There was no redemption. He would not, eventually, pay his debt in full and be allowed to return to the world that was home even if it had always been hostile to him. There were no second chances doled out for those, like himself, who had never truly been accepted to begin with once they had stepped beyond forgiving because they had committed a ‘crime’ completely unacceptable to angels. So there was no true salvaging of the life he had thrown away because he had not learned to control his emotions while he had at least token acceptance among his people.
But he had learned.
He had learned the hard way that not only could he not go back, he also had no future if he could not learn that one thing that made order possible, that made it possible to evolve, develop a society, progress as a people—discipline, self-control, responsibility.
If he devolved now, he was lost forever.
He would never earn Claire’s trust, her acceptance, her love.
* * * *
It was a combination of fear and anger that sent Claire barreling out of Dante’s apartment in search of escape shortly after he had left her to cool down. It had occurred to her, forcefully, that she’d allowed her–completely unacknowledged—emotional attachment to Dante to blind her to all sorts of things—dangerous things—that she had willfully ignored because of her attraction to him.
Truthfully, she doubted she knew any more about Nick DiCarlo. He could be just as dangerous—maybe even more dangerous—because he was human and the species was riddled with predators.
But there was a danger factor with Dante because he wasn’t human!
He wouldn’t think like a human or feel the things humans did or even look at things the same way—would he?
Would angels consider it murder if they killed a human? Or would they look at it pretty much the way humans looked at slaughtering ‘lesser’ animals—not murder so long as it was another species they were killing?
She shook that thought. It defied logic to think that Dante meant her any real harm. If he had, he’d had plenty of opportunities to harm her.
But did that mean she could and should believe his claim that another group of aliens was out to get her because she’d seen things she shouldn’t?
Or had he brought her here for some purpose she couldn’t fathom because she didn’t have an alien mind like his?
Maybe, since he’d mentioned mating, as a sex slave?
That didn’t repulse or terrify her nearly as much as it should have, which just went to show she couldn’t trust her survival instincts around Dante.
How many women, she wondered, had been lured to their death by men whose idea of ‘fun’ was to torture them to death?
She considered that a little fearfully and realized that Dante had never even shown a glimmer of having that side to him. Oh he had scared the absolute shit out of her that first time in the cave. He’d displayed barely leashed fury that had turned her knees to water.
But it had been leashed.
His touch hadn’t been hurtful at all.
And the passion he’d unleashed on her directly afterwards had been pretty damned convincing as the root of that first, frightening encounter.
She realized abruptly that that was why she’d dismissed even the threat of violence she’d seen in him.
Should she, though?
Was it dangerous to suppose that he could control himself—always—because he had seemed so close to losing control that time and yet hadn’t? Was it safe to think that it was passion for her that made his emotions run so high at all—because he’d told her that was what it was?
Or was that incredibly egotistical and dangerous?
She didn’t know, but she no longer trusted herself around Dante. Her instincts seemed too focused on mating and not nearly focused enough on potential threats.
She didn’t know why he’d really brought her to this place—because her life was in danger from some other aliens or for some other reason—but she couldn’t stay. She wasn’t going to stay. She didn’t know if her sister was alright. She thought Madelyn had made it to safety but that wasn’t good enough.
Especially if it was true that these other aliens had caused the earthquake and tsunami and would kill anyone with the ‘knowledge’.
Even saying this place truly was safe, she couldn’t cower here and leave her sister exposed!
And she wasn’t going to beg Dante to bring her sister here when she didn’t know if it was safe to be here!
There had to be a way out! It was underwater, granted, but it wasn’t on the moon! If she could get out, she could make it to the surface and ….
She was a decent swimmer, but she didn’t think there was much chance she could swim to the surface holding her breath and then swim to shore! She was going to have to find something … like maybe an escape pod. Surely they’d have something like that?
She didn’t realize her preoccupation with her thoughts had been a seriously dangerous distraction until it occurred to her that she’d been walking long enough that she should have reached the hanger/bay. Stopping abruptly, she looked around, but all she could see was a corridor stretching off in both directions with doors here and there. There were no windows, or portholes, and there was no sign of a door that looked like the one they’d come through from the hanger.
She couldn’t even remember if there’d been any distinguishing marks on the door to Dante’s apartment!
“Oh my god! This was really stupid, Claire!”
Should she compound her embarrassment by screaming for help and letting whoever was around know just how utterly stupid she’d behaved?
She decided to save that for later—if she couldn’t find her way and discovered she was hopelessly lost.
How lost could she get inside a damned building anyway? Surely, she would have to find her way back … eventually?
It was like being lost in a desert, though. She was already tired by the time she realized she’d either missed the hanger or gone in the wrong direction entirely.
And thirsty.
And there were no handy water fountains strategically placed along the corridor.
She sat down on the floor with her back to one wall to rest while she considered what would be the best thing to do. She knew the direction she’d been traveling, but if she went back the way she’d come could she find Dante’s door when she hadn’t had enough sense even to count doors? Would she run in to him? Could she scream loud enough for him to find her?
Were they the only ones occupying this vast underwater base?
Surely there had to be others here even though she hadn’t seen them?
Knock on some doors and see if she could find something that would help instead of killing her on sight?
She finally decided to head back the way she’d come, trying to match her pace of before, and mentally ‘clocking’ the time she’d been walking as closely as she could. When she decided she must be close to Dante’s apartment, she stopped at a door and knocked cautiously. When she didn’t hear any sound inside, she tried the catch and discovered it opened easily.
It was not Dante’s apartment, however!
She hadn’t been there long enough to identify everything, but it had definitely been furnished and had a ‘lived in’ look, and this apartment was virtually empty. The next one she tried looked like it was occupied—which thoroughly rattled her—but it wasn’t Dante’s. More cautious after that, she knocked at several more doors and listened carefully before opening them to look in.
After checking a half a dozen, the uneasy feeling settled over her that she had turned down a corridor at some point without noticing.
The damned place was like an underwater city!
Well, like a damned big underwater apartment complex anyway!
There must be hundreds of them living here, she thought uneasily.
And yet she hadn’t seen anyone. She struggled to make sense of that for a while and finally decided that they must roam the Earth looking for evil humans sticking the
ir noses in where they weren’t wanted!
Of course, as far as she knew, they were single males and single males weren’t inclined to hang out in their apartments by themselves.
Did that make sense, though? To decide that all of the angels that had come or been sent were single males?
She’d never been more conscious of just how little she knew about Dante or his people or his reason for being on Earth. She knew his mission. He’d told her that. But he hadn’t been very open about anything else.
She’d assumed—because of his talk about mating—that he was single, but she didn’t even know that for certain. In the first place, married human males lied about being married and she saw no reason to think married/mated alien males might not also have that flaw. In the second, she didn’t have a clue of what their mating practices were. Maybe sex was mating to them? Maybe they flitted around like butterflies, propagating every ‘flower’ they ran across?
That thought and the image it produced amused her briefly.
Wings or not, regardless of how beautiful she thought he was, she couldn’t think of Dante as a butterfly! Maybe a hawk—certainly some sort of predatory bird.
But the thought of him ‘propagating’ wasn’t even vaguely amusing. It made her feel a little sick to her stomach.
She wandered around a while, checking one apartment after another, before she stopped to rest again, but she was feeling the beginnings of panic as time went on and she didn’t find Dante’s apartment and her needs increased. Now she was thirsty and she also had to pee.
Damn it! Being tired and scared wasn’t enough?
She was sorely tempted to enter one of the apartments and take care of her needs, but the fear of being caught there as an intruder made her uneasy enough that she decided she would just wait a little longer and see if she found her way back to Dante’s apartment or found public facilities.
Eventually, she opened a door that looked far more like an office or perhaps a lab. Still feeling the creepiness of being an intruder and having no idea when or if someone might pop out, she went in. Her primary concern by that time was the bathroom and water fountain, but she felt like she might be more likely to find them in a work area.
There was no sign of either of the things she was most interested in. In fact, there was very little of anything at all beyond a couple of desks or consoles.
There was a door at the other end of the room, however, and she moved toward it. The door opened immediately as she approached it. Beyond the opening, she could see a vast room illuminated as the lights flickered to life, responding, she assumed, to her presence. A whirring, clapping sort of sound made her heart skip a few beats and drew her gaze to a series of panels that seemed to be opening, folding together and making the dull, clapping sound. Her stomach seemed to drop as exterior lights flooded the view beyond the fortress, revealing a huge expanse of seafloor that formed an exotic valley surrounded by crumbling walls far into the distance that seemed to go on forever.
As she stepped across the threshold, however, enchanted by the view beyond the almost ceiling to floor portal on the sea world, her attention was caught by a sight that, by contrast, was almost obscene—certainly the most horrific sort of things she’d ever seen.
There were glass fronted, or at least clear fronted, man-sized capsules along all the walls, but the mummified or petrified things inside bore little resemblance to man. She clapped a hand to her mouth to suppress a scream as she stepped inside the room and came face to face with the monster incased in the first clear capsule.
It had the torso of a man but, from the waist down, it looked like the lower portion of a bull, maybe—just guessing, but the head was most definitely that of a bull.
She stared at it, hard. It seemed to be floating in some sort of preservative, at a guess. It was floating in some cloudy substance and, although she strained to peer through the liquid for a better look, she didn’t see any sign that the beast pieces had been stitched to the human torso. They seemed to be grown together.
She managed to examine four more gruesome experiments of humans with other animal’s parts attached seemingly at random when a flickering light caught her attention.
When she looked, she saw that it appeared to be the particle thing she’d become reluctantly familiar with.
The being that was materializing out of the beam, however, wasn’t human. It was an angel—but not Dante, or the one he’d called Galen.
And the moment he became completely solid and mobile, his gaze zeroed in on her. His face contorted with rage and he raised his sword arm—the one holding a sword nearly as long as she was tall—and let out a challenging roar that abruptly unfroze her from the spot as her heart leapt into her throat and tried to choke her.
She would’ve screamed if she couldn’t managed to give voice to her terror past the heart lodged in her throat, but that wasn’t possible.
It took her agonizing moments to get up any steam for retreat. It seemed to her that she bounced off of everything between her and the door before she managed to reach the opening. She ran into one of the capsules hard enough to bounce back and set it to teetering precariously on its base. She heard a loud crash behind her as she ejected from the room through the door but she wasn’t sure if it was the capsule and she’d toppled it or if the thing bearing down on her had knocked it over in his efforts to reach her and cleave her in two.
She didn’t question her certainty that that was his objective for even a second. The expression on his face before he’d launched into attack mode was sufficient evidence in her book that she was dead if he caught her. She also didn’t have time to try to figure out why he wanted to hack her to death. Her entire focus was on escaping.
She raced through the outer room and out the door without pausing to decide on a direction to run. She had no idea where Dante was, although the question pounded through her mind like a scream for help—because it was.
She had no idea whether he could hear that attempt at a telepathic cry or not, or if he would come, or if he could even find her in the maze that was the fortress. She didn’t have time to wait for rescue, however, or a lot of brain function to spare for contemplating that sort of thing. Her entire focus was on trying to outrun a fucking flying thing with a sword nearly as long as she was and a stride at least a foot longer than hers—possibly two.
The all out run wasn’t going to do it, she realized despairingly. She couldn’t possibly outrun him even though she’d had a good head start. He had been gaining on her steadily and she could have sworn she felt the hot breath of his rage on her back.
The hall was straight, however. She had no choice except to keep running straight or try to get into one of the apartments and although that appealed, and she was the next thing to a babbling moron in her terror, it only took two mental leaps to figure out that she wasn’t likely to be able to bar the door to the thing and then she’d be trapped in a place with no space for running.
She almost missed the corridor jutting to her right. She slammed into the wall on the far side as she skidded around the turn and caught a glimpse of the angel from hell behind her. His face was red with fury and the sword still upraised. She screamed instinctively, shoved away from the wall she’d hit and poured on as much speed as she could manage even though it felt like she’d torn every muscle from rib to hip.
She screamed again when she saw an angel leap into the corridor in front of her. For a split second, she was thrown by the certainty that the angel chasing her had somehow taken another route and come out in front of her, but even as she slowed a step in indecision, she heard him behind her.
“Get down!” Dante roared just as it clicked in her mind that it was him running toward her.
She hesitated, but she was dead if he also meant her harm. He was her only hope for salvation at this point. She obeyed him with barely a mental pause to evaluate, almost literally diving onto her knees and sliding past him like a baseball player sliding into home base.
The two titans clashed behind her in a deafening collision of flesh, bone, and metal.
Struggling for breath and the strength to get to her feet, fighting a dizzying wave that passed over her as she tried to get her heart rate under control, Claire risked a glance back at the combatants, but they were locked in battle, and moving so swiftly she wasn’t sure which was which.
Not that she could have helped anyway. She didn’t have a weapon and she was afraid any attempt to ‘help’ Dante would just end in disaster for both of them.
She didn’t like the idea of slinking off and hiding while Dante kept him occupied.
But she also didn’t like the idea of waiting till they finished since she couldn’t be sure that Dante would be the victor.
On the other hand, she’d pretty much given it her all just to get as far as she had. She’d never run so far so fast before in her life and she was very much afraid that her heart was going to burst before it could calm down or that she was going to throw up from trying to suck in enough air to keep from passing out. She focused on trying to normalize her vitals for a few minutes and then began struggling to rise.
To her horror, she discovered she couldn’t get up. There wasn’t an ounce of strength left in her body to lift it off the floor. It was like climbing out of a swimming pool one had been in for hours—as if her body weighed twice—or four times—normal. She crawled, trying to put a little more distance between herself and the two fighting men—angels—not just because she didn’t know who might win but also to keep out of their way to keep from being stomped or throwing the fight by tripping the wrong one up.
If she’d thought she might tip the battle in Dante’s favor by tripping the crazy one up, she would have considered looking for an opening, but her vision had been narrowed by shock and fear and fatigue to the point that she still thought she might pass out. It was as if a dark fog had invaded the corridor.
Six doors down on the right. Get inside and barricade the door.
Claire lifted her head and stared at the fighting men, trying to decide if she’d heard what she thought she had or if it had been inside her head.
The Watchers Page 15
