A Mermaid's Ransom by Joey W. Hill

invaded her hands, seizing her arms and freezing them in place, even as the fire continued to burn her flesh.
    "Help! Dante, please help me."
    She'd never had a childhood friend who was cruel to her. Never been lost where she hadn't been found by a kind stranger and returned. Even the times she'd brushed too close to those too lost for her to ease, help had been there to draw her from harm. The fear of what might happen to her had always been her parents' fear, never her own.
    Surrounded and nurtured by love and the best in peoples' hearts all her life, it was hard for her to wrap her mind around what this was. A betrayal. And not a minor one. This was major league, oh god-what-have-I-gotten-myself-into betrayal.
    Breath for screaming was snatched from her. The fire roared over her like a blanket covering a corpse. She smelled her own flesh burning, saw the ends of her hair catch fire as her fingers and arms turned whitish blue from cold.
    "Dante, don't do this. Help me." I'm so afraid . . .

    HUMANS were often oblivious to the delicate balance on which their world rested, but angels and other creatures were wired to it, such that a minor shift could be felt in the blood. The feeling that shuddered through the firmament now, shaking Heaven, Hell and the Earth caught in between, brought every angel to a full stop. Particularly one Legion Commander, his hand automatically gripping his sword, fury and fear twisting in his gut.
    At the bottom of the ocean, a mermaid seeking shells to make a necklace for her daughter froze, her heart thudding up in her throat.
    And deep in the Nevada desert, a seawitch who rarely visited the sea anymore erupted out of her porch swing, her gaze narrowed on something no one else could see.
    "Oh, bloody, fucking hell," she snarled.

Five
    DANTE squatted in his locked chamber at the top of the tower. Hidden behind a screen of tattered cloth pieced together, he studied the merangel lying in an unconscious, crumpled heap in the circle of blood. The edges were marked with symbols that would keep her inside of it, but it was the symbols now burned on her flesh from throat to pubis that would keep her invisible and beyond the reach of those attempting to retrieve her.
    By releasing a serum in his back fang during his first blood taking, he'd made it impossible for her to escape him. He could find her, no matter where she was. This time he'd used the second serum, which opened her mind so he could read anything there. He'd heard her voice in his head. I'm afraid. Help me . . .
    He possessed a third serum as well. It had an ethereal blue color to it. Before his mother could teach him more about that one, she'd descended into madness. She'd mumbled that the other two serums had to be administered first, and there'd been something about the third being used to bind someone's soul, but even her memories hadn't been able to offer much more than that.
    As an experiment, he'd tried injecting it into one of his Dark One feedings, when he'd been strong enough to force his meal to await his pleasure, but nothing different really happened, though he'd had a tingling sense something was supposed to. Of course, his mother was long dead, so vampire peculiarities weren't something he could explore, except in the sketchy memories she'd left implanted in his mind. Those, along with the windows provided by the rifts before the seawitch had closed them, had helped him understand many things about the blue and green world that should have been his home.
    It was this world he'd had to survive, however. His Dark One half had helped with that, but the cunning, speed and strength of his vampire blood had brought him to this point. He hadn't needed whatever that third mark did. And until now, he'd had no interest in binding someone's soul to him. He wasn't even certain if Dark Ones had souls, which might explain why it hadn't worked.
    As Alexis moaned and turned over, her bloodstreaked face damp with sweat and tears, his thoughts