Buch lesen: «Brimstone Seduction»

Chapter 1

She was used to being followed. Sometimes she lost him. Sometimes she didn’t. It was those times she feared. Father Reynard wasn’t her enemy, but as she cut down the familiar side street that formed an alley between the auditorium and her apartment, she knew what he was to her was more complicated and more frightening than if he was something she could fight.

The Savannah, Georgia, air was muggy in July, and her efforts to evade Reynard had left her damp with a sheen that was more humidity kissing her skin than sweat. But she didn’t pause to set down her cello case so she could mop her forehead with a lace hanky like a flustered Southern belle. Instead, tendrils of her thick chestnut hair curled around her face as strands loosened from the diamanté clips the salon had used when she’d been cool and collected and air-conditioned that morning, preparing for the afternoon’s performance.

She heard his footfalls behind her. She knew his step. Others from his Order often hunted as well, but Reynard considered her his own.

Her faltering steps had brought the sound of his relentless pursuit closer. A desperate instinct to run, to hide, rose up in her chest, squeezing her lungs so that she breathed more quickly than her current exertions required. It was fear, plain and simple and stark.

Because there was no escape.

The soft blanket of gloaming draped the city in a muted haze. The muggy haze had dimmed to purple with the setting of the Georgia sun. In the distance, she could hear the traffic and the hum of people on the sidewalks of the historic district preparing for ghost tours and streetlight-lit carriage rides. But here, on the leftover cobblestones of a distant time, she was alone...except for Father Reynard.

His whistle began as it always did, with a lilting trio of notes that led into song. She recognized it as a Verdi piece she’d played that afternoon. Gooseflesh rose on her arms in spite of the oppressive heat from the summer day trapped in the narrow alley. The whistle meant he had her. It meant there must be a daemon nearby that she’d been drawn to. Her affinity had reliably led Father Reynard right where he most wanted to be. Again.

She did stop then.

Not giving up. Never that. She only paused to brace herself for what might be an ugly, dark and dangerous evening more from the violent monk who dogged her steps than the daemons he hunted. Although there was danger there, too. Certainly.

She was trapped in the middle of a war that would never have a winning side.

Katherine saw the daemon then. A woman. The glow of the horizon narrowly visible at the end of the alley cast her stiff form in stark relief. She stood poised for a fight. Her arms akimbo. Her knees slightly bent. It was going to be one of those times when the daemon didn’t go quietly. This was no hopeless soul longing to be sent back home. Katherine could see determination tense every muscle in the figure she faced.

“A female. Good job, Katarina. It’s so important to banish these before they breed,” Father Reynard said as he came up behind her. She kept her focus on the daemon, but she was totally aware of Reynard’s movements. The same way she would be if she were a hiker who was suddenly forced to skirt a mountain ledge over a steep precipice. Her footing was just as precarious. One wrong move with the deadly daemon hunter and she might be dead herself. She could feel the suck of gravity as if she was on the ledge, inches from death. His steps were slow and steady. Not rushed. He was confident. His voice was already smug with success. She was the one who was in danger. She was the one who might slip and fall.

Kat cringed at the utter contempt Reynard had for the daemon as a living, breathing creature, whether it was human or not. And at his total disregard for her and her disgust for his bloodthirsty quest.

Kat fisted her hands, but the woman leaped before she could decide how best to give her a chance to flee. The alley was too wide, an access point for delivery trucks to service the buildings on either side. She dropped her cello case and jumped but had no chance to keep the hunter and his prey apart. Not when the prey was determined to get around her. Kat was pushed to the side. She slammed against solid brick, and all the air left her lungs in a painful rush.

The daemon attacked Reynard with a fury Kat had never seen.

He was the one with the drawn blade, but Kat was as much a weapon as the bloodstained blade in Reynard’s hand. She didn’t deserve to be bypassed. The daemon should have attacked her first.

The sight of the deadly knife always repelled her. But it was Kat’s ability that had led Reynard and his weapon here. Like deadly magnets with a pull she couldn’t resist, daemons called and called to Katherine.

She was inexorably drawn to daemons, and Father Reynard followed with crimson death across all their throats.

“Stop,” Kat choked out as her own throat empathetically tightened—to the daemon or to Reynard or to the family gift she hadn’t asked to receive.

It was too late. Grizzled and gray, Reynard had fifty years of experience in killing. An extension of his wiry, muscled arm, the long knife gleamed red in the last hurrah of sunset on the horizon. Then it dripped a much darker stain from the daemon’s blood. Kat shuddered and backed away.

It was always the same.

The body went up in flames, consumed from the inside out, eyes and mouth and the gaping wound across the daemon’s throat gone to glowing with an impossible heat of coals in a fiery furnace. It was the freed Brimstone that did it, an otherworldly fuel that flowed through a daemon’s veins. Reynard said it was a little bit of the hell dimension they took with them wherever they roamed.

Kat always forced herself to watch until there were only curls of smoke where a daemon had been, but this time there was a sound discernible beneath Reynard’s triumphant chants.

To the left, behind a Dumpster, there was a shuffle of rubbish and gravel. There was also a sob. A small face peeked from around the refuse container. As the embers died, Kat could see chubby wet cheeks and eyes widened in shock and fear.

By then, the sun was gone and the sky was dark. It was only the glow of the daemon’s banishment that lit the scene. The light flickered and faded, but the daemon’s last dying illumination caused an eerie spotlight on the cowering child.

This time, she wasn’t too slow to react. While Reynard was occupied with ritual, in those few seconds it took for him to finish with one daemon and turn his attention when he realized there was another, Kat was the one who leaped. She wouldn’t let the mother’s last light aid Reynard in his hunt.

The child tried to get away. After all, Kat was part of his mother’s murder. Or so it seemed. So it felt. Regardless of what Reynard said about the daemons rematerializing in their own hellish dimension.

Kat was faster than the child. He was young. No more than five. And the mother’s desperation had transferred itself to Kat’s arms and legs. In those moments, Katherine D’Arcy was fit, fast and nobody’s bloodhound. Not anymore.

She grabbed the reluctant boy. He balked, planting his small feet on the pavement as if he planned to remain a statue in the alley, a fierce little memorial to his mother forever. He wouldn’t run with her. She had to pick him up. She tucked his squirming limbs against her side and bolted, deciding to base jump instead of fearing the fall. She’d never openly defied Reynard. Her grandmother’s fear had been passed to her mother. Her mother’s had been passed to her and her sister, their legacy darkened by his long shadow. His surprise at Kat’s action gave her precious seconds to get away with the child.

But even if she was faster than the small boy, Reynard was faster than her.

She’d long since realized his obsession drove him to superhuman lengths. His madness gave him strength beyond that of a mortal man.

Her only hope was to get back to the crowded street with the boy, where a blade across his throat would be too bold a move even for Father Reynard. The trench coat he wore like a monk’s robes flapped as he ran, great dark wings on either side of his lean body.

He seemed supernaturally unstoppable. As if he would never need rest. Her back. Her arms. Her shoulders. They all screamed under the squirming boy’s weight. Far too mortal in comparison to Reynard. She didn’t look back again.

“Hold still. Hang on. We’ve got to get you away from him,” she said into the boy’s towheaded curls.

The strands smelled like baby shampoo against her face. The simplicity of that impacted her even harder than the sneakers kicking her side. The daemon woman who had attacked Reynard to defend her child had also lovingly washed his hair like any human mother would. Kat couldn’t let Reynard kill him. She couldn’t let the boy die because of her gift.

She heard booted footfalls catching up behind them as she flew from alley to street to sidewalk, trying to get back to the main thoroughfare where people would be.

If the boy had been a few pounds lighter or a few years younger or less panicked in his struggle against her, she might have made it.

“Katarina!” Reynard boomed close behind her. His pet name for her grated on her nerves as always. Now it was a proclamation of her guilt. She had betrayed him.

Resignation softened the muscles in her legs as adrenaline deserted her. She would never beat him in a foot race, even if she wasn’t carrying the child. Her only hope was to reason with a madman. No hope at all. Fortunately, the lack of hope made her more determined to try. Though she stopped to turn and face him and his blade with a pounding heart and ice in her veins, she couldn’t help noting his giddiness was gone. He was raw anger personified now. The guise of his righteous joy had burned away as surely as the daemon’s human form.

The boy had stopped his efforts to wiggle out of her arms. Perhaps between the man who had cut his mother’s throat and the woman who held him, he chose her.

Being the lesser of two evils didn’t seem a triumph at all.

“I won’t let you kill him, Father,” she said.

She held the boy close. She wrapped him tighter in her arms. She could feel the frantic beat of his heart against her chest, an echo to the thud of her own. She placed a hand on the back of his shampoo-scented head and pressed him even closer.

“I banish. I don’t kill, Katarina. You know this. I send them back to hell where they belong,” Reynard said. He stepped nearer. One stride. Katherine took the same stride back and away. He had always refused to call her by the name her mother had given her. It was as if he attempted to erase her true identity and replace it with one he had created.

But she had nowhere to run. She could still hear traffic and people in the distance. So close and yet so far away. The hum of the city mocked her efforts to defy the man who had dogged her steps from the time she could walk.

“So you say. All I’ve ever seen is the blood. The suffering. The pain,” Kat said.

The boy trembled in her arms. At some point, his small arms had twined around her neck.

“They are deadly. They manipulate us with trickery and deceit. Have you forgotten your mother?” Reynard asked.

Her mother had been killed by a daemon. It was true. They were dangerous. Deadly. But so was the human being she faced.

Reynard held his long blade in a steady hand. She could see the muscle and sinew standing out in his right forearm where his coat had fallen away. He was ready to slit the throat of a child...or her throat if she got in his way.

“A daemon killed my mother. But you were using her to hunt him when it happened. Would she be dead if it wasn’t for you?” Katherine asked.

“She would never have been born if it hadn’t been for Samuel. He gave his last breath to resuscitate your grandmother, a stranger he met on a train. He passed his ability to detect daemons hiding among us to your family. And this is the legacy you spurn.” Spittle flew with the accusation, and then several sudden steps brought Reynard much too close.

There was nothing she could do. Her back was pressed to the grungy brick wall. Only decades of faded graffiti would mark her grave if she continued to fight him. She had nowhere to go, but then again, she never had.

“It’s you I spurn, Reynard,” she said.

Slowly she lowered the child to the ground and pushed him behind her legs. Her body was the only shield she had to give. Her cello case had been dropped back where his mother’s smoke still swirled in the air.

“Your sister has evaded me for a long time. Too long. I begin to wonder if she spurned me only to be killed by a daemon, too. Perhaps your family legacy is one of failure,” Reynard said. The glee was back in his voice, lilting his words.

She thought of her cello, of her mother’s and sister’s singing. They had turned to music to buffer the bloody killings and to mute the daemon’s call. Had they failed, after all? Had all the years of practice and performance been for nothing? Her fingers tingled and ached, reminders of how many times she’d played until the tips bled in order to thwart Reynard.

The boy clung to her legs. She could feel the damp of his tears soaking through the chiffon of her concert gown. It was no suit of armor. No barrier to Reynard’s seasoned blade. She was no match for a killer.

When her sister Victoria had flown to Baton Rouge to take the role of Faust’s Marguerite at l’Opéra Severne, she’d told Katherine not to worry. She’d been gone for months, but she’d kept in touch at first. Kat hadn’t heard from her sister in a few weeks, but with rehearsals and the rush of preparing for performances, she’d hoped all was well.

“Give him to me, Katarina. End this. Embrace your legacy. Do not embrace a daemon,” Reynard coaxed, edging closer.

The idea that Reynard might be right about her sister hollowed out her insides until she echoed. Hollow or not, alone or not, she wouldn’t give up. She didn’t have a parachute to count on. She could only jump and try to fly.

“My name is Kat,” she replied, pressing her hand against the boy’s back and lifting her chin. Whether he accepted it or not, she would claim autonomy. She would follow her heart and her instinct to protect the trembling child behind her.

A sound of disgust erupted from Reynard’s lips and he brandished his knife. Would he slice her throat or stab her through her pounding heart?

Either way, if Reynard had to deal with her, it might give the daemon boy a chance to run.

She braced to push the child away, but before Reynard’s blade descended, an eerie mimicry of his earlier whistle began in the alley behind them. It stayed Reynard’s hand and caused Kat’s breath to catch in her throat. The boy against her leg lifted his head and turned his face to see.

There were few streetlights nearby. Most had been busted. Barely mitigated darkness enveloped them. Only one flickering holdout, the ambient light of the city against the sky, and the humid atmosphere gave them illumination to see. It was light pollution, but it mimicked fog. Through its violet haze and the floating of particles that were probably Brimstone ash, a figure stepped toward them.

The whistle and the posture of the man were casual. Exaggerated ease. He must see the confrontation he’d interrupted. He must see a woman and child threatened by a larger, stronger man, but he acted nonchalant, as if he was only out for a stroll. He must see the knife Reynard hadn’t bothered to hide away.

Man?

Kat’s gift wasn’t one of sirens and flashing lights. She was pulled toward daemons. It was subtle. The tingle, the thrill that shivered along her veins as the man approached was probably only shock that he would stroll past Father Reynard with barely a glance in his direction. A daemon wouldn’t dare approach them.

Closer, she could see that the stranger’s tall form was clothed in evening apparel. The flash of white from his shirt contrasted with the inky darkness of his suit or tuxedo. But closer still, she noted his bowtie was undone at his neck and hung on either side of his collar. So easy. So debonair.

It wasn’t until he stopped at her side that she knew she’d been fooled. He wasn’t relaxed. The tension in his body transferred itself to hers when his arm brushed her elbow. Hard. Prepared. Ready.

He might wear formal clothes, but beneath them he was all warrior. Molded body armor would have been more appropriate to the purpose inherent in every flexed muscle and the energy he exerted to hold himself in check.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Reynard asked.

The blade of his knife had dipped. He preferred an audience of one for his performances. Her. And her alone. Or her sister in turn. Their mother and grandmother before that.

“A bystander who finds himself unable to stand by,” the man said.

For her ears alone he added, “I’m John Severne.”

Memories of the opera house in Baton Rouge teased her mind, but she pushed them away.

She had no time for nostalgia. Worry for her sister wound tighter until her insides were pulled like cheap strings on an instrument’s bridge, stretched to the breaking point. One clumsy finger would cause her to snap.

Severne reached for the boy, but she stopped him. It only took one hand on his hard arm, but touching him felt braver than that. Almost as brave as opposing Reynard. His cultured Southern tones seemed as incongruent to him as his evening apparel. Beneath the polish, he was a man to be reckoned with. She couldn’t see his face...only a suggestion of angles and curves, but as he drew his arm back, she felt what it cost him. He forced patience with her interference. A thrill of cool adrenaline rushed down her spine at his stiffness, his anger. It shored up her nerve...barely. The boy trembled against her, not oblivious to the forces at work above his head.

“You are making a mistake,” Reynard growled.

“I would say the same to you,” Severne replied.

Then he pulled Katherine against him. She’d been right about his tension. She could feel the planned action in his body everywhere it touched hers. Muscle. Energy. Strength. And more adrenaline rushed because she was fairly sure the warning in his words, just like his name, had been for her, not Reynard.

He was warning her it was a mistake to resist his help.

But she didn’t snap like the cheap strings she imagined. She held fast. Unbroken.

“Let me take the boy,” he said for her ears alone, the flow of the Seine even more apparent in an intimate whisper than it had been in his louder speech. He had a Southern accent, but it was old-fashioned, formal and touched with a hint of Paris. Clenched teeth and a hardened jaw and the iron of his body against her offset the softness of his accent.

He was no French-kissed delta dream.

He was real. And the potential for danger radiated off him in heated waves.

“Hell, no,” Kat replied.

She finally recognized Brimstone’s fire. She’d felt it only a few times in her twenty-two years. Normally she avoided touching daemons. Pressed close to him, the simmer his body contained couldn’t be ignored. He had seemed so cool and collected in his initial approach. He wasn’t. Beneath the surface, he burned.

Her rescuer was a daemon, and she was damned for sure because she still refused to join forces with Reynard against him.

“We need more time to negotiate,” he said as if they sat at a boardroom table. “I can arrange that.”

She’d seen Reynard fight before, but when the energy she’d sensed in Severne erupted, the ferocity of his clash with her lifelong tormentor took her by surprise.

Reynard was in trouble.

Severne used only his body—fists, feet, arms and legs—but he used them in a graceful dance of martial arts moves meant to be deadly. The tuxedo he wore was revealed inch by inch as his coat was shredded away by Reynard’s blade.

John Severne was in trouble, too.

When a particularly vicious slice cut the fabric away from his muscled chest to reveal a hard, sculpted body, she blinked the sight away, but not before she cringed at the dark rivers of his blood.

After Reynard, there was always the desperate flight and the need to hide again. This time she’d flee for two. For the first time, she imagined what it must have been like for her mother to protect them from the obsessed monk. It had been a lost cause. But she had never stopped trying.

“We have to go,” she said to the boy. The fight was the diversion they needed to get away. She pulled him up into her arms again and ran. He clung to her this time, wrapping his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck, subdued by all he’d seen.

* * *

The absence of her cello made her ache. It wasn’t a missing limb. It was a missing chamber of her heart. There was nothing to be done. She couldn’t go back for it. She had gone to her apartment for a few necessities, but had sought shelter in the house of a friend who was out of town rather than risk Reynard knowing her current address. She moved often. It never mattered.

He always found her eventually.

While the boy slept, she looked up driving directions to Baton Rouge. She couldn’t ignore her concern for Victoria any longer. They’d been out of touch too long, and Reynard’s appearance only confirmed her fear. Urgency pounded in her temples to no avail. She couldn’t fly because she had no papers for the child. He wouldn’t even give her his name. If Reynard defeated the daemon, he would hunt her down. She didn’t have much time to save the daemon boy and find her sister. She’d called Victoria’s phone again and again. The cheery voice mail greeting became more ominous with every repeat. And what of John Severne? Had he ended up with his throat slashed and Brimstone-burned back to wherever he’d come from, or did she need to fear him as well as Reynard?

“Let me take the boy,” he’d said.

But every fiber in her body had resisted. It was her fault Reynard had found the boy’s mother. It was her responsibility to protect him.

The boy had refused to talk, but he’d seemed to understand everything she’d said. He’d also refused to let her out of his sight until he finally fell asleep. His dark lashes against his chubby cheeks gave him an angelic mien against his borrowed pillow. She’d smoothed his soft hair back from his forehead to kiss it, finding the extra warmth beneath his skin pleasant instead of frightening.

After that, the loss of her cello didn’t matter.

She’d curled her legs under her in a nearby armchair, determined to watch over the boy through the night.

But a noise outside interrupted the tea she’d made to calm herself. It had been cooling untouched anyway. She’d been replaying every word Severne had spoken. She’d even closed her eyes to remember the song of his voice, to gauge what was the truth about the daemon—his drawl or the deadly way he’d used his whole body as a weapon. His anger or the way he’d restrained his impatience with her resistance.

At the sound of a step on the front porch, she rose from the chair beside the boy’s bed.

She didn’t know whom she most feared to see.

It was ridiculous to feel gratitude to a stranger for his help when he might have his own daemonic designs on her family. The name Severne couldn’t be a coincidence. She hadn’t heard from her sister since Victoria had gone to the Théâtre de l’Opéra Severne in Louisiana, and Kat had felt the heat from Severne’s Brimstone-tainted blood.

She’d been desperate to defy Reynard, and for the first time she had, openly and with no regret, but she’d been successful only with the stranger’s help.

The shotgun colonial had creaky floors and high-ceilinged rooms. Kat moved along the edge of the hall where the boards were more firmly nailed to diminish the sound of her feet on the floor. The peach chiffon of her soiled and torn gown swirled around her legs. She hadn’t wanted to leave the frightened boy alone long enough to change, and now she padded downstairs on bare feet, pausing only long enough to pick up a bronze statue. It was a cherubic angel.

Her friend’s decor held an irony she was too tired to appreciate.

“Did you know your ability to detect daemons works both ways? They’re drawn to you like moths to a flame,” a familiar voice said. Her memory recalled the exact inflections and the intimate way he drawled certain vowels, low as if in a register she felt more than heard. Musical. His voice was musical.

Severne.

He came through the front foyer painted by shadows and soft light.