“Typical man. Tell me one of your dreams…or fantasies.” The question took him by surprise, mainly because he couldn’t remember any from his life other than momentary prurient things about a woman and sex. Something stirred in the mud of his subconscious, but like those shadows that kept flitting in the edges of his vision, he didn’t want to look closely at them. The question…hurt. The other things she’d pulled from him—anger, anxiety, uncertainty and confusion—they had been difficult, but he couldn’t seem to answer this question.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “When you were talking, I thought…it might be nice to be the type of man who deserved to kneel at your feet and put those compresses on.” He stared down at Eden. “I’ll never be that kind of person, will I? Ever. I mean, I want to at this moment, but in a few minutes, I’ll be afraid and then angry. I’ll be angry at you and I won’t know why… I can almost feel it getting ready to start up again. If I can’t… If something like feeling Eden can’t make me good for longer than five minutes, then what…”

“Nathan.” Her touch stilled his sudden desperation.

“You always call me that when you’re going to be kind…or your most cruel.” She nodded, acknowledging it. “Jonathan will never get there because Jonathan is not you. He’s not your soul. Nathan can, because he is your soul. Nathan is braver than Jonathan and knows what he has to do. This is a place for the soul to clean off the disguises we’ve placed upon it. It’s not pretty, it’s not easy. Jonathan is so firmly adhered, you’ve made him into your skin. To become Nathan alone, you’re going to have to skin yourself alive.”

“What I’ve done…” Eliza’s blue tear-filled eyes were in his mind, torturing him even without the presence of the mirrors. Quiet despair took him. Resignation. “She killed herself. Killed herself because of me, three months after I left. I got drunk when I heard, tied one on for a week. Cursed her. Even snuck back into town and pissed on her tombstone, screamed at her.”

Passed out on the grave and woke up with his face stained with a night’s worth of tears and the taste of vomit in his throat.

“I know.”

“Forgiveness isn’t possible, is it?” There was a weight on his heart as he said the words, a weight he was sure would keep him pinned down forever.

“No, it isn’t. Not initially.” Her fingers touched his jaw. Somehow she had the strength he lacked, though he felt as if his head was heavier than the world’s sorrows.

She lifted it, made him meet her gaze. “Redemption is. Payment for your crimes, acceptance of that burden.”

He saw in her eyes that she had walked that path as well.

“When it’s true,” she said quietly, “when the debts have been accepted into your heart and paid, then there is forgiveness.”

“From God?” His lip curled up, half derisive, but he knew it was a mask for hope.

“Yes, from all that is God. From your own soul, which is the part of God that dwells within you. You come home to yourself and to the Great Lord and Lady, whatever name you choose to give Them. You discover what drives the redemption, the justice, the forgiveness. The Constant.”

“What’s that?”

“Love. Faith. They are one, for they’re inseparable.” He swallowed, managed a scoff that came off like a sob. “I don’t have that, do I?”

“I love you. I believe in you.”

“Because we’re soul mates.”

“Yes and no.” She cocked her head. “I don’t think the feeling that soul mates have is a biological imperative we have no control over. I think we’re matched because we chose one another, back when our souls were new. No more than babies, because babies understand everything.”

He swallowed. No one loved him. No one ever had, and he’d done nothing since the realization to make himself more loveable. What could he have done, anyway? He’d started his life with a black mark over him. There’s something wrong with this one. Its mother didn’t want it. Why not throw such an infant on a refuse heap, let it go back to dust unnamed, rather than making him suffer through a life branded with the tearing pain of that knowledge? Perhaps that was the true secret of the tree of good and evil.

Adam’s and Eve’s eyes were opened, and they knew then they would suffer through pain. Their children and children’s children would be subjected to unspeakable evil because their Father truly didn’t give a shit. They’d simply been Play-Doh toys to amuse Him.

He didn’t want the bitterness to overtake him, rob him of this moment. “Please…

Will you say what you just said…one more time?”

She hesitated a moment, enough to warn him that what she was about to do wasn’t necessarily something intended. When she leaned over, she stopped just before she reached his lips and looked into his eyes. “I love you, Nathan. I always will.” Then she kissed him. Not the brief brush he’d stolen from her in the beginning, but a full fusion of their mouths, her lips coaxing open his to tease him with her tongue, make him feel her need as well as his own.

Everything went away. There were no clothes, no piercings, no Hell, nothing. It was like they were back in the Garden again, only there were no forms. Just the feel of it surrounding them, the light of that sword a protective cocoon holding all of it in. No bindings kept his hands from her and yet he found he could not move until his Mistress gently closed her hands on his wrists and brought them to her waist. He touched her skin and more than her skin. He felt her body against his, but at the same time there were no barriers at all, as if his soul simply stepped into the light of hers. The Dona his eyes had seen all the time, the Goth Mistress of Hell with her red lips and dark-rimmed eyes, faded away. The disguise for her soul.

He nearly cried out at the flood of white light that poured into him, surrounded him, held him. It was like that poison ivy she had described, a moment of overwhelming craving for something before it melted into this. Contentment, peace, desire sated forever in nothing more than an embrace, in one kiss. He could almost feel the softness of her wings enfold him, the purity of her so strong he could no longer use vision to see her. He simply closed his eyes and kissed her back, kissed this beautiful spirit who was kissing him. He held her in his hands, held light as substance.

When she broke away and stood back from him, her eyes were wide, almost frightened. She was the Dona he knew physically, but so different. His soul knew her, knew things his rational mind did not understand and was already scrambling to hold, frightened of losing a grasp on them.

We may not have Eden. But we have this.

It was as clear in his head as if she’d spoken it. He saw it in her eyes.

“Dona, you…you’re an ang—”

You’re my soul mate.

He’d seen the movies where the elevator cable gave way, plunging the occupants into screaming terror. Suddenly the Garden was gone, the ground was gone and he dropped, tumbling into darkness. Dona dissipated before his eyes, her mouth open on a cry, perhaps a scream, as he fell…

Chapter Eleven

Cold stone. He was on cold, wet stone. He got to his feet in complete darkness, feeling off balance from the lack of a visual anchor. Dona hadn’t been in control of this.

He’d seen it in her eyes, the fear, the guilt. She’d broken some type of rule. At the thought, suddenly where he was and what was about to happen to him were irrelevant.

“Dona!” He shouted her name. At first he only heard silence. Then he wished for silence.

It was a moaning, like a lonesome wind through a dark forest at night, only there was no wind, no forest. A tide of voices rising in a discordant symphony of despair, the keening punctuated by the occasional shriek of agony. The sound people made when fear overcame every rational thought so all that was left was the unstoppable need to scream.

“Dona!” He roared it, moving forward, stumbling blindly. “She didn’t do anything wrong. It was me, my fault. Leave her alone. Dona, dammit, where are you?” He fell, caught himself with a hand, felt rock stab his palm, but more importantly, he noted his fingers fluttered over nothing. He was on the edge of something and it was from that chasm the wailing was coming. It was far away, but not so far that the despair couldn’t blast him like the heat of a furnace. Everything in him told him to back away, to scramble from that precipice. But Dona could be there. Dona might need him.

Snarling, he charged forward before he could lose his sense of direction. Intending to leap into open space, instead he yelped in surprise when he came up short, rammed hard into a surface like a brick wall that rapped him smartly on the forehead. It made him stagger back, his senses spinning.

“She’s not there. Granted, she cheated there at the end, but since it was a compulsion of her heart, it was not a true deception. She wanted to let you understand your true self, even if for only a moment. I’m not inclined to punish her for that. It was an act of Fate. I suspect that my Lady’s stubborn, meddling and yet usually right Will was also somehow involved. For you see, only your soul mate can bring your soul to the surface with a kiss.”

Nathan blinked to find his surroundings had become illuminated. He was on a cliff top, a pillar of rock surrounded on all sides by an open chasm. The light came from a fire-like glow that emitted from the chasm, as if they floated on a sea of embers.

The voice came from a man squatting on bare feet not more than ten feet from him.

“Man” came to Nathan’s mind only because of His form. While the man rested on His knuckles in a familiar, mundane pose, the energy pulsing from Him was overwhelming, such that Nathan could do no more than obey the compulsion of his trembling legs to fall to his knees.

It was the light he had felt inside Dona, only this was the source, her light like the gift of one of its rays.

The man had pale skin, almost a silk-gray in the light. His long dark hair fell snarled over broad shoulders, the strands tangling in the upper curve of the gray silver-white feathered wings that were half spread, balancing Him, as much a part of His body as a bird’s.