Page 84 of Vampire's Choice
“Why did you bring me here?”
“It felt right for whatever words, whatever truth, you wish to speak to me.” Marcellus glanced at him. Waiting.
“You said you had something to discuss with me first.”
Marcellus raised a brow. “Do you want to play games with me today, Merc? Your vampire would feel better having you near while she recovers.”
Merc pressed his lips together. “What you call games, I view differently.”
“Yes.” Marcellus gazed at him. “Survival behavior. But for a while now, there’s been something going on behind it. Do you trust me enough to show it to me? Come down here. You are giving me a crick in my neck.”
“You could always stand back up.” But Merc dropped to his heels next to him and, emulating Marcellus, he dipped his hands into the water. It wasn’t every day one touched the waters in the Garden of Eden. It tingled over his skin, telegraphing its healing and regenerative properties. Maybe that helped him say the words that had been inside him a while. A wary act of trust.
“For years you have championed me, not just with others, but against myself, when I only wanted to embrace the darkest part of my incubus nature. In the first years, I hoped to do something that would force your hand, make you kill me.”
“That was a difficult time. You almost accomplished it.”
“No,” Merc said. “I don’t think you ever lost sight of who I was. Who I could be. You gave me responsibilities. Opportunities. Lately, you’ve been giving me more of them, things that rely on my angel blood to fulfill them.”
He paused, made himself say it. “The blood no one else thought mattered inside me, because I myself rejected it.”
Marcellus’s gaze flickered. “Demon blood will always try to reject angel blood.”
Merc stiffened, but he knew Marcellus wasn’t insulting that side of him, just acknowledging the dichotomy within Merc. But when he’d fed on Ruth without killing her, responding to her trust and following that path to its natural conclusion, he’d realized he was master of both parts of himself. Something he’d sensed but not really known, not to the level needed. Angel blood, incubus blood, they were all him. He held the upper hand on both. The choices were his.
Maybe they hadn’t always been, but the things Marcellus had cultivated in him, the things Merc had explored himself, had brought him to this moment.
“Why did you agree to be responsible for me, Marcellus?”
Because of his age and power, Marcellus might answer a question or he might not. This time, however, he did.
“Because of Mina, the seawitch, but not for the reasons you think.”
Witch seemed a very limited term for what Mina was. Bonded to an angel herself, her power seemed more demi-goddess in scope. When she’d evaluated Merc in Hell, determining his Fate after he was dragged back there, her bi-colored eyes, one dark blue, one crimson red, saw every shadow in his soul. Under that gaze, he could hear the helpless cries of everyone he’d fed upon as their life was pulled from them. He’d had to see her a couple times since then, but he always hoped it would be the last, no matter that her assessment was why he hadn’t been summarily executed.
If he owed her a thanks, which he grudgingly assumed he did, he’d send her a fruit basket.
Marcellus’s expression was touched with grim humor. “She is not easy to be around. Once, I wanted her dead. She is half Dark Spawn, and the Legion has fought their kind for centuries, seeing nothing redeeming in them, creatures of pure evil. Yet she saved this world, and likely others, not in spite of that blood, but because of the way her own will blended her mermaid blood with it.
“We are far more than our birth. To consider our origins a mistake, rather than accepting them as part of us…we limit our path.”
He gazed at Merc. “Things that come from darkness, they often see and know things that we need, and what they need is someone in their corner. I believe the universe sent me to you for a reason, after I learned my lesson about Mina. But I had to wait to see if you would see it yourself, because accepting that truth is up to you.”
Merc could feel his heart beating in his ears. “I can speak it, Marcellus, but I would ask a favor. That you say what you believe.”
He needed to hear it said by a male…he respected.
Merc saw he had surprised the older angel. They rose to their feet together, and Marcellus faced him with gravity, giving him the rare straight answer. “I believe the angel blood is stronger than your incubus blood. Far stronger. I think it is your core. And would have been from the beginning, if you had not been so shamefully abandoned.”
As Merc stared at him, Marcellus continued. “When you were young, I think the more you gave yourself to the incubus abilities, the less obvious the angel ones were. Angels automatically protect the universe from unbalanced demon influence. Your angel side went dormant because it would not hand your incubus side the arsenal that being an angel would give you.”
“I don’t want to deny my incubus side. It isn’t evil.”
“No, it is not. No more than humans are evil. But it is believed whatever created them came from darkness. It was the Goddess who had compassion and gave humankind Her spark of creation, the fighting chance against the darkness.”
Marcellus’s eyes were even more unfathomable than usual. “When there is time and opportunity for it to make itself known, the will can decide, Merc. And I think, like Mina, time and circumstances have given you that opportunity to determine your full potential and however the Goddess means you to serve. She has been there, too, has she not? Her influence inside you. You can feel the connection to Her.”
When he was alone in one of his perches, listening to the forest, watching the stars in the sky, all the elements pressing against him…yes, he had felt Her. A whisper in his mind, in his heart and soul. At first, it had frightened him, but lately, not so much. When he was with Ruth, tapping into the deep feelings between them… She was there, too.