'Tween Heaven and Hell (32 page)

I narrowed my eyes at Nille and, surprisingly, I saw the
beginnings of his movement toward me. I knew that within a breathlessly short
period of time he’d be standing next to me and I reacted. I gathered my magic
quickly and, with a whir of light and sound, I was suddenly teetering on the
edge of the altar. I’m sure if I could have seen my face as I fought for my
balance I would have laughed at the look of shock and surprise there. Apparently
I had gained the ability to shimmer and spaceshift from Dialle. Again came the
clench in my heart that I had to push away.

Nille was standing where I’d been when I looked up. His face
was no longer smug. In fact, the pale blue eyes had narrowed to showcase his
anger. Oh hell. Now I’d pissed off the boogeyman. I realized I still had my
power gathered around me and I decided to expand it, use it as a protection as
I’d done with Rayanne.

Across the room Nille tensed in the first movement of what I
now recognized as a spaceshift and I poured everything into my protective
bubble to hold him off. Almost immediately I felt him hit my protective wall
and instinctively I closed my eyes. His brittle laughter pried them open.

“Your tiny powers are nothing to me, Astra.”

“Oh yeah. Have you seen the lovely Rayanne since she got on
my bad side?”

A flash of anger colored the pale eyes before he could stop
it. Then he shrugged and the cold smile he wore on his face widened. “Surely
you don’t think she was as powerful as me?”

“As I. Always use good grammar when boasting about your
ability to eat an enemy. They’ll take you more seriously.” I gave him a smile
of my own and then shimmered to a spot just behind him.

As soon as my feet hit the ground I dropped the protective
bubble and redirected the power to stab it into him like a psychic sword. It
entered his back between the golden shoulder blades and cut a path through his
flesh with a sizzle and a snap of bone. I saw it plow out of the front of his
chest like a bolt of lightning. He cried out once and then I watched his body
tense and my power was ejected from his body. It flew back toward me. I dove
for the floor just as it whizzed over my head.

The moment I hit the pile of bodies beneath us, I rolled and
flipped back onto my feet. His hand swiped at me but, remembering how he’d
disintegrated the demon that had jumped on me earlier, I had a lot of incentive
to avoid his touch. I sprang upward, achieving a surprising height of more than
ten feet and landed again on the altar. I was instantly aware of a new tingling
sensation rising up into my legs. Magic, like tiny explosions of vigor in my
blood, burst through me and I suddenly felt jittery with power. I realized that
the altar had somehow absorbed an incredible amount of energy and it was making
itself available to me. I grinned. I’m not proud. I’ll take all the help I can
get. Even from a rock.

I was vaguely aware of a pale, fragile corpse lying across
one end of the altar. My senses recognized her before my eyes did. Like the
other royals I’d seen, Queen Kaline’s body appeared to have been sucked
completely dry. I felt a stab of pain looking at her, but I didn’t have time to
think about what it all meant.

Nille strode toward the altar, his golden, muscular arms
lifted above his head. The blue of his chilling eyes throbbed with power and
something else. I didn’t stay around to find out what he had in mind. I
shimmered away and ended up on the ledge above his head with the angels. For a
moment Nille lost track of me. I watched his throbbing, blue eyes ripping the
cavern apart looking for poor little ol’ me. I shivered. It wouldn’t be good
when he found me. He looked royally torqued.

I shrank back into the shadows to think. I knew I had maybe
seconds, not much more. For the first time I realized the ledge was littered
with bodies in addition to the wide-eyed angels.

Myra and the other angels stood in a semicircle around a
dark mound that had probably once been alive. A jolt of cold dread speared
through me as I caught Myra’s eye and I knew. It was Dialle. And the angels
were standing over him protectively.

My eyes swung to Nille and he was no longer standing where I’d
left him. Cold, raw fear crept through my chest but I knew what I had to do. Running
to Dialle, I knelt down beside him. He was lying on his side, crumpled like a
broken rag doll. He wasn’t moving even a little bit but something about his
face gave me hope. I touched his neck and felt nothing. I dropped my face to
his and said a silent prayer that I would feel breath upon my cheeks. Nothing.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nille shimmer to a spot
about ten feet away. Almost instinctively, the angels closed ranks around us
and began to swell with light. A warm nimbus emanated from the encircled angels
and vibrated against my skin. The circle of light was filled with an energy
that was pure power. I realized they had covered us with protection. My eyes
flew to Myra’s and she frowned.

“For the moment he will not breach our protective wall. The
goodness within it would burn his skin like acid. But he is powerful, Astra. He
will not be stopped for long.”

“What should I do?”

Myra shrugged. “That is for you and Dialle to determine.”

It was my turn to frown. Dialle was dead. Wasn’t he? In
desperation I reached up and touched the mating mark at my throat. It began to
throb as I touched it. Almost immediately I felt a shift in my mental drawers. The
merest whisper only. He was so weak. Guilt washed over me. I’d let him down
when he’d needed me. And now he was dead or dying.

Tears ran down my cheeks as I dropped to the ground and
placed my forehead against his, thinking his name with everything I had in me.
Dialle!
I need your help to fight Nille. Don’t leave me…please!

Nothing. I stayed there, pleading with him mentally and then
I sat up in desperation and cried openly. I felt the angels’ eyes on me but I
couldn’t look up at them. It was over. I’d failed. Nille would win.

My hand reached out and brushed a long tangle of silky hair
from Dialle’s face. He was terrifyingly pale. He looked like a cold, porcelain
statue on that dirt floor. So beautiful. So perfect. So cold to the touch.

My hand stopped in mid-caress as I saw, for the first time,
the mark on his neck that matched mine. I stared at the pale, red teardrop and
my heart started to pump again.

I felt adrenaline like fire course through my veins. My
fingers were drawn to touch it. I reached out, placing the tips of two of my
fingers against the mark and felt it immediately warm under my touch.

My mental drawers shifted and static poured through my mind.
Somewhere in the midst of the static was a weak voice. Dialle’s voice. I
strained to understand it. It sounded like he was telling me to touch the mark
he’d made on my own neck. I shook my head. Somehow I knew that, if I did, my
life would change forever. I resisted until I felt him slipping away again and
then I panicked. My eyes dropped to the hand that still clutched the knife in
my lap and I forced my fingers to unwrap from the warm metal. Although I knew
the thing was worthless against my current foe, years of dependence on physical
weapons made me incredibly reluctant to give one up when I found myself in a
dangerous spot. But I dropped it because I had to.

I moved my fingers to hover over the mark on my neck. It was
throbbing wildly now. I wasn’t sure I could touch it. Somehow I knew it would
close the connection between Dialle and me and permanently bind us. It was the
last thing I wanted to do. But my choices had been taken away from me. So I
closed my eyes and touched the mark.

Power exploded between us. Dialle’s body surged into a
sitting position and one of his hands closed painfully around my wrist, holding
us together. His eyes shot open and I was suddenly looking into a pool of ocean
blue that registered calm despite the violence of our joining. His sensual
mouth opened enough so that I could see the tip of his tongue playing at the
sharp, white teeth. His face held the look of a man near orgasm. I’m sure mine
held the look of somebody who needed to change her underwear.

The magic wound through us and around us with ravenous
energy, locking us together physically as well as mentally. Pictures flew
through my mind of things I’d never seen, never experienced. I felt our minds
merging and wondered at the thoughts we shared. Would Dialle view the outlines
of my life as I seemed to be viewing his?

The power, incredibly, was growing. I felt as if a million
volts of electricity poured through my veins. I was burning up from the inside.
My skin felt as if it were being ripped off of my body one small, horrifically
painful piece at a time.

Somehow Dialle and I had become entwined the full length of
our bodies. My arms were wrapped around him, his around me. Each of us had one
leg wrapped around the other’s body so that we formed a perfect path for the
energy to flow through. Our foreheads touched and I could feel his heated
breath against my lips. Our skin felt seared together. I don’t think we could
have separated if we’d wanted to. And, although the joining was painful, I
really didn’t want to. The force of our joining was almost sexual, like nothing
I’d ever felt before.

As the path formed and the bond was completed, our bodies
flew off the ground and hung in the air, twisting manically while the power
tossed us around. It plowed through us as if we had somehow created a pathway
from the spiritual world to the physical world, allowing it to enter and fill
that dim, blood-soaked cavern. It drove back the circle of angels. It drove
everything on the ledge away. On some level I became aware that the cavern
walls were quaking with it. The ledge was breaking away and falling into the
cavern below.

A sudden, hot, bright light filled the cavern and I realized
the power had drilled a hole through the miles of rock above our heads and I
was looking at the sun, feeling it burn the top of my head. It was crazy. It
was wonderful. It was impossible.

Little by little, inch by inch the power eased away from us.
Slowly Dialle and I floated toward the floor, still wrapped tightly together. As
our feet neared the floor his lips met mine and a new kind of explosion ripped
through us. Every pore on my body, every sense I owned, every muscle fiber I
had, responded to his hungry kiss. If the power hadn’t convinced me that Dialle
and I were joined for good, that kiss certainly would have done it.

We may have stayed that way for hours, days, weeks. I don’t
know. I only know that when we surfaced we were surrounded by whirring,
shimmery things and the cavern was bathed in a soft, golden light that had
nothing to do with the encroaching sun.

I pulled away from him guiltily, suddenly ashamed and
embarrassed. Suddenly I wanted to be somewhere, anywhere but in that cavern. Not
a new feeling for me I know but this time it was for totally different reasons.

Dialle was watching me with a knowing look that made me want
to hide. I tried not to look directly at him and ended up searching for my angel
instead.

She floated down beside me, her usual scowl firmly in place.
“You rang?”

“What about Nille?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. He shimmered away when you and
Dialle channeled the power.”

It was my turn to scowl. “He’s gone? Where?”

Dialle’s voice pulled my gaze reluctantly toward his. My
heart leapt in my chest as my brain finally registered the blue eyes. “He has
not left. He is all around us.”

“What the hell does that mean? Why do you dark world types
always talk like you’re stuck in the middle of a bad western wearing eagle
feathers on your foreheads…”

I didn’t get much further than that. As I’d been indulging
in my screaming tantrum—stress always makes me irrationally cranky—I had been
dimly aware of a rumbling sound growing nearer. It seemed to be coming from beneath
the cavern floor. Gradually the rumbling moved from the center of the Earth and
emerged through cracks in the dirt and rock floor beneath our feet. The ground
started to shift and break apart. Myra and Dialle each grabbed one of my hands
and we were suddenly airborne. We shot upward at an impossible rate of speed. Even
at that pace I felt the hole in the cavern closing rapidly around us. The light
of the sun was being reduced by half with every advancing second. Throwing a
panicked look upward, I realized we weren’t going to make it out in time. We
were going to be buried alive.

I was conscious of silvered forms shooting past us and felt
a moment of anger as I assumed they were scurrying through the hole before us,
leaving us to be buried alive. But as we neared the quickly narrowing hole I
realized that the angels had formed a tight circle at the opening and were
holding it open with a ring of power.

We barely made it through the quickly narrowing hole before
it exploded inward. The implosion sucked two of the angels into the hole,
covering them with tons of rock and dirt.

Myra cried out and looked toward the imploding Earth beneath
us with a look of such pain on her face. I followed her gaze and saw a familiar
form disappearing into the crumbling Earth. I sucked in a horrified breath. I
suddenly knew that I would go to my grave picturing Prevara’s terrified face as
she was sucked away.
Killed saving me. Shit. I wasn’t worth it.

I closed my eyes as my feet came to ground far away from the
spot where the Earth still clashed and screamed and sank away. I felt Myra’s
hand drop from mine and I turned to her. “I’m sorry, angel.”

She threw me a scowl that was even more intense than her
usual and shimmered away. I recognized the scowl for what it was. A coping mechanism,
an attempt not to show me how upset she was. I sighed, fighting tears myself.

Dialle grabbed my hand and pulled. My nerves had melded
together into one, big, raw thing and as he pulled at me I snapped. I yanked my
hand away and screamed. “Leave me the hell alone. I’m sick of you pushy,
frunking devils. I’m going to see if I can help.” With that I turned and headed
back toward the cave, where I hoped Emo was still among the living. Maybe the angels
could be saved. Maybe I could dig my way through…