "I'm closing that portal."

  "No."

  He straightened. Mina shifted in front of the entrance, though she already saw it in his face as if he'd pinioned her heart with one of his daggers. No matter what he had to do to her to make it happen, he was closing that portal.

  "I wasn't asking."

  "You can't close it. Not until I go through it and send back the Trumpet."

  HE didn't want t
o discuss it, probably thinking she was stalling, but with dogged persistence, she persuaded him to let her explain.

  "You remember how I was able to get Jonah's sword to him in the desert, all the way from where I found it in the ocean? It's not an easy magic, particularly at this distance, but the connection is strengthened if I have a blood link to someone here, like I have with you. Once I lay hands on it, say the proper spell and offer it some of my blood, then the Trumpet could transport. The key isn't that it has to jump from one realm to another, but that the magic and mind's reach have to be sufficiently powerful. I can do it," she added resolutely, hoping she was right.

  "You've never been to their world. You wouldn't get a chance to find it before they discovered you there."

  "I have been there."

  "A dream, no matter how vivid, isn't firsthand knowledge."

  She bit back impatience. It was easier to focus on this than the flat way he was speaking to her, as if she were just a member of his platoon making a report. No, that was wrong. He loved the men in his platoon. She was far less than that to him now.

  "Dream is the wrong word. I connect to it. See it, observe it. In some ways, they're aware of my presence, because there have been times they've turned toward me in the dreams, tried to speak to me. But they can't hold me there. They can't read my thoughts."

  "So if you saw the Trumpet in the Citadel, there's no way they knew its location through you."

  "That's what Jonah and Marcellus think, don't they?" It's what you think.

  When he didn't reply, she tightened her jaw. She should never have let him matter. Should have figured a way to neutralize that blood link so he could never find her. The Trumpet might have been taken regardless. She'd be in mortal danger like everyone else in the world, but without this terrible sense of loss in her chest. "I know the landscape of their world, David," she forced herself to repeat the words. "I have their blood, so I can walk through the portal and survive there. I will locate the Trumpet. It's an item of tremendous power, so I can pick up the energy signature. I suspect they didn't take it far. They'll want to use it, as soon as they can figure out how."

  "According to Gabriel, it requires a Full Submission angel or a strong, exceptionally powerful magic user to unravel the spells over it," David responded. "Has it occurred to you that they might intend you to be the one who does that? You told me that every day is a struggle not to walk through that portal, that they've always been calling to you. That they offer you the sense of belonging you lack here."

  "I also told you that I know that's a lie, David. I can't belong to them. I'm not fully one of them. I'm not fully a merperson. I can't belong to anyone." She swallowed as something flickered in his eyes. "I guess you know that now, too."

  She turned away, because she didn't have the courage to look at him. But she would give him truth. The bodies before her, everything he'd given her so far, had earned him that right.

  "Yes," she said. "I believe they're trying to get me into their world to play the Trumpet. If so, then under the same criteria, I might be the only one who can get close enough to take it away from them."

  "Why would they trust you?"

  "I've got to convince them to trust me. It will be difficult, but I don't think it will be impossible." She looked toward the dark hole leading to the portal chamber. "They'll wonder about my actions at the Canyon and will probably test me on that. But one thing they understand is the nature of Dark One blood. I'm hoping they'll believe no Dark Spawn is strong enough to resist it when immersed in the energies of their world."

  "What if they're right? I've seen what happened at the Citadel, Mina. Based on what I felt in that portal, it seems the balance tilts in their favor, exponentially. There will be nothing to pull you back the other way."

  "I can impose some shields they can't detect to filter it." She didn't like the thoughts moving behind his eyes. Angry he might be, grieving, but damn it, his mind never stopped working. She crossed her arms, managed to bump her injured finger and bit her lip against the pain. "I don't pretend to care about the battle for good against evil the way that you do, but I do care about what's done as a result of my actions. If I had let you seal the portal when you asked, this wouldn't have happened. I intend to do what I can to make this right."

  "It was my decision to keep it open. I bear responsibility for it."

  "We're both responsible, then."

  "Then we should both go."

  "No." She'd seen it coming, but the icy hand of fear still gripped her. "David, have you lost your mind? You can't go. You're an angel."

  "You can cast an illusion spell over me so I appear like one of them. You changed my appearance in the saloon, as well as yours."

  "That's not the problem. There are energies in that world... Remember how you felt, just stepping into the portal chamber? Also, Dark Ones raise that battle instinct in you. Imagine that magnified a thousand times, with an illusion spell in place where you have to react as a Dark One would to another Dark One. You can't do that."

  "You know every spell there is. Dark magics as well as light ones." His gaze slid around the room, over her books, back toward the room of her stores. "There's a way around that. Isn't there?"

  And when his gaze came back to her face, she knew he'd seen something in her eyes or body language. Gods, they needed to stop talking about this. He saw too much. And he was too noble, too damn self-sacrificing...

  "No," she repeated stubbornly. "I won't do it. You can't make me."

  "Mina, do you know what the Resurrection Trumpet does? Blow one note and that tone resonates, plunges deep into the crust of the Earth, waking layers upon layers of the dead. A second blast, and the earth shifts, folds back peacefully to uncover those bodies. On the third blast, the dead begin to walk, to live again. Their souls return to them and they are restored to life."

  "That doesn't sound terrible," she said, though she knew he wasn't done.

  "That's what happens if an agent of the Goddess blows it. If the one with the Trumpet is evil, those who rise are not given their souls, or free will. Mountains crumble, and the shifting of the earth becomes earthquakes. They're the walking dead only, obeying only hunger and impulse. In short, they will be an army for the Dark Ones, creating the chaos they need to turn this world into a reflection of their own."

  She had an overwhelming urge to put her hands over her ears, tell him she didn't care, but even she wasn't that brave. Noble and self-sacrificing suggested gentle traits, but when he became determined like this, the intensity of his presence, his resolve, crashed against the cave walls like sound echoes, creating a din inside of her almost as hard to bear as when the skeletons had fallen into piles in the freighter. The power of an angel's will was nothing that a mortal could hope to resist, and the energy of it was pressing her up against the wall, making her want to escape, the Dark One blood roiling within her. He was losing patience with her. The thing he'd once thought he cared about, until she'd lost him his men.

  "You know the connection between humans and Dark Ones." He persisted, ignoring her distress. "Humans fight the darkness in themselves as well. This will be the ultimate act of chaos, of evil, tipping that scale, so the Dark Ones could use it not just to tear open a rift, but the whole damn sky, claim Earth and the humans as their own at last. So if there's a way for me to go, I need to go."

  "You'd be a liability to me," she insisted.

  "If that happens, abandon me," he said brutally. "But it's possible I can help."

  "For the ten seconds before they tear you to pieces."

  "I can help," he retorted, an edge to his voice. He met her gaze. The knowledge there lanced through her. "Not only for balance. An offering to prove they can let you get close to the Trumpet."

  "No." She lifted her head. How had he known? "Don't use my mind like that. I haven't given you any right-"

  "So you've already thought of it." He stepped forward, even as she slid along the wall, trying to get away from him. "In the dark sh
adows of that brilliant mind of yours."

  "And discarded it." She hated him for knowing her as well as she knew herself, maybe better, because everything in the past two days was shattering, becoming a lie. He'd never look back on it fondly, for he knew the extent of the evil, how deeply it reached into her now.

  "Tell me."

  "No. No. No." She said each word more vehemently than the last, and when he put his hands on her shoulders, she struck at him. Not with her considerable defensive abilities, but in despair, slapping at his face, his chest, trying to shove him away even as he brought her in to his body, wrapped himself around her, his wings, cocooning her. "Don't touch me when you..." When you don't want me anymore. When everything has changed. Had to change, not only because of those three angels, but because of what dark things he'd just picked from her mind.

  "Stop it, Mina. Stop. Tell me."

  "I hate you."

  "You don't have to say it. Just say it to me in your mind. Let me see it."

  She couldn't resist his compulsion, but he couldn't make her do what she wouldn't. "I'll let you see it, but we're not doing it. I won't. I will convince them alone."

  He was silent as she relayed the idea to him, and she expected him to stiffen in shock, or move away from her. He did neither. Which meant, to her terror, he accepted it. Accepted such a terrible thing could come from her mind, such a horrible idea, and he'd still hold her like this.

  She couldn't let herself go down that road again. Breaking free of him, she slid under his arm and backed away. "I will convince them alone," she repeated.

  "Mina, we need to go in with our very best plan, because there's only one shot at something like this."

  Had she thought she liked the term we? Now she despised it.

  "You want me to go. You need me to go. You think I don't know what it will cost you to step into that portal? That you're using that indomitable will of yours to squelch the terror of what it will do to you?"

  She couldn't bear the softening of his tone, what it did to her insides, making her believe everything hadn't been destroyed. Things she hadn't even known she wanted and now, suddenly, two sunrises and sunsets later, she felt like she couldn't do without. But since when was anything like that a choice for her?