Brimstone Bride

by Barbara J. Hancock

  He remembered one failed escape more vividly than all the rest. That morning so long ago he’d breathed the fresh air deeply into lungs that were weakened from a long, damp winter. He’d known he might fail again, but at sixteen he’d been ready to try rather than be buried alive beneath evil zealotry. Malachi hadn’t been able to beat away the memory of his mother’s face or his father’s strict but fair hand. Malachi’s lash was cruel rather than strict. And there was nothing fair about being pressed into an Order of merciless killers.

  The mother’s milk of this mountain orphanage was blood.

  This time he hadn’t escaped alone. He’d carried another, weaker novitiate with him, but Thomas wouldn’t be with him long. Adam sat with the frail younger boy near the flowers while he drew his last breaths. Thomas was only five. He’d never known another life. Spring hadn’t come soon enough to the dark confines of the monk’s conclave. Dampness had settled into the tiny boy’s lungs. He’d never been strong. Even Adam’s sacrifice of most of his winter’s gruel from his own plate hadn’t been enough to strengthen Thomas and help him withstand the chill. Adam’s kindness had probably only prolonged his suffering.

  In the end, hot with fever and dreaming about the sky, Thomas had begged to be taken away from the compound. Adam had heeded his prayers because they echoed the longing in his own heart.

  Every moment outside was a reprieve, even if it meant his suffering would increase once he was dragged back to the Order.

  Adam had held the boy’s hand while he gasped the fresh air. Each pause between gasps became longer and longer. And something had darkened inside Adam. He’d seen so many others come and go. He’d seen and shared their suffering. One more. One more. One more.

  They tracked him down again, of course. He’d stood on the crest of a rise when they came for him, looking toward the south where his parents’ village may as well have been a different world. He hadn’t fought them. The monks who reclaimed him were not boys. They were full-grown men who had embraced the life of the Order. Their flesh was steel. Their hearts burned with hell’s fire. He was no match for them.

  Yet, even when Malachi lashed the skin from his back in punishment, an ember of hope remained kindled in his breast. They hadn’t found Thomas’s body. Adam had hidden it deep in a crevice so Thomas could at least be free of the monks in death. Adam had taken care to be sure that the small body had fallen faceup to the sky.

  One day he would be strong enough, quick enough, smart enough to defeat these men he refused to call his masters. Then he would return to his true home. For now, he endured the lash and, later, the punishing chore of mucking out the filth from the deepest, darkest dungeon beneath the main keep.

  In these tunnels that wound in a seemingly endless maze, wafts of sour air carried with them the defeated moans of the dead and dying. He knew Malachi wanted him to dwell in the atmosphere of stinking defeat so it would permeate his soul. The jailer had laughed when he’d left Adam to his broom. He’d even dropped his heavy iron ring of keys on his chair before he walked out, mocking Adam’s earlier efforts at escape.

  As Adam worked, his rough robe rubbed raw the scars and fresh wounds on his back that spoke of all too frequent beatings. The pain was severe. The memory of the monks as they crushed the wildflowers beneath their feet was worse. He needed flowers to grow unharmed, somehow, somewhere. The thought helped him endure this darkest of hells.

  “The love of your master drips cruelly down your legs, son.” A coherent voice from one of the cells startled him. No one spoke in this place. Ever. Words took energy and effort. By the time prisoners came here, they had nothing left but the basest animal instincts.

  Adam didn’t need the smoking light from flickering torches to see that the wounds on his back bled dirty rivers of blood down both of his bare legs. He could feel their sticky trails. He could smell the metallic bite blended with the disgusting scents of filth and decay around him.

  “Not my master, sir. My captor. Although I’m not in chains, I’m bound like you,” Adam replied.

  He cautiously moved to the bars of the cell until he could see the creature within. Creature, not man, because the torchlight revealed the nightglow eyes of a daemon when its head tilted this way or that. Manlike for sure. A tall, well-made masculine figure with broad shoulders and a proud stance in spite of the manacles and prayer-scribed chains that bound it to the wall. Other than the eyes and obvious strength despite its circumstances, the creature looked like a man and a noble one at that.

  No ordinary man could look so well in these dungeons.

  Adam had grown up around daemons and he knew they had fallen from heaven by choice to rule in hell. He hated the Order, but the very idea of a creature who would choose damnation caused his knees to go to liquid in the being’s presence.

  But even the dark land the daemons claimed and ruled could not be as hellish as this dungeon—Adam’s hell on Earth.

  “You are a novitiate of the Order of Samuel. You wear the robes. You do the work they set you to do,” the daemon noted.

  It moved closer to the bars and Adam didn’t back away, although he did grip his broom tighter until his knuckles showed white beneath grime and dried blood.

  “My mind is my own. My heart is my own,” Adam insisted.

  His body was marked forever by Malachi’s lash. Even now, his blood continued to drip on the floor. The daemon’s eyes flashed as it looked him over from head to toe.

  “Release me and I will free your body from this place to join your heart and mind,” the daemon said.

  In the flickering torchlight, embers, ash and dust sparkled as suddenly suspended motes in the air. Adam had to exert effort to expand his lungs in the thickened atmosphere. His heartbeat slowed.

  “I’ve been warned against such bargains with daemons,” he said.

  The daemon in the cell stepped fully into the light. Though he was smudged with dirt and his long hair was rumpled in clumps, the disarray didn’t seem to touch his proud angular face. Him, not it. Adam could no longer refer to the creature as a thing when he was obviously a man, whether he was human or not.

  The daemon turned his muscular body, clad only in dark leggings and no tunic. The torchlight revealed savage scars on his shoulders, cruel and deep.

  Adam took a step back and a gasp escaped his grimaced lips. The daemon was old. One of the ancients who had actually walked in heaven. The scars on his back revealed where he’d once had wings.

  “My heart and my mind are also my own, in spite of the scars,” the daemon said.

  Adam’s knees were barely supporting his body and his head was light. Surely empathy with a daemon damned him, but his raw back would allow no other response.

  “We are their prisoners, but if you free me from these chains, I will free you from this place,” the daemon promised.

  “Freedom isn’t the only thing I seek. I want to stop them. To make them pay for what they’ve done,” Adam said. The words came from a deep, dark place inside him, darker than the dank dungeon. It was the place he’d discovered while he sat beside Thomas as the tiny boy lay dying.

  The air hardened and thickened even more around him until his chest was compressed by the pressure. The daemon’s chains rattled as he straightened in response to Adam’s proclamation. He might have been shocked. Or he might have given the words the respect of a soldier standing at attention. But when the daemon nodded to affirm that he heard and accepted, his nod was the nod of a king.

  “If you will free me, I will free you. If you serve me, I will help you achieve the justice you seek. You will be bound to me until the Order falls,” the daemon said.

  “Yes,” Adam said. He forced the agreement through petrified lips. “This I pledge.”

  “I accept,” the daemon said.

  The thickened atmosphere held Adam in place for the space of several long mom
ents. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. His heartbeat thudded sluggishly in his ears. He was a statue painted with blood.

  Then all returned to normal around him. Torches flickered. Prisoners moaned. The daemon waited.

  Adam placed the broom against the wall as the daemon watched. He turned and traveled back through the corridors to the jailer’s chair, where the heavy ring of keys waited. He could have chosen a different kind of slavery in that moment. He could have walked away. He could have accepted the life of the Order of Samuel. Instead he chose to barter his soul for freedom and the chance to fight. He couldn’t save Thomas. He couldn’t save himself. But there were countless others he might be able to save. Even if the price was his soul.

  It was in that moment that the deal was really made.

  He didn’t pause.

  He didn’t pray.

  He picked up the keys and carried them back to the daemon’s cell.

  The walk was dark and long, but elsewhere wildflowers struggled up through the snow and parents waited and wept.

  The first key fit the lock on the cell’s door. His heart pounded quickly, no longer sluggish, as he approached the daemon who waited within. Once the chains were removed, the daemon might easily crush the life from him and leave him to rot.

  “A daemon is bound by their bargains as surely as a human. I will stand by my promise,” the daemon said.

  Adam tried key after key. His fingers fumbled beneath the daemon’s fierce stare. How had he felt they had anything in common? He was a grimy, scarred failure of a boy, kidnapped and forced to train as a merciless warrior. While this daemon had once had angelic wings! But he found the right key and opened the manacles, prepared to risk death to be free.

  He wasn’t prepared for the burning agony that suffused his entire body when the chains fell free. He collapsed to his knees, crying out against the fire that claimed his veins until nothing but Brimstone-tainted blood remained.

  “I should have warned you that the irrevocability of a daemon’s word is something every mortal should fear. There are always ramifications and complications to every daemon bargain. The Brimstone mark is only the first of many hardships to come, I’m afraid. A deal with the devil is not something to enter into lightly. But I knew as soon as I saw your face and your bloody scars that you might be able to withstand the burden. Might. We shall see. We shall see,” the daemon said. “You are no longer merely human. You are more. Stronger, better, faster, smarter. Only time will tell if it will be enough to give us victory over the Order of Samuel and the Rogue daemons who use them. The Brimstone will give you time.”

  Adam remembered the daemon picking him up as he’d picked up Thomas that morning. He remembered the Burn of Brimstone searing away the pain on his back, cauterizing his wounds.

  Once free of the sanctified iron, the daemon had carried him out of the compound, too fast for anyone in the Order to stop them. But he could also remember how the struggling wildflowers had gone up in flames as he and the daemon had blazed past, more ferocious and terrible than any spring sun.

  * * *

  Damnation.

  It seared his veins. It fueled his cause and kept him warm at night when he eschewed companionship. Now it was nothing but ash. He’d captured two of the Order’s monks on the estate tonight. Even though he’d swept the area clean before Victoria arrived. They were moths to her flame. Both had Brimstone in their veins because they’d sold themselves to the Rogue sect.

  He stripped off his clothes and tended to minor injuries that wouldn’t need the doctor’s help. Most were so shallow the Brimstone had already cauterized them.

  But his hands shook.

  He wanted to go to her. He’d fought like a fiend to protect her. And he refused to imagine how his daemon masters might be drawn to her. She’d loved one of them. An Ancient One who had actually walked in heaven before he chose to fall to a new autonomous land with Lucifer. They had reigned in hell until the Rogues had overthrown and killed Lucifer. The Rogue sect was made up of younger daemons who resented the fall. They wanted to wage war with heaven and reclaim their “rightful” place in the stars.

  A revolution in hell hadn’t ended well for the Rogues. The Loyalists had reclaimed the throne and set a daemon named Ezekiel on it. A daemon king who considered Victoria D’Arcy his adopted daughter.

  She’d loved one of them. She might love him still.

  Adam could certainly use support from Loyalists to handle the extra influx of monks and daemons that Victoria’s affinity seemed to be drawing to Nightingale Vineyards, but he couldn’t stand the thought of Victoria drawn to Loyalist blood, even as he refused her affinity himself. He recognized the gnawing teeth of jealousy. He couldn’t pretend he was only interested in keeping her safe from harm.

  Damned for a hundred years? He hadn’t known true damnation until now.

  Once he was clean, he stretched out on the bed and replayed every expression, every breath, every sigh, every taste until finally the torture of the present became entwined with the mistakes of his past.

  She’d been hounded by daemons her whole life, but she was still beautiful. The hope and determination in her heart was more powerful than the Brimstone in his.

  It was another mistake, but he reached for the earbuds beside his bed. He’d managed to find an amateur recording of Victoria before she’d arrived. It had been a mere curiosity, easily satisfied by unlimited resources, but it had turned into something more once he’d heard her hum the same song in the garden.

  He stretched out again once he’d tabbed the icon for the song to resume. He’d had it on Repeat for a long time.

  The song had soothed away his nightmares before she’d arrived. Now it fed his dreams.

  Chapter 6

  She should have been content to hide in the cottage and catch her breath after pilfering the keys, but an odd restlessness gripped her after her near miss with Turov in the garden. He’d returned to the house. No doubt he was now sound asleep, having completely forgotten about the kiss. Her affinity didn’t seem to seduce her host as easily as Katherine’s had seduced Severne. Either that or Adam Turov resisted more successfully.

  She should be glad. Her resistance to the pull of his Brimstone was shaky at best.

  When she returned to the cottage, instead of hiding, she used her laptop to chat with Michael and Sybil. She needed to ground herself in the reality of her situation once more. She wasn’t here to seek contentment or romance. Michael was happy to see her. He pressed his chubby hands to the screen and she’d pressed hers against his. He was still too young for conversation. His excited babble had included definite words such as ball and Gim—her son’s name for his ferocious hellhound Grim—but much of what he tried to tell her was indistinguishable syllables.

  Sybil filled in the blanks of how her son was spending his days in the Cape Cod vacation house in Massachusetts, far away from their home in Shreveport, Louisiana. Grim filled the screen behind the boy and his daemon nanny, a hulking black shadow with glowing eyes and gleaming white teeth that shone against his smoky fur.

  As Sybil spoke of sandcastles and swing sets, Grim settled down in the background and Michael settled with him. Her son fell asleep against the hellhound’s flank, using his hell-spawned guardian as a pillow.

  “I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to that,” Victoria told Sybil.

  The smooth-faced daemon nanny was hundreds and hundreds of years old. Older than Severne. Nearly as old as Michael’s daemon father, who had been one of the Ancient Ones who had once had heavenly wings. She looked Victoria’s age, but she spoke like a wise woman with many years of experience under her belt. She’d raised John Severne when his mother died. She’d mothered him for two hundred years while loving his father, knowing that one day John’s father would die and leave her to go on without him.

  “Grim is
the nanny. I just do the cooking and anything else that requires opposable thumbs,” Sybil said.

  Sybil had also been the seamstress at l’Opera Severne for a couple of centuries. No big. The dress she wore was old-fashioned, but lovely. Each stitch perfectly placed. Victoria was certain that Michael’s pants had also been hand-sewed by Sybil.

  “Thank you for keeping him safe. I know you miss the opera house. I hope you’ll be able to return to it soon,” Victoria said. Her sister and brother-in-law had rebuilt the opera house after it burned to the ground. Sybil had been welcomed back to an even more cavernous costume warehouse where she still preferred to use large wheeled iron ladders rather than the electric revolving racks, shelves and bins that Severne had custom-installed.

  “This is a nice vacation. Which I well deserve after a couple of hundred years,” Sybil said.

  “He loves you,” Victoria said. “They love you.” She spoke of Michael, but also of Kat and Severne. It was complicated. Sybil had almost hurt them with her daemon manipulations, but she had acted out of long-standing love and loyalty to Severne’s father and Severne himself.

  “Love is dangerous, Victoria D’Arcy. Remember that. Love requires sacrifice. Sometimes it seems as if it craves our very blood to sustain it,” Sybil said. “Be careful. Be wary. Guard your heart.”

  The daemon woman didn’t know all the details of what Victoria was doing in Sonoma, but it was safe to bet she knew ten times more than she’d been told. Besides her Brimstone blood, her perceptions were heightened by nearly immortal experience.

  “Michael is my heart. You and Grim are guarding him. The one that beats in my chest went cold when Michael’s father died. It’s as worn-out and unused as my scratchy voice,” Victoria said.

  “You’re too young to speak of wearing out,” Sybil scolded.