The enchanted spring David had mentioned when he and Mina first came here had seen frequent use these past weeks. Mina loved the hot water, enjoyed swimming in it with him, the twining of their bare bodies together, her ability to shift to mermaid form if she wished, but not have the problems with the cold-water environment in which she'd used to live.
It was also the perfect environment for a mermaid mother's birth. But when Anna had to release her so they could move single file down the stairs to the cellar, she could see the worry in Jonah's face.
Mina knew as well as Anna that, as bad as the curse's trait of taking a daughter of Arianne's life at twenty-one seemed, the worst part of the curse was when the new daughter was born. Every generation was born with diabolically self-destructive magical abilities that cut the infant off from normal contact. In a way, it made dying at twenty-one a kindness, though Mina was sure only someone with Dark One blood might see it that way. Fortunately, Mina's decision as a nine-year-old had saved Anna that one burden.
The mother would be worried for her child, while Mina knew Jonah's worry was for both. If Anna made it a few more months, to the age of twenty-two, they would know the events of the Canyon Battle had broken the curse, but the key to the death of the daughter of Arianne had always been that it came shortly after she had the next daughter.
Mina thought of a world without Anna in it and could understand the shadows around Jonah's eyes, the tautness of his mouth as he waded into the spring with her, held her an extra moment before he lowered her to the rock shelf. Anna's fingers lingered on the bracelet Jonah wore, the one made of her hair. Jonah's reminder of why he fought, of why he'd chosen life over death, good over evil. For her.
"Do you know how to do this?" David murmured in her ear, his body a reassuring brush against her back. He hadn't put his T-shirt back on, of course, and she was grateful for the distracting heat of his muscled flesh.
"My mother taught me, but no one ever came to me for it. Don't worry. Raphael's on his way. And I have extraordinary powers, right? What's the birth of one little baby?"
That angel better be here any minute, she added mentally.
"Mina?"
When Mina moved into the water toward Anna, she changed to her mermaid form to give her more stability against the current. The expectant mother had her hand outstretched again, and Mina found herself taking it once more.
"When I was born," Anna said steadily, holding her gaze, "it was you who saved me. I know this was horrible of me, because it could bring back such terrible memories for you. But then again, I thought it could be a new beginning. Or bring a close to it. Did I offend you?"
"No."
Anna nodded, relief easing her features. "Can you check anything now?"
Mina had to wait a moment for Jonah to shift to the other side of Anna. The commander wasn't letting go of her for long; that was certain. Mina laid her hand on Anna's distended stomach, noting the purple and blue scales closer to her distended belly were starting to turn a glistening pink, like those at her tail fin.
She closed her eyes. Probing, listening. A faint smile crossed her lips. When she opened her eyes, it was to Anna's amazed expression. "I've never seen you smile. Mina, you're beautiful."
"Yes, I am. I didn't have any choice."
David coughed over a chuckle and Anna's eyes sparkled. "Is it so bad?"
"No, but that's because David treats me the same. I like that. I need that." Mina glanced down significantly. "Except he can't really hide the fact that he's happier about..."
"Breasts." Anna rolled her eyes. "Males are so predictable."
David snorted. "I noticed she didn't tell Raphael not to expend the energy to restore certain of my parts."
"Well, I had to have some use for you."
The commander managed a half smile, but Mina saw that the worry in his expression didn't abate, though he managed a reassuring look when his mate's attention turned briefly to him. Then another contraction arrived. Anna gripped one of Mina's hands again, breathing through it.
"Heavens, this hurts a little bit," she managed to pant.
"You're going to be fine," Mina said. And she made herself change the arrangement of their hands so hers were around Anna's now. "I'm here. Jonah and David are here. We're all going to take care of you. And your baby."
"Okay," Anna said. As she kept her gaze on the seawitch, Mina didn't need any special powers to read what was there. Anna was a little scared, but she wasn't going to show it, not for the world. She wouldn't add any worry to her mate right now. "What did you feel, when you touched me and smiled?"
"I saw your baby," Mina said. "And she felt me, responded to my touch, so she has some ability already."
"What about the curse?"
"I don't feel anything." But before Anna's smile could blind them all, Mina added shortly, "I won't know for certain until she's outside the womb. But don't worry about that now. You just concentrate on getting her out."
Raphael arrived then, and when Mina would have moved back, Anna wanted her close, demanded it, so Mina moved to her head, where it lay against the curve of Jonah's muscular arm, the water lapping just under her breasts.
As Raphael examined her, Anna kept her attention on Mina's face, only about two feet between them. Reaching up abruptly, she touched Mina's earlobe. "You're wearing that dolphin earring I gave you."
"I've always worn it." It wasn't so hard to admit it now, the tiny bauble she'd kept hidden on her unscarred side, disguised beneath her hair. She reasoned it was a good test of her shields when Anna's smile nearly blinded her. Her soft sheen of tears would have sent an army galloping happily to their deaths if it would restore her happiness.
"We've beaten the odds, again and again, both of us," Anna said. "We'll do it again. I know I'm being a bit of a coward," she added, her voice lowering as if no one else were there. "But all I could think was you had to be here. And not just for that. You're my friend, Mina. My true friend."
Mina briefly met Jonah's gaze and then shifted back to Anna. "You know I don't know how to be a friend."
"You don't have to. You are." Anna's violet eyes held hers, steady. "You think that I don't know? You think I didn't pump David for information?"
When she reached up, Mina found her hand taken again. This time she found herself squeezing back, hard, and it wasn't because of the labor pain. It was a shared something Mina couldn't define, the thing that had always lain between the two of them. Not between the daughter of Arianne and the seawitch, but between Mina and Anna. Something she realized she valued.
A light smile played on Anna's lips now. "It's actually really easy to get David to talk. He's so in love with you. And you know, maybe we're not so different, the dark and light thing. I do think about murdering Jonah about once a week."
"You do not," Jonah objected.
"I do, too. You're overbearing and stubborn most of the time, but I love you anyway. And now you'll have someone else to be overprotective about."
"He'll have a whole battalion assigned to her all the time," David observed while Raphael hid a smile.
"Keep it up, and I'll make you the head of that detail." But then Jonah's gaze softened on his wife as she worked through another contraction. "All right?"
She nodded and lifted her chin, which he responded to by leaning forward and taking her lips in a long kiss, while she put her hand up to stroke through his hair. "It's going to be okay," she murmured against his lips, then broke the kiss to smile at a discomfited Mina.
"You can't make a joke out of the Dark Ones."
Anna sobered. "How can we do anything else, with the way our lives have been? I'm about to have a baby." A fierceness came into the expectant mother's face. "She is going to be happy and safe, because I just won't tolerate any other possibility. And you, you and David have each other now, you see? Someone loves you and is watching out for you."
"Putting up with her," David added. Mina shifted a narrow gaze to him.
"He's an idiot," s
he retorted.
"An idiot over you," Anna laughed.
"Shut up and have this kid already. I have things to do." Mina aimed her attention at Jonah. "You may not have noticed, but he has his wings back. So he's coming back to you. To the Legion."
Jonah blinked. Did a double take. "I'm thinking about it," David amended. "I've not decided on it yet."
"Your place will be there," Jonah said at last, giving an assessing, thoughtful glance to the bicolored wings.
"It's hard sometimes, worrying about them fighting. But it's what they do, isn't it?" Mina could tell Anna was trying not to look at Raphael's sober expression and worry. "And I suspect before long, you'll be helping them fight in some way. There are big plans in the universe for you, I think. Oh, here comes another."
Raphael took over the conversation then, thankfully, and Mina moved to Anna's opposite side as Jonah took a place on an underwater rock ledge, holding Anna in the cradle of his embrace to help her push, breathe and follow the healer's instruction.
As the birthing process happened, Mina let her gaze pass over them. Jonah, so absorbed in his wife, sharing every pain with her, every smile. Raphael, calm and capable but in his element, knowing just what to do, thank the Goddess for him.
And David. Just behind her in the water, his hand on the small of her back, a reassuring touch. It was an amazing moment, for her mind could not help but go back to the birth of Anna so long ago, the terrible chain of events it unleashed, but which somehow had led to this, a very different moment.
"Don't let your head get all big about that comment," David murmured, his hand on her hip. "I'm not a complete idiot about you. You can be a terrible pain in the ass. And I have thought about murdering you in your sleep."
She turned her face to his throat. "Anna defines that as love, I think."
"Loving Jonah, for sure," he said. He pressed a kiss to her temple, but then they shared a collective gasp as the merchild slid into the water in a burst of loosened scales that spun away like coins sparkling in the water.
Raphael caught her deftly, holding her beneath the water's surface. Mina knew a merinfant took additional moments to orient its gills and lungs, so they couldn't breathe above water for the first few moments. The healing angel made use of the time to clean off the afterbirth, clean out the nostrils and mouth. Since Jonah was still holding his wife, Raphael looked to Mina. "I think she wanted you to hold her first."
Mina nodded. Conscious of the anxious gaze of a mother and the tension of a father, she slid her hands beneath the small body, still attached to her mother by the umbilical cord. Something soft and downy pressed into her palms, and she realized she was feeling tiny fledgling wings. Gods. A merangel. As she looked down, the baby's blue eyes opened, stared at her.
She couldn't help it. Not knowing the how or why, tears began spilling down her cheeks. David was holding her shoulders, steadying her, giving her the love that was so easy to him, so precious to her.
"All right, then. Let's take her up." Raphael, rather than taking her away, put his hands beneath Mina's and together they brought the baby up. Blinking through her tears, Mina focused, focused hard. She didn't find the trace of dark shadowing that had been the sigil of the self-destructive magic within every daughter of Arianne. It just... wasn't there. She shifted her glance to Anna's white face, shook her head.
"She'll be a shifter, like you, but whatever magical ability she'll have will be pure. And learned." She swallowed, wondering why her voice was trembling, why she was willing to offer hope, which she'd never believed in before. "It's a very good sign the curse is broken."
"Oh. Oh, thank the Goddess." Anna's face began streaming as Jonah's arms closed over her, his face pressed into her neck as she slid her fingers into his hair and tightened fiercely, the two of them taking the hope she offered and making it part of the love they already shared.
While they did that, Raphael guided Mina to lay the child on Anna's breast. Even the Prime Legion Commander looked somewhat choked up as they released each other to greet their daughter for the first time. He touched her tiny hand with one enormous finger.
Anna looked at Mina again. "If the curse is truly broken, then it would be broken for you as well. You no longer are bound to protect me."
Mina shrugged. "And a great deal of trouble you've been. I gladly turn you over to Jonah."
But when Anna smiled, lowering her attention to her daughter, Mina looked at the two of them, and knew Anna was wrong. "You looked after me, with no curse to compel you to do it," she said slowly. "You made sure Jonah sent David to me. You visited me, wouldn't let me be, even knowing all the time what I was." When Anna raised her gaze, Mina locked onto it with her own. "You assume that curse has ever been able to tell me what to do. I'll protect you if I want to, and you can't stop me."
The mermaid princess smiled again, the type of smile that made Mina look away, but not before she saw a look on Jonah's face that she was sure she misinterpreted, since it gave her the alarming sense he might reach over and embrace her in a flood of new father sentiment. She dropped back behind David, quickly, saving them both.
Thankfully, he shifted that look toward her angel. "Lieutenant, will you cut the cord?"
David started, then nodded. "I would be honored, my lord."
Out of habit, he always wore at least one of his daggers. When he drew it, Mina shifted so they were side by side. Anna lifted the baby and extended her again. "Hold her while he does it, Mina."
As Mina took the small body, and David bent over her, Anna spoke again. "We want you to be her godparents."
As one, David and Mina looked up.
"Jonah," David spoke, his voice thick with emotion. And Mina, wondering at more tears coming from her eyes, thought that between her and Anna, they'd be affecting the water level in the spring soon.
"And promise me, if something happens-" Anna continued.
"It won't." This came, adamantly, from three voices. Jonah, David and Mina at once, making Anna blink away renewed moisture, but she lifted her chin resolutely. "I want to believe it won't. But if it does, promise you'll step in, be her mother, Mina. I know you think you can't, but you can. You and David can, together. I know it. Promise."
Mina looked back down at the tiny infant with huge blue eyes. Her mermaid tail had the coloring of Anna's. But she had a dark mop of hair already, her father's. As well as the little wings. Mermaid and angel.
There was nothing more pure than a child, so she remembered to up the strength of her shields as something filled her heart to bursting. Was this love? Perhaps it was. Stripping yourself bare, willing to take the chance that you would hurt someone by trying to take care of them, because the alternative, indifference, was worse.
Still holding that tiny, squirming creature, she watched David capably sever the cord between mother and child under Raphael's guidance. Those beautiful hands, that serious expression, the core tranquility in those warm brown eyes. As she looked into his face, she found she might have the courage to believe it was true and real. And say to him what she never had.
"I love you, too."
He raised his head, staring at her face with such raw emotion, she couldn't handle it. She looked back down at the baby, and when she did, the baby scrunched up her face and made her first attempt at a Jonah-intimidation stare. It was so like him, she couldn't help it. She laughed.
David couldn't breathe. So overwhelmed by the gift of her words, her joyous laugh made this moment everything he could ever want.
And because his seawitch was a young Goddess, as she laughed, the water in which they were resting started to sparkle, the blue of a Caribbean sea spreading across it. White water lilies appeared, scattering all around them, delighting the infant and her new parents.
"Yes," Mina said, encompassing them all in her mysterious, bicolored gaze. "We'd be honored to be her godparents."
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (US
A) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,
South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright (c) 2009 by Joey W. Hill.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form
without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in
violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
BERKLEY(r) SENSATION and the "B" design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Sensation trade paperback edition / January 2009
eISBN: 978-1-440-66032-0
An application to register this book for cataloging has been submitted to the Library of Congress.