Brimstone Bride

by Barbara J. Hancock

  He arched to kiss her again. But this time his kiss was gentle. He held the back of her head and slowly tasted and explored the tenderness she’d expressed.

  Between her legs, she could feel the swollen length of his erection pressing insistently against her even though it was still restrained by his tactical pants. She moved her hips and reached for the buckle and button and zipper, but it wasn’t until he helped her with all the fastenings and the shifting of his hips necessary to pull his pants down that she was finally rewarded with the revelation she sought.

  The lantern’s glow illuminated his flushed shaft and she took his heat in her hand. His head fell back and he groaned her name. She teased him with stroking movements while she tried to undo her own pants with only one hand. He noticed her struggle. He opened his eyes and through heavy-lidded slits he helped her unbutton the waist of her denim. She released him long enough to stand and unzip her boots. Then she shimmied out of jeans and boots both, leaving them abandoned on the ground while she reclaimed the warmth of his lap.

  He’d pulled his sweater off so they came together skin to skin. A mere touch of their hands had scorched them. When Victoria settled herself onto Adam’s erection, taking him inch by inch to the heart of her womb, she was claimed by the fire of her affinity fully melding with his Brimstone. Her body stiffened. Her back arched. She cried out as tremors of release racked her body.

  Adam held her. He supported her as her orgasm took her to edges she’d never seen. He caught her against him as she fell, even as his release flooded her. He cried out and she sang his name.

  * * *

  The tiny cabin didn’t have a kitchen, but it did have a serviceable bathroom. The pipes were bare, the fixtures seemed decades old, but the room was clean. Only a small web in one corner with an eight-legged denizen and its carefully silken-wrapped midnight snack it was saving for later gave indication that the bathroom wasn’t as civilized as it could be.

  Victoria even found the water hot when she undressed to shower. Hot, but cool compared to Adam. She shivered beneath the steamy flow and tried to prepare for the morning. She could already feel the warning tingle of unfriendly Brimstone blood over the horizon. Just like Father Reynard, there would be monks who had sold their soul for longevity, strength and the power that came with it.

  Adam had murmured his plan against her ear when they’d moved from the hardback chair to the bed. He’d cradled her in his arms, spooning against her back as if they were a regular couple, while he talked of sneaking in the monastery keep through tunnels that had been painstakingly dug, decade after decade, one spoonful of dirt at a time. She had experienced a thrill when she’d thought of rescuing Michael through tunnels that Esther, Gideon and countless other rebellious novitiates had created. The Order corrupted those it devoured, but there were people who resisted. There were novitiates who escaped.

  Adam had escaped a hundred years ago, but he’d never left his ordeal behind. He’d worked to build a network of people to help him infiltrate and influence. He had suggested the tunnels be dug. He had saved all he could while still focusing on an endgame many of his people wouldn’t live to see.

  They knew they wouldn’t see it. And they worked for Adam anyway.

  Because he was a good man.

  He’d sold his soul for freedom and revenge, he’d said. But the truth was that he’d sold his soul for the freedom of all he’d saved and to work for the downfall of the Order so that they would face the justice they deserved.

  Victoria rinsed away the last of the soap that she’d found on a shelf wrapped in a design that screamed 1952. She toweled dry, marveling how she’d just made love to a time traveler, basically. How many of his people had he watched grow old and die before they lived to see the Order stopped once and for all?

  She dressed and braced herself for whatever she would find tomorrow when they infiltrated the compound. Adam was sleeping when she rejoined him on the bed. As her eyes closed and she tried to join Adam in sleep, she felt the scars on his back against her palm. She remembered Esther’s scars. She thought of Gideon’s formal coveralls with their long sleeves.

  Michael was not quite three years old.

  Her heart thudded in her chest when she imagined him scarred by evil hands. Adam stirred and shifted in his sleep and he gathered her close to him as if he’d been disturbed by her thoughts. Even his Brimstone heat couldn’t soothe her fears away. Adam would sacrifice himself to save her and Michael. He would never be satisfied until he had saved everyone but himself.

  Chapter 20

  They left the cabin as weak sunlight barely filtered through the clouds with the rising sun. The resort was asleep. There were no other hikers silhouetted in the distance. Only trees, the glacier lake and wildflowers greeted them as they wound behind the cabin and began to climb a steep trail that was mostly overgrown with grasses. Soon they left even that sign of direction, but Adam seemed to know. He confidently placed one foot in front of the other and Victoria followed.

  She was glad of her coat. The morning temperature on the mountain was chilly. Summer in the Carpathians was short. Morning and evening were more likely to resemble early spring in Louisiana. Her breath didn’t fog, but her nose was cold as they followed a route that meandered, but steadily carried them higher and higher.

  The resort was out of sight now and the ground was far too craggy to encourage casual hikers to brave this area on the mountain. They encountered larger and larger patches of gray, sharp-edged boulders, but they barely slowed Adam down. Soon she realized he knew the way over and around even in situations that seemed impassable. There were switchbacks and tricks to the passage that could only have been man-made.

  “The Order discourages casual visitors to the compound. The old monastery did as well, which is why it was ultimately abandoned as civilization encroached. But the Order actively maintains this part of the mountain. They block passes and create ravines and rockfalls. Trusted novitiates are taught the route by the time they become monks. I figured it out on my own,” Adam said. He reached back to pull her up over a particularly jagged blockade of boulders that seemed to have fallen naturally from an outcropping above them. “It only took about fifty years.”

  In several places they encountered official-looking signs. Adam translated for her as they passed. “Danger, rock slides, steep crevasse.”

  With every step her anxiety heightened, but the knot in her chest loosened because she was climbing closer and closer to Michael. Her sides ached by the time they paused just below the final ascent. The ground was all rock now. Only sparse areas of wildflowers broke up the look of desolation. Wind whipped this side of the mountain. The sun had risen, but the wind chilled her to the bone.

  Adam told her to sit and catch her breath on a sheltered boulder and she complied without argument. She dug a water bottle from her backpack and drank while Adam walked toward a jumble of large rocks that seemed to shelter around the dark slit of a crevice in the ground. He crouched beside the crevice and sat back on his heels. She thought she saw his lips moving, but the wind whistling in and around the boulders carried the words he spoke away.

  After Thomas died, I dropped his body in a deep crevice in the mountain.

  She lowered the bottle from her lips as she realized Adam was visiting Thomas’s grave.

  They didn’t pause long. Adam rose and came to her. He gestured for her to follow him again. She didn’t mention Thomas or try to soothe him. She could feel her son nearby, and her drive to go to him superseded all else. She did murmur a prayer that none of them would end up in an unmarked mountain grave before the day was over.

  * * *

  Her first sight of the crumbling castle monastery Reynard had called home caused her to stop in her tracks. The giant keep rose high above them and leaned into the mountain itself, as if its walls had grown naturally from the gray stone. It seemed like
a poisonous mushroom that had pushed out of the mountain, rending its peaceful crags, but continuing to suck life from its soil and rock. If it had ever been a holy place the vibe around it was no longer peaceful and holy. The stone block used to build the wall and the monastery itself was striped with calcified streaks from rain and melted snow, as if the stone wept dirty white tears. The dark shadows of ravens circled the high towers of the castle-like keep and, though she couldn’t hear their cries, she could imagine what grim feasts had drawn them to this place. Whether it was her imagination or not, a whiff of decay seemed to reach them on the wind.

  “The entrance is small. Have you ever been spelunking? We’ll have to crawl before we can walk,” Adam warned.

  Like ants they scurried across a clearing from the rock cliff to the base of the wall, but their fast movements didn’t feel fast enough. Victoria’s back was stiff with the feeling of being watched. There were raised places on the wall that would have been perfect for sentries to be shielded from view while still being able to see everything that went on below. There were glinting narrow windows in the keep itself. Hundreds of them. Where monks could look out at the world and possibly see two interlopers come to take one of the most important novitiates they’d ever kidnapped. A half daemon prince who might grow up to rule hell itself. A toddler boy who held the power of Brimstone and Samuel’s Kiss hidden in his heart.

  But he was only Michael to her. The baby she loved. And she had come to simply take him home.

  The entrance was worse than she’d expected. She was petite in spite of the slight maternal curves she’d acquired in the last few years, but she had to wonder how Adam had managed to fit his broad shoulders into the tunnel when she dropped to her knees to crawl in behind him. She had to take off her backpack and push it ahead of her. Adam’s body blocked the dim light of the flashlight he’d pulled from one of his tactical suit’s pockets. She was left in the dark, following blind through a dirt-and-rock tunnel that scraped against her sides.

  She didn’t consciously decide to hum, but a soft sound of reassurance crooned from her throat nonetheless. Adam paused, but only for a second before he began to crawl again. Her heartbeat sang, “Michael. Michael. Michael,” with every beat. Her hum was something else. A bayou lullaby she’d often sung to him when the lonely nights were long and he was teething and restless. His restlessness had echoed her own.

  They’d been a pair standing against a dangerous world for a long time. Although they had Grim and Sybil as well as Kat and Severne, it was the bond between mother and child that had seen them through the loss of Michael’s father.

  Yet it felt so right to follow Adam Turov into the dark.

  They crawled for an eternity. Victoria focused on movement, song and the memory of Turov’s smile. She thought of Michael’s hot little hugs and his laughter when he played with the ferocious, ugly hellhound she’d slowly learned to trust with her greatest treasure.

  She breathed as shallowly as she could as the air grew dank and decayed. Far beneath the Order of Samuel’s compound, the earth seemed to be tainted by all that went on above it. The tunnel didn’t smell of soil and natural crawling things. It smelled of desperate sweat and blood, of death and mold and stale tears. Just as she thought she couldn’t bear another second of being buried alive in such a grave, the tunnel opened up. Millimeter by millimeter the space around her expanded to allow a foot of space above her head and a glimmer of light to reach her from Adam’s flashlight.

  “The dead can’t hurt you. That’s a hard lesson to learn. Keep moving. Don’t look at the tunnel walls too closely,” Adam ordered.

  Victoria tried to obey, but in the wavering light she couldn’t help seeing what he’d warned her to ignore. Bones. The dirt walls of the tunnel weren’t only dirt. Bits of filthy fabric stuck out from the earth as did other, more gruesome things. She stopped. She closed her eyes against the sight. But Adam kept crawling. Soon he was several feet away and the idea that he might turn a corner to leave her in the dark with human remains was enough motivation to spur her on in spite of the hideousness of the path she must crawl.

  She hurried after Adam, but it didn’t save her from the clear shape of a skeletal hand protruding from the wall as if in supplication, nor did she manage not to see the dirt-filled eye sockets and gaping mouth of a skull.

  Her hum had stopped. Her crawl had turned into a scramble. The tunnel no longer squeezed against her, but she could remember where it had. She could remember bumps and pokes that she had assumed were rocks and roots. Her whole body began to quake with a shuddering she couldn’t shut down and bile rose to her throat.

  And still she hurried toward Michael. He had to be saved from this horrible place. Even if she had to crawl through purgatory to reach him.

  Finally, the tunnel opened even wider and before she knew she’d made it through, Adam’s feet disappeared in front of her and were replaced suddenly by strong arms pulling her from the nightmare shaft. He continued pulling until she stood against him, surrounded by his muscular arms.

  “They are beyond our help and are hopefully at peace now. The real monks must have entombed their dead here before the Order arrived. My people didn’t realize they were tunneling into catacombs before it was too late. Decades of work would have had to be abandoned,” Adam said. “I’ve never crawled through the tunnels myself. I didn’t know how bad it would be or I would have warned you.”

  Victoria had lived a dark life. This was the first time she truly understood that Adam’s had been much, much darker. His scars had warned her. His longevity was certainly an indication that he had seen more than a normal man had seen. “Bad” didn’t come close to what the tunnel had been. Yet if it helped her save her son and if it had provided a means to save others, then she would force herself beyond her reaction to the skeleton-lined pathway.

  “I told you I was coming with you. I didn’t expect a cake walk,” Victoria said. But she said it into his chest as the shivers died down.

  “I have no way of knowing where they’ll be holding him. We might have a long, dangerous hunt ahead of us,” Adam warned. “There’ll be other things no one should ever have to see.”

  “For Michael,” Victoria reminded herself. She pushed away from Adam and stood on her own two feet. His light revealed that they’d exited the tunnel into a damp, forgotten room that must once have been a cell. There was rotten bedding in one corner and rusted bars fallen to the side across an opening that led into a passage. The flashlight illuminated only so far and then the view was swallowed by shadows.

  “For us all,” Adam corrected.

  She looked up into his face. Backlit, his features were as swallowed by shadows as the mysterious passage beyond. He’d promised he would retrieve Michael from the Order, but now she wondered what else Adam might have planned. He’d held her to soothe her, but the outline of his face was as hard and stark as stone. She couldn’t see his bright eyes and his Brimstone burn was banked. It simmered so low she could barely detect it. Was he beginning to learn how to shield his heat from her the same way Ezekiel did?

  Or had crawling into this place of nightmares chilled him to the bone?

  Chapter 21

  What she’d assumed was rotten bedding was actually a pile of discarded robes. Adam pulled one from the middle of the stack and it turned out to be in better shape than the ones on top. Victoria shrugged into it when he offered its grimy brown folds to her. She wore it over her backpack, utilizing the bulk of it as part of her disguise. She ignored the robe’s musty smell. She pretended not to notice the stiff darker stains that she feared were dried blood. It took Adam several tries to find a robe long enough to accommodate his height. He finally found one that worked if he stooped. She copied him when he pulled a voluminous hood over his head. The cowls of both robes drooped over their faces.

  “If we meet anyone, let me do the talking. There are expecte
d words and phrases, but a novitiate is often under an order of silence so that will be assumed if I speak for you,” Adam advised.

  “I can feel him. I can feel Michael,” Victoria said. She placed her hand on Adam’s arm and he paused on his way out the door.

  “There are a lot of people in this compound. And many of them have bartered their souls to Rogue daemons. Are you sure it’s your son you feel?” Adam asked.

  “How did you know it was your mother who left the roses? Love knows,” Victoria replied.

  They stood in the doorway. She still held his arm, but he didn’t pull away.

  “You take the lead. We’ll follow your affinity unless I need to divert you away from danger,” Adam said.

  Victoria nodded and let go of Adam’s arm. She was immediately colder. His heat had buoyed her for a moment in this place that froze her soul. She didn’t tell him that it wasn’t purely her affinity that pulled her toward Michael. She was afraid a hardened warrior may not trust the instinctive thread between mother and child. She hadn’t understood it herself until Michael was born.

  They walked carefully but quickly through the passage that took them to a flight of stone stairs. As they passed some doors, the smell of decay was stronger than others, but when she would have paused to look inside Adam placed a restraining hand on her arm.

  “They are beyond help. Nearly dead before they’re left here to rot. We can help them most by continuing on,” Adam said.

  She’d always known the Order was evil. Her mother had taught her from birth to fear them. But in this place she tasted their corruption in the very air around her. So much suffering. So much torture and death.