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

the first like her we've ever had here. We should touch. Taste. Feeellll." The words drew out as the creature's fangs were exposed, and his eyes turned with malevolence on Dante. His claws cupped his sizeable genitalia. "Many of us. One of you. Why you want her? What you be doing? You have toy and we do not. We take her and give her back when we're done. You always let us do that before."

    AS Alexis woke, she became aware she was in some kind of shallow basin filled with cold, slimy liquid. The metallic, sickening smell drove the first nail of fear into her heart, for she knew it was blood. Opening her eyes, she had a brief impression of gray stone all around before she tried to scramble out of it. She yelped as she hit a shielding that knocked her to her back with a wet splat that soaked her feathers. The basin was a ritual circle. She couldn't shift. She tried, with mounting terror, but she was stuck in her merangel form. On land.
    Her stomach and chest hurt. Looking down, she swallowed another terrified noise as she realized the symbols she'd seen on Dante, and glowing on herself, were now burned into her flesh, explaining the raw pain throbbing there. Her clothes had been shredded during whatever had happened, so she pulled their remnants away from her, so tattered they were only a hindrance to her movements. Where was she? This was no dream. But then, she'd known Dante was real all along, hadn't she? That's why she'd been unable to deny him, deny his pain. He'd used it to trap her, take her wherever this was.
    The air was stifling, heavy. It was difficult to draw air into her lungs, and for a frightening moment, she thought she was somewhere there was no oxygen, no way to breathe with gills or lungs. But realizing she had oxygen was a short-lived relief. There was something wrong here, something draining the energy from her like a punctured gas can. It buzzed in her head like a continuous headache, made her organs strain to do their work. Her heart rate was accelerated, and she didn't think it was only terror. As an empath, she could sense the rightness or wrongness of her surroundings, and this place was extremely wrong. She wasn't meant to be here. No one was supposed to be here.
    Trying to orient herself, she saw she was in a chamber at the top of a round stone tower. The flat and mostly barren landscape outside an open arched window suggested they were high up, perhaps fifty feet or so. Naked black trees were scattered over ground that appeared to be oddly symmetrical areas of fire and dull gray ice. The smell in the air was death, pain . . . suffering. Winged creatures, far distant in the sky, still made her shudder.
    Then her head snapped around at the sibilant voice behind the door. Dante answered from behind a black-draped panel she hadn't yet examined, thinking she was alone. She sloshed around in her macabre bath to face it, but then he was striding from behind the ragged cloth, taking a seat on a large black wooden chair. He ignored her as he called out a command to enter. The door swung open.
    A blast of desolation, hopelessness, fear and torment hit her directly between the eyes. She scrambled for her filters, but it was like using a paper napkin to stop a bullet. Her palms slipped, and she was writhing in that shallow pool of blood again. No, no, no . . .
    She heard their words, saw what they wanted, felt it, but even more terrifying than the threat of violation was being sucked into the abyss of what these things were. There was no escape from it. Once there, she would wander forever, lost, just as she'd remembered from the last dream. A place where babies screamed, but no mother came. She grasped for Anna's image in her mind desperately. Oh, Goddess, help me. Did the Goddess even have sway over this place? How could She? The Goddess, Mother of Earth and connected to life in all ways . . . no. There was no way She had a part of this.
    Holy Mother, she was in the Dark One world. How could she not have