Brimstone Seduction

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.

The door had been locked, but that fact seemed distant. As if she’d expected the bolt to be nothing to him. She feared him. She feared what his intentions might be. But there was a song in his accent she couldn’t help appreciating. His voice called to something deep inside her, making her fingers itch to play.

All the lamps had been extinguished. The light from an open laptop and the streetlights outside still didn’t fully reveal the daemon’s face, but they did reveal the familiar shape of her cello case in his hand.

He came toward her with no hesitation, completely undaunted by the statue in her hand until he was only inches away...until she could feel his Brimstone heat. Again, the heat wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, in the air-conditioned chill of the unfamiliar house, she could almost lean into Severne’s heat if she allowed herself to be lulled by his song or relieved that she wouldn’t have to fight Reynard to protect the child...yet.

“Judging by body temperature, you’re mistaken about which of us is the flame in that scenario,” Kat said.

She’d never had a conversation with a daemon. It was wrong. Against everything she’d ever been told or taught. The trouble was, it was also exhilarating. Part of her was still all adrenaline from the way the night had played out. She should have been shaky and over it. Ready to hide behind Tchaikovsky and Wagner as safe excitements she could easily handle.

Instead, a part of her wanted to jump off a ledge again with this flaming parachute she’d been given and enjoy the burn all the way down.

Could he sense her exhilaration? How it barely edged out fear? Could he tell she trembled when he moved a little closer?

“I could have taken the boy away from danger,” he said, so close now that the statue pressed between them was even more useless than before. He didn’t make her put it down. He ignored it. As if he knew she wouldn’t give in to fear. As if he expected her to be braver than that.

She would have to be braver, because the real danger was Severne and her reaction to him, and there didn’t seem to be any escape from that.

“I don’t trust Father Reynard, but I don’t trust daemon manipulations, either,” Kat said. “Did you kill him?”

He paused. Hesitated as if her words had stopped him. Maybe she shouldn’t have spoken her suspicions about him and what he was...but the thought disintegrated when he lifted a hand to touch her face.

“No. He isn’t dead. Only slowed down for awhile,” Severne said. “I’m sorry.”

She let him touch her. She didn’t cringe away. As his warm fingers lightly trailed across her skin, Kat suddenly thought of the graceful but deadly way he’d dealt with Reynard in the alley. He was a daemon. It didn’t matter that he had helped her. She wouldn’t trust him. She hadn’t even fully seen him yet in a night of shadows and flickering light...

She could tell his hair was dark. Not whether it was black or brown. His eyes were dark mysteries. They could be any color. They held all his secrets in depths that appeared onyx in the night.

When he leaned down to press his lips to her temple, then to her cheek, then to trail them along her jawline as if to trace her face in the darkness...she didn’t protest. Was he comforting her? His lips were warmer than they should have been. The heat caused a responsive flush to rise on her skin. Her affinity kept her from reacting the way she ordinarily would if a man she’d just met had been so bold. It was a secret pulse between them, heightening a natural flare of chemistry, drawing them closer, sooner, than it should.

“Don’t be sorry,” Kat said. “I think he can’t be killed. He’s like Death himself, a Grim Reaper I can’t escape.”

He was all relaxed grace, taking the statue and placing it on a nearby table. She was all adrenaline and trembling sighs, but when both hands were free, she kept them at her sides. Not pulling him closer. Not pushing him away. Only refusing to hold on with all her might. He warmed her in ways that went beyond mere physical heat. Her usual affinity was magnified by his touch. It rose up and rushed through her veins almost as heated as Brimstone until she had the crazy urge to surrender to it and press herself closer into his arms. She saw it again in her mind, the way he’d braved Reynard’s deadly blade.

Those images held her still for his kiss.

Or did they? Her body mocked her need for an excuse. This—the heat, the masculine aura drawing her in, the night-cloaked scent that clung to his earthy skin and his hair and clothes—wasn’t he enough?

Right now, he was everything.

Because by then his soft, tracing lips had discovered her mouth in the dark, and a more intimate exploration of it had begun—lips, teeth, tongue. So velvety and alive with tremors and gasps and the sudden moist dip of his tongue.

A hot coil unfurled in her abdomen, her nipples peaked and her knees grew weak.

Then Severne pressed the handle of her cello case into her right hand. Her fingers curled around the indentions they’d made over fifteen years of constant companionship to the leather-bound grip.

“Never trust a daemon bearing gifts, Katherine D’Arcy. There’s always a price to be paid,” he murmured into her hair when she slumped loose-limbed and faint against the firm wall of his body.

“No,” she protested. But it was too late. She’d accepted the cello like a long-lost love. The Order warned against communicating with daemons. Hell was structured around a complex system of negotiating. She could feel daemonic power like static in the air as some unspoken bargain physically materialized around them, beginning with her acceptance of her case from his hand.

He lifted her and the cello easily. He cradled her against his chest, but she couldn’t make her body resist or her hand release the cello. He carried her and the instrument upstairs and placed her beside the boy on the bed with the cello case cool and lifeless on the other side.

Then he made the trade.

He picked up the daemon child.

Kat couldn’t move. He was no longer touching her, but his heat had remained, leaving her lethargic and weak.

Somehow she had agreed without meaning to. The cello for the child. The daemonic bargain held her in place. She couldn’t fight its power.

“Come and play for me in Baton Rouge, Katherine. We have more bargains to make. I can help you find your sister,” John Severne said.

“Never trust a daemon,” Kat promised her pillow. She refused to let her tears fall. Or maybe it was daemon manipulations that suspended each perfect droplet on her lashes as Severne walked away.

Chapter 2

He could hear the siren song that sounded when her heart beat, when she inhaled and exhaled. But that wasn’t what called him to her. It was the subtle scent of her, beneath soap, blended with a hint of verbena perfume. Like cotton warmed by the sun, but cooled by the breeze on a spring day, there was a freshness, a goodness to her, untouched by Brimstone.

Untainted.

And she thought he was a daemon.

He settled the boy with the costume matron, Sybil, who had been at l’Opéra Severne almost as long as he had. She’d always appeared as an older woman with that particular blend of sternness and maternal habits that made everyone defer to her in case she should decide to box their ears or swat their behinds. She looked no older than she’d looked the day he’d been ushered into her care when he was about the age of the boy he’d brought from Savannah.

Katherine D’Arcy was wrong.

No surprise that his Brimstone-tainted blood had fooled her. He wasn’t a daemon, but his grandfather had inked a deal with the devil in Severne blood. The Brimstone had come after, scorching their veins with its invasive mark.

He was only an heir to damnation, but Katherine D’Arcy was associated with the Order of Samuel, and in such a woman’s eyes there could be little difference.

Once he’d settled the boy with Sybil, he made his way back to the suite of rooms that made up his apartment several stories below and behind the grand opera stage for which the house was famous. The seemingly endless levels of basement beneath the opera shouldn’t have existed in a city that itself was beneath the flood plain of the mighty Mississippi, but nothing followed natural law here.

The opera house was a universe unto itself, influenced by its damned denizens and masters.

Its gilded mahogany columns and highly polished boards held ground against elaborately carved wainscoting more baroque than anything else you’d find in the river city. The carvings seemed to gambol and change as you passed, often reflecting your own experiences and thoughts back to you as if some long ago sculptor had chiseled out premonitory dreams in a laudanum haze. And all the shadows were draped in heavy layers of black-and-crimson satin and velvet curtains, which in spite of being impeccably maintained always ended up seeming shabby chic in the candlelight.

Time, distance, reality were softened inside l’Opéra, but the softness didn’t mute the cruelty of an eternity in the luxurious chains of candlelit opulence you couldn’t escape.

His rooms were more austere, but still overly filled with the detritus of centuries. His prison was made even more claustrophobic by books and art and textiles from too many years and fears to count.

Resisting the oppression of time had helped to harden him as much as his constant training had.

Only his bedroom reflected his true taste for simplicity. In it, the only furnishings were a large black cypress bed and a matching trunk bound with cracked leather straps and a heavy iron padlock.

He opened the trunk with gloved hands, carefully removing an iron cask. Even with the gloves, the heat of the metal fittings of the cask was uncomfortable to his hands. Without the added protection of the Brimstone in his blood, he would have been horribly burned.

He placed the cask on the hardwood floor, noting the scorch marks from it having been placed there before. The trunk was lined with lead or it would have turned to ash. Good thing his task wouldn’t take long.

He opened the iron lid, a habitual move that was still momentous every single time.

Inside the box, on a bed of coals, lay a rolled parchment. A curl of smoke rose lazily from one end, but there were no flames. He picked it up, ignoring the prickle of burns to his fingertips.

Slowly he unrolled the scroll.

The first names on the list had been marked through years ago. Their glow had faded to smudged black. But the second-to-last name on the list still shone like an ember in his dimly lit bedroom. It brightened even as he watched, and suddenly a line of fire scratched across the name. The blazing line flickered, flared and then went out.

In time, the name of the boy’s mother would fade as the others had before her.

Lavinia.

It would blaze in his mind much longer than that.

This time there was no corresponding pain as a slash of black was added to his scarred forearm like a grim tattoo. He hadn’t actually dispatched Lavinia himself. But there were many more marks from his shoulder down to beyond the crook of his elbow. A torturous tally he couldn’t ignore. One appeared each time he sent a daemon back to hell. Sometimes he wondered if the black marks reached deep, all the way to his heart. Marks that would stay with him forever even after he was free.

There was only one name left on the list.

Michael.

After centuries of damnation’s shackles, he was almost free. More importantly, his father would be free before he died. They’d suffered under the burden of Thomas Severne’s lust for success. The only way they could regain their souls was to hunt down the daemons on the scroll.

A being had to be extremely evil to wind up on hell’s blacklist. Or so he told himself when the nights grew long.

The boy was sleeping. He’d been reassured by the familiar warmth of Brimstone and by Sybil’s welcome. Severne was suddenly fiercely glad the old monk had been the one to dispatch Lavinia. The gladness stung. It was a weakness he couldn’t afford. Not now when his father’s soul was almost within his grasp before it was too late. He had always been as hard as he had to be. He’d grown even harder over time. His father needed him to stay strong.

He’d sent thirty daemons on the list back to hell. Usually a name was enough. Younger daemons were horrible at incognito. They always revealed their secret at the wrong time, in the wrong place. They shared their true name out of passion or pride, and then he was inevitably there to catch them. Because he didn’t rest. He’d watched those thirty daemons consumed by the very fire he feared as a corruption in his own veins. The boy here in his home would be a constant reminder.

Severne allowed the scroll to roll in on itself. He replaced it in the cask and then set the cask back in the trunk.

Only one name left... Michael.

But he might be the one that got away if Severne failed to use Katherine D’Arcy the way he intended. Michael had proved illusive. He was one of the ancient ones. They were much more experienced and discreet and much harder to find.

He rose from the trunk, but stood in the dark for a long time with the glow of the scroll still gleaming behind his eyes. He fingered the network of fine white scars that he’d received over the decades from daemon bites and claws or whatever weapons they could wield against him. Those marks were also reminders. Of what he had done. Of what he still had to do.

Hard.

Katherine’s skin had been perfectly smooth. So very soft to his touch.

He didn’t touch the tally marks. He suspected they’d scorch his fingers as badly as the scroll. If not literally, then figuratively, because of the guilt each mark represented.

She was coming. He could feel her approach, a distant tug on his senses that was both anticipation and... Her lips had been sweet, flavored by a vanilla lip balm and the champagne she’d been given after her performance. He hadn’t had to kiss her to influence her. The Brimstone in his veins gave him heightened powers of persuasion. A touch would have sufficed. He’d tasted her because he’d had to, but he hadn’t expected the taste to linger on his tongue. Most flavors were burned away before he could even enjoy them.

She threatened to soften him. He could feel the seduction of what it would be like to ease into her arms. Instead, she was the one who had to be seduced. He needed her to complete his task and end his imprisonment. The contract Thomas Severne had inked with hell must be fulfilled before Levi Severne died.

He left the bedroom to pass into a room that looked more medieval torture chamber than exercise room. He’d crafted most of the equipment himself to test his limits and push his body to become as iron as it could be though still flesh and bone. He began what would be hours of training with one thought burning in his mind.

When he was finished with Katherine D’Arcy, she would be scarred, as well. His seduction and betrayal would irreparably mark her heart.

Chapter 3

When Kat made it to Baton Rouge after driving the rest of the night and into the next day, she couldn’t shy away from her memories any longer. The city was a blend of modern glass and steel from the present and neo-Gothic architecture from times long past. It wasn’t hard to find the opera house because it sat on Severne Row, a street time had forgotten to touch. While much of Old South Baton Rouge had been claimed by poverty and, later, revitalization, Severne Row had stayed the same for decades.

They’d been to l’Opéra Severne as children accompanying their mother on tour. Even then, the theater was infamous for being devoted to a darkly Gothic version of Gounod’s Faust, its most popular draw. Their mother had been a contralto Marthe for several nights while they’d watched in awe on velveteen seats of pale, faded scarlet.

She pulled up to the theater and parked the nondescript sedan she’d rented with a friend’s help so her name wouldn’t be on the paperwork. Later the rental company would come to claim it. Kat was an old hat at traveling quietly and lightly. She had only a couple of suitcases in the trunk.

She carried them to the side entrance, where Victorian-style signs directed employees away from the main portico. She did pause to look up at the grand porches with their arches and massive stairs. The curving style of the rails was both beautiful and intimidating, oversized to denote the palatial quality of the building they pointed to.

When she moved to the side door, it pressed inward easily, and the shadowed interior sighed a welcome to her travel-weary senses.

The scent of the place evoked sudden visceral memories: swinging her legs clad in white tights, her feet tucked into polished Mary Janes, the scratchiness of her ruffled tulle skirt with its wide satin belt far too fancy for fidgets, and Victoria humming along, lost in rapt enjoyment of their mother’s inspired performance.

She could sense again the hush, the thrill and the music swelling until it claimed her to the marrow of her bones.

That night she’d known she would never sing.

It was the polished maple that called to her, the hollow reverberations coaxed to fill an entire room—lofted cathedral ceiling and all—in spite of humble nylon and steel beginnings.

Dust. Lemon floor polish. Wax and powder. As soon as she breathed the air in the two-hundred-year-old opera house again, she knew she’d missed it. She’d been in thousands of auditoriums, theaters and even more magnificent venues.

But it was the Théâtre de l’Opéra Severne that had shown her the way in which she could hold Reynard at bay.

She’d been fascinated by the orchestra pit, but especially the stringed instruments. The sound and movement of the musicians had transfixed her, and when they had plucked at the strings, they had plucked at her soul.