Brimstone Bride

by Barbara J. Hancock

  When she came around the corner of the path to face the root cellar doors, she stumbled to a halt.

  Elena Turov stood in the moonlight.

  Daemons were real. They spoke of heaven and hell as dimensions that physically existed, not amorphous religious concepts. But encountering a long-dead woman in the eerily glowing garden as moonbeams came and went with the clouds was more than Victoria’s mind could accept. For long moments they stood across from each other—both paused, both gaped, both stared. Victoria shivered because the gaze she met was empty and dark and obviously not that of a living person.

  And then Elena Turov moved to the side. She didn’t speak. She simply pointed at the cellar door. Her arms and hands were porcelain in the moonlight as was her face. She wore a very similar dress to the one Victoria had seen in the picture. It was as gray as if she’d stepped from the black-and-white photograph itself to take a stroll in the garden and point Victoria toward...what? The dead-end cellar where a daemon king who fancied himself her father might drag her to hell?

  Victoria wasn’t sure if she would have been brave or stupid enough to approach the dead woman whether time was running out or not. In the end, she didn’t have to make that decision. Elena slowly faded away. Clouds passed. Light and shadow ruled in quickly alternate moments. And she was gone as if she’d never been standing there in the first place.

  Victoria rushed forward. As much to check for footprints as to follow the dead woman’s gesture, but when she arrived near the cellar door she found something else instead. In the dirt smoothed by the door’s movement, she saw a glint in the pale light. She swept her skirts back out of the way and knelt to pick up a metal object halfway buried in the dust.

  She could feel the shape of it in her palm before the full moon bathed her in its light. A bare patch of sky had finally allowed the moon to shine unimpeded. Victoria opened her clenched fist and a brooch was revealed in the palm of her hand. It glittered darkly, but its form told Vic what colors the gems would be in the daylight—red, gold and green—because it was a firebird she held in her hand.

  Victoria looked around. There was no other evidence that Elena Turov had been here. Maybe her nerves were worse than she had thought. Maybe the brooch had been dropped long ago and only uncovered now after the door had been recently disturbed. Or maybe the ghost of Adam’s mother had left her a gift?

  She’d also pointed Victoria toward the cellar door.

  Victoria placed the brooch in the clutch and took out the keys. In the dark, she fumbled to find the one that would unlock the door, but she finally slid the right one home. Her heartbeat thumped in her ears and she admitted to herself that part of her fumbling was caused by fear that Elena Turov would return. Between her shoulder blades a cold warning seemed to skitter. She imagined Elena’s porcelain fingers, icy and dead, trailing down her spine. Why would she help Victoria to betray her son? Adam Turov was bound to make this delivery of prisoners to the daemon king.

  If Victoria interfered, she broke his promise to the daemon king and endangered his soul, not to mention his life, if the monks banded together to fight him.

  “I’m sorry, Elena. But you understand, don’t you? You understand what it’s like to have the Order of Samuel take your son. You want to help me because you remember that horror,” Victoria said.

  But she was very glad when she was able to open the door and step out of the garden where dancing shadows now all seemed to take the shape of a woman in an old-fashioned dress—pointing with her dead arms.

  Victoria paused long enough to exchange the keys for her cell phone in the clutch and then she continued down the stairs lit by its wavering beam.

  “And here I am again in a dead-end hole in the ground,” she said.

  The time on her phone was less than an hour from midnight. Far too late to rush for the utility shed and drive to the wine caves before midnight. Her affinity had frozen during her encounter with Elena Turov, but now it tingled once more. Surely it was only a residual reaction to the former presence of the daemon king. Yet it urged her toward the back of the cellar where darkness reigned.

  But it wasn’t only darkness she found when she followed the urging of her affinity to the furthest corner of the root cellar. There, behind a floor-to-ceiling shelf surprisingly free of the dust that covered every other surface, she found a stirring of air. She stood in the smudged ball gown illuminated only by her flashlight app glow and felt the tendrils of hair that had escaped around her face move—ever so slightly—as an almost indistinguishable breeze touched the strands. The movement tickled and she shivered. It was a cobweb feeling. A ghostly feeling, as if someone touched her face. But she didn’t cower because almost immediately she understood what the breeze meant.

  Why hadn’t the daemon king followed them out of the cellar that day? He was a solid being. At first she’d thought he might have powers she didn’t fully understand. Maybe he could travel between dimensions without a portal or a gate. She’d thought it possible that he waited for them to leave before he’d climbed the stairs himself. But now the truth dawned on her.

  The cellar had another entrance.

  It didn’t take her long to find the curve in the wall that led to an opening. Nothing but darkness had kept her from seeing it before. She had to feel the air moving and then position herself just right, her light shining at the right angle to reveal an opening. And not just an opening, but a tunnel that stretched into the distance.

  * * *

  Spelunking was not a hobby she would ever enjoy. The weight of the earth all around her and the musty scent of dirt and roots and crawling things was something to endure, not something to seek out for fun. She should be in coveralls with a miner’s hat on her head. She should probably also have a sword or a gun. Or a tank. Instead she had a vintage ball gown, a ring of keys, a firebird pin and a dark path to take.

  Victoria ran. The floor was packed and smooth, her flat slippers slapping against it. Her skirts billowed back from her legs. The slit in her underskirt allowed her to pump her knees high, and her clutch thumped against her hip.

  As she ran, the tunnel narrowed. She didn’t slow down. Soon she realized she was running through tendrils that grew out from the walls. The earth around her was no longer polished. It was alive with roots so close to her sides that they brushed her arms as she passed.

  A thousand acres of roots and she ran through them to save her child.

  He didn’t need roots. He needed her.

  She burst from the tunnel into the wine cave just before midnight. Her phone glowed with numbers that gave her hope. She had time to release the prisoners. If her luck held. Unlike the dining room cave, this cave wasn’t clean and polished. The floor was littered with broken barrels and leaves. The air was as musty and dank as the root cellar she’d left behind.

  But it was illuminated with electric fixtures. Naked bulbs hung from wires in the ceiling and they allowed her to see the prison cells. In long rows, cage-like cells held monks in preparation for the daemon king’s arrival. Many were on their knees with their heads bowed in prayer. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned and I liked it? Victoria thought. Others were holding the bars of their cell with their faces in various stages of anger and denial.

  These were the warrior monks. The ones who hunted. The men who had stalked her all her life so that they could be led to the Loyalist daemons they would condemn to death and worse—eternal imprisonment by the Rogue daemons who wanted a battle with heaven. She’d seen their prison. On the walls of l’Opera Severne, a frieze seemingly carved from solid cherry had held every banished daemon in a horrible sentient stasis. They had been bound and helpless. She’d seen the father of her child on that wall. Forever separated from their love. The Loyalists had been freed from the walls by a fire that burned the opera house to the ground, but it had been too late for Michael’s father. He’d used all his energy to
manifest as an icy shadow to try to fight the Rogues and the Order.

  After the fire, he’d been gone.

  But most of the Loyalist army had survived their imprisonment. They had been freed to follow their new king, Ezekiel, and their sudden great numbers and the surprise attack had given them the advantage to finally defeat the Rogue Council and reclaim rule over the hell dimension.

  She didn’t want to free these evil monks.

  She didn’t want to help Malachi. She didn’t want to betray Adam or help the Rogue daemons. And Ezekiel? Although she felt as if the daemon king had abandoned her and Katherine when they needed him most, she didn’t want to work against all he’d accomplished. Michael’s father would have fought for Ezekiel. He was a Loyalist through and through. He didn’t want a war with heaven.

  She thought of all this as she approached the cells. The monks were too disciplined to call out to her. Perhaps they could see indecisiveness in her movements. But it didn’t stop her from reaching out for the first lock with the firebird keys in her hand.

  “How did you know about the tunnel in the root cellar?” Adam asked.

  Victoria paused with her hand on the lock. She’d yet to insert the first key. The monk looked up from his place on the floor, glancing from her to Adam and back again as he slowly rose to his feet.

  “It’s a long story. You wouldn’t believe it. And it seems cruel to tell,” she whispered. Her voice was throaty and full of emotion. She couldn’t tell him about seeing his mother in the moonlight. Not on her birthday. Not when she had helped Victoria prepare to betray her son.

  “Back away, Victoria. It isn’t safe to get too close. They don’t say much, but they’re like snakes, always coiled to strike,” Adam warned.

  Victoria didn’t need to be told. But she also wasn’t sure she was finished here. Adam may be prepared to stop her, but she was pretty sure she could unlock this cage before he reached her side. The monk would attack Adam, enabling her to open other cages. There would quickly be too many monks for him to fight.

  She would fulfill her mission. Adam would be badly hurt and possibly killed. The trade-off seemed impossible to make. After all, Michael was still safe. He was protected by Sybil and Grim.

  “Stay back,” she repeated Adam’s advice back to him and inserted a key in the lock. The monk came forward another step. “That goes for both of you,” she continued, glaring at the man in the cell.

  “Malachi has sent you,” the monk said.

  Murmurs echoed the dreadful name all around the room.

  Adam visibly paled. Then, in the dimly lit cave, his eyes glinted as his jaw hardened. His vivid eyes went silvery blue and then the irises gleamed with embers of red.

  “You do not want to serve Malachi. He’s the worst devil that ever lived outside hell. Helping him will not help your son,” Adam said. “He asks this of you. Then he’ll ask for more and more and more. Nothing but your blood and your son’s blood will satisfy him and even then not for long,” Adam warned. “Trust me. I know.”

  Her affinity was choking her with song while she stood in the worst moment of her life. When Michael’s father had fought Father Reynard to save her, she’d been holding Michael against her chest. When the opera house burned to the ground, she’d also been holding her baby close, protecting him from the flames while she choked on the acrid smoke. Now again she had to determine the best way to protect Michael, but now there was no obvious route. She couldn’t hold him close. She couldn’t shield him from death and destruction with her own body and soul.

  “Let the daemon king take these men to their just reward. My bargain with him is a dark one, but it serves what’s right. They need to be kept from hunting. You know that. You’ve tried to avoid them for as long as you can remember. They have been stopped and now they must answer for what they’ve done and who they have served,” Adam said.

  He was right. He was only echoing what her own heart felt. The truth of his words thumped loudly in her chest. The monk in the cage saw her expression change. He leaped for the keys, but she was already stepping back from his frantic hands, taking Elena Turov’s keys with her. She put them back in the clutch when she was far enough away from the cell to maneuver without danger.

  Adam had also leaped forward, but the monk now cringed against the back of his cage. The righteous rage on Adam’s face was impressive for a damned man. Victoria didn’t blame the monk for cringing. Not at all. She squared her shoulders and faced Adam’s anger, but just like that it faded. It wasn’t for her. It had all been for the monk who had threatened her.

  “I’ll protect you. I don’t need a bargain with Ezekiel to pledge my skills to you and to your son. And you don’t need to fear this promise. There are no strings attached,” Adam said.

  Victoria wasn’t so sure. She could feel the strings between them. Binding and twining and twisting and drawing them closer and closer together. Like tendrils of grapevine roots growing in ways she couldn’t predict or understand.

  How could a man with Brimstone in his blood make a promise so pure? There was no pause. The universe didn’t stop around them. The oxygen didn’t freeze in her lungs. And yet it somehow did in the most mortal of ways. He took her breath, standing there beside all the evil monks he’d defeated with violence and blood. She knew it wasn’t the hope of more violence that caused him to want to protect her and Michael.

  He wanted to spare her son.

  She didn’t fall to her knees. She refused to be that weak in front of the Order’s men. She stood tall and squared her shoulders in her dirty and torn firebird gown. There didn’t have to be a daemon bargain between them, but she wanted to acknowledge what he’d offered.

  “I accept,” she said.

  Lucifer’s Army didn’t arrive from the tunnel or from the wine cave’s door. They stepped from the stacked stone walls as if the walls didn’t exist. Suddenly, en masse, they came from the walls like a frieze come to life, like the one that had haunted l’Opera Severne.

  “At midnight on the night of the full moon the line between our world and the hell dimension softens because of my agreement with Ezekiel. My bargain invites them in. I give them passage to come to this cave,” Adam explained. “Though, as you’ve seen, Ezekiel is capable of abusing the parameters of our agreement.”

  “He used the tunnel to come and see me,” Victoria said.

  Adam had moved closer and she didn’t mind when he stood tall and strong beside her. When the daemon king stepped from the wall, surrounded by an army of his Loyalist followers, Adam placed his hand on the bare skin above the small of her back where her dress dipped low. Her affinity burned for him and him alone.

  But she suspected the daemon king buffered the lure of his Brimstone to be polite.

  “I have arrived to accept your offering, Adam Turov,” Ezekiel proclaimed.

  “Just as promised, daemon king,” Adam replied.

  The daemon king walked as if the weight of the bronzed wings on his back were nothing to him. Yet she could see their weight in the carriage of his broad shoulders and in the ember of light glinting in his eyes. To the last monk, the men in the cells fell to their knees when Ezekiel passed. He did not give them a glance. There was no mercy evident in the line of his clenched jaw.

  He stopped in front of Adam and Victoria.

  His burning gaze followed the movement of her hand when she reached to hold Adam’s arm. Adam’s hand pressed into her back in response. Reassurance. Or fear?

  “Am I correct in supposing that you aren’t ready to return with me, daughter?” Ezekiel asked.

  “We can speak another time,” Victoria responded.

  The army around them was unlocking the cells and claiming the condemned men. Iron manacles and chains rattled.

  “I will have my hands full for some time,” Ezekiel said, looking around at the silent prisoners
. “But our conversation won’t be put off forever. Go and collect your son. He should be here when I come again.”

  Her body tensed, but Adam’s hand rose up to press around her waist, gathering her closer against him. She bit her tongue. Better to not directly challenge a daemon king feeling paternal.

  “Continue to serve me well and you shall earn back your soul one day,” Ezekiel said.

  “I will,” Adam replied.

  It was a ceremonial exchange that must have been going on for a hundred years.

  This time when the army stepped back through the walls they hauled their prisoners with them, but the transition to the hell dimension must not have been smooth for the evil monks. They had been mostly silent since she came to the cave, but when they passed through the wall, they screamed.

  Dozens of screams echoed and filled the expanse of the wine cellar. And then they were cut short.

  Victoria pressed her face into Adam’s chest. Would the transition to hell make her baby scream?

  Chapter 14

  Adam had driven her back to the main house in an ATV. The warmth from his Brimstone contrasted with the numbness of her rebellion. What would Malachi do now? She was certain she’d made the right decision. Complying with Malachi’s demands would have only emboldened him to demand more and more. But her open defiance might cause him to act right away to prove his dominance over her family.

  She’d already texted Katherine and Sybil to warn them. Neither had responded. Sybil and Grim would have to be enough. She could think of no better nanny than the ferocious hellhound who had protected John Severne for two hundred years.

  Except perhaps the silent man at her side.

  “I won’t bring him here,” Victoria said.

  “You shouldn’t. Ezekiel isn’t your master. You don’t have to obey his commands. Leave your son in hiding. I’ll take care of Malachi and the daemon king,” Adam said.