Barbara Hancock - Brimstone Prince

Maybe Sophia would understand the deal he’d had to make to protect Lily.

An indistinct murmur was his undoing. His resolve had been firm. Get in. Get out. But he heard a rustle and murmur and he was drawn to his daughter’s bedroom. He didn’t go in. He only peeked from the door. She had murmured in her sleep. He watched as his three-year-old child snuggled deeper into her pillow. The softest whimper reached his ears. Samuel had to reach for the doorframe to hold himself in place rather than go to her.

Was it a nightmare, or did she sense his presence and his pain? Her mother might understand the desperate measures he’d been driven to take, but would Lily?

He watched as soft moonlight from the window illuminated her hand. Her tiny fist opened to reveal a kachina doll that had been grasped in her fingers. A frisson of dread shivered down his spine when he saw it was the doll that had been carved in the shape of a warrior angel. The wings down its back had been painted black long ago by one of Sophia’s Hopi ancestors. Unlike the other kachina dolls that were traditionally carved with indistinct features and masks with rough edges and curves, the warrior angel was like a Renaissance sculpture in miniature form, but crafted of wood instead of stone.

Had a Hopi priest seen his daughter’s future in some prophetic dream long, long ago?

He forced himself to turn away. He spared only a glance for the bedroom a little farther down the hall. Sophia had been a softness to his otherwise jagged life. It had been weakness to love her. But it was strength to leave her now. The wound on his back screamed for surcease that would never come. He had to walk away. He was a deadly magnet on an ordinary day. Injured and weak, he was an irresistible lure to Rogues or anyone with Brimstone in their blood.

In time, Lily would be a magnet as well. That’s why he’d been forced to ask for help.

This time as he made his way to the street, the building around him was utterly silent. No creature stirred. The simple operation of the elevator doors sounded like a shriek. Finally, he made it to the street where he remained on foot. He headed to the bus station. One dogged step after another. If anyone saw him, they would have assumed he was a drunken vagrant. He planned to get on a bus and ride as far away as he could from his precious family before he fell.

He could only hope and pray that the daemon deal he’d made would protect Lily once he was gone.

Chapter 1

When the daemon stepped from the shadows, the darkness seemed to cling to his tall, lean form, separating from the black leather of his jacket and the faded denim of his jeans reluctantly. For long seconds, his angular face and muscled shoulders seemed to be draped in a dark winglike mantle. Lily Santiago’s breath caught in her lungs as familiarity punched her in the gut until he came forward another step.

She blinked as he moved, and she exhaled a long shaky breath as the shadows retreated to the corner of the kiva where they belonged. The daemon didn’t have wings. But he should, her senses told her. He should. An impossible familiarity began to foment in her brain. She’d seen this daemon before.

The underground Hopi chamber was a circular room with a packed earthen floor and stacked stone walls. There was only one opening to the sky where an old wooden ladder would have leaned. She’d used a nylon climbing rope to descend the ten feet. The abandoned chamber would have been dark at midday—at midnight only her lantern and the occasional flash of the daemon’s nightglow eyes as they refracted the low light held back the night. The firepit on the other side of the sipapu had been cold for a century or more. She rose slowly from her crouched position near the kachina dolls she had carefully placed for the ceremony she was about to invoke. She gripped a short silver flute in one clenched fist.

“Move away from the edge,” the daemon ordered.

Lily had heard daemons speak before, yet none of their voices had been so deep and melodic. Her heart thrummed in response to the mellow drawl of his vowels and the low pitch of his husky tone. He wore a guitar on his back, she noted. The silver-studded strap crossed his broad chest and she could see the neck of the instrument behind his right shoulder.

If his voice caused gooseflesh to rise on her bare arms, it was the Brimstone of his blood that forged a deeper reaction. Her stomach coiled. Her muscles tightened. Her skin flushed and her breath, once caught, now came too quickly between parched, parted lips. She was used to being buffered against the Brimstone burn. She’d known she would have to be much stronger outside the palace walls.

Her affinity for daemons was her greatest strength and her greatest potential weakness. She could summon them, but she couldn’t control them. Her control was limited to the elemental spirits that dwelled in the kachina dolls her mother had carved. Those she could summon and control.

But daemons were different.

No one could control Brimstone’s burn, not even the daemon whose veins flowed with the lava of hell. Her affinity made her vulnerable, so she stood and waited for the inevitable fight.

“I promised my mother when she died that I would seal every sipapu in New Mexico with the skills she had taught me,” Lily said. It was a warning. She wasn’t here to fight, but neither would she be swayed from her mission.

The sipapu was a hole at the center of the kiva. It was thought by many to be a symbolic opening to the lower world. Hopi people believed that their ancestors had risen up from such places to become a part of this world. In most kivas, the hole was only a few inches deep. In this unexplored, undiscovered kiva she had found with the direction of her affinity and her mother’s kachina dolls, the sipapu’s floor was so deep that it wasn’t revealed by her lantern’s light, and a cool waft of air rose up to chill the whole chamber.

Lily set her teeth, hardened her jaw and dug her heels into the hard-packed desert earth that had been carved into a religious chamber hundreds of years ago. She needed to seal the portal to the lower world. Then she needed to pretend she had discovered the kiva and the surrounding ruin of a small unknown Hopi pueblo on an innocent hike so that archaeologists and Native historians could come in and excavate the site.

“A noble promise, but I bet you’ve met resistance along the way,” the daemon replied.

He didn’t hold a weapon. But he was obviously big and powerful. Not to mention the whole daemons-being-nearly-immortal thing. At five foot four inches, and one hundred ten pounds, she was in trouble. She had no one to rely on for protection but herself. Not anymore.

The daemon edged closer. The kiva chamber was a large circular room. She was separated from the approaching daemon by the fire pit and the sipapu, but the sipapu was only about a foot in diameter and he’d already made his way around the bigger indention of the pit that was still blackened by ancient fire.

“I have a sacred duty. I handle resistance as it comes. I’ve sealed every single sipapu I’ve discovered,” Lily warned.

Her family tree could be traced to ancient Aztecs on one side and to Spanish settlers on the other, but it had always been rooted by one simple thing: standing against evil. There was irony in that, considering where she’d spent the last fifteen years, but she had no time to let that slow her down.

The daemon didn’t flinch or falter when she refused to move away from the portal. He continued to approach. Slowly, carefully, as if he were giving her time to get used to his presence. The pleasure of his voice spread warmth to other places already warmed by his Brimstone burn. The whole chamber had gone from chilled to heated. Her gooseflesh was gone. Her flush had deepened. The perspiration had evaporated from her skin. She’d been warned to guard against daemon persuasiveness. Her powerful affinity wouldn’t protect her from it. On the contrary, it made her more susceptible than most.