A Mermaid's Ransom

  His hold on her tightened, and his nose and mouth touched the crown of her head, nuzzled her hair. "Like you. You smell so different. Not of death and fire, decay and hatred. I don't even know what scents cling to you, but I could . . . I want . . ."

  He stopped, lifted his head. "I did my best to re-create it, physically. The rose."

  For lack of anything else to say, unnerved by his mercurial moods, Alexis turned her attention to the roses. She couldn't imagine how many hours it took him to fashion the layers of petals, figure out how to put the material together. She reached out toward a branch and touched the edge of one, amazed at the soft texture. Then she swallowed and closed her fingers, drawing her fist back to her chest.

  "They're human."

  "Human skin. I tried it with scraps of paper, and cloth, but they'd all rot away. Metal worked for some things." He nodded to the flat-petaled flowers that gleamed in the dull light. "But I wanted the softness I remembered. I figured out how to preserve it, make it hold its shape."

  Leather. He'd figured out how to make leather. And spent hours re-creating a flower he'd held once, until he could perfectly duplicate it out of the remains of the terrified victims Dark Ones had brought here. Nausea gripped her.

  "You don't like it."

  "It's not that." She tensed as darkness roiled through him at what she couldn't conceal. "Dante, I feel their deaths. Do you understand that? Their pain and terror."

  Alexis made herself look up into his face, and something twisted in her, hard, at the flash of pain in his eyes. He'd brought her here because he thought she'd like it. He wanted to offer her something beautiful, something like her world, show her that he was different.

  It was such a quick, staggering flood of emotion, she reeled from it. Instinctively, she reached toward the hideous flower again, intending to take it in her hand, make up for her reaction. Instead, he stepped back, taking her out of reach.

  "I can read your mind, Alexis," he reminded her in a dull monotone. "Do not pretend what you do not feel." He set her down on a bench created of the black tree branches, blissfully without any embellishments using body parts, or remains of clothing. He returned to the tree, and stood with his back to her, looking at it.

  Whether he could read her mind or not, Alexis had never been one to hold back her feelings about any situation. Sadness, laughter, anger, whatever the moment required, feelings were a natural flowing river through her heart, because she received them so clearly from others. She was horrified by this, but it was tempered by him. He'd tried to be more than what his environment demanded of him, and used the materials at hand. He'd thought this garden a way to connect to her, which meant he wanted something more from her than ransom leverage.

  From the very first, she'd felt his loneliness, and it swamped her again now, so strongly it clogged her throat, leaving her anguished and confused, uncertain how to proceed.

  "May I have a part of you?" he asked at length.

  He didn't move, still staring at the macabre blossom he'd created and grown out of death and despair. For some reason she recalled a piece of artwork depicting a flower growing out of a tiny crack in the concrete. In this instance, Dante was that flower, wasn't he? Her mind struggled to solve the mystery of it. "I don't understand," she said.

  Turbulence hovered around him as thickly as an impending storm. "If somehow I am unsuccessful, I would like to have something of you here, to remember you."

  It was unwise to agree, not that she could really refuse him. He'd said he'd used Mina's hair to reach the dream world. But he'd asked Alexis, not demanded. When he looked around at her then, she made her decision.

  "What . . . would you like?"

  Watching the grace and power in his walk, the way his hair fluttered back over his bare shoulders, the firm set of his mouth, she recalled the Christian idea that Satan was the most beautiful of all the angels. Reaching her, he knelt again, and put out a hand. She made herself lay her own in his palm without hesitation, despite the trepidation fluttering in her belly.

  "Not going to take one of my fingers, are you? I'm pretty partial to having ten."

  "No." He shook his head. He stared down at her fingers, lying so tentatively in his grasp. His thumb moved, banding over them, sliding over her knuckles.

  "Why did you ask me all those questions, on the way out here? About my eyes, and genetics?"

  He didn't lift his gaze. "My mother made me do that--it was a way to keep me from giving in to my childhood fears. When they didn't drive me off, I'd sit by her leg, which of course was chained, and she'd ask me questions. Teach me to reason, until she lost the ability herself. I don't know why it was important to me, for you to like this."

  Alexis couldn't help it. She turned her hand over, slid her fingers in the spaces between his, drawing his eyes back up to her. "Because when you create something, you want to share it with someone. No one is solitary, Dante. Everyone needs someone."

  "I don't care about any of them. I've never felt anything for those they brought here to die." Though she flinched at his words, Alexis made herself stay still as his gaze sharpened on her. "So why do you matter?" he mused.

  "You might have cared, if caring and compassion had a place here. They don't. There's nowhere for it to exist."

  "They do, inside of you. And you are here."

  "Yes. But that's because I've known caring and compassion." Drawing a deep breath, she swept the garden with a thoughtful look, knowing her mind and heart were open to him. "I think you've created a place where your hopes had a place to hide. I think you brought me here, because some part of you knows that. You're allowing yourself to care, maybe for the first time."

  "Is that what you know, or are you simply hoping?"

  Because her father had the same solid-colored eyes he had, she could tell the conflict within the crimson depths of Dante's, with or without her gift. So instead of answering, she looked down. In his other hand, he held one of the roses he must have drawn off the tree when he had his back to her. Right now he was clenching it in his hand as if he wished he could crush it. He'd wanted to offer it to her. She felt his quenched desire. But then he'd realized it had no smell, no beauty, nothing of the world she'd left, and that its material revolted her.

  His anger and violence, his desire to tear it to pieces, to tear everything around him to pieces, was spiraling outward like a slick black oil spill. Just as his muscles tightened, she reached down, and cupped both her hands around his, around the rose.

  Empathy was her gift, but she was not unskilled in other arts. She just had to pull deep for it from a body already weakened by the suffocating despair of this alien environment, so far from the magical energies of the Earth and the Goddess. But she dove into what reserves she had, though a sickly tremor swept her limbs, her neck cording with the effort as she murmured the enchantment. As she did, she punctured her finger on the thorn he'd created on the flower's stem, a rusty metal tip that allowed her to touch the flower with her blood.

  "Alexis, what are you--"

  "Look," she gasped. "Smell. Quickly."

  Letting her hands drop, she pushed his up, pulling at his fingers so he opened in reflex. The rose had transformed, shimmering with the temporary nature of the magic, a soft pink that stunned him enough she had to push further, carry his palm to his nose. His nostrils flared, and she caught the scent herself, that sweet, haunting fragrance that could never be inhaled too deeply, but intoxicated the senses. It made her want to weep for home. For lazy meadows and afternoons on the beach, for the freedom of sky and water, and all the earth in between, as different from this place as the difference between Heaven and Hell.

  IT was a heady combination. The wafting, brief fragrance of a sun-drenched flower and the temptation of her blood, so close. Her quick frown at the puncture, the pain making her tired face look more haggard, bothered him. The track of her tear as she recalled her home, the quivering of her body that said her time was growing shorter, bothered him. As did the constant tu
rbulence of her emotions and thoughts, which told him her fear was held back by a thread as thin as the knife blade. It all bothered him.

  She herself was like the rose, her life and scent clinging to her, making her fragile and breathtaking at once, an immutable force that reined in his savagery just by her proximity. That very delicacy, which his brutality could destroy in an instant, rending the petals away and leaving him nothing to experience but what he'd always had, kept him in check and left him confused about his own feelings.

  She cried out, the muscles in her stomach knotting, and her hands fell away, her body doubling over and then toppling her onto her side on the bench. Her temple would have hit the wooden arm, but he dropped the rose to catch her head in his palm, his arm curling around her waist, holding her.

  "Used too much magic," she gasped. "It will pass."

  She was gazing down at the ground, and he followed her look, so they both watched the rose fade back into cured skin.

  "You're right," he said roughly. "That's a mockery of the real thing."

  "No." She shook her head. "What you made . . . it's beautiful, Dante, in a terrible and strange way. Because of why you made it, not the substance itself. It's hard to get past . . . substance, sometimes. Oh, Goddess, this hurts."

  "The Goddess doesn't come here. No one comes here who isn't forced to." He lifted her, and then sat on the bench, cradling her in his lap and holding her with one arm as he cut open his wrist with a fang. "Open your mouth," he ordered.

  When he brought the heat of his pulse against it, the smell of blood, she tried to wrench her head away. He was much stronger, though, and held her still, made her take his life energy.

  Alexis's mind rebelled, but her stomach didn't. For some reason, where the blood in his chamber had sickened her, the smell of his blood now provoked an inexplicable hunger to taste him. Her lips pressed on the wound, throat muscles working as she swallowed. Tentatively, her tongue began to lick at the wound.

  As his body shuddered beneath her, she heard his growl of approval. The tips of her breasts tingled, and the tender flesh of her sex reacted, wanting him. But that was not the most unexpected change that occurred.

  As she ingested his blood, the low level buzzing that had occurred when he first started speaking inside her head came back to life. Only now it expanded like the rush of the ocean, taking up the horizon of her mind so that he was all that was there, his presence, his need . . . him. Her body jerked as if it were transforming, just like it had when she'd first learned how to manage her transitions. He held her, and she wanted him to always hold her. He was part of her, as near and vital as blood and bone, breath and feeling. It was frightening, all consuming, as if she'd just given him her soul and therefore could not be without him. But her hands clutched him, one latched on his biceps, the other behind his back, pressing into powerful muscle and ribs, sensing the flow of blood beneath.

  The rolling feeling, as if she were on wave after wave of surf headed toward a far distant shore, went on for some time, even after she stopped drinking. She could do little but lie there, letting the blood energy he'd given her help her recuperate. It was hard to reclaim her senses though, as he was busy arousing all of them, moving to her mouth to tease away the remains of any blood, nipping at her throat as her head fell back in surrender to him, working his way down until he reached her breast and closed over a nipple, suckling her deep. He was oh-so-careful with those fangs, so she only trembled in fear a little, and maybe not because of that. Something elemental had changed, something she didn't understand, but it had taken the connection she'd felt for him in that very first dream and made it permanent. Made Beauty the willing slave of the Beast before she even made the decision herself.

  She clutched at him now, another, softer cry coming from her throat at his provocative pull on her breast, his other hand sliding beneath her hips to find the soft entranceway to her sex. The scales were brittle, but he eased in carefully, and found wetness waiting. He didn't pause, taking two then three fingers in deep, almost matching his own thickness, teasing her with the thought of that as she pressed down on him, his cock rising hard and heavy beneath her weight.

  That was what she wanted. She was too weak for it, despite the fact his blood had given her this new surge of energy, but she had to have him inside her now. It was this overwhelming feeling, and more than that, it was the one thing that felt right, a defiant scream against a place that should never exist.

  Please . . .

  She couldn't give voice to it, but she didn't have to. He could read her every thought and desire. Sliding himself free of the ragged but blessedly accessible clothing he wore, he kicked it away, no modesty to him, and then reseated her on his lap, replacing his fingers with himself. He was more gentle than he'd been before, but still just as inexorable in his progression, taking her down inch by inch on that thick staff.

  I like it when you beg. It makes me harder.

  The rough lust in his thought made her wetter in response, but she vaguely caught another undercurrent. Was he as unsettled by what had just happened as she was, as baffled? She was not ignorant of energy use, and something powerfully magical had just occurred.

  Now was not the time for questions, though. He seated her against his thighs, his cock thrust deep in her, and she writhed, wanting more friction. Instead, he slid an arm around her waist and the other diagonally across her chest, settling his palm around her throat like a collar, coming in under the joint of her wing. He held her back against his body, her tail trembling and flexing its muscle between his spread knees, her tail fins unfurled over his bare feet. The ridges of his abdomen were a wall against her lower back, his chest buried in her wings and pressed against her shoulder blades. She could turn her head, put her mouth below his ear, her face into his hair if he'd allow it, and he did, though he kept his hold on her throat and waist, forcing her to stillness. She shuddered.

  "You can come, even if I hold you motionless like this," he whispered against her ear, a tempting demon. "It takes longer, and makes the buildup more powerful. I can feel it in you, see so deep into your mind. Your every desire and need, your every dark fear. I will protect you from all of them, but you must give me everything you are."

  Frantically, she took a nip of his jaw as spasms rocked through her lower body. Goddess, she could feel the pulse of blood in his cock, pounding against her walls. She wanted to pump herself hard, as she would in a strong current, send herself spiraling forward in the warm waters of her own desire. But, anticipating her, he lifted his legs and locked them over her tail, strong thighs flexing against her sleek, tight scales, ankles crossed and planted between the vee of her tail fins. She pleaded in a wordless moan, and he answered by increasing his grip on her throat.

  "You are mine," he reminded her. "I want all of your soul, not just a piece." He stopped, and through the haze of her desire, she sensed an odd hesitation in him, a brief flash of confusion. "Though I believe I may have already taken it."

  Her outer body he could control, but she had other muscles. She tightened on him inside, the ancient ways of the female body surpassing her limited experience, knowing how to tease and seduce what she wanted from him, even if he tried to control all else. She rippled along his length, and heard his breath suck in, a rattling growl.

  Stop that.

  No. She did it again, and again. She started to jerk again, because his own grip was easing as he began to move instinctively against her, thrusting into her body with the coaxing movements of her slick muscles. She'd kept her face turned into the side of his, but now, obeying some compulsion or instinct of her own, she turned her attention outward, stared at this garden he'd made.

  It had taken years to scavenge and hide for it, until his power was enough to create and then protect it from the others. He'd shared it with her, an offering Hades might have given to Persephone, hoping a creature of light and life would see something worth staying in darkness and death with him, give him what he longed to have but was
forever outside of his reach. He would keep her there against her will, too desperately alone to do otherwise, always hoping she would at last stay willingly, learn to love the Beast.

  The mythology and fairy tale whirling together in her head, becoming her own unique story, Alexis turned her face back to his jaw, to the pulse pounding high in his throat. As a sensuous groan broke from his lips, heralding his own unwilling release, the surge of triumph in her own female power roared over her, taking her with it. She climaxed with him, biting into his throat again, swallowing beneath the too-tight grip of his hand. She didn't understand the truth, but she could feel it, and it was too frightening to face. She chose oblivion instead.

  Ten

  COMING back was even more difficult this time. She drifted in a hazy world, her heart pumping slow, erratic. She felt him there, in her mind, in her soul perhaps. He was worried. He was stroking her hair, her lips with his clever fingers.

  She was on the bundle of rags again, back in his protected chamber, because her nose recognized the blood stench. Goddess, she wished she was home. What would it be like to turn over in her own bed, run her fingers over his chest, down to his groin and find the thick length of him? Maybe even take her mouth down, down, while he slept. Close over him, suck deep and feel him wake in her mouth as he woke above, tangling his fingers in her hair.

  Were these her thoughts or his? She'd never been wantonly sexual or adventurous, even in her imaginings, probably because she'd barely held out hope for a decently passionate kiss. Tingles of sexual awareness had been pushed away, locked down in some part of herself. Behind that closed door, her mind had obviously been quite busy, because now her fantasies were in full bloom in the midst of a nightmare. Leave it to her to embrace sexual consciousness in the midst of a hostage crisis.

  Shame swept her. What must be going on in the world she'd left? Her mother and father. Oh, Goddess, Jonah. His wrath would be terrible. She hoped Lucifer was with him, and Mina. Please, Goddess, if you hear me, if there's any way to let them know, please tell them I'm okay.