No one should be loved no matter what. Nobody deserved that, particularly her. She'd never loved anyone. And not only had she never been loved, she'd never been loved unconditionally. He'd given her both without requiring anything from her. She wasn't strong enough for it.
At the base of the tower, she was lifted under the arms, almost respectfully, by two of the winged Dark Ones. Lifted up, higher and higher, headed toward the top. Her fear of heights didn't touch her. Being dropped and all her bones crushed by impact might be a welcome mercy, after all.
As they lowered her on the flat expanse of the keep, littered with rubble from the spires that surrounded it like rotting fingers pointing at the sky, she saw the Resurrection Trumpet.
The gleaming gold and silver instrument had a long and slender throat, a red silken cord and white sash of silk wrapped around the handle. They had placed it on a stone tablet, surrounded by a circle of thirty or so higher-echelon Dark Ones. Higher echelon because they were taller, with eyes that narrowed with a far greater intelligence. She identified the one standing directly behind the Trumpet as the most powerful, for energy pulsed from him, and the containment spell, buffering them from the emanations of the complex spells the angels had on the Trumpet already, bore his signature. He was likely the one responsible for figuring out how to circumvent her cave wards and enter the portal from the ocean side. She narrowed her focus to him. He was what she had to defeat.
All she had to do was touch the instrument with a bloodied hand, and it would be gone, in Jonah's hands. She would die. Perhaps after being tortured as long as they could make it last.
David would be destroyed as well, for the binding spell on him would destroy him if she were killed. But the Dark One she was staring at would figure that out before he killed either of them. He would keep her alive long enough to use David's Dark Blood to make him truly one of them and unravel her binding. Then Jonah would one day face his young lieutenant and be forced to strike him from the sky, incinerate his putrid, monstrous body.
No. There had to be another way. Gods, she'd spent her life in study of magical systems, historical conflicts and survival strategies among various species. She should be able to think of something different than this pointless martyrdom for a tin horn. But she knew all the other ways were too risky.
We only get one shot at this. We have to choose the best way.
Thirty pairs of red eyes followed her as she approached. David had been brought up as well, for the flock of bloodthirsty Dark Ones dropped him to the surface on the rough ground behind her. She could hear his panting breath, knew from a brief glimpse out of the corner of her eye he was on his side, struggling to lift himself on one arm. The other one appeared to be broken, useless, a wet gleam of white bone poking through his upper arm and at his wrist. Someone stepped on it as she watched and he screamed. A rock was shoved into his mouth, wrapped in a filthy cloth. It was too large and it was forced in, hard enough she heard the snap of his teeth.
An oyster shell, leaving wounds that took nearly two years to heal well enough for her to be able to comfortably eat...
She yanked her attention away.
"Who is he?" The tallest one's voice shrieked along her nerves, but she could not deny her sire's blood also responded to it, such that it perversely helped steady her.
"An experiment." She cocked her head. "You know they have been guarding me from you, thinking you intend me harm. He is young, and I was able to get him alone, tricked him into drinking our blood, and bound him to me with an enslavement charm. It is part of why I have come. The experiment was successful, but I could not stay there without invoking the wrath of the Legion."
"You stole an angel for us."
"I stole an angel for me," she corrected coldly. "I brought him to you so that the Legion could not take him away from me." She tilted her head, allowed a feral smile to stretch across her face, reveal her fangs. "But I might be coaxed to do it to other angels. Slaves that serve you all. And your children, the humans."
"How do we know if you lie? How do we know he is fully under your power?"
She arched a brow. "Look at him. He cannot fight them off. Though he continues to struggle, his powers are hampered. He can only strike out in my defense, not his own. You know angels cannot bear the stink of your kind. If he could kill all of you, he would."
There was muttering in the circle around the Trumpet, hissing, suspicious looks. She lifted a shoulder. "You've been hovering over me in my dreams since I was born, and you don't feel why I'm here? I am tired of being neither one thing nor the other, of running. Of being cold and wet. If I have a place here, then that ends."
"You helped them."
"Yes. In the past. Unlike your pathetic Dante, I choose my allegiances for my own reasons, but it allowed me to get close to them, to learn to do this." She jerked her head toward David. Still didn't look at him. "But you've never cared about that. You knew the blood was calling me. The dreams enticing me to come have increased, even as you pretended to seek me for revenge. It was never about revenge. You want me to unravel the magic bindings on the Trumpet and play it." She gave the tallest one a derisive look. "Can't figure it out yourself, or can't play it if you did?"
His crimson eyes went to malevolent slits. "You should not taunt us."
Shrugging, she flicked her fingers, sent a zap of electrical power toward a small Dark One that had been creeping up on her ankle, probably to bite her. It retreated with a yelp.
"Chaos on the blue green place will give us more of what we want," one beside the tallest said.
"So what does that give me?"
The red eyes narrowed. "We will use the humans to help us procreate, make more Dark Spawn. Stronger than humans. Replace them. It will become your world, instead of theirs. You are powerful, but we think you have not truly embraced your power. You reject it because of your mortal mother." His gaze shifted behind her, to the scuffling sounds going on, the groans and thuds. "But we are encouraged by this."
The this was drawn out, sibilant, but she noted he cut it off. Trying to appear civilized, articulate? It was laughable, considering their surroundings.
She considered it. "It can be done. It'll take some destruction, some reworking of the firmament and terrain after you use the Trumpet, but it can be done."
"You will help us?"
"Perhaps."
"You think you have a choice?"
"Of course I have a choice." She took a deliberate step forward, until the nearest Dark One around the table was only several feet away from her. Meeting his gaze just long enough to get him to shift his, she swept the faces of the ones around him with a disdainful look. "If you make it not a choice, you won't get anything from me. I care nothing for pain or death. I've experienced both, and I wasn't impressed. And there is no one I care about."
"Even the daughter of Arianne? What if we brought her here, cut her babe out of her womb while she screamed, let her bleed and die before you?"
Jonah would tie you in a ball with your own intestines and kick your bony ass back here before you got within a hundred miles of Anna. And you know it. Else you wouldn't want a girl to do your fighting for you.
"You already know I am cursed to protect the daughter of Arianne, no matter my own wishes." She laughed, an extremely unpleasant sound, rough to her own ears. "It never occurred to you that was why I was in the Canyon? I never did one thing to protect the angels. Only her."
There was shifting, muttering, a consultation of sorts. Mina waited, maintaining a dispassionate mien, walling out everything. The gag must have fallen out, for another terrible scream came from behind her. The kind of scream that ripped from one's throat when one had an appendage torn off. She remembered her fingers, a small barracuda biting them as she tried to fend it off. Then there'd been several other fish, and she'd lost the fight.
She felt the close regard of the Dark One Council. Sighing, she gazed boredly out over the landscape. Gods, I will do this. Damn the whole world, but I will
do it. I will get that Trumpet back, for David. Then I will annihilate all of you. All my life I've repressed my Dark Blood. It's time to use it.
"You are right." The tall Dark One was looking at her with different eyes now. Not completely convinced, but far closer to it than a moment before. "It is something we had missed. The angels who have been following you around made us uncertain."
She lifted a shoulder. "Her mate feels that I did it out of regard for her. She is an innocent fool, a being of light. He thought I needed protection, and as I said, it gave me the opportunity to study the angels more closely. If you want to disembowel her, and can figure out a way to do it where the curse won't compel me to protect her, I would savor the watching."
"If all you have said is true, we will welcome you," the tall Dark One said. "I am Amal. The beginning for the Dark Ones." He looked down at the Trumpet. "Prove yourself to us. Unravel the spells on this so that we may use it. Can you do it?"
If she'd had any sense of impending victory, it would have surged through her now, but all she had was simmering violence and a clamp on her emotions so strong she was certain she'd never feel anything again, even if the universe disintegrated around her. The rein on her control was so tight, it almost made her nauseated, but there was no time to steady her stomach. She stepped forward, and the Dark Ones parted, let her come forward, press her hip against the side of the stone tablet to still the distracting ache, the beginning of a cramp starting there. "Yes. I can do it."
"How long?"
Mina ran her hand over top of the instrument, not touching it. "A few minutes."
A hiss of surprise. "Our oracles tell us true about your power. If you are telling us the truth."
She tilted her head, gave him a sidelong glance. "Only one way to find out, right?"
Amal lifted a lip in a bloodcurdling expression that she supposed they might call a smile, if Dark Ones knew what a smile was. It was all right. She didn't really understand smiles, either. Any more than she would ever know what laughter was.
Amal spat out three words, and the universe disintegrated in truth.
Twenty-four
IT was as if the Dark Ones' world had been a paper backdrop and his words had punched a hole into it, the ends curling back, already on fire, disappearing. Stars, a swirling pinwheel of them. She remembered when David had shot up in the sky with her, that first time when she'd had little but fear of him. How she'd fought and he dropped her. There'd been this moment of suspension, very brief, when the mind registered that it was about to topple in a free fall. This was the same, only the heights were far, far greater, the terrain of the Earth far below, the moon off to the right, looking the size of the Abyss.
Before she could draw breath, she was snagged in the sharp talons of one of the winged Dark Ones. They were spiraling through the dark sky, past that moon and all those stars, down toward Earth, so fast it was like traveling with the angels.
At least it was over quickly. In a blink, they were past the ozone layer and standing on a high, frozen mountaintop, where it seemed the air was so thin she could barely draw breath, though she'd had no apparent problem in the reaches of space where there was no oxygen.
And David was still with her, a blessing and a curse. They dropped him in the snow twenty feet from her. A spray of blood spattered the ground, a momentary impression before his captors were covering him again, like piranha over a water buffalo. Being the lowest of the lower echelon, like the one that had tried to gnaw her ankle, they were simply hungry pets for the more evolved Dark Ones. David was being used as a bone to keep them occupied while the adults took care of business. She saw a flash of his other hand, trembling fingers, showing he was still alive, and then she forced her gaze away again.
She'd even taken away his ability to fight back.
"Do not get angry with them," Amal commented, now at her right side. "They will not kill him. They know he is yours. But we have suffered so much at their hands, and of course it is so irresistible to have one at our mercy."
He couldn't control the sibilance this time. She thought if she ever heard the word irresistible spoken again, she would be sick.
Then the Trumpet was lowered on its stone dais before her. The Dark Ones carrying it backed off, leaving only her and Amal, and that half circle of his cronies. "The angels will locate us quickly now that we are in their sphere," Amal said. "Do it. Prove yourself. We can feel the blood in you reaching for us. For this."
They pressed around her, those tall ones. Talons drifted across her nape, an unexpected intimacy they'd bestow on a child toward whom they had improper urges. She suppressed a shudder.
They had wasted little time once reasonably convinced of her willingness to help, which suggested they feared the angels coming up with possible alternative magics to render the Trumpet inert. They were afraid of losing their opportunity to at last realize their dreams of ultimate destruction. Like comic book villains. She had a couple of comics, favored fare of the sailors on the freighters. Now she found those graphic pictures far less fictional and overly dramatic than she'd first imagined.
Most of the sounds behind her now were the Dark Ones. She wondered if David had seen her looking and was now straining, using every bit of his energy toward silence so as not to distract her. He knew her indifference for the lie it was. He'd known she was a liar from the beginning.
Of course his attempt to remain silent would make them torment him further, see what could tear a scream from his throat, whether he willed it or not. Angels couldn't pass out from too much pain, after all.
As if summoned, a small handful of feathers drifted past her, clumped with blue and red blood, a trace of black. The Dark One closest to her pounced on it, jammed the wad in his mouth and swallowed, cackling. The heat in her rose, a red film starting to close over both eyes.
From the time Mina was cognizant, her mother had taught her the first priority. Control the Dark One blood within her. Repress its sadistic urges, lock away its potential for destruction. She'd lived her life on that knife edge, refined that balance to the point that every moment, every experience or thought, was a calculation. The only time she'd ever been swept away from it without consequence was when she was with David. He pushed her onto a knife edge as well, physically and emotionally, and had revealed what it was to be suffused by joy and heartbreak at once.
That was what love was. The best of both worlds, the dark and the light, the perfect balance.
But the rage building up in her for what they were doing to him, it called for something different. What if she used a lifetime of control to embrace her Dark One blood fully and unleash it? See where it took her. Take the risk of not being able to call it back to heel.
It was against everything she'd taught herself to do, but why the hell not? As she'd told David, she wasn't a warrior for the light or a denizen of evil. She cared nothing for either side. What did she have to lose? The world? What had the world ever done for her?
She laid her hands on the Trumpet, felt the energy sing up her fingertips, the angelic wards attempt to burn her, reject her touch. Gritting her teeth, ignoring that, she analyzed the complex magics around it. Difficult, dangerous. Almost impossible to defuse without harm to the defuser. Unless they knew exactly what they were doing.
It was like pulling a knotted string at the right end, knowing which side would result in the whole thing coming unraveled and which would just cause more knots to pick out.
There was blood on her shoulder, where the Dark Ones' talons had cut her, and that blood was making an inexorable track down her arm, almost to her elbow. It would be to her hand in a matter of seconds. All she had to do was say the chant, charge the necessary energy, activate it with her blood, and the Trumpet would be gone.
"When you blow it, the earth will begin to shift." Amal was speaking in that rasp, his red gaze focused on the land stretching out around the mountain. "The dead will rise, an army. The angels will come down in the sky and try to stop this, but it will al
ready be started." He turned to the others gathered around the dais. "Call your legions forth now and be prepared to engage. The angels will be weakened as the energy of chaos builds. It will disrupt their power base and we will be able to decimate their numbers."
His red gaze shifted to her. "You do this, witch, you know you will have a place with us. You will belong with us."
"Until one of you decides to try and slit my throat." She picked up the Trumpet, watched the blue light start to coat her hands, her flesh start to singe. "Watch me do this, Amal, and remember." She met his gaze. "You will not give me anything. What I want, I will take for myself."
Mina felt the truth of it boiling through her veins, the blood of a Dark One, of a fifth-generation seawitch, more powerful than any of the previous ones. More powerful than anything standing near her now.
She spat out the unraveling spell, watched the blue light twist, contort and then whip around the Trumpet, retracting like snapped twine. It dissipated, destroying the Dark Ones' containment spell as an afterthought. Light flashed around the instrument, bright enough to drive the other Dark Ones back and envelop her, but she had no fear of it. She had enough darkness boiling through her now to swallow even the Lady's light.
She brought the Trumpet to her lips and blew a single clear note.
It was thunder and music together, the meaning of the word herald. The mountain on which they stood shook, and that shaking spread, rumbling out from the ground, faster, farther, until the vibration was in the sky, all throughout her body, her bones.
What was it they said? Power corrupts. A story told by mothers to frighten children. Told by her mother to frighten her. Now she called all of it to her. Dark Blood roared up inside her in triumph, overwhelming her senses, overwhelming everything.
The dead. As they stirred, she felt them throughout the earth, beneath her feet. As she embraced the flow of the power, it opened channels inside her that had no geographical limit. She sent a thousand tendrils and probes through those channels, all over the Earth so she not only felt the dead stirring in this mountain, but in the cemeteries in Sweden, the Mediterranean, Saigon, the California shore. The skeletal and partially decomposed, the newly dead. Even the beings fossilized in stone, dead long before there were burial grounds. Closing her eyes, she blew the second blast.