Barbara J. Hancock - Brimstone Bride

Politics.

The D’Arcy ability to draw and be drawn to daemon blood had placed them in the middle of an otherworldly civil war.

Love wasn’t allowed.

Ironic that her favorite role to play had always been Juliet. She’d traveled around the world to sing the part of a tragic romance again and again.

“What do you want me to do?” Victoria asked.

The man on the cover of the magazine was a beautiful stranger in a designer suit. Behind him, a vineyard stretched in seemingly endless verdant rows. He stood with one foot on the threshold of a historic stone building, a massive wooden door with iron hinges looking rough-hewn and craggy in sharp contrast to his polished clothes. There was a gleam to the black waves of his hair, but those waves and his sun-kissed skin seemed more in keeping with the door than his suit. Victoria had grown up in the dramatic world of the opera. She knew a costume when she saw one. The man’s civilized suit was a lie.

“You will gain his trust. You will learn his secrets. Once you discover where he keeps his prisoners, you will free them,” the monk said. “Once they are freed, they will use their combined strength to kill him. In this way, you will guarantee your son’s safety.”

Children laughed and ran and played all around them. Tears burned behind her eyes. But she forced them to dry. She waved again and this time Michael waved back, still laughing. Katherine was looking at Victoria closely now. As if she sensed something wrong. But the monk had already risen, prepared to walk away. He didn’t need her answer. He could sense her defeat in her slumped shoulders and her trembling wave of reassurance to her child.

“I’m not a spy. How will I do this?” she asked his back. He paused and halfway turned back to reply.

“He has Brimstone in his blood. He’s damned. Your affinity is the perfect weapon. His home is a fortress. You will penetrate his defenses. Seduce his secrets from him. Free our brothers. Capture him. Then, you and your family will be left in peace.”

He lied.

She would never know peace.

“Who knows? You might even enjoy yourself. You have proven you have a taste for damnation,” the monk said. His knowing laughter didn’t blend with the innocent laughter of the children around them. It jarred. It condemned. Her cheeks burned. Not because she was ashamed of loving Michael’s father, but because this man didn’t deserve to pollute what they’d shared by mentioning it. Daemons were nearly immortal beings who lived in the hell dimension. They were different but, like men, they were only damned by their actions, not by their blood. Michael’s father had been heroic in the end, sacrificing himself for his child even though he’d been a daemon.

The children on the playground seemed to sense the evil in their midst. They parted as the monk passed as if a snake slithered among them. One little girl began to cry without obvious cause and a kind woman ran to see what she could do to help.

The monk had left the magazine beside her on the bench. She picked it up. The man on the cover hadn’t looked at the camera. The photographer had caught him in a moment of reflection, with dark shadows from the vine-covered building on his face. The photograph drew her as if the Brimstone in the man’s blood could already sense her affinity. Yes. He had secrets. She could see them in his shadowed eyes.

A single tear did fall then. The monk had already walked away. His laughter drifted back to her on the humid Louisiana breeze. She had loved and lost, but she wouldn’t lose again. Only one tear fell. It rolled down her cheek to fall on the back of her hand. It glistened there, useless.

She would do what she had to do to protect her son.

She willed the unshed tears to dry as she widened her eyes and clenched her jaw. The magazine crinkled in her ferocious grip.

Her son’s vigilant protector, the hellhound Grim, wasn’t allowed to materialize in the playground, but Victoria saw a shimmer of shadows near the swings, too dark to be cast by the blossoming grove of cherry trees that surrounded the park.

The wind blew and petals fell like pale pink rain. They settled on Katherine’s dark hair and the children laughed. They raised their hands to the sky to try to catch the drifting blossoms. Near the shadow of Grim, the petals shied away in puffs of disturbed silk as the giant dog shook his sooty coat to maintain his disguise. She could imagine his movements because she knew he was there. No one else noticed. Just as no one else had heard the monk’s threats.

During the fire, Katherine’s husband, John Severne, had risked his life to give Grim to Victoria’s son. His sacrifice had saved Michael. The fearsome beast had been Severne’s companion for two hundred years. Now, he watched over her son.

But Grim wouldn’t be enough.

Victoria had to do more.

Even if it meant continuing to be a servant to madmen whose evil requests damned her as if she’d sold her soul.

As the playground full of children continued to laugh and play, fear burned hotly inside her chest, exactly as she imagined the damning fire of Brimstone might burn in daemon veins.

Chapter 2

Few people had gotten close enough to see his scars.

Adam Turov sat with his chest facing the back of a wooden chair. He gripped the polished cherry slats with white knuckles, but he didn’t flinch as he hunched his bare back for Dr. Verenich. The Brimstone in his blood wasn’t always enough to heal the injuries he sustained hunting devils with no care for how much human blood they spilled.

“Live for a century, learn for a century,” the doctor murmured under his breath as he plied needle and thread to close the dagger slash too severe to knit itself. “I have learned to use specially constructed thread in your treatment, shef. And yet you have not learned to avoid daemon-cursed blades.”

“Without effort, you won’t pull fish from a pond,” Adam said. He could fight the doctor saying for saying. He’d learned all his Russian idioms firsthand before the Revolution.

“So, no pain, no gain?” The doctor chuckled grimly as he worked on the man he still referred to as his boss as his father had before him, even though Adam Turov had also become his friend. Gloves protected his hands from Brimstone’s burn, but every now and then they’d sizzle and hiss, and smoke would rise into the air as he pierced Adam’s skin with his needle and fireproof thread. “I’ll tell you what you have gained, my friend...” He urged Adam to turn his back toward an antique mirror with a gilded frame. It was Tsarist, of course. The Turov family had brought a king’s ransom to California during the Revolution. They survived by adapting, persevering. They had worked through the darkest hours. Sweat and blood had replaced diamonds and tiaras.

Reflected in the mirror, Adam Turov didn’t look a day over thirty, even after a life-threatening battle with evil monks from the Order of Samuel and their Rogue daemon allies. On a good day, in fine clothes, he would seem even younger. Too young to successfully run the oldest winery in Sonoma, California.

“Wings. Over all these years, you’ve developed a macabre pair of wings,” the doctor said.

Adam could see them. The scarifications the doctor pointed out by gesturing in the air above them. The tracery of scars swept down his back on both sides like folded wings. The irony caused a grim smile to curve his lips. There. That expression was older. Much more in keeping with his actual age.

“A dark angel indeed, Doctor,” he said.

He could remember the initial beatings with a lash that had begun the “wings.” And later, every hack and slash. Every stitch. Every battle. He could remember the face of every monk he’d delivered to hell. None of the monks in his memory were the one that most haunted him. Not yet. Father Malachi had wielded the lash with enthusiasm. The younger the novitiate, the better. The Order purported to be the last line of defense between hell and Earth, but they lied. In truth, the faction of Rogue daemons that wanted to overthrow Lucifer’s Army and wage war on heaven had corrupted them. The Order of Samuel wasn’t holy. They were as damned as he was.