Brimstone Seduction Page 17

  Katherine D’Arcy was his. And she would lead him to her sister. They’d both always belonged to him. The bracelets had been a gesture on his part. A mark of favor. But first their mother had spurned him, and now her daughters had betrayed him. They required stronger chains. He would bind them and he would use them, willing or not, to continue his mission.

  It was time to bring his Katarina home.

  Chapter 20

  Grim sat back on his haunches when Severne came out of Katherine’s rooms. But as soon as the door clicked shut, he jumped to his feet and padded away. Severne followed, distracted, but too used to his sidekick’s ways to refuse to follow him now.

  The walls watched man and daemon dog pass. In the distance, the party had become more raucous. It was well after midnight. Champagne had flowed for hours. There would be mischief. There always was. Guests who started here would wind up there. Time would be lost. The hours stretched indistinct. Lovers would find each other in the shadows. Then they would find someone else.

  The masquerade wasn’t the most coveted invitation in Baton Rouge because it was a tame event with safe parameters.

  L’Opéra Severne had centuries of decadent practice.

  The opera house had been betwixt and between for decades. A little too close to hell for comfort. People were drawn to its mystery, lured by its secrets, seduced by truth and lies. But no human being had ever disappeared in its shadows.

  The patrons and guests tonight would enjoy their revelry and return to the real world at dawn without realizing how close they’d danced to the damned.

  Grim came to a halt down a long, dark, doorless hallway Severne had rarely seen. Even on his Brimstone-warmed flesh, goose bumps rose as the temperature dropped. He kept a wary eye on shadows as he leaned down to poke the puddle of crimson velvet and silk Grim snuffled on the ground.

  The pale white mask stared up at him blankly from the cloak’s red folds.

  A lesser man might have jumped in surprise.

  “I should have known it would be the catacombs. I know every other damned inch of this place,” Severne said.

  Grim whined again. This time the sound he made was low and uncertain as if he was afraid of who or what might hear. He padded over to an archway barred by a heavy iron door. The door had been left partially open, and an icy tendril of catacomb air teased eerily across Severne’s face.

  Grim stepped toward the opening.

  “No. Come. If you go down there, you might never return. Even you can get lost, and you know it,” Severne said.

  Baton Rouge was below sea level. What lay beneath the opera house was geographically impossible, but the danger of the twisted caverns and the unnatural labyrinth they formed was very real.

  If Kat’s sister was down there, she hadn’t ventured into the depths alone. His quarry was close. The end of his quest to save his father was so close he could taste it. Trouble was, he could also taste Kat’s lemonade cocktail on his tongue. The memory of her kiss had followed him into the shadows.

  He couldn’t go into the catacombs without preparations.

  For now, he reached out and closed the iron door. The echo of its clanging reverberated for a long time.

  He didn’t hurry away. He stood. He waited. Like Grim, he was standing guard. Closing the door wasn’t enough. But as he looked down at the dog, he noticed that one of Grim’s legs was held at an unusual angle. He wasn’t placing it firmly on the floor.

  Severne ignored the crimson cloak and the mask. Instead, he dropped down beside the hellhound whose whine now had a deeper meaning. Grim whined again. And then again. In all the years they’d hunted together, the hellhound had never been injured.

  Severne hissed when he saw the ugly wound on the dog’s hind leg. A serrated blade had slashed and burned a streak across his hair and flesh. The hellhound’s skin was charred. The wound on his leg was angry and red.

  They’d never had a man-and-his-dog relationship. Grim was no one’s pet. But in his own monstrous way he’d been Severne’s faithful companion for far longer than most men lived.

  Severne reached to pick up the giant hellhound as if he was a Labrador retriever. A warning growl rumbled deep in the animal’s barrel chest, but he allowed Severne to carry him.

  “She told me she saw one of the Order’s priests and I didn’t heed the warning, Grim. I left you to face that threat alone. But you protected her, didn’t you? Did you give worse than you got? Is there anything left of him for me to find?” Severne asked.

  He needed to get the hellhound to safe care, and then he needed to be sure that Katherine wasn’t being stalked by the Order of Samuel under his roof. Brimstone flared in his blood as he imagined Reynard or his minions stalking his halls.

  He was the master of l’Opéra Severne. They would be very sorry if they breached his walls again.

  * * *

  He’d been used to the burn of Brimstone when Grim came into his life. He’d held the giant puppy often, unafraid of his scorching tongue. He’d always considered the hellhound a gift from his father, but he’d known who had really called the pup to come and live with him at the labyrinthine opera house full of danger and deadly shadows.

  Sybil.

  She’d always been there. She’d always been different. A daemon he didn’t have to fear completely or hunt.

  Grim was much heavier than he’d been as a puppy, though even then he’d been the size of a full-grown dog. Now Severne was glad of the discipline that had trained his body to bear the burden of his injured companion. It shook him to the core to see the hellhound brought down. It seemed a foreshadowing of worse losses to come.

  “I feared this might be what all the urgent whispering was about,” Sybil said.

  He came into her sewing room with the ease of familiarity. He hadn’t given Eric to anyone less than his foster mother. A “woman” who had raised him and cared for him as if he’d been her own child.

  “What could have done this to him?” Severne asked.

  Grim growled when he laid him on a high table that Sybil used for completing alterations. She must have cleared it before they arrived. It was spread over with a clean, white swath of cotton cloth to protect it from Grim’s dark blood.

  She’d always known more than most people about what went on at l’Opéra Severne. He’d been taught to ignore the walls. Sybil didn’t ignore them. He opened his ears and heard them now. The urgent whispers she spoke of. They must have alerted Sybil to Grim’s injury.

  “No mortal blade could have done this,” Sybil said. She ignored the hellhound’s growl to lean close and examine the wound.

  “Lucifer’s Army?” Severne asked. He placed his hand on the hellhound’s side. “Grim is better than that. Too fast for them. Too fierce. They can never get close enough to cut him.”

  More growls from Grim rumbled beneath his hand. Either in agreement or because the hellhound wasn’t used to having his ferocious adult dignity infringed upon with so much contact. It had been decades since he’d bestowed fiery puppy kisses on a laughing boy immune to being burned.

  “Not Lucifer’s Army. This cut is corrupt. It festers already. That’s why it isn’t healing. Daemon blades would have cut clean. This was a darker blade. Welded by someone unnatural. Unclean. Evil,” Sybil said.

  “What’s darker than the damned?” Severne asked.

  “Daemons are different, not damned. It’s the Council that corrupts. They want war and conquest. They aren’t satisfied with ruling hell. They want to reclaim Heaven. They corrupt everything they touch,” Sybil said.

  “Including me?” Severne asked.

  “You remain your own man. Like your father before you,” Sybil said. “They cannot corrupt your heart even if they do have a hold on the Brimstone they’ve placed in your blood.”

  She tended Grim’s wound withou
t looking up. But Severne heard the truth in her voice. She loved him like a mother. She had hope for him. Just as his father had before he’d forgotten.

  “He is well. The hydrangeas are blooming,” he said.

  “Blue was always his favorite color,” Sybil said.

  Severne had seen the daemon beside him wear every shade of blue during his lifetime. From cerulean to azure. It had always been a chicken-or-the-egg curiosity for him. Had she worn blue for his father, or had his father loved blue because she always wore it?

  He’d known. He’d always known. She loved him like a son. She also loved his father. But she’d let Levi Severne go. It was as if she had outlived him even though he was still alive.

  “We all live by our promises. By our love. By our wits and our will. By our blood,” Sybil said.

  Severne jumped to stop her, but not in time. She had taken a large pair of fabric shears from a jar on the table. She’d opened them and pressed the blade against her wrist. The move to cut had been hard and fast. There was a flare and then a crimson flood onto Grim’s leg.

  “His own Brimstone wasn’t enough. So I give him mine,” Sybil said.

  The hound cried out but then stilled as if the lava-like liquid soothed instead of burned. Sybil didn’t allow herself to bleed out. She pressed a cloth to the wound, and smoke curled up from it as the Brimstone was absorbed back into her skin.

  “If you had told me, we could have used my Brimstone,” Severne said. He shook in reaction to the injury.

  “You wouldn’t survive the loss of what he needed,” Sybil said. “You are human, Severne. Though you sometimes seem to forget it.”

  Severne moved to wrap the maternal daemon in his arms. She allowed it for several seconds longer than she would have if she hadn’t been weakened. Daemons were not demonstrative with the humans they held in their affections. Or perhaps it was just Sybil who had lived and loved among human daemon hunters for so long that she protected her heart.

  “I promised your father I would watch over you. At the last, when he still knew my name, I promised him I would help you,” Sybil said.

  He would never ask her to help him kill her own kind. But he was grateful that she had saved his oldest friend. And that she’d given him a companion in the first place to ease his lonely existence.

  “Thank you,” Severne said into hair that would never go gray.

  “Different, not damned. Remember that. There may come a time when you need to recall it,” Sybil said.

  * * *

  A long soak, a change into jeans and a T-shirt, and an angry eruption of shoving the white dress into the back corner of her closet helped Kat get a handle on her emotions. She had begged for his touch. He’d obliged. He’d never promised her forever. Or even tomorrow. It hurt, but it shouldn’t have surprised.

  Daemons couldn’t be trusted.

  His touch had been a gift. He’d taken her so easily to climax. But there’s always a price to be paid. That was what terrified her. She’d given him nothing in return, and all she could think about was how badly she wanted to settle that debt.

  Katherine tossed and turned in fitful sleep. When she woke feeling as if she’d had too much champagne even though she’d had only one glass of spiked lemonade, she retrieved her breakfast from the cart at her door and took it to her vanity table.

  L’Opéra Severne was staffed like magic. So many hallways and corridors. Hundreds of people working to keep the singers and musicians at their best for performances. And yet, more often than not, their comings and goings went unremarked and unseen.

  It was only when she lifted a cup of café au lait to her lips that she saw the letters. They sat on her table. The familiar satin sash had been retied into a tighter bow.

  She remembered the unlocked door.

  Who had brought the letters to her while she was at the masquerade?

  Had it been only wishful thinking when she imagined the crimson-cloaked figure behind the crying mask had been her sister?

  She had to look. Quickly she exited her room and checked next door. Nothing had been disturbed. The hint of her sister’s perfume was fainter than before. There was more dust. No crimson cloak on the foot of the bed. No empty-eyed mask propped on the pillows. Kat went back to her own room.

  The letters had been left for her to find, if not by the woman in the crimson cloak, then by someone else. Daemon. Or shadow. Lover or enemy. Or both. She went to the bundle and untied the sash. The satin slid through her fingers and trailed silkily to the floor.

  She opened the first letter, loosening each fold with trembling fingers. What she saw was faded ink written by her mother’s long-dead hand.

  Chapter 21

  My Dearest Daughters,

  I have failed you in so many ways. I didn’t know how much until Ezekiel came into my life. How frightened I’ve been. How failed by my own mother. This is not the legacy I would bequeath to you. I know that now. I know what I must do. Reynard has found me for the last time. He intends to destroy Ezekiel. I must seek help from a man I don’t fully trust. But I do trust Ezekiel in spite of his daemonic nature. We’ve been so wrong. So misled. Daemons aren’t damned. They’re different from us. More different than our human beliefs can describe.

  I can only assure you that Ezekiel loves me as I love him, and he loves both of you although you were fathered by one of the monks who mercilessly hunt his people. No beings that love as fiercely as daemons love can be damned. I won’t believe it.

  Your biological father was as misled as we have been. He cared for us as much as he was able to care once the Order had corrupted his heart.

  Please remember that when you think of him. He was not an evil man, but he followed an evil man, and for that reason and that reason alone he had to die. I will stop Reynard once and for all without help if I have to. Ezekiel doesn’t know what I intend to do. If he did, he would try to stop me and the Order would have him. I can’t distract him from his duty to his people. He’s their leader now. I know it seems a horror for me to be in love with the Prince of Darkness, but I promise you that it isn’t horrible. I’ve seen true darkness in my life. I’ve seen it always in Reynard’s mad eyes.

  Please know, if I fail you yet again, that I also do this for you. I can no longer justify running and hiding. I must make a stand.

  My only consolation in this long, dark life has been my love for you both. You and the music have saved me. When we sing and play, I feel the love of Ezekiel around us. That sustained me for many years.

  But now, I must step boldly into the shadows and meet my fate. If I succeed, we will be free. If I fail, you must continue the fight without me.

  Love always,

  Mother

  Going back in time was messy. Especially when it revealed how others perceived you. Kat read all the letters, not only the final letter meant for her eyes. Her mother’s words to Ezekiel, the daemon she’d loved, described her daughter as quiet, withdrawn, guarded and always alone. Her cello was her only friend.

  It hurt.

  But she’d come to l’Opéra Severne to help Victoria in spite of those things. She was stronger than her mother had known. The true revelation was about her mother’s tragic past.

  She’d loved a daemon, and she’d been forced to let him go. Their father had been one of the monks in the Order of Samuel, but their mother had never loved him. She’d been forced to marry him. Forced to have children the Order could use. She worried that one day they’d be forced to do the same. Ezekiel, in his letters, had promised to rain hell’s fire on the Order’s heads if they tried to hurt them.

  They’d been loved.

  In the great darkness of Anne’s life, having children to resist the Order by her side had been a comfort to her. Time and again she spoke of her love for them in spite of everything.

  They had
never known.

  They’d been told their father had died fighting a daemon to protect their mother. She told a different tale. About how her true love had tried to save her and how he’d killed their father when he wouldn’t let them go.

  Reynard had told them the same daemon had killed their mother, but her last letter revealed that she was going to try to save the love of her life from Reynard and that the obsessed priest might kill her if she got in his way.

  What had Victoria thought of the letters? Had discovering Reynard’s betrayal frightened her into hiding? Had their mother succeeded in saving the daemon she loved?

  The letters raised more questions than they answered, but they also revealed that Anne D’Arcy was braver than Katherine had ever imagined. She prayed that they had that in common.

  Chapter 22

  L’Opéra Severne was muted the next day. Any loud noise drew dark looks from a multitude of people who had overindulged the night before.

  “You understand the twenty-four-hour recovery window now,” Tess said. The cooling gel mask she wore over her eyes was an ironic commentary on the masquerade masks from the night before.

  Kat had joined Tess in the quiet dressing rooms for pedicures. She needed the company, and the mundane beauty ritual was soothing. She’d opted for a deep crimson on her toenails as a shout of hope to a universe determined to throw her one tumultuous twist after another.

  “I saw you dancing with Severne, by the way,” Tess said. Her eyes were closed beneath her mask, but her tone was arch.

  “We did dance. There was...dancing,” Kat said.

  Tess opened her eyes and glanced at Kat sideways. “He terrifies me. I mean, in the most delicious way. But I’m still scared. Be careful there,” she said.

  Kat had a nailbrush full of Scarlet Temptation in her hand, but she knew her friend wasn’t talking about being careful with the bold color.