A Mermaid's Ransom by Joey W. Hill Page B

passage taught to her by King Neptune himself, the heart made its final beat, the woman's eyes now empty glass.
    Dante knelt on the other side of her, dipping the cloth in the fresh blood again. With a snarl, Alexis launched herself at him, using the wings to take her up and over the body. Weak as she was, she didn't get the clearance she needed, so she rolled the body like a log against him. But that added to his surprise as she plowed into him.
    She'd never been a violent creature. She'd dutifully learned to protect herself through Jonah's teachings and that self-defense course she'd taken with Clara, but she had no killer instinct. No plan propelled her, no thought of escape, just fury at what she'd seen. Self-revulsion galvanized her attack. Goddess, she'd felt bonded to him, connected. She hated this place, she wanted to go home, she never wanted to dream again. She wanted to bathe for days. She wanted to close her eyes, curl in a ball in her bed, surrounded by her stuffed animals, and not think until all the terrible memories of this place went away. And she never, ever wanted to smell blood again in her life.
    While Dante was much faster and stronger, she had the satisfaction of knocking him on his ass and getting in several swift, if ineffectual, punches in his face, one of which caused his fang to stab his lip and created a flow of blood.
    "Why did you kill her?" she wailed at him. "She didn't do anything to you."
    In a flash of movement he shoved her off him, lifted and slammed her against the stone wall. Several of the slender bones in her right wing broke, crushed beneath her. She snarled in pain, but the adrenaline carried her through it with barely a blink. She bared her teeth. "You're a monster. Mina shouldn't free you. You should be locked in a cage."
    "I am in a cage." He dropped her, so she fell to the stone at his feet, her wings limp around her shoulders like a blanket. Her scales scraped the rough stone. When he stepped back, his crimson eyes were orange and yellow flame, his mouth a hard slash. He pointed at the door. "Those symbols protect you from what's out there. That, and me, are the only things that protect you from what happened to her, and from you dying sooner here than you would otherwise."
    "I'm not going to thank you when you're the one who pulled me over here in the first place," she retorted, blinking back tears. "I would never want you to kill someone."
    "Even to preserve your own life?"
    "I don't have that right. No one has that right."
    A muscle flexed in his jaw. "That's incorrect, Alexis. In your world, lives are taken every day as a choice. Animals, because they cannot fight you. People, in wars, or in self-defense."
    "That's different."
    "Yes, it is." He pinned her with that hard glance. "Here you only live if you kill. You only survive if you kill. You only gain something of your own if you kill . I won't allow them to harm you."
    "What about her?" She looked back at the woman. Because she didn't want to be near him, she dragged herself back across the ground. The woman had blue eyes, like Anna. Like Alexis. "What about her family, where she comes from? Why did you let the Dark Ones hurt her first?"
    "Because there is a balance here," he said flatly. "You were awake to see it. I give them as much as necessary in order to maintain control over them. I may be more powerful than they are, more clever, but if they all turn against me at once, there is little I might do against them. Now be still and let me finish this."
    He resumed his gruesome task, turning his back on her as if she mattered as little as the cooling corpse. A tool for him. Alexis stroked the woman numbly, studying her hard so she didn't have to look at anything else. This will be me soon. Painfully and slowly . . . She didn't know what was more difficult for her mind to process, what he'd just done, or what he knew they'd been doing to her while he'd been caressing and arousing Alexis's flesh.
    "Did you think of her at