Angela Knight - Over The Moon

"Then I had not seen it before. I have only seen your fearlessness, your great heart." He turned me in his arms, peered deep into me with his sharp falcon's eyes. He was a gyrfalcon in his other form, and keenness of sight all the way down into another's soul was one of his gifts.

"You doubt yourself," he said with soft amazement, "when you never have before."

"I'd never failed before. But I failed with you. I couldn't heal you when you were dying. And Beldar smells much worse than you did even near the end, weeks later, when you were rotting away from the silver poisoning you from within. What happens if I fail with him, too?"

"You did not fail with me," Gryphon said softly. "You simply found another way to save me. If you cannot heal him with your power, we will find another way with him as well."

His trust humbled me. But his words made me think, gave me an idea. One I didn't like but had no choice but to pursue. Looking into Gryphon's beautiful eyes, this man, this miracle whom I loved so much… it was the hardest thing to be the Queen that they called me, and ask what I asked next of him.

I took a deep choking breath and made myself do it. "Gryphon, you've interacted the most with the demon dead. Are the most knowledgeable about them among us. I… I must ask you to search for Lucinda. Perhaps the demon dead princess will know how to heal Beldar. I'll do my best to heal him, but in case I can't… Take Chami with you and try to find her, please. For me. For all of us."

Gryphon brought my hand up, and pressed a gentle kiss to the back of my fingers. "Of course. I shall go do as you ask." He strode to the door, Chami beside him, and I watched them, feeling a terrible knot of worry and fear twist my stomach as I sent them out into danger.

"Be careful," I called out to them because I could not stop myself. "If you cannot… if the hellhound is with her… Don't let yourselves be hurt. Come back to me safe and whole, and as you said, we will find another way."

Gryphon smiled, a tender curve of his lips. "As my Queen commands." And then he and Chami were gone. Only Amber remained. Amber, me, and a dying Monère warrior bitten by a beast from Hell.

I took one last deep breath of cool night air and walked over to Beldar, eased him out of his long coat. Then, kneeling before him, I began unbuttoning his shirt. It was stained on the right side by a dark wet substance—the source of the foul stench.

"I've dreamed of this," Beldar said, his mouth quirked up in a weak smile. "You kneeling in front of me, your hands touching me. Of course, I hadn't imagined myself in quite this much pain."

"I, no doubt, was the one in pain," I said tartly, a hard glint entering my eyes.

"Ouch." He gave me a rueful smile. "Still don't forgive me for when we first met."

"When we first met, Beldar, you were going to rape me. No, I do not forgive you. You would have taken me without a qualm, wearing that pleasant smile that even now graces your lips."

"Ah, but I would have thanked you afterward," he said like the charming bastard he was, grinning with a shadow of his old charisma.

While it was true I hadn't forgotten, would never forget, I also wasn't as mad as I pretended to be. We'd been intruders, Gryphon and I, stealing into Mona Sera's dwelling. And when Beldar had pounced on me, it had actually been in an attempt to save Amber from their Queen's wrath. Amber had refused to rape me, so Beldar was going to do so in his stead. Twisted, and yet still gallant in a perverse way.

And so, even though my fear of that time was still a sharp memory within me, my hands were gentle as I pushed open his shirt… and gasped. Not a smart thing to do because it drew more of that terrible smell into my lungs.

He'd been bitten on the right side, just below the ribs. Terrible ripping tears that had turned his flesh into jagged raw meat with deep gouging grooves. And yet that wasn't what made me gasp. It was the color of his skin surrounding that awful bite that filled me with such revulsion.

Blackness had seeped malevolently beneath the surface of his white skin, swirling, spreading slowly in a sluggish creeping advance even as I watched, like a dark hand of corruption moving insidiously within him. Like an evil hand of death, despoiling the clean flesh it touched, changing it into putrid mush.

It had spread across his entire abdomen and was moving up his chest. The blackish discharge oozed from the hole in his side like fecal drainage, making the nurse in me wonder if his bowels had been perforated. But only for a moment. The Monère part of me that could smell him knew that it wasn't stool that leaked out his side but rotten, decaying flesh.

"Merciful Light. It looks even worse than it feels," Beldar said faintly. "And it feels really, really bad." A painful shudder rippled through him.

A sharply indrawn breath turned me to Amber, to find him kneeling beside us. Wetness glistened his eyes as he gazed upon the horror that was Beldar. Any doubts about whether Amber cared for this man ceased to be as I looked into those deep sorrowful eyes. Yes, Amber cared. He cared deeply.

"Do not fear, Beldar," Amber murmured. "Mona Lisa shall aid you."

The total faith I heard in Amber's words shook me. How could he believe in me like that? Completely, with such absolute trust?

Beldar's face suddenly twisted. "Oh, Goddess!" he cried, as another agonizing wave of pain wracked his body, and the corrupting darkness crept further up him. "Hurry, please," he gasped, fear wild in his eyes. "If you are going to try and save me, do so quickly while there is yet something to salvage."

I gazed at him helplessly for a moment. With his fear echoing within me, desire was the farthest thing I felt. Then a wonderful calm stole over me, that stillness that sometimes came upon me before a battle, when I knew there was nothing else to do but go forward. The doubt, the unusual hesitance in me faded away, disappeared as I realized there was no one else to help him. Only me. We no longer had time to doubt and worry. Only act. And I knew what I wished to do.

My right hand came up to cover the ravaged side of him, to barely touch the ruined surface gently. Putrid slime wet my hand, coated it. But it was the pain deeper within that decay that called forth my own power to the fore, pulling it from the center of me. It flowed up my body, and washed down my arms and out through my hand in a powerful rush. The Goddess's Tears embedded in my palm tingled and warmed, reverberating my hand as that energy spilled down into his wounds, taking away his pain, balming it like a cool wind as it searched and assessed and found that the damage within him was deep and malignant, frighteningly so.

"Oh, my," Beldar breathed, turning wondrous eyes to me. "You took away the pain."

"Only temporarily. And only the pain. I cannot heal you that way."

"I know," he whispered. "You heal with sex." And with the pain gone, the look in his eyes became more heated, more male.

I shook my head. "No intercourse, Beldar. Amber will be the one in my body, bringing me as I bring you."

"No sex?" he said, pained. "I'm dying, Mona Lisa, truly dying. But you are killing me even more."

I touched his sweat-dampened face. "You are not mine, Beldar. I must return you. I would not be doing you a favor returning you more powerful than you came to me. You walk the line already with Mona Sera. I do not wish to be the one to tip you over so that she feels threatened, so that she feels she has to destroy you."

He froze under my hand in that unnatural stillness the Monère were capable of. And I did not know if it was in fear, or because he was not used to a woman's gentle touch, making me wonder how long it had been since anyone had touched him in kindness, in tenderness?

"You think optimistically," Beldar said quietly. "In terms of a future when I do not know if I truly have one. When I saw you that first time with Amber, there on the dungeon floor as you tried to save him, both of your bodies aglow, filled with our moon's marvelous light, I thought then that if Amber were to die, being with you, being in you like that, would be a wonderful way to go."