Brimstone Prince
Brimstone Prince
Barbara J. Hancock
A match made in hell… The adopted daughter of the daemon king, Lily Santiago has lived her life in darkness. After one glimpse of desert sunlight, she begins to understand what she's been missing.Michael D'Arcy Turov might be heir to the throne of hell, but he has firmly rejected that legacy. All he wants is to play his guitar… Until he meets Lily, and her kiss awakens the Brimstone burn he's long suppressed. A pawn in the war between her foster father and rogue daemons, Lily is determined to let Michael keep his freedom. But what if his desire for her is enough to take him back to hell?
A match made in hell
The adopted daughter of the daemon king, Lily Santiago has lived her life in darkness. After one glimpse of desert sunlight, she begins to understand what she’s been missing.
Michael D’Arcy Turov might be heir to the throne of hell, but he has firmly rejected that legacy. All he wants is to play his guitar... Until he meets Lily, and her kiss awakens the Brimstone burn he’s long suppressed. A pawn in the war between her foster father and rogue daemons, Lily is determined to let Michael keep his freedom. But what if his desire for her is enough to take him back to hell?
He wasn’t meant for her.
He was meant for the throne. And the daemon king expected her to help him force Michael to accept it.
His lips were full and warm against hers. Lily didn’t reject the intimacy of his moist, hot tongue. She opened for him. She eagerly met his tongue with flicks of her own. She pressed into his muscular body and his arms fell from her face to her back where they smoothed and molded her curves to fit him. She had been forced to take haven in hell, but she tasted heaven on Michael’s lips. It was a paradise flavored with salty tears.
Her father had made a deal with the daemon king to protect her eighteen years ago and now Lily knew what price she would have to pay for his protection.
BARBARA J. HANCOCK lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where her daily walk takes her to the edge of the wilderness and back again. When Barbara isn’t writing modern gothic romance that embraces the shadows with a unique blend of heat and heart, she can be found wrangling twin boys and spoiling her pets.
Brimstone Prince
Barbara J. Hancock
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Sam, Daisy, Brownie, Betsy and Punk...
the rescued dogs who have rescued me.
Contents
Cover (#u0170452b-a7be-55fb-8302-32b01e2094a5)
Back Cover Text (#ua952e3fa-8f72-5f08-92ef-2ffc9f44aa25)
Introduction (#u3021b5b4-8452-5952-a4c5-5f024afd0105)
Title Page (#ua27c4a8d-f265-5aad-b194-fb226f1d4c96)
About the Author (#u75e6fe54-7159-5136-8b10-c879777eeed3)
Dedication (#u9a7983cd-39d4-5789-9c3d-7cd349a3b1d0)
Prologue (#u13165fcd-99e4-5cd5-bdef-9fff5edfa268)
Chapter 1 (#udf992a36-02d5-5904-8b07-bb4db53b5131)
Chapter 2 (#u4d9f722a-8325-534b-8c51-84e52b741618)
Chapter 3 (#u607ae18c-93ac-5aff-ac99-9be77f6fcabd)
Chapter 4 (#ue8037a53-236f-595a-b3ba-f5cebed901f4)
Chapter 5 (#ubc7e7154-1367-596d-96cb-d54e836d625e)
Chapter 6 (#u2434fde1-656b-5d3b-aeee-b88de4a59df8)
Chapter 7 (#uad74ed77-ff2e-5d0a-b1d8-f9d69fdd9c23)
Chapter 8 (#u8dc6bd06-f433-59eb-b617-dd1936c0c63b)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
He was dying. The blade his former partner, Reynard, had plunged into his back had failed to kill him immediately, but the blow would be fatal all the same. Samuel Santiago could taste sulfur in the back of his parched throat. When he coughed up blood, it was tinged with black. He could feel the burn as the taint from the daemon blade Reynard had used spread its way through his veins.
Daemons weren’t damned. But just like men, they could choose evil paths.
The cab dropped him at a familiar corner in Santa Fe. He was able to walk slowly but surely to the address of the apartment building where his young daughter would be sound asleep. He had a job to do. His Latin-scribed blade was wrapped in burlap and hidden beneath his coat. It and secrecy would be the gifts he’d leave Lily and her mother, Sophia. He’d been wise to forge a deal that would protect her and her mother from Reynard’s treachery, even if he hadn’t been able to protect himself.
It took forever for the elevator to respond to the summons of the glowing button that wavered in and out of focus as he waited. The Rogue daemons Reynard had sold his soul to were blackened by the desire to rule the hell dimension and then conquer heaven. They wanted to reclaim the paradise Lucifer had rebelliously left. Hell was embroiled in revolution. Loyalists against Rogues. But the Rogues couldn’t be stopped by Lucifer’s Army alone. At one time, Samuel had hunted all daemons, but he’d learned that Loyalists had no quarrel with humans. It was the Rogues who desired to enslave and destroy. The daemon king needed help from humans to defeat the Rogues. That fact might save Lily’s life.
Rogues would hunt him down. He looked over his shoulder when a random noise from a nearby apartment made him feel as if they were already behind him preparing to pounce.
The hall was empty. Somewhere in the distance a small dog barked.
Samuel stumbled into the elevator. He jabbed at the button to close the door as if the hounds of hell snapped at his feet. In a way, they did. He didn’t sigh in relief when the door closed. He leaned against the elevator’s humming wall, tense and watchful, as it rose up to the tallest floor. It was almost midnight. They would be sleeping. He didn’t have much time. He couldn’t see them. He couldn’t say goodbye. He couldn’t risk staying longer than it would take to place the wrapped sword on the mantel.
Lily had his blood. For better or worse. He supposed that was a gift he would leave her, too, although it often seemed a curse. His affinity for daemons had led him to join with Reynard in hunting them. It was Reynard’s joy in the hunt, his increased ruthlessness, that had led Samuel to question his gift. He was drawn to daemons and they were drawn to him, but in the end he had decided he was supposed to be the bridge between humanity and daemons, not their executioner.
That realization had come too late.
The Rogues were evil because they sought power and dominion over the entire universe. Loyalists only wanted to build an autonomous life for themselves. Lucifer didn’t fall from heaven. He leaped. Others had followed him. His death at the hands of Rogues had begun the revolution.
Samuel quietly let himself into the apartment. He left his key and the sword on the mantel near the kachina dolls his wife had arranged above the fireplace. The colorful Hopi statues had caught his eye many years ago, even before he’d fallen in love with the woman who carved them. She’d been at a stall in a Native American market. He’d paused, drawn to a spiritual song from the dolls that only his affinity could hear. She would know when she found the sword that it was a farewell. They had only ever had stolen moments anyway. His life wasn’t his own. He hadn’t been free to settle down and live with the family he loved.
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 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
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.
“The other daemons who tried to stop you were Rogues. They want as many pathways to the hell dimension as possible to remain open as they resist the rule of the rightful daemon king,” the daemon said in a soft, reasonable voice, as if he was pacifying a madwoman.
Who was he and how did he know these things?
Considering her free hand had gone to the hilt of a hidden sword at her back, his tone was probably justified. She could feel the grimace that stretched her face taut as she prepared to battle. She was no warrior, but the small elemental spirit dolls at her feet weren’t her only weapon. The flute and the dolls helped her channel her affinity to call on the elemental spirits. In days long past, she would have been deemed a priestess. Her mother had trained her in the old Hopi ways...but the sword had come from her father.
“My mother gave me a job to do and the sacred tools with which to do it. My father gave me this,” Lily said. The rasp of steel against its leather scabbard sounded loud in the underground room.
Perhaps the daemon could see the Latin prayers scribed into the blade even by lantern light, but if he could he didn’t retreat. He came toward her one more step. Then two.
“And what makes you aware of the daemon king’s wishes?” Lily asked as she brought her father’s blade down in a practiced move that prepared for the daemon’s attack.
The whole while she took in the daemon’s appearance. The absence of wings didn’t matter. Her mother had given her a gift along with her training and her tools. It was nestled in the backpack that had held all the kachina dolls that were now arranged near the sipapu. Hundreds of years ago one of her ancestors had carved an unusual kachina doll. It had been passed down for generations. From the time the daemon had stepped from the shadows, she’d recognized the sharp angle of his jaw and the full swell of his lips. She recognized the thickness of his wavy, shoulder-length hair swept by the desert winds. His broad shoulders, the set of his eyes and the patrician nose were all familiar.
The kachina doll had stiff wings that had been carved in a mantle down its back and painted black. This daemon had no wings. That initial illusion had only been created by shadows. But his fallen angel’s voice made the idea of wings possible every time he spoke.
He couldn’t be her warrior angel.
Her hand gripped the hilt of her sword to stop the trembling in her wrists and fingers. This couldn’t be her family’s kachina come to life. He was no nature spirit or ancestor who had come to help her. When he moved, she could see the glint of Brimstone glow in his eyes. She could feel the heat of his blood. She refused to let fire and familiarity influence her actions.
“The daemon king doesn’t rely on sipapu portals. He has his own pathways he protects,” the daemon explained. “But it isn’t safe for a human to meddle in these matters.” He had paused, but it didn’t feel like a reprieve. It felt like he was waiting for an opportunity to pounce.
“Are you his servant then? And you’ve come to help me?” Lily asked.
Likeness to her family’s oldest treasure aside, she still held the sword at the ready. Over the long, hot months of the strangest summer job any runaway had ever taken on, she’d learned to guard against daemon deception. They couldn’t be trusted. It wasn’t her Hopi mother who had told her that the devil had a silver tongue. That bit of wisdom had come from her guardian himself.
“No. I’m not his servant. I’m his adopted grandson,” the daemon said. “My name is Michael D’Arcy Turov.”
Her sword didn’t waver, but the air did catch in her lungs again in a hiccup of surprise. Her guardian’s heir wasn’t here to hurt her. She’d never been allowed to meet him, but she’d known about him from afar. The guitar on his back should have given his identity way, but her shock over his features had distracted her.
Michael Turov was a living replica of her warrior angel, but he was also the Brimstone prince. He was the talk of the hell dimension and had been since it had become common knowledge that he didn’t want the throne.
The unusual kachina her Hopi family had once worshipped, then treasured for centuries, was the perfect likeness of a daemon prince. She wondered why her guardian, the daemon king, had never deemed it necessary to warn her. Lily was distracted by the revelation only long enough to blink in surprise, but that was long enough. The daemon leaped. His body slammed into hers and her planted feet slid backward with the force of his superior weight and strength. His momentum pushed her back from the portal’s edge, and his hands over hers on the hilt of her sword kept her from using it in defense.
It didn’t matter. She couldn’t have attacked him anyway. Not even if she hadn’t realized he was trying to protect her from the sipapu’s edge. She’d always slept with the beautiful kachina beneath her pillow. When Michael Turov pressed her back against the chamber’s earthen wall so that his body was between her and the open sipapu, the shock of his Brimstone heat didn’t stop her from tracing the familiar features of his face with her gaze. It was almost too sharply cut to be traditionally handsome. There was something inhuman in the perfectly pronounced bone structure beneath his skin.
This daemon prince’s face was the reason she’d been drawn to kachinas in the first place.
Face-to-face with a living replica of the unusual doll, her hand twitched against the hilt of the sword. Her mother had been a carver, but Lily suddenly ached to be an artist. Could she re-create the angles of his cheeks and jaw? Could she capture in wood the ferocity of his expression while still creating the slight softness of his lips? She noted his mouth seemed to tilt on one side as if he laughed at the world, or himself, or some unseen joy in the shadows that gamboled for his attention alone.
“Grim, we’re about to have some unsavory visitors. You might want to come out here and give us a hand,” Michael said. “Or a paw.”
His gaze swept over her face as he spoke as if he was the sculptor who would try to capture the blend of Hopi and Spanish that came together to create her brown eyes, dramatic brows and dark hair. Her hair had loosened when she hit the wall. It had fallen around her face in a black waterfall of straight silky chunks.
“Your hair reflects the light,” Michael said.
Maybe it was a daemon prince thing to say, but it wasn’t a usual thing for her to hear. She’d been kept in isolation her whole life. The wonder in his tone and the admiration in his eyes gave her pause. For the first time, her grip loosened beneath his fingers on the hilt of her sword.
“Who is Grim?” Lily asked.
Michael turned his face toward the shadows where he’d appeared earlier and his move—when she dragged her gaze from the razor’s edge of his lean jaw—allowed her to see a monstrous doglike beast swirl into being as ashy embers coalesced into a canine shape. A snarling maw of snow-white teeth was the first part to solidify, followed by a muscular form surrounded by shifting fur that seemed more smoke than hair at the ends.
Lily’s nose twitched as the pleasant scent of wood smoke filled the air around them. It was a scent her body instinctively associated with hearth and home—because of the slight sulfuric burn, not in spite of it. She’d found a haven in hell with her mother as a child. They’d created a home in one wing of an immense Gothic palace others would have feared.
Her hands tightened again and she tried to pull from the daemon’s grip, but he held fast. His hands were big and warm around hers. She glanced down. The indentations his guitar strings had caused in the tips of his fingers were slightly rough against her skin.
“Grim is a friend. And we’re going to need his help,” he warned.
She stilled and looked up into Michael Turov’s gaze. In this position, the glint was gone and all she saw were sincere hazel irises rimmed with a darker chocolate as he met her gaze without blinking. But movement behind him kept her from becoming mesmerized. Smoke poured up from the hole in the ground. The sipapu now seemed like a slumbering volcano that had wakened. The wood smoke scent was suddenly tainted by a much stronger sulfuric stench.
“Let us take the lead,” Michael said. “Rogues give no quarter and they have particular reason to want me dead.”
“Oh, so you came to make it worse then?” Lily joked. “Don’t let my hesitancy to lop off your head fool you. I don’t need anyone to take the lead. Not a prince or a...” She failed to be able to label the creature across from them that snarled and snapped at the sulfuric smoke.
“Hellhound,” Michael supplied. “Grim is my hellhound.”
“Of course he is,” Lily replied.
A fissure had begun to open up from the sipapu. She gasped, more concerned at the destruction of the kiva than she was over what the fissure signified...until daemons began to climb from the widening portal.
“Complete your ritual,” Michael yelled over the grinding of crumbling earth.
But frankly, she was too busy deflecting the daemon blade that aimed for the back of Michael’s neck. He fell back as her sword clashed, metal against metal, and sparks flew. Several Rogues had climbed from the sipapu, but several more had come from the shadows and the smoke. Half a dozen daemons attacked. Michael fought with his bare hands and his hellhound’s crushing bite. She fought alongside them until she realized they didn’t need her help. For now. The widening fissure was the threat if it allowed more of the Rogue daemons to join in the fray.
Her traditional kachinas were already in place. She raised the flute to her lips and called the spirits to life with the song her mother had taught her. It didn’t matter that her mother had considered it nothing but tradition and a comfort during the difficult times following her father’s death. Lily’s affinity brought the old ways to life. The song came from her flute, but it also came from the affinity in her heart and the Hopi blood in her veins. She could feel Michael’s gaze on her as she moved. She’d never done the ritual with an audience. For the first time, distraction threatened. She struggled to block the daemon prince from her mind, but hadn’t he somehow always been there? The hidden kachina in her backpack was one of her earliest memories. It had fascinated her forever. While her mother’s kachinas were masked and carved with blocked shapes, the one with wings had been rendered with meticulously lifelike features. She hadn’t known how meticulously until moments ago when Michael Turov had walked into the kiva.
The earth calmed as she played. The fissure shrank, and then closed. The sipapu became filled in to the point of being a shallow, symbolic hole the size of a melon. There was a pause as the kachina spirits quieted and the universe accepted her interference. She’d run away from her refuge in hell in just this way by widening a sipapu portal with the kachinas’ help. Even though it had been three months, she still couldn’t believe that the daemon king hadn’t retrieved her.
In the lantern’s glow, motes of ancient desert dust hung in the air before they began to float and fall again.
Lily fell, too, her energy completely spent. But instead of the hard-packed soil she expected, her body was caught by strong, muscular arms.
* * *
Michael quickly carried his slight burden up out of the earth. Grim helped without being asked. Walking a short distance ahead, he led Michael and the woman he carried through pathways only he could find. Michael was used to walking through the chill of an otherworldly portal. He was used to dematerializing in one place and reappearing in another. He laid the woman on a smooth patch of ground and shrugged out of his jacket to roll it up and cushion her head. Then he forced himself away to start a fire beneath the rising moon and sleepy stars winking awake in the night sky. The desert sky wasn’t black. It was a midnight blue so deep and lush it reminded him of velvet. But the night would grow cold and the young woman, no matter how ferociously she’d fought, didn’t have Brimstone in her blood to keep her warm.
The fire kindled easily while she murmured in her sleep.
He approached her after the fire was built. She drew him with a powerful pull—like the moon to his sea—and damned if he didn’t feel like waves crested and crashed inside of his chest with every heartbeat. She didn’t seem hurt, only drained. Sleep was probably what she needed to recover. She was petite, but athletic, and obviously used to fighting daemons. He touched her face when a particularly loud whimper escaped from her rosy lips. It was a mistake. The scars that tracked along his arms flared to life with a red glow. The sudden ignition startled him into stumbling backwards to cradle his tingling fingers against his chest.
The tempest in his chest was shocked into stillness.
Her affinity was stronger than any he’d felt before. And it called the Brimstone in his blood to roaring life in spite of a lifetime of practice at tamping it down. After that touch, he took a seat well away from the young woman. He put the fire between them. Not because the flare had hurt him. It hadn’t.
It had been a pure pleasurable jolt of heat akin to desire.
Where had this woman gotten an affinity so strong that it tempted him to loose his Brimstone burn? He had inherited affinity from his own mother, Victoria D’Arcy. Affinity for daemons had been passed to his grandmother, Elizabeth, by a monk named Samuel. She had passed it to her daughters and, in turn, it had come to him. But each passing had diluted the affinity’s strength.
He was used to its almost musical call. He wasn’t used to this. The woman’s affinity was nearly pure and so powerful that he could feel it calling the Brimstone blood he’d inherited from his biological father even though he had a lifetime of experience guarding against it.
He hadn’t trusted his daemon blood since it had almost killed him as a child.
He hunted daemons. He refused to accept that he was nearly one himself. But hunting Rogue daemons wasn’t the only family business and the daemon king wasn’t their only concern.
The Turov estate was one of the largest in Sonoma, California with thousands of acres of vines. His stepfather had established it right after the Russian Revolution when he’d brought his parents to America and he’d had many years to bring it to lush, thriving success.
Brimstone wasn’t all bad. It had extended Adam Turov’s life and allowed him to help Michael’s mother after Michael’s real father had died. Turov had helped Victoria defeat the Order of Samuel when they’d kidnapped Michael as a small child. Then, Turov had married Victoria and raised Michael as his own.
The Brimstone in Michael’s blood had almost killed him when it had first flamed high during his rescue. He’d never trusted it since.
He reached for his guitar to keep himself from standing and going to the woman again. Her restless murmurs drew him as much as her affinity. She was distressed. What worried this amazing woman who had used her affinity and her dolls to call Fire, Water, Wind and Earth to defeat the Rogues that stalked her? Were more daemons on their way? He could see Grim silhouetted on a rise just outside of the fire’s light. The hellhound was alert and watching for trouble, but Michael still felt every protective instinct he possessed on high alert as well.
The fire’s glow was gentle in comparison to the glare that had come from his scars. It helped to filter the woman’s murmurs and sounds through a soft haze of smoke. By all accounts, his grandmother had been a remarkable woman, too. She’d loved the daemon king before he was a king. He’d loved her as well. So much so that he’d “adopted” her human children after her death. Unfortunately, his devotion to the D’Arcy family shadowed Michael’s future.
And now it would shadow this woman’s future as well.
He was in the fight of his life against more than the Brimstone in his veins. He fought against the daemon king’s expectations. Ezekiel had proclaimed Michael the heir to the throne of hell. But Michael’s scars were a constant reminder why that could never happen. They didn’t glow anymore. He’d succeeded in extinguishing the flare. He always would. He refused to acknowledge his daemon heritage, now or ever. He’d seen the harm his own blood could do. He’d grown up knowing that daemons couldn’t be trusted. He refused to accept a position that might make it impossible for him to protect others from the power in his blood.
His guitar came to life in his hands as the elements had come to life for the woman. She’d used a flute and the dolls to channel her affinity. He used the guitar’s strings. But he wasn’t calling anything. He played to drown out her affinity’s call. He played to control the Brimstone in his veins. If he also soothed her distress, so be it. He would give her peace before he shattered her peace completely.
Because in spite of needing to keep his distance from the woman who obviously tempted his burn, he needed her help to find the one thing his “grandfather” the daemon king wanted more than Michael—Lucifer’s wings.
* * *
Guitar music woke her. Classical Spanish guitar expertly played and accompanied by flawless singing. It was a song about a desert flower she’d heard before, but for some reason the lyrics romanticizing a woman as a beautiful, hardy bloom made her flush. She hadn’t told him her name. If he asked now she might say “Jane.” Anything but allow him to see that the sound of her name from his lips as he sang caused a rush of response she’d never felt before.
“You have a powerful gift. I’ve never seen anything like that...and I’ve seen more than most.” He stopped singing to speak, but he continued to play.
She had blinked open her eyes and lifted her torso from the ground. From her propped position, she could see his fingers deftly flying over the strings. The calluses she’d felt on each digit were explained by his swift, experienced manipulations. He wasn’t a casual player. He played often and long, enough to cause permanent ridges. He plucked, strummed and slid his hand on the neck as easily as another man would breathe.
The guitar was a rockabilly beauty complete with inlaid turquoise and silver panels. The color was brilliant against his black t-shirt and faded denim.
Nearby, a tiny fire crackled. It had been built with the kind of foraging only an experienced desert camper could accomplish—brush, twigs, dung—all patiently scavenged from the barren landscape. The fire held back the night with a soft wavering circle of light, which only served to make the vast expanse of blue-black sky above them seem limitless and cold. There, bright diamond bits of stars twinkled while down below a daemon prince bent over his strings and the flash of glimmering polished maple. A vintage motorcycle was parked near the outer reaches of the light. Farther out still, her dusty SUV was exactly where she’d left it before night fell.
She didn’t believe in coincidence. A ward of the daemon king learned early and well to notice every tweak, every manipulation to the universe around them. The daemon king hadn’t retrieved her and now his grandson appeared. What trickery was this?
“The kachinas. I need to pack them properly,” Lily said, suddenly appalled that she hadn’t thought of the sacred dolls right away. She was light-headed, but she rose to her feet and made for the pack that had been placed near the fire.
“Easy does it. You went down hard,” the daemon prince said. Michael. His name was Michael. She’d been sheltered in a secluded wing of the palace. Kept away from others because of her affinity. But she knew all the D’Arcy family by name. They were the daemon king’s beloveds and Michael’s sudden appearance in her life was cause for concern. He continued to play his guitar, but he’d tensed. He watched her as if she might faint into the fire.
“I’m fine. Summoning takes a lot of energy. Like a marathon. I could run ten more miles if I had to. Just need carbs and water,” Lily said.
She rummaged through her bag for a protein bar and a bottle of water. As she ate and hydrated, she repacked the dolls in their burlap wraps. She was relieved to note that Michael had been careful with the kachinas. None were busted or broken. He’d also placed her flute back in its velveteen pouch. The special kachina that bore a remarkable likeness to the daemon prince was still wrapped and undisturbed.
Her relief lasted only as long as it took for her to realize her father’s sword was missing. It hadn’t been returned to the sheath that rested between her shoulder blades beneath her shirt and it wasn’t in the specially altered side pocket of her backpack that ran the length of the bag. Only the top of the hilt showed when it was in her backpack, but she was used to the weight and balance of the bag when the sword was hidden within it. Her father’s sword was gone.
Slowly, Lily stood. The pack dropped at her feet as she flexed her arms out at her sides. The daemon prince’s fingers stilled on his strings. He watched her rise. He met her accusing gaze. The flickering fire made mysteries of his dark-rimmed eyes. She couldn’t read them or guess what his intentions might be.
Daemons couldn’t be trusted. Surely, a daemon prince least of all.
“I need your help. Normally, I rely on Grim to guide me to Rogues over pathways that aren’t fully a part of this world. But he’s a hellhound and he can’t guide me to where I need to go this time,” Michael said.
He shifted to place his guitar on the ground beside him and then rose so gracefully that he seemed to be standing before her between one blink and the next. His movements echoed with the grace of the rhythm and blues he played as did his voice. But there was another quality to his voice—a smokiness that hinted at pain. Lily swallowed because his grace and his pain were alluring. She had heard of him. Of course she had. She knew he was the heir to the throne of hell and she knew he wasn’t happy about it. She was suddenly afraid that she knew why the daemon king had allowed her to run away. The music of this daemon prince was as seductive as the fire in his veins. Her affinity must have brought him to her. Had the daemon king planned it that way?
“I’ve been searching for a guide. Someone who can help me retrieve my grandfather’s crown. It isn’t an actual crown, but a symbol of his right to rule the hell dimension. He sacrificed it years ago to save my father’s life. It’s my duty to get it—them—back,” Michael said.
“Them?” Lily asked. It was extremely dangerous to have a conversation with a daemon, but she had no choice. She wasn’t leaving without her father’s sword. She firmed her spine as if he was coming at her with weapons instead of words. Because daemons used words as weapons.
He’d stepped closer and closer to her as he spoke. His face bathed in the light from the dancing flames was hypnotic in its familiarity and the startling newness of seeing it animated, alive, life-size and so achingly appealing.
“Lucifer’s wings. When Rogues like the ones that just attacked us revolted, they cut them from his dead body and coated them in molten bronze. They hung above the Rogue Council until the council was defeated and driven from hell by my grandfather. He’s the king now. The wings rightfully belong to him,” Michael explained. “The only problem is that they’re currently in heaven.”
“Bronzed wings singed black by Brimstone,” Lily whispered. She’d seen them once or twice or a million times as a child, but the daemon king, Ezekiel, looked nothing like her doll. A daemon who looked exactly like her kachina searching for black wings caused an eerie awareness of destiny to prickle along her skin.
“Yes. I must retrieve them from heaven and deliver them to my grandfather in hell. It’s complicated...but doing so will complete a bargain between us,” Michael said.
“Lucifer’s wings are in heaven,” Lily repeated. She could easily imagine the kachina doll in her pack with its dark wings and Michael’s face.
“The elemental spirits you call might be able to guide us to find them,” Michael said as if he was certain of her abilities. More certain than she. He had no idea how unpredictable spirits could be. And he had no idea that she had her own obligation to his grandfather.
“It’s possible. It’s also possible they’ll refuse to help you. Sealing a portal to hell is one thing. Stealing from heaven another. Where is my sword?” Lily asked.
He had stopped very near her. The fire now backlit his features until they were entirely in shadow. Her chin lifted in response to his height and his nearness, but she could no better read his eyes in shadows than she could in firelight. In a way, she’d known him all her life, but in much more tangible ways he was mysterious, a threat to her and to her duty and possibly even her soul. He obviously denied his Brimstone blood. He refused to live in hell and his heat was tamped down so that someone without her level of affinity might not even detect it but his controlled burn seduced in ways that a more rampant fire never had. It was a distant intrigue to her senses. One she had to work to resist.
“I’ll give you your sword and help you close the portals you promised your mother you would close. You’ll lead me to Lucifer’s wings,” Michael proposed.
Gone was the almost lyrical quality to his speech. He had spoken in a loud, clear voice as if a proclamation had been made.
Lily’s chest tightened. The air had gone thick and still around her. The dancing flames slowed. Her mother had warned her. Daemon deals were dangerous. They’d lived in hell for years because of a deal her father had forged with the daemon king before he died. But Lily couldn’t turn away. She was held in place by the universe pausing around her as it waited for her to accept or reject this daemon prince’s plea.
Because it was a plea. She could feel the tension in the man before her. He didn’t touch her, but he stood so close that his Brimstone heat caused her cheeks to flush. He’d said that retrieving the wings would cement a bargain between him and the daemon king. In her bag, the kachina doll had black wings that had been carved hundreds of years ago by a Hopi ancestor she’d never known.
Michael D’Arcy Turov should have wings.
Lily knew it. The dolls in her bag were wrapped and silent. She didn’t summon any spirit for guidance. It was her heart that whispered the truth.
“I’m Lily Santiago. Give me back my father’s sword and I’ll guide you to Lucifer’s wings,” she agreed.
The flickering flames halted. Sparks above them hung suspended in the air. Her lungs froze. Her heart paused, but after a moment of panic everything resumed as it should. The fire flickered. She breathed. Her heart pounded. And Michael Turov, the daemon prince, turned away. But not before she saw the flash of triumph in his suddenly illuminated eyes.
Chapter 2 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
Hell had no stars. The sky above the palace was as thick and impenetrable as velvet. There was no moon. No planets. Only a nothingness of an atmospheric blanket that existed to separate a lower dimension from another. One had to rise up to the outer earth to see the stars, moon and sun. In hell, day was divided from night by the passage of time and by a slight violet haze that distinguished the coming of dawn and a deeper purple hue that signified the fall into dusk.
The hell dimension was beautiful—different, dark—but beautiful. Ezekiel often wondered that anyone could find it frightening or ugly.
Of course, the purple haze illuminating the carnage of battlefields was hideous. A sight he would never forget. And for a daemon king, “never” was a very long time.
He had been a warrior king during a time when war was inevitable. But it was time for a shift. Hell needed different leadership. Even a warrior king could dream of peace.
He stood on his own private balcony looking up at the velvet sky of hell’s night and instead of thinking about war he thought about children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He thought about Samuel Santiago and the deal they’d made. For a human, Santiago had been surprisingly capable of planning for the future. Ezekiel had cared for them separately—Lily and Michael, but he’d watched them grow and he’d waited for the right time for them to meet. His grandson was almost twenty-one. It was time, but that didn’t stop Ezekiel from worrying about his ward outside the palace walls for the first time. Her affinity had always taken his utmost ability to dampen in the palace, but he’d had to keep her presence mostly hidden until the time was right.
Rogues would be drawn to her. She was in terrible danger. Ezekiel fisted his hands and placed them on the cold stone rail in front of him. A daemon king had to take risks sometimes. Bold moves had to be braved. Even if it meant he risked losing them both. To Rogue daemons, to each other, or, worst of all, to a betrayal of all he held dear. Michael was only half daemon. Lily was human. Yet the fate of hell was in their hands.
Ezekiel stood for hours watching the black velvet sky lighten to purple. The passage of time was tricky in the hell dimension. They had yet to completely understand and master it. He had manipulated time to bring Lily and Michael together as peers. Time in the palace didn’t stand still. It was only infinitesimally slowed. Lily had actually been born first, but she’d needed to wait for Michael. Now, they were together. Santiago and D’Arcy. Kindling waiting for a spark. Things would proceed quickly. Yet it seemed an eternity passed as he watched and waited.
* * *
Lily cleaned and polished the sword with the same reverence she’d shown the kachinas. Her entire world had been one wing of a dark Gothic palace for many years. There was plenty of time to devote to ritual and habit when your world was one of confinement. Her mother had filled their days with art and music as well as exercise and training. Lily continued the practice after her mother had died.
“There are prayers scribed on my sword...it didn’t hurt you to touch them?” she asked.
Michael still stood near her after he’d given her back her father’s sword. She tried to ignore the intensity of his gaze, but it carried an almost tangible heat that flushed her cheeks.
“My mother was human. My father was a daemon. I’m only half-damned. Your sword is uncomfortable for me to touch, but not impossible,” Michael said. “Your father was a daemon killer?”
“Yes,” Lily responded. “Until he decided he wasn’t a killer after all.”
“But you decided you would kill in his stead?” Michael asked.
Lily noticed him take a step toward her, but she wasn’t sure he noticed himself. There was nothing she could do about the affinity for daemons in her blood. The daemon king was the only being she knew who could dampen her call. It was a vulnerable feeling to be fully herself in the New Mexico desert, but it was liberating as well. She would deal, come what may.
But when Michael took another step toward her she couldn’t help that her heartbeat quickened.
His Brimstone was a pleasant burn even if it shouldn’t be.
“I defend myself and my work,” she answered. Then she sheathed her father’s sword at her back and rose slowly to meet his advance. Only at that point did he realize he’d moved toward her. He stopped. He blinked. His hands fisted at his sides.
“Is it your command of the elements that calls me? Your command of fire?” Michael asked.
“My kachinas are packed away,” Lily reminded him.
“Then what? I have control over the Brimstone in my blood. I gained control as a child and I’ve never lost it. I’ve always credited the music for keeping it in check. My music soothes it. Or so I thought,” Michael said. He’d taken two more steps. He was directly in front of her now. She had to lift her chin to look up into his eyes. They glittered in the firelight. He didn’t have to tell her that his Brimstone was burning nearly out of control. She could feel it. The heat came off of him in waves and nothing could have stopped her from taking the last step between them.
Her affinity had blossomed up and out. Her body hummed with it. No song necessary at all. She took that step and Michael sucked in a deep breath in response as her breasts touched his chest.
“Daemons are drawn to me. It’s something bequeathed by my father’s blood,” Lily confessed.
“Samuel’s Kiss bequeathed an affinity to my mother and her sister through their mother. A dying man saved my grandmother. Gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but he gifted her something else with those life-saving breaths,” Michael said. “She passed it to her children, and my mother passed it to me.”
Lily hummed out loud when his hands came up to cup the sides of her face. Moisture filled her eyes. She’d never known her father was responsible for gifting the D’Arcys with affinity. Ezekiel had never told her. Michael’s human grandmother. The passage of time in the hell dimension didn’t match with the passage of time on earth.
“My father’s name was Samuel,” she breathed out.
“How is this possible? Samuel died before my mother was born,” Michael said. His mouth was so close to hers that his warm breath caused her lips to tingle.
“I don’t know,” Lily lied just as Michael leaned to press his lips to hers.
The moisture in her eyes wasn’t for the loss of her father. He’d already been gone a long time. She’d shed all the tears she could shed for him years ago. Her eyes filled because she knew in that instant that she’d been right about the daemon king’s manipulations. Michael wasn’t some random prince she’d met in the desert night. He was the reason she’d been allowed to leave the palace. And it didn’t matter that his likeness was nestled with her kachina dolls in a dusty backpack on the sand.
He wasn’t meant for her. Her destiny might be twined with his but not for reasons of the heart. He was meant for the throne. And the daemon king expected her to help him force Michael to accept it. His Brimstone blood made him vulnerable to her powerful affinity and that made him vulnerable to the daemon king’s manipulations, if she didn’t resist them herself.
His lips were full and warm against hers. She didn’t reject the intimacy of his moist, hot tongue. She opened for him. She eagerly met his tongue with flicks of her own. She pressed into his muscular body and his arms fell from her face to her back, where they smoothed and molded the curves of her body to fit against him. She had been forced to find haven in hell, but she tasted heaven on Michael’s lips. It was a paradise flavored with salty tears.
She would be damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.
Her father had made a deal with the daemon king to protect her. For Lily, it had been fifteen years ago. On earth more time had passed. Enough for a Brimstone prince to be born and grow to his majority. And now Lily could guess what price she might have to pay for Ezekiel’s protection.
* * *
The hellhound saved them. He leaped through the fire, scattering embers and sparks and coals in his wake as a ferocious growl erupted from his chest. They broke apart and he landed between them on stiff legs with his back hunched high.
“What the hell, Grim?” Michael protested.
“No. He’s right. We can’t burn so bright. It’s time to go,” Lily said. She was already finishing the job Grim had started, kicking apart the fire and burying the coals with desert sand.
“We don’t know which direction to take yet,” Michael protested.
“Away. First we go away and then I’ll take the time to determine specifics,” Lily said. “Rogues always find me. You found me. More will come. Especially if I don’t tamp the affinity down.” She stomped on the buried fire as if to physically illustrate her point. Then she stilled and closed her eyes. She actually knew when he took a step toward her. Lily raised her hands and held them up to ward him away.
He might have gone to her side anyway except Grim was staring out into the desert night growling at the darkness. Something was out there stalking them. Probably more than one thing.
“Right. Come on,” Michael said.
It took only seconds to grab their things. His guitar. Her bag. Grim growled louder, deep in his chest, an obvious warning to whatever approached. Lily glanced one more time at her dented SUV, but it was too far away. Michael had climbed onto his motorcycle. It was a decision of the moment to hop on behind him and wrap her arms around his chest. He didn’t seem surprised. The machine roared to life beneath them as daemons appeared from the shadows.
Michael wasted no more time. He pointed the motorcycle to the road and goosed the accelerator. Lily held on tight as they narrowly escaped dozens of daemons they couldn’t have possibly defeated even with Grim’s help. The hellhound must have been able to count. Lily saw him materialize on the road beside them, already running full speed, his legs a blur of shifting smoke.
They drove until dawn, which arrived in a burst of russet hues from umber to golden orange, but in the hours of road-eating travel Lily failed to figure out how she could break it to Michael Turov that he’d just rescued the woman who would be forced to seal his hellish fate.
Chapter 3 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
Michael instinctively headed to the nearest redoubt he knew. Lily needed a protected place to perform her ritual and he would need to switch the motorcycle for a vehicle that could hold supplies for two. When he’d started touring the Southwest, he’d decided to travel light, but he’d also wanted safe places to crash in between gigs and inevitable clashes with Rogues. He’d found the perfect place already built by a wealthy survivalist with an environmentalist streak outside of Phoenix, Arizona.
He pulled the motorcycle into a drive that had been created with packed earth and crushed gravel as reddish brown as the surrounding sand. He felt Lily become more alert behind him after the mind-numbing miles they’d traveled. The sun was rising, but the earth-sheltered home built into the ground of the Sonoran Desert would be a cool respite. Especially if they went to separate rooms. A glittering expanse of glass greeted them, but between the layers of glass were blinds that automatically opened and closed when necessary to keep the temperature of the home consistent. The thick cement construction was hidden by earth and the roof was covered with desert grass with only strategically placed skylights to indicate the home beneath the ground.
Like an ordinary dog, his beloved Grim waited at the sliding glass front door. The hellhound could have morphed through in a swirl of smoky shadow. Instead, he watched and waited for them to climb off the motorcycle and walk to his side. Michael watched as Lily approached the massive, ugly creature carefully, but without trepidation. Hellhounds were rare. He wasn’t surprised she’d never seen one. He only knew of one other in existence besides Grim. His cousin, Sam, had been given a hellhound puppy when he was a baby. There was much to admire in Lily’s attitude toward the beast that was as tall as her chest. When she actually reached to place her hand lightly on the top of Grim’s head as if a hell-spawned dog was nothing to fear, Michael stopped and stared.
She was petite. Her jeans were dusty and torn at the knee. Her pack had seen better days. But as the sun rose it glinted off her hair the way the lantern light had the night before. It created a halo effect that caused him to blink and look away.
He clenched his jaw against the burn in his blood. Samuel’s daughter. Had the affinity in her blood been so powerful that it affected her aging the way Brimstone did with daemons? He’d heard of Samuel’s Kiss his whole life. It had changed the course of his family’s history. His mother never would have fallen in love with his daemon father if it hadn’t been for the affinity Samuel had bequeathed to her. He had mixed feelings about that.
The door opened with a whoosh of displaced air. The passive solar home was always a perfect, comfortable temperature. It was his inner heat that caused perspiration to dot his upper lip.
“Make yourself comfortable. There should be food, drink, towels...anything you need,” Michael offered. He was already retreating to the master bedroom, where hopefully a cold shower would help him regain control of the lava in his veins.
* * *
Lily showered and put on a fresh change of clothes from her backpack. She washed out the clothes she’d been wearing and hung them in the spare bathroom to dry. She found canned fruit in the kitchen and sat down to eat a bowl of peaches while water ran in a nearby room. She needed calories to deal with elemental spirits, and eating redirected some of the tension from resisting Michael’s Brimstone pull.
Had the daemon king meant to throw them together? Would he spell out what he expected from her or was she supposed to play this by ear? The debt she owed him would have its price. She’d always known that.
Once the water had been turned off for a long while, Lily went in search of her host. She didn’t want to set up her mother’s kachinas and play her flute without warning the daemon prince to brace himself against her affinity’s call.
She found him bare chested and tending several minor wounds in the master bedroom in front of a full-length mirror. He’d pulled on a pair of slim-cut jeans after his shower, but they rode loose and low on his hips. So loose and so low that she could see the muscular plane of his abdomen and the dusting of golden hair that disappeared into the waistband of his pants. He was lean, hard, beautiful...and scarred.
Lily stopped in the doorway with an inadvertent gasp on her lips.
His body was amazing. Muscular and obviously toned for something besides strumming the guitar. No wonder he’d been able to fight the Rogue daemons with his bare hands. His arms bulged and rippled as he moved to place a bandage on a cut on his side. But there were other ripples, too. Burn marks dimpled his skin on his chest and back. Similar marks lightly streaked his arms and his abdomen.
“From a time when I didn’t know how to control the burn. It almost consumed me,” Michael said. He answered a question she never would have asked. “My father was a daemon. I’m not. I never will be,” he continued. “The Brimstone doesn’t rule me.”
“Daemons aren’t inherently evil, you know. They’re not human, but Brimstone doesn’t actually signify damnation...” Lily began.
“I can fight my blood and I will,” Michael interrupted.
Lily nodded as if she understood why he would reject his heritage. She had run away from hell herself. She should understand. But his burn was already such a part of the man she had just met that she couldn’t believe he would be so deluded about who and what he was.
“Let me help you with that,” she offered. She came into the room where he was trying to reach one last cut on his back with an antiseptic wipe.
“Be careful. Sometimes my blood can be dangerous,” Michael warned.
“It seems fine right now. No smoke. No fire. Look. The bandages aren’t turning to ash,” Lily teased. She dabbed at the cut and listened to his very mortal hiss before reaching for the bandage he’d already taken from its wrapper.
“For now. I’ve got it under control,” Michael said. She could hear the tension in his voice. He spoke with a tight jaw and narrowed eyes.
If so, he was doing better than she was. Her heartbeat had quickened. Her lungs had tightened. She was as close to him as it was possible to be without embarrassing herself and it wasn’t close enough. She’d had several months of practice dampening her affinity, but that practice fell to dust with Michael. Her hands trembled as she placed the bandage over the cut on his back.
But worse than the tremble that betrayed his effect on her...she allowed her fingers to brush over the ripples of his scars. His chest expanded in a sudden gulp of air at her touch. She shivered. Her affinity tuned her in to the agony of his long-ago pain. No wonder he rejected the heat of his Brimstone blood. It had almost burned him alive from the inside out.
Their gazes met in the mirror and Lily’s hand paused. She didn’t jerk it away, even though his skin began to heat.
“You want the bandages to scorch?” Michael asked. His voice had gone deeper and more melodic than before.
If she’d been honest, she would have told him she was a full-on pyromaniac in that moment. She’d been sheltered from this burn her entire life even though she’d been raised in hell. The daemon king had buffered and dampened and kept her safe. She’d run away from that refuge. She’d run from the frying pan into the fire. And she wanted Michael to burn. Her father had used the last hours of his life to bargain for her safety, and now all she wanted was to step into this dangerous man’s arms and throw away all thoughts of a safe haven.
Even so, alarm flared in her breast when Michael stepped forward, nudging her body toward the mirror with his. She didn’t resist. She backed up until she was pressed between the cool glass and his hot chest. Her hand had fallen away from his back, but now she lifted both of them. She meant to press her palms against his shoulders to hold him back. But the move became another caress of sensitive fingers down the scars on his arms.
He trembled beneath her touch and she looked up to see that he’d closed his eyes.
“This won’t be a refuge for long. We have to determine where we go from here,” Michael said. His voice was only a rough whisper. It revealed what her touch made him feel, but he didn’t lean to kiss her. She could feel the desire in his body. She could tell that he held himself in check even though he was pressed against her. The glass at her back no longer felt cool. His Brimstone heat had transferred to her. She wondered that the mirror didn’t melt, because she felt as liquid as lava.
“I’m going to have to play the flute. My affinity will fill this place,” Lily warned.
“I’ll be outside. For as long as I can manage to resist,” Michael said.
But he didn’t immediately move. Their respiration synchronized. They breathed in and out together. Each slow, shaky inhalation was a confession. Each exhalation seemed to invite and encourage their lips to draw closer. Tingles of awareness charged her skin as he drew nearer. Their mouths were only slightly apart, their gazes locked, their breath coming faster and shallower when Michael finally moved away. The cool rush of space between them was harsh. They had stood together far longer than they should have. The pause hadn’t been innocent. It had been a test of self-control—for both of them.
Lily shivered, suddenly chilled.
She watched as he pulled on a clean T-shirt and called for Grim. The hellhound rolled into being from the paws up as it moved toward the door. She’d been sheltered in the palace. She’d never seen one of the giant creatures until today, but he still reminded her of home. She touched the top of his head earlier because there was something familiar about the frightening beast who obviously loved his master. Touching Grim had soothed her. Touching Michael had left her completely undone. He was scarred from his own Brimstone, in and out.
She was already certain there was no way she would be able to fulfill her guardian’s wishes if what he asked was for her to throw Michael into the flames he’d spent his whole life resisting.
Chapter 4 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
Her bag was a trusty familiar tool she approached with more caution than she’d used before. Michael’s presence and the daemon king’s possible manipulations were added elements that caused her previous work with the elemental spirits to seem like child’s play. A child who had no idea she had been playing with fire.
This time she dug deep into her pack to draw out the oldest kachina first. She’d never dared to use it in a ritual and she certainly wouldn’t now that she’d met its living, breathing embodiment. But she couldn’t resist unwrapping its familiar shape and tilting its face toward the light. Sun beamed into the room, softened by the tinted glass of the skylight above her. The kachina’s carved features were barely illuminated. She’d memorized them long ago, but now she’d seen the sharp angles of cheek and jaw in real life. The tightening of anger and concern. The softening of humor...and desire.
She’d tasted Michael’s lips. She’d craved the heat of his tongue. Lily had grown up in a palace in hell. She called on Earth, Wind, Fire and Water and they answered her call. But this tiny figure come to life had shaken the fabric of her reality until it seemed the very shadows whispered with secrets she could almost hear for the first time. The recessed skylight was framed by several feet of packed earth encased in adobe that had been painted rich, deep ocher. Desert grass moved in an outside breeze she couldn’t feel and its swaying created a dance of shadows across the kachina’s face.
A warrior angel. A daemon prince. Its black wings boldly arched over its muscular back. Lily closed her fist around the doll, feeling its weight and shape in her hand. Every curve, every angle fit perfectly into the soft crevices of her palm as if the lines and indentations had been made to hold it.
She had no time for this reverie.
Sunlight wavered, painted dark by grass shadows and passing clouds. She quickly rewrapped the kachina and vowed not to take him out again. Instead, she reached for the wrapped dolls that represented Earth, Wind and Water. She imagined she could feel heat rising from the wrapped form that represented Fire as her hand hovered over it. Her fingers were a hairsbreadth away when she fisted them and pulled them away.
She would leave Fire in her pack, unsummoned. She’d had enough heat for one day. Her lips still tingled and no amount of moistening kept her from feeling a parched ache for a forbidden sweetness she suspected only a daemon prince’s kiss could satisfy.
Her flute was cool to her touch when she slid it from its pouch. The dolls were easily placed in position. Dancing shadows painted their blocky features with darkness and light. The earth-bermed home surrounded on the top and three sides by packed desert dirt was ideal for the ceremony she would initiate to call for the spirits’ guidance. It wasn’t a kiva, but the earth embraced it. Lily dropped her pack on the bed and sank down on a woven rug that was only the thinnest of barriers between her and the packed-earth floor.
This time she softly trilled an ironic measure of a classic tune about stairs to heaven. Spirits were playful. They wouldn’t mind. And she needed to settle her nerves. Affinity took the tune from there, quickly morphing her wry beginning into a complexity of air and vibration that claimed her entire body from blood to breath to bone. She communed with the universe by sound. Her music was a prayer. She combined the teachings of her mother with the power gifted to her by her father to come to a deeper connection with the spirits than others had achieved before. Her ability was unique, but that meant it was a challenge to navigate. She felt her way through every possibility as she went along.
Hair began to move around her face, tossed by a breeze that was both as natural as could be and eerily impossible in the closed room. Beneath her the earthen floor trembled, and moisture began to coalesce in the air around her until her parched lips were dampened and her lashes sparkled with what felt like unshed tears.
Lily paused in her playing. She held her breath. The last note faded and she carefully lowered her flute from her lips.
“Lucifer’s wings,” she whispered into the silence that seemed heavy with humidity from an approaching storm. The complex challenges she faced made the words seem more curse than request. The wings had to be meant for Michael Turov. They wouldn’t be a means of escape or a bargaining chip he could use to barter his way out of hell. They would seal his fate. Michael Turov’s rejection of his daemon legacy was well-known in the hell dimension. He’d visited. He’d walked away. No one expected him to return for good...except the daemon king.
“L-L-Lucifer’s wings,” she said again. Her hair whipped around her cheeks now. It had grown damp and stung her eyes and skin like a thousand tiny lashes. The earth rumbled. A crackle of electricity charged the air as if lightning was seconds away. A wash of ozone rode the elemental breeze.
Her pack at the edge of the bed behind her tumbled to the floor and landed open beside her. The two dolls she’d tried to leave wrapped and hidden rolled out. The warrior angel figure stopped against her shoe, still wrapped, still unsummoned. But the doll that represented Fire was loosened. Its burlap wrap was scorched and blackened. Smoke curled from it into the air.
Lily grabbed for the smoking doll, but it was too late. She cried out and pulled back burned fingers as the wrappings burst into flame. More smoke than the fuel justified billowed upand rose into the spirit-tossed air, but Wind and Water didn’t touch the rolling gray smoke. It had a life of its own and it was soon evident exactly what...or whom...the smoke would become.
Lily stumbled to her feet and backed away as rain began to fall. Her wind-whipped hair was plastered against her face, but she saw the smoke come together to form a familiar figure. The grumble of the earth seemed a herald of sorts, more powerful than a plague of angels’ trumpets as the smoky form became solid walking toward her.
He moved like a king before he was any more than ashy smoke. As his muscular body solidified, he conquered the room by right and by the price he’d paid evidenced by every scar he bore—both seen and unseen. Lily knew Ezekiel’s heart was as craggy as the battle-marked planes of his chest and cheeks.
She had summoned the daemon king. Or had she? She doubted if her guardian had to be called. He’d arrived at his own appointed time.
“Sir,” Lily said. If her earlier “Lucifer’s wings” had been a curse, this was a prayer. Because she dreaded the price of the protection he’d given her these last fifteen years.
“You are well. Your mother’s request might have been lethal,” Ezekiel said. His voice was deep and rich, warm with an interest that could be terrifying if you weren’t braced for it. Lily had the practice of years behind her, but she still blanched. Her cheeks chilled and her head went light. Her mother had wanted to preserve the old Hopi sites from daemon destruction. But mostly Sophia had wanted to help Ezekiel against the Rogue threat. It had been a last gesture of unrequited love. Lily had agreed because she owed her guardian everything, even though Ezekiel’s distant devotion was difficult to bear. Hadn’t she seen her mother suffer for years because she had fallen in love with a “man” who merely cared for her as a means to an end?
“She wanted me to help you, but she also dreamed that one day I’d be free,” Lily said.
Her guardian was fully formed now and his worn leather armor told much about his mood. He was perfectly capable of manifesting ordinary, everyday clothes. He didn’t always dress like he sat on a medieval throne.
“The only way you will ever be free is to die. I’ve promised to prevent that for as long as I’m able,” Ezekiel said. “But your affinity is your jailer. Not I.” His scent was familiar. Wood smoke tinged with a hint of sulfur, ancient leather, and a metallic hint of blood. Yes, her childhood had been interesting. The daemon king smelled like home.
“So you haven’t come to punish me for running away?” Lily half joked. She feared his devotion to the D’Arcy family he’d adopted because of his love for Elizabeth. Its ferocity. Its fire. She feared his expectations would consume her as she burned herself out trying to repay him. Never did she fear he would purposefully harm a single hair on her head. But he might inadvertently scorch her and everyone else on the earth to protect and promote those he truly loved.
“I would sooner slay an entire army of Rogues bent on my destruction,” Ezekiel replied. “Alone. With my bare hands.” He cared for her. Not in the way that he cared for the D’Arcys, but he did care. It had always been obvious that she and her mother were mere obligations. He’d disappeared for years at a time to watch over the D’Arcys while she and her mother stayed in the palace alone. She’d learned early on not to expect visits or attention. She hadn’t learned not to be hurt by the neglect.
Lily could no longer hold herself back from the pull of the only familial affection she’d known since her parents’ death. She threw herself into the daemon king’s arms and he held her to his armored chest with a fierce grip just shy of being painfully ferocious. It was startling. He’d never been demonstrative with her in the past. She’d expected him to stiffen and hold her at arm’s length.
“I worried,” he said into her drying hair. The earth had quieted. The air was still. None of the spirits dared to make a peep in Ezekiel’s presence.
“And yet you let me go,” Lily said.
“Never trust a daemon,” they both whispered together.
And then he set her from him, maintaining only one of her hands in both of his.
He was a daemon. He was the daemon king. He could care for her as a guardian more deeply than any mortal father and still he would use her to order the universe to his liking. Daemons were chess players with an eye for the long game—centuries long—and the game Ezekiel played held the balance of worlds in its outcome.
“You will help him retrieve Lucifer’s wings with no reservation, no equivocation. But you already knew I would ask this of you,” Ezekiel said.
She pulled her hand from his and turned away. Unfortunately, the tiny bedroom gave her no place to flee. Even if she’d had the whole palace at her disposal or the entire desert, there was no place she could go to escape the obligation to the daemon king. He’d saved them. He’d shielded them. Her mother had fallen madly in love with Ezekiel, and he’d never hurt Sophia even though he hadn’t loved her in the same way. Daemons loved long, and Ezekiel had loved Elizabeth D’Arcy and only her. Forever.
Elizabeth had been Michael’s human grandmother. Ezekiel’s love for her lived on in her children and grandchildren.
Yet the daemon king had been tender toward Sophia Santiago. The mighty warrior had treated her like a queen all the days of her life and he’d held her hand when she died. She’d known he didn’t return her love, but the pain of that had been softened by his protective care for her daughter.
Lily loved him for that even though she feared him for his devotion to the D’Arcys. She knew her place in the scheme of things. She’d always known. She was the daemon king’s ward, an obligation, no more, no less. It didn’t negate her debt. Her father had made a deal with the devil and now she would pay the price.
“I will,” Lily agreed.
Any freedom she’d contemplated turned to ash in Ezekiel’s presence. He was her guardian. He was the only father she’d known for a very long time. Her affection and her affinity bound her to him as surely if not more so than her real father’s daemon deal.
She would never be free. But it wasn’t stalking rogues that damned her. Or a deal struck between Samuel and Ezekiel years ago. It was Ezekiel’s scarred heart and the D’Arcys’ claim on it. She wasn’t immortal, but she was afraid she would strive to earn her place in his affections every day of her short life.
“It is done,” he said, and no throne was necessary to make his words a royal decree.
His legs began to dissipate as he turned to walk away. Lily fought the tears that filled her eyes. Not because she didn’t want him to see her cry, but because she couldn’t stand to see him untouched by her tears.
“And then I’ll come home,” Lily promised.
The daemon king was already nothing but smoke and yet he replied, “Of course. The palace was built for you eons ago, after all.”
* * *
After Ezekiel vanished—literally going up in smoke—Lily washed her face in the master bathroom sink and reset the ritual, this time with deadly seriousness. This time the elemental spirits cooperated immediately with no stormy hijinks. No doubt the spirits were as cowed as she was by the daemon king’s visitation.
Wind and Earth created a recognizable channel in the floor of the bedroom and water rose up to flow along its curves. Words came from Lily’s mouth, placed there by her ancestors’ ancient knowledge of heaven and earth.
“The Colorado River,” Lily whispered, but her voice was unfamiliar, colored by the spirits of all who had come before her. The path was revealed with no reservation, no equivocation. Her short-lived taste of freedom was over. She would never be free from the terrible weight of expectations from the only father she’d ever known. No matter what deals were struck and fulfilled, she was bound by her unrequited love for the daemon king. And to defy him more than she already had might mean losing him forever.
Chapter 5 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
Spirit summoning made Grim nervous. The great ugly hellhound Michael loved stood stiff-legged and quivering as he stared at the adobe home for almost an hour while his master played.
Only the music kept Michael from responding a couple of times when he felt Lily’s call all the way to the boiling marrow in his bones. He played obsessively until sweat ran down his cheeks and his body trembled against the pull he resisted.
“You aren’t helping, you damned mutt,” he ground out between his teeth.
Grim whined, but only came to lie at his feet when Michael thought his hellhound might never turn toward him again. Only then did Michael allow his fingers to still on the strings. The sun had set. The nocturnal activity of the desert came to life around him. Scurryings and scrapings, scufflings and squeaks began to fill the air with soft sound.
“She’s done, isn’t she?” he asked. Grim chuffed and collapsed as if he’d run a million miles with the intensity of his watch. Michael understood. His muscles ached from tension when he uncurled from around his guitar and stood.
The sliding glass door opened and Lily stepped out into the deepening night. Lanterns at either side of the entrance illuminated the beautiful young woman, and Michael slowly lowered his instrument to the ground as he stared.
She was soaked. Her hair and clothes plastered to her petite body. Steam began to rise from her as the cool night air hit her curves. But it was her haunted gaze that captured his attention. Her eyes were dark in the lantern light. Their brown irises deepened to a dusky midnight. And they were rimmed with red as if the water on her face was...tears.
He didn’t think. He didn’t hold himself back. As Grim bristled and let out a sound that was half growl, half whine, Michael strode forward to meet Lily and he was there to catch her when she stumbled forward into his arms.
“My God, woman. That wasn’t a marathon. It must have been a crucible,” he said. The sound of his own voice shook him as much as her appearance. He was hoarse. All the tension of the day spilling from his lips.
She was pale and clammy against him and her body shivered.
“I might need more than a protein bar this time,” she said. Her teeth clicked together as she spoke.
Lily didn’t resist when he gathered her up in his arms. She was limp. What had he done? Was his freedom worth hurting an innocent woman? The Brimstone in his blood burned him with shame. He’d done this to the daughter of a veritable saint with his selfish demands. Maybe he deserved to sit on the throne of hell. He was no better than his grandfather. Ezekiel’s attention could focus on a goal with no consideration for those he burned out in the process. His mother had warned him about that since he was a small boy.
“Come on, Grim. I’ve got a job for you,” Michael said.
* * *
She’d sipped a cup of soup before she was fully conscious enough to realize it. She came awake to a full stomach and the fiery heat of a massive hellhound snuggled against her side. When her eyes opened, Grim’s glowing red irises blinked at her as if to say, “I’m a useful monster, aren’t I? By the way, I know your secrets even if my master doesn’t.”
Then she noticed she was bundled in a clean, dry sheet and nothing else.
“Um. Little help?” she asked, muffled beneath sulfuric fur.
“Grim, that’s good. You don’t have to smother her with your devilish charm,” Michael said.
The hellhound heating pad slowly got up, stretched and moved away. Lily blinked against the sudden light that glared from the fireplace once the hellhound wasn’t shielding her from its glow. Michael sat on the hearth. He sipped dark wine from a glass. She noticed the sip first. The slow, savoring movement of his mouth on the rim of the crystal and the glistening moisture of the crushed fruit on his lips. The flick of his tongue. The intimacy of his throat as he swallowed.
Then she noticed the tape on his fingers. Every pad was bandaged, and the white of the bandages was stained with blood.
“Your hands,” Lily said. She gripped the sheet around herself and rose to her knees. She and the hellhound had been lying in front of the fire so the move brought her to Michael’s legs.
He didn’t move away. He simply placed his glass to the side and waited to see what she would do. Lily held the sheet across her chest with one arm and reached for one of his hands with the other. He didn’t resist. She looked from his taped fingers up to his shuttered eyes.
“I played to drown out your call,” Michael said.
Her hair had dried in a riot of waterfall waves around her face and shoulders. She didn’t have enough hands to hold her sheet and his hand and push back her hair. As if he noticed her quandary, he reached up with his free hand to softly brush waves back from her face. But he paused in the middle of the move when his hand glanced against her cheek. He released her hair to cup her jaw as if he couldn’t merely perform a practical move when he was distracted by touching her instead.
“I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Not for Lucifer’s wings. Not for me. Ever again,” Michael said.
“You hurt yourself for me,” Lily reminded him. The hand on her face was bandaged, too. She couldn’t imagine the intensity of his playing if it had hurt the hand that held the neck of his guitar.
“Purely selfish. I was protecting myself,” he said.
She didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was probably only the daemon king’s presence that had dampened the Brimstone pull and the affinity’s call between them so that he could resist. She didn’t want to mention Ezekiel. Not while Michael’s hand was on her face. Not while his warm gaze searched hers. It was the daemon king’s manifestation that had drained her to the point of collapse. Summoning the devil himself took a lot out of a girl. Especially a girl with an affinity for Brimstone already strained by kisses from the future Prince of Darkness.
“Where are my clothes?” she asked instead.
“On the chair behind you. They were cold and damp,” Michael explained.
“I’m warm now,” Lily said. She was on her knees between his jean-clad legs. Warm was an understatement. The fire behind him was meaningless. The fire in his blood called to her and the daemon king was long gone.
Heat rose in her cheeks and spread down to her chest. His gaze tracked the movement as her skin flushed. Or did the track of his gaze cause the flush with its intensity? The sheet was a pristine contrast to the way her skin revealed her way-less-than-pristine thoughts.
His hand slid from her jaw to the nape of her neck beneath her hair. When the move tilted her face up, she didn’t fight it. She should have. She should have pulled away. Stood. Put distance between them. There was no buffer here. Allowing the heat to build between them was suicide.
Her affinity was a beacon for Rogue daemons.
She both feared immolation and craved it. Feared it from Rogues. Craved it from Michael. When he leaned down to give her the burn she wordlessly begged for, on her knees and as supplicant as she could allow herself to be, the thought of Rogues was scorched away.
For the first time in her life she was free.
His lips were hot from Brimstone and dusky sweet from exquisite wine. They were also perfect. Full and masculine and so familiar she could close her eyes and explore with impunity. He gasped when she boldly traced their carved curves and swells with the tip of her tongue. Then he urged her closer until her stomach was pressed to the intimate swell of the erection between his legs. He curled down to deepen the kiss.
Suddenly, he was the royal. He would claim her. He would take control. She might be caught in a devil’s bargain that would lead him all the way to hell, but in this—kissing, touching, claiming—he had the upper hand.
Lily held tight to his muscled legs, but his heat called and she allowed her palms to press and slide. Closer and closer along his thighs to find him, and measure the length of his penis caught and contained away from her by his jeans.
He growled against her mouth and moved his hands to her shoulders to urge her back. She went with his urgings. She made room for him to leave the hearth and join her, on his knees. Now they were both supplicant. Both begging. Distantly, Lily heard Grim whine, but she could only focus on getting closer to Michael’s heat. All rational strategy was forgotten. Her vision of the Colorado River boiled away to nothing. The daemon king’s manipulations paled in comparison to the demands of her and Michael’s bodies.
Her sheet had fallen away.
She was naked for her Brimstone prince and when his lips left hers to trail down and claim her breasts with his mouth and hot, wet suction, she thought she would die. Her heart raced. Her lungs hitched. Her body burned.
Lily reached for him and even through his clothes his rising body heat transferred to her fingers. When she stroked her palms down from his shoulders to his bare arms, his skin was feverish to her touch. Impossibly hot. She brushed down the slightly roughened skin of his scars anyway. Learning, exploring and burning all the while.
But Grim’s whine erupted into growls and Michael pulled away before she had even begun to know him as well as her affinity drove her to. He rose and went toward the hellhound.
Once their bodies were separated, she could feel the Brimstone burn of the intruders that were causing Grim such concern. Rogues. Here. No doubt called by her affinity that sang with an almost audible hum in her body when Michael touched her.
“We’ve got trouble,” Michael said. He’d moved to the front window to place his hand on Grim’s head and look outside.
“More than you can possibly know,” Lily replied. She was already shrugging into her clothes, which were stiff and warm from drying by the fire. The fire’s heat paled in comparison to Michael’s Brimstone burn. She shivered at the loss of his touch in spite of the warmed clothes. Her fingers fumbled on the buttons while Michael turned from the window where he’d shrugged into his jacket to grab up his guitar. She hadn’t noticed it leaning by the hearth. It was such a part of him. Like a shadow that moved when he moved and stilled when he stilled. He placed his arm through the tooled leather strap and settled the instrument against his back, where it fit perfectly as if made to match his planes and curves.
“How many?” she continued. Her own pack settled against her back with a weight that had become familiar over the past few months. Her affinity didn’t tell her the odds. It was only a magnet that drew her toward daemons and their Brimstone blood. In the past, her father’s affinity had been used to hunt and destroy daemons until he’d decided to fight the violence and hate. He’d split with the hunters. And his decision had led to his death at their hands.
“Too many to fight. Too many to face. We’ll have to take the back way out,” Michael said.
As if Grim understood his master’s words, he turned from the window and ran toward the back of the earth-bermed home.
“I thought we were surrounded by dirt on three sides?” Lily said.
“I grew up on a vineyard estate. Playing in wine caves. Other kids had tree houses. I had tunnels and cellars. A maze of them beneath the vines. And I played hide-and-seek with a hellhound for fun,” Michael explained. “Hidden exits are a family tradition. I had this one installed shortly after I began using this place.”
He took her hand, and she let him pull her after Grim toward what seemed like a dead end at the back of the house where even the skylights failed to illuminate the shadows with moonlight. The fire still crackled and burned in the front room, but they stepped into chilled darkness that smelled of earth. She pulled her hand from Michael’s when they paused. Touching him caused her affinity to flare. There was no logic in being any more of a beacon for the Rogues than she already was.
Loud thumps came from the front of the house. Rogues were at the door. Maybe they had seen Grim at the window and they were reluctant to break through the glass where he might be waiting.
Michael pushed aside a large cloth that hung on the earthen wall. She’d thought it was a Navajo blanket, but up close, even in the shadows she could see it was a woven tapestry of European origin. She reached up to touch the figure of a bird created with bright crimson plumage at the center of the piece.
“It’s a Russian firebird,” Michael explained. “That folktale has special significance to the Turov family.” But he was already disappearing into the gaping hole he’d uncovered behind the tapestry. Lily followed as the sound of breaking glass came from the bedroom behind them. The skylight. One of the Rogues had decided to come through the roof.
She followed the prince through murky subterranean shadows. Grim had stopped in front of them. Michael pushed past his hellhound and she went with him. She couldn’t be sure in the dark, but she thought the large creature was guarding their retreat.
The tunnel narrowed and dropped, taking them deeper underground. Her hands rose instinctively as they hurried along. She could barely see. She had to feel her way. Her fingers trailed across packed earth. Claustrophobia threatened. She tried to breathe normally but her respiration was hurried. In and out with every quickened step.
“Only a little farther,” Michael said. His deep voice was contained by the small space around them. The weight of the earth trapped the sound, making his melodious accent muffled and strange.
“What about Grim?” she asked. And suddenly her voice echoed as they exited the tunnel into a more cavernous space.
“Grim doesn’t need a car to escape,” Michael said.
And that’s when Lily saw the gleam of chrome and glass and steel.
The vintage muscle car was black, or she might have seen it right away. Once her eyes had adjusted to the difference in the quality of light between the tunnel and the cavern, the car’s striking curves and angles reproved her inability to see and appreciate right away. Rogues were only a few hundred feet behind them. A hellhound prepared to defend their retreat. But Lily still paused as Michael opened the driver-side door and tossed his guitar in the back seat.
Beside the car, Michael was also all striking curves and angles. The leather of his jacket gleamed. His teeth flashed in a quick, savage smile at her surprise.
“Run with me?” he asked.
She didn’t need to be urged twice. There was no time to contemplate daemon deals, guilt or loyalty. In seconds she had ripped open the passenger door and tossed her pack in the back beside his guitar. They both sank into the buttery cream upholstery at the same time. Before she could close her door, growls and screams erupted from the tunnel. Lily almost got out of the car. Grim was in trouble. Michael reached to stop her.
“He’s got this,” he said. He had already closed his door. Now he reached across her body to pull the passenger-side door closed with a decisive thud. “He’s much older and wiser than we are. He knows what to do.” Even with the doors closed, the ferocious sounds of fighting penetrated the confines of the vehicle. “He’s just buying us time.”
Lily wasn’t so certain. She’d never heard such horrible screams and she’d grown up in hell. If the ugly beast died at the hands of the Rogues she had lured with her affinity, she would never forgive herself.
“Buckle up and hang on,” Michael said.
The car roared to life beneath them and Lily did as she was told. She’d never ridden in a sports car before, much less one that looked as deadly as this one.
“Also a Firebird, by the way. 1968. My father says it was a very good year,” Michael said. He shifted the car into Reverse and they roared backward with no further explanation.
Lily yelped and grabbed for the dashboard. She expected to hear the crunch and slam of destruction as the car rammed into the solid earth wall behind them. But instead they whooshed from zero to sixty along another tunnel. This time the tunnel rose up instead of down. She was glad she forced her eyes open when they flew out into the night, because for long seconds the vehicle seemed suspended in starlight surrounded by the endless midnight blue of the desert sky.
When they slammed down into a road carved into the sand, adrenaline soothed the jarring of her body and soul. Sure, she bit her lip and tasted blood, but it was worth the moments of flight.
“Grim?” Lily shouted above the engine’s roar.
“He’s with us. Look,” Michael said.
Lily looked out the window to see a blur of smoke and ember eyes running alongside the car.
* * *
He would have had her in front of the fire. The flickering flames reflected in the warm brown of her eyes had only matched the flames beneath his skin. She wasn’t frightened by his heat. And that gave him permission to burn.
The flavor of familiar wine had changed against her tongue. It had become sweeter, richer and more intoxicating. Especially when she had explored his mouth with sensual, darting flicks that sent desire hotter than Brimstone straight to his...
They were running for their lives and he was lost in the physical sensations of what might have been if they could have continued to indulge.
He’d been careful to take no liberties when he’d stripped off her wet clothes. Oh, he’d noticed her lush beauty. He wasn’t blind. But his primary drive had been to help and protect her. When she’d knelt between his legs, his drive had shifted.
She’d welcomed his touch. She’d welcomed his mouth on her perfect breasts. He held himself as still as possible as the memory rocked him with shudders behind the wheel.
His control hadn’t been shaken. It had been boldly thrown aside. Worse than that, if he were free to pull the car over right here, right now, he’d continue where they’d left off.
Her lips had opened so hungrily. Her hands had eagerly reached for his erection. They were running for their lives, but he couldn’t focus on the road because of the woman beside him. He could no longer pretend that he didn’t want to burn with her again. He wanted to taste her and touch her. He wanted to bring her to trembling pleasure again and again.
But only by choice. Not driven mindlessly by his Brimstone burn. Never that. He was a man, not a monster. If he couldn’t pleasure Lily as a man, then he wouldn’t touch her at all.
Chapter 6 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
The sun rose until heat waves hovered above the ground, causing it to shimmer in the distance as if this world was only a too-bright illusion, one that would disappear if she blinked or shielded her gaze. She played the game of not blinking until her eyes burned with unshed tears.
Run with me.
She would hear those words forever.
They would haunt her. As would the flash of mischievousness that had lit his eyes for a split second when she’d jumped into the car.
Grim was fully materialized now except for the blurred movement of his giant legs as they churned up dust beside the highway.
“How did he get away?” she asked when the world seemed real enough to risk speech once more.
“Hellhounds can travel between worlds. Between time and space and Lord knows where else. They use pathways we can’t see. He and I often travel that way,” Michael explained.
“So why did we have to run for the car?” Lily asked. “He couldn’t take me, too?”
Michael downshifted on a rise. He glanced sideways at her, but only for a second before his attention was back on the road as he accelerated once more.
“Grim could take you. But he won’t. Hellhounds are...unpredictable. He’s led entire armies through those pathways,” Michael said. Through the tinted windows, sunbeams glinted on streaks of hair that had been naturally highlighted by his time on a motorcycle without a helmet. Lily narrowed her eyes, but she still fought the constant need to blink. She had lived her life in darkness. She might never acclimate to the desert sun.
“He wouldn’t take me,” she said.
How cruel to be pained by both sunlight and the rejection of a monstrous creature of shadowy darkness.
She belonged to no world and no one.
Grim knew. Her obligation to Ezekiel might be a secret from his master, but the hellhound knew she had divided loyalties. From what she’d seen of Michael’s hellish companion, the beast would brook no shades of gray. He might be an ugly monster spawned in the depths of hell, but he was pure of heart. More pure than Lily Santiago, the daemon king’s ward who would die trying to earn a place for herself. Here. There. Anywhere. Her life was one long, ritualized sacrifice. If she played, summoned, served with all her heart perhaps one day she’d get love in return.
“He’s always been temperamental,” Michael said. Her silence was heavy in the car. She couldn’t hide her dismay. “I blame it on the whole ‘bred in the fires of hell’ thing.”
The vintage Firebird he drove as beautifully as he played and sang rolled to a stop. Lily was startled by the sudden cessation of movement and her game of not blinking was lost. Thankfully the moisture in her eyes had dried and no tears fell to betray her feelings. She could blame her sudden blinking on the sun. She looked around. Michael had pulled into a shabby gas station with two pumps and a peeled and cracked fiberglass statue of a man holding a wrench.
“He doesn’t trust me,” Lily said, softly. She didn’t turn back to Michael. She spoke as if to the hazy reflection of herself in the tinted glass. Her voice was as cracked by circumstances and expectations as the fiberglass statue of the mechanic was worn by time and desert wind.
Not to mention tension.
She was drawn to Michael. And the daemon king had known she would be. It wasn’t only her affinity for the Brimstone in his blood. The man was as appealing as his daemon heat.
“Lucifer’s Army he trusts. But he’s leery of a petite woman with a flute and a bag of dolls,” Michael said. “Maybe it’s because you’re way too young to be Samuel’s daughter. There are things about you that don’t add up.” She glanced at him. His hands were still on the steering wheel. He looked easy in the driver’s seat as if there was no place he’d rather be. Yet she knew he belonged on stage, playing and singing for an adoring crowd. Of course, the whole world was Michael D’Arcy Turov’s stage. She knew that even though she’d known him for only a short while.
“I’m going to freshen up,” Lily said. What else could she do or say? She couldn’t tell him she’d grown up in hell where time had flowed differently. She pushed open the car door and escaped only to find herself cornered by the very creature who seemed to know her secrets. Grim had solid legs again. He padded up to the car, panting lightly like a German shepherd who’d taken a quick morning jog.
“The daemon king is your rightful master, too, you know,” she muttered to the suspicious beast.
Grim licked his lips and sat back on his haunches. His fiery eyes were toned down so that any humans in the vicinity would think him hideous but not hellish. How the attempt worked she’d never know. He was obviously supernatural, and even acting casual his whole demeanor was more Big Bad Wolf than ordinary puppy.
Michael got out of the car to pump gas. He watched her skirt the giant hell beast and make her way inside the gas station. She walked as normally as she could with two sets of eyes setting her back on fire.
The less-than-shiny restroom had only one working sink. She managed to get a small trickle of water to flow and she splashed it on her flushed face. It didn’t do much to cool or calm her.
Rogues were drawn to her. They had been since she’d run away from the palace. There was no buffer for her on earth. Worse, Michael seemed to function as the opposite of a buffer. He enhanced her affinity’s call. He was half daemon. His biological father had been an Ancient One. He’d chosen to fall in order to rule with Lucifer in the hell dimension. They’d given up their places in heaven for autonomy in hell. Rogues were younger daemons. They resented the Ancient Ones’ choice. They wanted to take over the hell dimension, but their desire to rule hell was only a stepping-stone toward claiming heaven. Rogues had killed Lucifer. Lucifer’s Army wanted autonomy. Rogues wanted dominion.
Ezekiel was an Ancient One who needed a Loyalist heir to keep Rogues from power.
No. A little gas station sink water wasn’t going to absolve her sins. Both Michael and Ezekiel wanted her to help find Lucifer’s wings. But Michael didn’t want to wear them. He wanted to deliver them. He’d never made any secret of his distaste for the throne.
Run with me.
He hadn’t meant it in the way her soul had heard it. There was no “away” far enough for her to run from Ezekiel’s expectations or Rogues’ hunger. But Michael was a powerful lure and her soul ached to answer his call. He was a what-if she wasn’t free to explore. There was no future for her that included a man, a car and a hellhound’s devotion.
Grim was right not to trust her. She looked into the smudged and cracked glass as water swirled down the gurgling drain. She would fulfill her bargain. She would pay the price Ezekiel asked for his years of protection. Then she would go back to the cold, dark palace alone.
Her guardian’s heart had always been out of her reach. He had been a distant figure always too busy to provide the time and attention she craved, but she owed him her life and her mother’s life. It didn’t matter that his time had always gone to the D’Arcys. She couldn’t refuse him. Not when his request was to help him save the one place she’d ever called home.
* * *
Michael had pulled the car away from the pump and parked it to the side. Lily walked toward it slowly, squinting her eyes against the sun, but soaking up the heat. She’d been cold since the Rogues had interrupted her and Michael by the fire. It was possible now that her body had tasted his Brimstone burn she’d never be warm without him again.
He was propped against the hood of the vintage car. He wasn’t playing his guitar. His arms were folded over his chest. His boots were crossed at the ankles. His jeans matched his boots. Worn and scuffed. They spoke of the dust of miles traveled. He was waiting for her.
Run with me.
If she were free to run there was no way she could resist him.
“So we haven’t had a chance to talk about your ritual... How did your summoning turn out?” Michael asked.
Lily stopped in her tracks. She held on to the straps of her pack. The wrapped dolls were dormant. Silent. All her secrets hidden. For now. The daemon king was supposedly back in hell where he belonged. She was standing in the sun. She wanted to belong, but didn’t. Not here. And not there. She was as in-between as the pathways Grim traveled.
Grim knew shadows.
He came around the bumper of the Firebird with his nose in the air, sniffing out the hint of sulfur on her skin she could never quite wash away.
“The Colorado River will lead us. The clerk had a map. I can show you,” Lily offered. She pulled the map she’d gotten from the service station counter from her back pocket. She forced herself to approach the car as she unfolded the map with each step. Michael pushed away from the fender with his hip and stood up straight to meet her. Grim paced a few steps away. His eyes were watchful.
Lily spread the map on the hood of the car. She was careful to keep some distance from Michael. He had tamped down his Brimstone heat and his affinity, too. His guitar was in the back seat. It sat there like a special passenger. Its seductive song silenced...for now. She was pretty sure it was unnatural for him to leave it there, neglected and unplayed.
It didn’t matter.
All the self-control in the world—hers and his—didn’t stop her body from humming in his presence.
She focused as much attention as possible on the map. It would have meant nothing to her without the spirits’ guidance. Geography of his world wasn’t her strong suit. It hadn’t been her home for a very long time. Thanks to her elemental guides she was able to point out the exact route she’d seen traced in the dirt of Michael’s bedroom floor.
“The Grand Canyon leads to heaven?” Michael asked.
“The river leads. The canyon is incidental. The carving of it a side effect of the river’s flow.” Lily shrugged off one of the wonders of the mortal world.
“And you couldn’t follow that path to lead me to Lucifer’s wings?” Michael asked Grim.
The hellhound tilted his head, but arrogantly. He was a creature of hell. What did he care about pathways he was forbidden to take?
Without being conscious of her actions, Lily had shrugged out of her backpack and placed it on the hood to hold down one corner of the map. Michael called her attention to the bag and its contents when he suddenly placed one hand over the lumps that showed beneath the worn canvas.
“If I hadn’t seen you summoning with my own eyes, I would think you were going to lead me on a superstitious version of a wild-goose chase,” Michael said. Every inch of her body tensed and Lily held her breath. His hand was directly over one of the larger lumps that indicated dolls other than the tiny carved representation of himself. She had no idea how her treasured warrior angel would react to Michael’s touch. It had never reacted to hers. Unlike the other dolls, it seemed to have no powers whatsoever. Part of her fascination came from its silence.
She hurriedly grabbed for the backpack, more out of embarrassment than fear. She had no idea what Michael would think of the likeness, but she’d prefer he never see himself in a tiny doll she’d treasured for so many years. She was too hurried. Her rushing made her clumsy. Her whole body brushed against his and her hand tangled with his fingers. Had she actually wondered if this world was real all morning? Because it was suddenly ferociously real... Her skin flushed, her breath caught, every muscle tightened. There was no breeze—the air stood still—and yet she felt a rush of response lift her hair.
At first she thought her sudden movement had caused Grim to growl low in his chest. That maybe the contact of her against his master had worried him. The hellhound was up and pacing. Grim’s hackles had risen and turned to something more like smoke swirling on his back. Michael narrowed his eyes, but his focus wasn’t on the bag she had pulled away from his hand to clutch to her chest. Rather he looked back down the highway the way they’d come.
“It’s time to go,” he said.
The map resisted being folded correctly when she grabbed it off the hood of the car. She was breathing again, but her respiration was rushed and her fingers were clumsy. Grim was all swirl now. He hadn’t disappeared, but he looked like nothing but smoke and ember eyes.
“Keep an eye on them,” Michael ordered. Grim had vanished before his master finished speaking.
“It’s getting worse. I don’t think we’ll be able to shake them as long as we’re together,” Lily said. She sounded winded. She was winded. That slight contact between them had left her oxygen-deprived. Michael had already opened the passenger-side door for her. A prince to her princess. His consideration was salt in the scratch of her reaction to him. She wasn’t sure if she would have been able to operate the door handle herself.
“We have to be very careful. When we touch, the affinity is amplified,” Michael warned. It was the understatement of the century. Did his body still vibrate as if it was an instrument’s string? She wondered that hers wasn’t quivering for the world to see, still reacting from the slight brush of her body against his.
As he crossed around to the driver’s side, Lily swallowed. The distance between them was still negligible. Because it wasn’t from the earth to the moon. She didn’t have the guts to tell him actual touching might not be necessary at all. She still felt amplified. Every cell in her body seemed tuned to the possibility of the future touch and taste of him, but even if those touches never happened, the memory of previous ones might well keep her affinity vibrating forever.
There was a time she’d felt safe, if a little trapped, behind the palace’s walls. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever feel that way again. She’d flown with Michael, silhouetted against the desert sky. His burn and the adrenaline of that moment might be with her forever after.
Deep down she thought this new fear was a small price to pay for the exhilaration of that flight.
Chapter 7 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
Peter could taste the wild, sweet affinity on the back of his tongue every time it was unleashed. He’d traveled across the world to this godforsaken desert before Samuel’s daughter had even met the half-daemon prince. Her blood alone had lured with a purity of call he’d never sensed from others.
She’d been sheltered from detection for years. Hidden. Kept by Ezekiel. They had never suspected. Samuel, once the mightiest daemon hunter, had allied himself with the heir to Lucifer’s throne. Such an alliance had been unexpected, as the Order of Samuel was already dismantled. Scattered to the winds. So few brothers were left to carry on Reynard’s work. That great man had been murdered by D’Arcys and Loyalists. As had most of his followers.
Peter himself had been close to giving up. But he’d remained faithful. He’d survived by selling his soul to Rogues. In that he’d also followed in Reynard’s footsteps.
And now he had hope again for the first time in years.
He traveled in a fleet of gleaming black vehicles with a group of Rogues more ruthless than any he’d known. They’d been on the trail of Samuel Santiago’s daughter for months before Michael Turov had found her for them. The second he’d touched her they had pinpointed her exact location. Together they burned with the heat of a thousand suns. Residual desire coursed through Peter with the memory of that burn. The Rogues were like a pack of hounds on her scent and he, too, panted. But the Brimstone his deal had accepted into his blood was for the Order of Samuel. With Samuel’s daughter he could rebuild what they had lost. Perhaps, in time, he could turn on the Rogue allies and purify the earth of the daemon scourge once and for all.
The Rogues could have heaven. What did he care of that far-off realm? He would rule a new order on earth. He wanted to bathe in Samuel’s daughter’s affinity, and when he no longer needed her, maybe he would bathe in her blood. All the years of powerless fury he’d suffered would be soothed.
They were close. So close. And other Rogues were close to a different prize they’d sought. Lucifer’s wings were almost within their grasp. Ezekiel would be brought to his knees. But he wouldn’t be bowing before Rogues. He would be bowing before a new order of saints. One led by Peter himself.
* * *
He hadn’t had the flame nightmare in a very long time. When it visited him with a vengeance, as if to make up for years of leaving him in peace, the vivid memory of pain seared along the tracks of his scars and woke him with the sound of his own screams. Grim was there before the sound died down and the hulking beast almost smothered him with his concern. He pressed his great hairy body against Michael’s arms as if he were putting out actual flames and not the memory of a first Brimstone burn that had almost annihilated a toddler too young to control it.
One of Michael’s first lucid memories was of his mother’s soothing song and touch. She’d held him in spite of the danger. She’d risked being burned alive in order to bring him back from the brink of combustion. Rogues had taken him to get to her and the daemon king. Adam Turov had helped Michael and his mother defeat the Rogues that had also tortured him as a child.
His stepfather also had scars from his time with the Order of Samuel. But the beautiful opera singer, Victoria D’Arcy, had helped the daemon hunter to heal. They had raised Michael together even though his biological father had been a daemon. He’d had love, stability...and the looming threat of a grandfather who wanted to bequeath him the throne of hell on his twenty-first birthday.
Thankfully he’d been sleeping outside the roadside hotel to keep watch and to keep his distance from Lily Santiago when he woke screaming. The night air helped to cool his skin, and no one saw the glow along the tracks of his scars caused by the Brimstone in his blood rising to the surface.
Lily didn’t have to touch him. Ever again. Keeping his distance did nothing. The memory of her touch was enough. He’d fallen to sleep hotter than he’d been in a very long time. Thus the dream. Thus the burn. He rose and went for his guitar for comfort. The music and the affinity his mother had bequeathed him held the Brimstone burn at bay.
Of course, the music did nothing to erase the memory of Lily’s taste on his tongue.
* * *
Sometime after midnight, Lily woke suddenly with her heart pounding. Her fists were clenched, but the only intruder in her room was a stray shaft of moonlight beaming through the slim opening between the heavy motel drapes. It wasn’t the first time she’d woken afraid from a sound sleep since she’d left the protected confines of the daemon king’s palace. She’d been hunted from the start. Rogues craved her ability to lure and hunt daemons because of the power it would give them over Loyalist enemies. But their desire to use her was at war with their more personal desire to claim her affinity for their own pleasure.
Reason to run, for sure.
But running with a half-daemon prince wasn’t exactly salvation, especially when she found herself uncomfortably close to having those same thoughts to covet and claim. She was no greedy Rogue daemon, but Michael’s Brimstone was alluring.
Michael would have been alluring if his blood was cold as ice.
Lily rose from tangled sheets that spoke of her restless dreams and tiptoed to the window. She twitched the curtain just enough to look down on the Firebird gleaming in the pale moonlight. She hadn’t expected to see Michael leaning against the hood in a familiar pose, his legs crossed at the ankle. She eased back, but he wasn’t looking up at the window where she stood. He was concentrating on the guitar in his hands.
She couldn’t hear his song. Not with her ears. But she suspected she’d woken with his playing, attuned to him in ways she couldn’t understand. He played to quiet the Brimstone in his blood. To soothe away the burn. Knowing he was as restless as she was didn’t help. He was used to controlling his burn. She was less practiced at pretending. Especially when she wasn’t at all sure the attraction between them was something they could fight.
That’s when she saw Grim. She’d been too distracted by the striking figure of a daemon prince curled around his guitar at midnight. At first she hadn’t seen the giant shadow of his constant hellhound companion. But, unlike his master, the hellhound had seen her. His snout was pointed toward the window and for a second the burning coals of Grim’s eyes met hers. He had been sitting at Michael’s feet. He rose and walked several stiff-legged paces toward the hotel. Lily heeded the warning. Her fingers slid from the curtains and she turned away from the beautiful prince playing by the light of the moon.
Her backpack was only a few steps away. She kept it close at all times. In addition to the kachinas, her father’s sword was stowed in a side pocket that served as a sheath. Only the top of its hilt protruded, but it was within easy reach should she need it. It was probably a mistake to pick up the pack and bring it with her when she climbed back into bed. She did it anyway. It wasn’t safe to stare at Michael. But there was an alternative. She’d been staring at his kachina-doll likeness her whole life.
So why did the beat of her heart kick up again when she pulled out the tiny burlap bundle to unwind it? Why did every slow revolution of the doll as she freed it feel like a risk she couldn’t afford to take?
The room was dark, illuminated only by the moon on one side and the soft glow of emergency lighting from the interior corridor on the opposite side.
She saw the doll with the pads of her fingers more than her eyes.
It was still a treasure, but it was no longer as compelling as it had been before. Now she’d seen the real warrior angel in action. She’d heard his song. She’d felt his burn. She’d tasted his perfect lips. But more than that, she’d felt his scars. The tiny carving hadn’t revealed those scars to her. She’d had to see them on the real man in real life. Something deep in his changeable eyes told her there was much like the scars about him. Things the kachina doll had never revealed in spite of her familiarity with it.
She had to obey the daemon king.
But as she held the doll in her hands the smooth statue suddenly grew cool in her fingers and she trembled. The chill was unexpected. The real man could warm her if it wasn’t forbidden in so many ways. The hellhound knew her secret. But Michael was the true mystery. A daemon prince determined to run away from the throne of hell. He was scarred by his past. He fought his future. Yet he’d had the kind of familial love she’d never known.
The doll was too cold to comfortably hold and she rewrapped it, puzzled by the sudden change. What could it mean?
Ezekiel had a plan, and she was entangled in his scheme because love and gratitude bound her. She’d run away only to find that her guardian wouldn’t set her free. Whether Grim approved or not, one of her ancestors had seen the daemon prince in her future. Was he her destiny or would she be his damnation? Was the sudden chill from the doll meant as a warning?
She wanted to warn Michael. It wasn’t the Brimstone in his blood he should fear. It was her place in Ezekiel’s plan and the power she might have to overcome his resistance.
Chapter 8 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
It wasn’t safe for her to travel alone. She couldn’t fight off an army of Rogues with her father’s blade. She wasn’t sure how much sleep they’d managed between them, but they were up before dawn to meet at the car as they’d planned. Grim had disappeared. She blinked at shadows to determine if the hellhound was lurking near his master, but couldn’t decide if her gooseflesh was in response to the cool morning air or the beast’s stare.
“We should separate and meet at the river, but I don’t want to leave you on your own and Grim won’t cooperate,” Michael said.
Lily wouldn’t have been keen to travel alone with the hellhound anyway.
“I’ll think cold thoughts,” she promised, knowing it was a lie.
“Will you?” Michael challenged. He had placed his guitar in the back seat and he braced his hands against the top of the car on the driver’s side. Lily stood in the open door of the passenger side and met his gaze over the dusty roof. Something in his narrowed eyes spoke of tension and she dropped her eyes, but that only led her to look at his white-knuckled grip.
“Maybe you’re the one that needs to chill?” Lily suggested.
“I’m working on it. Trust me,” Michael said. He pushed away from the car and got behind the wheel in one fast, fluid motion. Lily swallowed. If this was him working on tamping down his Brimstone burn, she couldn’t imagine him letting go. Couldn’t, but did for several long moments as she tried to remember how to get into the car like a woman who wasn’t lost in thoughts that could get her killed.
Only the sudden thought that the daemon king had known exactly what he was doing when he’d thrown them together spurred her to take a deep breath and get into the car. He wanted them harried and hounded by Rogues. He wanted them drawn together. He wanted them to crave the forbidden fruit while they went for the wings.
A mantle fit for a future king.
She’d wondered what Ezekiel’s entire scheme entailed and maybe she was beginning to have an inkling of an answer. It was in the flush on her skin as she sat too close to Michael in the enclosed space. It was in the deep breath she took as she buckled her seat belt, already craving the scent of his skin, warmed from the outside by sun and from the inside by his fire.
Ezekiel was an Ancient One. He’d fallen from heaven to rule in hell. He’d battled Rogues for centuries. But he was a complex being with many facets all tilted toward strengthening his kingdom.
Michael’s reluctance as the prince and heir of the throne was well-known, but Ezekiel was determined that he would be a king. Ezekiel had ruled alone for too long. He might want more for his beloved Elizabeth’s grandson.
The idea of her royal guardian as a nearly immortal and unpredictable matchmaker caused panic to rise up in her chest.
“Hang on,” Michael said. “The sooner we get to the wings the better.”
Her body was pressed against the buttery leather by their momentum as the Firebird sped from the hotel parking lot. Her head grew light and her palms pressed against her hollow belly as her stomach dropped. Michael drove down the Arizona highway with a hound of hell literally at his bumper urging him on.
But would her task be over once they retrieved Lucifer’s wings? She was afraid that leading Michael to heaven was only the beginning of her torment.
Ezekiel had said the palace had been built for her. She was used to the temporal tricks and treats of the hell dimension, where time was amorphous and seemingly unrelated to time on earth. The palace had seemed ancient and always. Built long before she’d been born.
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Barbara J. Hancock
A match made in hell… The adopted daughter of the daemon king, Lily Santiago has lived her life in darkness. After one glimpse of desert sunlight, she begins to understand what she's been missing.Michael D'Arcy Turov might be heir to the throne of hell, but he has firmly rejected that legacy. All he wants is to play his guitar… Until he meets Lily, and her kiss awakens the Brimstone burn he's long suppressed. A pawn in the war between her foster father and rogue daemons, Lily is determined to let Michael keep his freedom. But what if his desire for her is enough to take him back to hell?
A match made in hell
The adopted daughter of the daemon king, Lily Santiago has lived her life in darkness. After one glimpse of desert sunlight, she begins to understand what she’s been missing.
Michael D’Arcy Turov might be heir to the throne of hell, but he has firmly rejected that legacy. All he wants is to play his guitar... Until he meets Lily, and her kiss awakens the Brimstone burn he’s long suppressed. A pawn in the war between her foster father and rogue daemons, Lily is determined to let Michael keep his freedom. But what if his desire for her is enough to take him back to hell?
He wasn’t meant for her.
He was meant for the throne. And the daemon king expected her to help him force Michael to accept it.
His lips were full and warm against hers. Lily didn’t reject the intimacy of his moist, hot tongue. She opened for him. She eagerly met his tongue with flicks of her own. She pressed into his muscular body and his arms fell from her face to her back where they smoothed and molded her curves to fit him. She had been forced to take haven in hell, but she tasted heaven on Michael’s lips. It was a paradise flavored with salty tears.
Her father had made a deal with the daemon king to protect her eighteen years ago and now Lily knew what price she would have to pay for his protection.
BARBARA J. HANCOCK lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where her daily walk takes her to the edge of the wilderness and back again. When Barbara isn’t writing modern gothic romance that embraces the shadows with a unique blend of heat and heart, she can be found wrangling twin boys and spoiling her pets.
Brimstone Prince
Barbara J. Hancock
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For Sam, Daisy, Brownie, Betsy and Punk...
the rescued dogs who have rescued me.
Contents
Cover (#u0170452b-a7be-55fb-8302-32b01e2094a5)
Back Cover Text (#ua952e3fa-8f72-5f08-92ef-2ffc9f44aa25)
Introduction (#u3021b5b4-8452-5952-a4c5-5f024afd0105)
Title Page (#ua27c4a8d-f265-5aad-b194-fb226f1d4c96)
About the Author (#u75e6fe54-7159-5136-8b10-c879777eeed3)
Dedication (#u9a7983cd-39d4-5789-9c3d-7cd349a3b1d0)
Prologue (#u13165fcd-99e4-5cd5-bdef-9fff5edfa268)
Chapter 1 (#udf992a36-02d5-5904-8b07-bb4db53b5131)
Chapter 2 (#u4d9f722a-8325-534b-8c51-84e52b741618)
Chapter 3 (#u607ae18c-93ac-5aff-ac99-9be77f6fcabd)
Chapter 4 (#ue8037a53-236f-595a-b3ba-f5cebed901f4)
Chapter 5 (#ubc7e7154-1367-596d-96cb-d54e836d625e)
Chapter 6 (#u2434fde1-656b-5d3b-aeee-b88de4a59df8)
Chapter 7 (#uad74ed77-ff2e-5d0a-b1d8-f9d69fdd9c23)
Chapter 8 (#u8dc6bd06-f433-59eb-b617-dd1936c0c63b)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
He was dying. The blade his former partner, Reynard, had plunged into his back had failed to kill him immediately, but the blow would be fatal all the same. Samuel Santiago could taste sulfur in the back of his parched throat. When he coughed up blood, it was tinged with black. He could feel the burn as the taint from the daemon blade Reynard had used spread its way through his veins.
Daemons weren’t damned. But just like men, they could choose evil paths.
The cab dropped him at a familiar corner in Santa Fe. He was able to walk slowly but surely to the address of the apartment building where his young daughter would be sound asleep. He had a job to do. His Latin-scribed blade was wrapped in burlap and hidden beneath his coat. It and secrecy would be the gifts he’d leave Lily and her mother, Sophia. He’d been wise to forge a deal that would protect her and her mother from Reynard’s treachery, even if he hadn’t been able to protect himself.
It took forever for the elevator to respond to the summons of the glowing button that wavered in and out of focus as he waited. The Rogue daemons Reynard had sold his soul to were blackened by the desire to rule the hell dimension and then conquer heaven. They wanted to reclaim the paradise Lucifer had rebelliously left. Hell was embroiled in revolution. Loyalists against Rogues. But the Rogues couldn’t be stopped by Lucifer’s Army alone. At one time, Samuel had hunted all daemons, but he’d learned that Loyalists had no quarrel with humans. It was the Rogues who desired to enslave and destroy. The daemon king needed help from humans to defeat the Rogues. That fact might save Lily’s life.
Rogues would hunt him down. He looked over his shoulder when a random noise from a nearby apartment made him feel as if they were already behind him preparing to pounce.
The hall was empty. Somewhere in the distance a small dog barked.
Samuel stumbled into the elevator. He jabbed at the button to close the door as if the hounds of hell snapped at his feet. In a way, they did. He didn’t sigh in relief when the door closed. He leaned against the elevator’s humming wall, tense and watchful, as it rose up to the tallest floor. It was almost midnight. They would be sleeping. He didn’t have much time. He couldn’t see them. He couldn’t say goodbye. He couldn’t risk staying longer than it would take to place the wrapped sword on the mantel.
Lily had his blood. For better or worse. He supposed that was a gift he would leave her, too, although it often seemed a curse. His affinity for daemons had led him to join with Reynard in hunting them. It was Reynard’s joy in the hunt, his increased ruthlessness, that had led Samuel to question his gift. He was drawn to daemons and they were drawn to him, but in the end he had decided he was supposed to be the bridge between humanity and daemons, not their executioner.
That realization had come too late.
The Rogues were evil because they sought power and dominion over the entire universe. Loyalists only wanted to build an autonomous life for themselves. Lucifer didn’t fall from heaven. He leaped. Others had followed him. His death at the hands of Rogues had begun the revolution.
Samuel quietly let himself into the apartment. He left his key and the sword on the mantel near the kachina dolls his wife had arranged above the fireplace. The colorful Hopi statues had caught his eye many years ago, even before he’d fallen in love with the woman who carved them. She’d been at a stall in a Native American market. He’d paused, drawn to a spiritual song from the dolls that only his affinity could hear. She would know when she found the sword that it was a farewell. They had only ever had stolen moments anyway. His life wasn’t his own. He hadn’t been free to settle down and live with the family he loved.
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 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
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.
“The other daemons who tried to stop you were Rogues. They want as many pathways to the hell dimension as possible to remain open as they resist the rule of the rightful daemon king,” the daemon said in a soft, reasonable voice, as if he was pacifying a madwoman.
Who was he and how did he know these things?
Considering her free hand had gone to the hilt of a hidden sword at her back, his tone was probably justified. She could feel the grimace that stretched her face taut as she prepared to battle. She was no warrior, but the small elemental spirit dolls at her feet weren’t her only weapon. The flute and the dolls helped her channel her affinity to call on the elemental spirits. In days long past, she would have been deemed a priestess. Her mother had trained her in the old Hopi ways...but the sword had come from her father.
“My mother gave me a job to do and the sacred tools with which to do it. My father gave me this,” Lily said. The rasp of steel against its leather scabbard sounded loud in the underground room.
Perhaps the daemon could see the Latin prayers scribed into the blade even by lantern light, but if he could he didn’t retreat. He came toward her one more step. Then two.
“And what makes you aware of the daemon king’s wishes?” Lily asked as she brought her father’s blade down in a practiced move that prepared for the daemon’s attack.
The whole while she took in the daemon’s appearance. The absence of wings didn’t matter. Her mother had given her a gift along with her training and her tools. It was nestled in the backpack that had held all the kachina dolls that were now arranged near the sipapu. Hundreds of years ago one of her ancestors had carved an unusual kachina doll. It had been passed down for generations. From the time the daemon had stepped from the shadows, she’d recognized the sharp angle of his jaw and the full swell of his lips. She recognized the thickness of his wavy, shoulder-length hair swept by the desert winds. His broad shoulders, the set of his eyes and the patrician nose were all familiar.
The kachina doll had stiff wings that had been carved in a mantle down its back and painted black. This daemon had no wings. That initial illusion had only been created by shadows. But his fallen angel’s voice made the idea of wings possible every time he spoke.
He couldn’t be her warrior angel.
Her hand gripped the hilt of her sword to stop the trembling in her wrists and fingers. This couldn’t be her family’s kachina come to life. He was no nature spirit or ancestor who had come to help her. When he moved, she could see the glint of Brimstone glow in his eyes. She could feel the heat of his blood. She refused to let fire and familiarity influence her actions.
“The daemon king doesn’t rely on sipapu portals. He has his own pathways he protects,” the daemon explained. “But it isn’t safe for a human to meddle in these matters.” He had paused, but it didn’t feel like a reprieve. It felt like he was waiting for an opportunity to pounce.
“Are you his servant then? And you’ve come to help me?” Lily asked.
Likeness to her family’s oldest treasure aside, she still held the sword at the ready. Over the long, hot months of the strangest summer job any runaway had ever taken on, she’d learned to guard against daemon deception. They couldn’t be trusted. It wasn’t her Hopi mother who had told her that the devil had a silver tongue. That bit of wisdom had come from her guardian himself.
“No. I’m not his servant. I’m his adopted grandson,” the daemon said. “My name is Michael D’Arcy Turov.”
Her sword didn’t waver, but the air did catch in her lungs again in a hiccup of surprise. Her guardian’s heir wasn’t here to hurt her. She’d never been allowed to meet him, but she’d known about him from afar. The guitar on his back should have given his identity way, but her shock over his features had distracted her.
Michael Turov was a living replica of her warrior angel, but he was also the Brimstone prince. He was the talk of the hell dimension and had been since it had become common knowledge that he didn’t want the throne.
The unusual kachina her Hopi family had once worshipped, then treasured for centuries, was the perfect likeness of a daemon prince. She wondered why her guardian, the daemon king, had never deemed it necessary to warn her. Lily was distracted by the revelation only long enough to blink in surprise, but that was long enough. The daemon leaped. His body slammed into hers and her planted feet slid backward with the force of his superior weight and strength. His momentum pushed her back from the portal’s edge, and his hands over hers on the hilt of her sword kept her from using it in defense.
It didn’t matter. She couldn’t have attacked him anyway. Not even if she hadn’t realized he was trying to protect her from the sipapu’s edge. She’d always slept with the beautiful kachina beneath her pillow. When Michael Turov pressed her back against the chamber’s earthen wall so that his body was between her and the open sipapu, the shock of his Brimstone heat didn’t stop her from tracing the familiar features of his face with her gaze. It was almost too sharply cut to be traditionally handsome. There was something inhuman in the perfectly pronounced bone structure beneath his skin.
This daemon prince’s face was the reason she’d been drawn to kachinas in the first place.
Face-to-face with a living replica of the unusual doll, her hand twitched against the hilt of the sword. Her mother had been a carver, but Lily suddenly ached to be an artist. Could she re-create the angles of his cheeks and jaw? Could she capture in wood the ferocity of his expression while still creating the slight softness of his lips? She noted his mouth seemed to tilt on one side as if he laughed at the world, or himself, or some unseen joy in the shadows that gamboled for his attention alone.
“Grim, we’re about to have some unsavory visitors. You might want to come out here and give us a hand,” Michael said. “Or a paw.”
His gaze swept over her face as he spoke as if he was the sculptor who would try to capture the blend of Hopi and Spanish that came together to create her brown eyes, dramatic brows and dark hair. Her hair had loosened when she hit the wall. It had fallen around her face in a black waterfall of straight silky chunks.
“Your hair reflects the light,” Michael said.
Maybe it was a daemon prince thing to say, but it wasn’t a usual thing for her to hear. She’d been kept in isolation her whole life. The wonder in his tone and the admiration in his eyes gave her pause. For the first time, her grip loosened beneath his fingers on the hilt of her sword.
“Who is Grim?” Lily asked.
Michael turned his face toward the shadows where he’d appeared earlier and his move—when she dragged her gaze from the razor’s edge of his lean jaw—allowed her to see a monstrous doglike beast swirl into being as ashy embers coalesced into a canine shape. A snarling maw of snow-white teeth was the first part to solidify, followed by a muscular form surrounded by shifting fur that seemed more smoke than hair at the ends.
Lily’s nose twitched as the pleasant scent of wood smoke filled the air around them. It was a scent her body instinctively associated with hearth and home—because of the slight sulfuric burn, not in spite of it. She’d found a haven in hell with her mother as a child. They’d created a home in one wing of an immense Gothic palace others would have feared.
Her hands tightened again and she tried to pull from the daemon’s grip, but he held fast. His hands were big and warm around hers. She glanced down. The indentations his guitar strings had caused in the tips of his fingers were slightly rough against her skin.
“Grim is a friend. And we’re going to need his help,” he warned.
She stilled and looked up into Michael Turov’s gaze. In this position, the glint was gone and all she saw were sincere hazel irises rimmed with a darker chocolate as he met her gaze without blinking. But movement behind him kept her from becoming mesmerized. Smoke poured up from the hole in the ground. The sipapu now seemed like a slumbering volcano that had wakened. The wood smoke scent was suddenly tainted by a much stronger sulfuric stench.
“Let us take the lead,” Michael said. “Rogues give no quarter and they have particular reason to want me dead.”
“Oh, so you came to make it worse then?” Lily joked. “Don’t let my hesitancy to lop off your head fool you. I don’t need anyone to take the lead. Not a prince or a...” She failed to be able to label the creature across from them that snarled and snapped at the sulfuric smoke.
“Hellhound,” Michael supplied. “Grim is my hellhound.”
“Of course he is,” Lily replied.
A fissure had begun to open up from the sipapu. She gasped, more concerned at the destruction of the kiva than she was over what the fissure signified...until daemons began to climb from the widening portal.
“Complete your ritual,” Michael yelled over the grinding of crumbling earth.
But frankly, she was too busy deflecting the daemon blade that aimed for the back of Michael’s neck. He fell back as her sword clashed, metal against metal, and sparks flew. Several Rogues had climbed from the sipapu, but several more had come from the shadows and the smoke. Half a dozen daemons attacked. Michael fought with his bare hands and his hellhound’s crushing bite. She fought alongside them until she realized they didn’t need her help. For now. The widening fissure was the threat if it allowed more of the Rogue daemons to join in the fray.
Her traditional kachinas were already in place. She raised the flute to her lips and called the spirits to life with the song her mother had taught her. It didn’t matter that her mother had considered it nothing but tradition and a comfort during the difficult times following her father’s death. Lily’s affinity brought the old ways to life. The song came from her flute, but it also came from the affinity in her heart and the Hopi blood in her veins. She could feel Michael’s gaze on her as she moved. She’d never done the ritual with an audience. For the first time, distraction threatened. She struggled to block the daemon prince from her mind, but hadn’t he somehow always been there? The hidden kachina in her backpack was one of her earliest memories. It had fascinated her forever. While her mother’s kachinas were masked and carved with blocked shapes, the one with wings had been rendered with meticulously lifelike features. She hadn’t known how meticulously until moments ago when Michael Turov had walked into the kiva.
The earth calmed as she played. The fissure shrank, and then closed. The sipapu became filled in to the point of being a shallow, symbolic hole the size of a melon. There was a pause as the kachina spirits quieted and the universe accepted her interference. She’d run away from her refuge in hell in just this way by widening a sipapu portal with the kachinas’ help. Even though it had been three months, she still couldn’t believe that the daemon king hadn’t retrieved her.
In the lantern’s glow, motes of ancient desert dust hung in the air before they began to float and fall again.
Lily fell, too, her energy completely spent. But instead of the hard-packed soil she expected, her body was caught by strong, muscular arms.
* * *
Michael quickly carried his slight burden up out of the earth. Grim helped without being asked. Walking a short distance ahead, he led Michael and the woman he carried through pathways only he could find. Michael was used to walking through the chill of an otherworldly portal. He was used to dematerializing in one place and reappearing in another. He laid the woman on a smooth patch of ground and shrugged out of his jacket to roll it up and cushion her head. Then he forced himself away to start a fire beneath the rising moon and sleepy stars winking awake in the night sky. The desert sky wasn’t black. It was a midnight blue so deep and lush it reminded him of velvet. But the night would grow cold and the young woman, no matter how ferociously she’d fought, didn’t have Brimstone in her blood to keep her warm.
The fire kindled easily while she murmured in her sleep.
He approached her after the fire was built. She drew him with a powerful pull—like the moon to his sea—and damned if he didn’t feel like waves crested and crashed inside of his chest with every heartbeat. She didn’t seem hurt, only drained. Sleep was probably what she needed to recover. She was petite, but athletic, and obviously used to fighting daemons. He touched her face when a particularly loud whimper escaped from her rosy lips. It was a mistake. The scars that tracked along his arms flared to life with a red glow. The sudden ignition startled him into stumbling backwards to cradle his tingling fingers against his chest.
The tempest in his chest was shocked into stillness.
Her affinity was stronger than any he’d felt before. And it called the Brimstone in his blood to roaring life in spite of a lifetime of practice at tamping it down. After that touch, he took a seat well away from the young woman. He put the fire between them. Not because the flare had hurt him. It hadn’t.
It had been a pure pleasurable jolt of heat akin to desire.
Where had this woman gotten an affinity so strong that it tempted him to loose his Brimstone burn? He had inherited affinity from his own mother, Victoria D’Arcy. Affinity for daemons had been passed to his grandmother, Elizabeth, by a monk named Samuel. She had passed it to her daughters and, in turn, it had come to him. But each passing had diluted the affinity’s strength.
He was used to its almost musical call. He wasn’t used to this. The woman’s affinity was nearly pure and so powerful that he could feel it calling the Brimstone blood he’d inherited from his biological father even though he had a lifetime of experience guarding against it.
He hadn’t trusted his daemon blood since it had almost killed him as a child.
He hunted daemons. He refused to accept that he was nearly one himself. But hunting Rogue daemons wasn’t the only family business and the daemon king wasn’t their only concern.
The Turov estate was one of the largest in Sonoma, California with thousands of acres of vines. His stepfather had established it right after the Russian Revolution when he’d brought his parents to America and he’d had many years to bring it to lush, thriving success.
Brimstone wasn’t all bad. It had extended Adam Turov’s life and allowed him to help Michael’s mother after Michael’s real father had died. Turov had helped Victoria defeat the Order of Samuel when they’d kidnapped Michael as a small child. Then, Turov had married Victoria and raised Michael as his own.
The Brimstone in Michael’s blood had almost killed him when it had first flamed high during his rescue. He’d never trusted it since.
He reached for his guitar to keep himself from standing and going to the woman again. Her restless murmurs drew him as much as her affinity. She was distressed. What worried this amazing woman who had used her affinity and her dolls to call Fire, Water, Wind and Earth to defeat the Rogues that stalked her? Were more daemons on their way? He could see Grim silhouetted on a rise just outside of the fire’s light. The hellhound was alert and watching for trouble, but Michael still felt every protective instinct he possessed on high alert as well.
The fire’s glow was gentle in comparison to the glare that had come from his scars. It helped to filter the woman’s murmurs and sounds through a soft haze of smoke. By all accounts, his grandmother had been a remarkable woman, too. She’d loved the daemon king before he was a king. He’d loved her as well. So much so that he’d “adopted” her human children after her death. Unfortunately, his devotion to the D’Arcy family shadowed Michael’s future.
And now it would shadow this woman’s future as well.
He was in the fight of his life against more than the Brimstone in his veins. He fought against the daemon king’s expectations. Ezekiel had proclaimed Michael the heir to the throne of hell. But Michael’s scars were a constant reminder why that could never happen. They didn’t glow anymore. He’d succeeded in extinguishing the flare. He always would. He refused to acknowledge his daemon heritage, now or ever. He’d seen the harm his own blood could do. He’d grown up knowing that daemons couldn’t be trusted. He refused to accept a position that might make it impossible for him to protect others from the power in his blood.
His guitar came to life in his hands as the elements had come to life for the woman. She’d used a flute and the dolls to channel her affinity. He used the guitar’s strings. But he wasn’t calling anything. He played to drown out her affinity’s call. He played to control the Brimstone in his veins. If he also soothed her distress, so be it. He would give her peace before he shattered her peace completely.
Because in spite of needing to keep his distance from the woman who obviously tempted his burn, he needed her help to find the one thing his “grandfather” the daemon king wanted more than Michael—Lucifer’s wings.
* * *
Guitar music woke her. Classical Spanish guitar expertly played and accompanied by flawless singing. It was a song about a desert flower she’d heard before, but for some reason the lyrics romanticizing a woman as a beautiful, hardy bloom made her flush. She hadn’t told him her name. If he asked now she might say “Jane.” Anything but allow him to see that the sound of her name from his lips as he sang caused a rush of response she’d never felt before.
“You have a powerful gift. I’ve never seen anything like that...and I’ve seen more than most.” He stopped singing to speak, but he continued to play.
She had blinked open her eyes and lifted her torso from the ground. From her propped position, she could see his fingers deftly flying over the strings. The calluses she’d felt on each digit were explained by his swift, experienced manipulations. He wasn’t a casual player. He played often and long, enough to cause permanent ridges. He plucked, strummed and slid his hand on the neck as easily as another man would breathe.
The guitar was a rockabilly beauty complete with inlaid turquoise and silver panels. The color was brilliant against his black t-shirt and faded denim.
Nearby, a tiny fire crackled. It had been built with the kind of foraging only an experienced desert camper could accomplish—brush, twigs, dung—all patiently scavenged from the barren landscape. The fire held back the night with a soft wavering circle of light, which only served to make the vast expanse of blue-black sky above them seem limitless and cold. There, bright diamond bits of stars twinkled while down below a daemon prince bent over his strings and the flash of glimmering polished maple. A vintage motorcycle was parked near the outer reaches of the light. Farther out still, her dusty SUV was exactly where she’d left it before night fell.
She didn’t believe in coincidence. A ward of the daemon king learned early and well to notice every tweak, every manipulation to the universe around them. The daemon king hadn’t retrieved her and now his grandson appeared. What trickery was this?
“The kachinas. I need to pack them properly,” Lily said, suddenly appalled that she hadn’t thought of the sacred dolls right away. She was light-headed, but she rose to her feet and made for the pack that had been placed near the fire.
“Easy does it. You went down hard,” the daemon prince said. Michael. His name was Michael. She’d been sheltered in a secluded wing of the palace. Kept away from others because of her affinity. But she knew all the D’Arcy family by name. They were the daemon king’s beloveds and Michael’s sudden appearance in her life was cause for concern. He continued to play his guitar, but he’d tensed. He watched her as if she might faint into the fire.
“I’m fine. Summoning takes a lot of energy. Like a marathon. I could run ten more miles if I had to. Just need carbs and water,” Lily said.
She rummaged through her bag for a protein bar and a bottle of water. As she ate and hydrated, she repacked the dolls in their burlap wraps. She was relieved to note that Michael had been careful with the kachinas. None were busted or broken. He’d also placed her flute back in its velveteen pouch. The special kachina that bore a remarkable likeness to the daemon prince was still wrapped and undisturbed.
Her relief lasted only as long as it took for her to realize her father’s sword was missing. It hadn’t been returned to the sheath that rested between her shoulder blades beneath her shirt and it wasn’t in the specially altered side pocket of her backpack that ran the length of the bag. Only the top of the hilt showed when it was in her backpack, but she was used to the weight and balance of the bag when the sword was hidden within it. Her father’s sword was gone.
Slowly, Lily stood. The pack dropped at her feet as she flexed her arms out at her sides. The daemon prince’s fingers stilled on his strings. He watched her rise. He met her accusing gaze. The flickering fire made mysteries of his dark-rimmed eyes. She couldn’t read them or guess what his intentions might be.
Daemons couldn’t be trusted. Surely, a daemon prince least of all.
“I need your help. Normally, I rely on Grim to guide me to Rogues over pathways that aren’t fully a part of this world. But he’s a hellhound and he can’t guide me to where I need to go this time,” Michael said.
He shifted to place his guitar on the ground beside him and then rose so gracefully that he seemed to be standing before her between one blink and the next. His movements echoed with the grace of the rhythm and blues he played as did his voice. But there was another quality to his voice—a smokiness that hinted at pain. Lily swallowed because his grace and his pain were alluring. She had heard of him. Of course she had. She knew he was the heir to the throne of hell and she knew he wasn’t happy about it. She was suddenly afraid that she knew why the daemon king had allowed her to run away. The music of this daemon prince was as seductive as the fire in his veins. Her affinity must have brought him to her. Had the daemon king planned it that way?
“I’ve been searching for a guide. Someone who can help me retrieve my grandfather’s crown. It isn’t an actual crown, but a symbol of his right to rule the hell dimension. He sacrificed it years ago to save my father’s life. It’s my duty to get it—them—back,” Michael said.
“Them?” Lily asked. It was extremely dangerous to have a conversation with a daemon, but she had no choice. She wasn’t leaving without her father’s sword. She firmed her spine as if he was coming at her with weapons instead of words. Because daemons used words as weapons.
He’d stepped closer and closer to her as he spoke. His face bathed in the light from the dancing flames was hypnotic in its familiarity and the startling newness of seeing it animated, alive, life-size and so achingly appealing.
“Lucifer’s wings. When Rogues like the ones that just attacked us revolted, they cut them from his dead body and coated them in molten bronze. They hung above the Rogue Council until the council was defeated and driven from hell by my grandfather. He’s the king now. The wings rightfully belong to him,” Michael explained. “The only problem is that they’re currently in heaven.”
“Bronzed wings singed black by Brimstone,” Lily whispered. She’d seen them once or twice or a million times as a child, but the daemon king, Ezekiel, looked nothing like her doll. A daemon who looked exactly like her kachina searching for black wings caused an eerie awareness of destiny to prickle along her skin.
“Yes. I must retrieve them from heaven and deliver them to my grandfather in hell. It’s complicated...but doing so will complete a bargain between us,” Michael said.
“Lucifer’s wings are in heaven,” Lily repeated. She could easily imagine the kachina doll in her pack with its dark wings and Michael’s face.
“The elemental spirits you call might be able to guide us to find them,” Michael said as if he was certain of her abilities. More certain than she. He had no idea how unpredictable spirits could be. And he had no idea that she had her own obligation to his grandfather.
“It’s possible. It’s also possible they’ll refuse to help you. Sealing a portal to hell is one thing. Stealing from heaven another. Where is my sword?” Lily asked.
He had stopped very near her. The fire now backlit his features until they were entirely in shadow. Her chin lifted in response to his height and his nearness, but she could no better read his eyes in shadows than she could in firelight. In a way, she’d known him all her life, but in much more tangible ways he was mysterious, a threat to her and to her duty and possibly even her soul. He obviously denied his Brimstone blood. He refused to live in hell and his heat was tamped down so that someone without her level of affinity might not even detect it but his controlled burn seduced in ways that a more rampant fire never had. It was a distant intrigue to her senses. One she had to work to resist.
“I’ll give you your sword and help you close the portals you promised your mother you would close. You’ll lead me to Lucifer’s wings,” Michael proposed.
Gone was the almost lyrical quality to his speech. He had spoken in a loud, clear voice as if a proclamation had been made.
Lily’s chest tightened. The air had gone thick and still around her. The dancing flames slowed. Her mother had warned her. Daemon deals were dangerous. They’d lived in hell for years because of a deal her father had forged with the daemon king before he died. But Lily couldn’t turn away. She was held in place by the universe pausing around her as it waited for her to accept or reject this daemon prince’s plea.
Because it was a plea. She could feel the tension in the man before her. He didn’t touch her, but he stood so close that his Brimstone heat caused her cheeks to flush. He’d said that retrieving the wings would cement a bargain between him and the daemon king. In her bag, the kachina doll had black wings that had been carved hundreds of years ago by a Hopi ancestor she’d never known.
Michael D’Arcy Turov should have wings.
Lily knew it. The dolls in her bag were wrapped and silent. She didn’t summon any spirit for guidance. It was her heart that whispered the truth.
“I’m Lily Santiago. Give me back my father’s sword and I’ll guide you to Lucifer’s wings,” she agreed.
The flickering flames halted. Sparks above them hung suspended in the air. Her lungs froze. Her heart paused, but after a moment of panic everything resumed as it should. The fire flickered. She breathed. Her heart pounded. And Michael Turov, the daemon prince, turned away. But not before she saw the flash of triumph in his suddenly illuminated eyes.
Chapter 2 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
Hell had no stars. The sky above the palace was as thick and impenetrable as velvet. There was no moon. No planets. Only a nothingness of an atmospheric blanket that existed to separate a lower dimension from another. One had to rise up to the outer earth to see the stars, moon and sun. In hell, day was divided from night by the passage of time and by a slight violet haze that distinguished the coming of dawn and a deeper purple hue that signified the fall into dusk.
The hell dimension was beautiful—different, dark—but beautiful. Ezekiel often wondered that anyone could find it frightening or ugly.
Of course, the purple haze illuminating the carnage of battlefields was hideous. A sight he would never forget. And for a daemon king, “never” was a very long time.
He had been a warrior king during a time when war was inevitable. But it was time for a shift. Hell needed different leadership. Even a warrior king could dream of peace.
He stood on his own private balcony looking up at the velvet sky of hell’s night and instead of thinking about war he thought about children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He thought about Samuel Santiago and the deal they’d made. For a human, Santiago had been surprisingly capable of planning for the future. Ezekiel had cared for them separately—Lily and Michael, but he’d watched them grow and he’d waited for the right time for them to meet. His grandson was almost twenty-one. It was time, but that didn’t stop Ezekiel from worrying about his ward outside the palace walls for the first time. Her affinity had always taken his utmost ability to dampen in the palace, but he’d had to keep her presence mostly hidden until the time was right.
Rogues would be drawn to her. She was in terrible danger. Ezekiel fisted his hands and placed them on the cold stone rail in front of him. A daemon king had to take risks sometimes. Bold moves had to be braved. Even if it meant he risked losing them both. To Rogue daemons, to each other, or, worst of all, to a betrayal of all he held dear. Michael was only half daemon. Lily was human. Yet the fate of hell was in their hands.
Ezekiel stood for hours watching the black velvet sky lighten to purple. The passage of time was tricky in the hell dimension. They had yet to completely understand and master it. He had manipulated time to bring Lily and Michael together as peers. Time in the palace didn’t stand still. It was only infinitesimally slowed. Lily had actually been born first, but she’d needed to wait for Michael. Now, they were together. Santiago and D’Arcy. Kindling waiting for a spark. Things would proceed quickly. Yet it seemed an eternity passed as he watched and waited.
* * *
Lily cleaned and polished the sword with the same reverence she’d shown the kachinas. Her entire world had been one wing of a dark Gothic palace for many years. There was plenty of time to devote to ritual and habit when your world was one of confinement. Her mother had filled their days with art and music as well as exercise and training. Lily continued the practice after her mother had died.
“There are prayers scribed on my sword...it didn’t hurt you to touch them?” she asked.
Michael still stood near her after he’d given her back her father’s sword. She tried to ignore the intensity of his gaze, but it carried an almost tangible heat that flushed her cheeks.
“My mother was human. My father was a daemon. I’m only half-damned. Your sword is uncomfortable for me to touch, but not impossible,” Michael said. “Your father was a daemon killer?”
“Yes,” Lily responded. “Until he decided he wasn’t a killer after all.”
“But you decided you would kill in his stead?” Michael asked.
Lily noticed him take a step toward her, but she wasn’t sure he noticed himself. There was nothing she could do about the affinity for daemons in her blood. The daemon king was the only being she knew who could dampen her call. It was a vulnerable feeling to be fully herself in the New Mexico desert, but it was liberating as well. She would deal, come what may.
But when Michael took another step toward her she couldn’t help that her heartbeat quickened.
His Brimstone was a pleasant burn even if it shouldn’t be.
“I defend myself and my work,” she answered. Then she sheathed her father’s sword at her back and rose slowly to meet his advance. Only at that point did he realize he’d moved toward her. He stopped. He blinked. His hands fisted at his sides.
“Is it your command of the elements that calls me? Your command of fire?” Michael asked.
“My kachinas are packed away,” Lily reminded him.
“Then what? I have control over the Brimstone in my blood. I gained control as a child and I’ve never lost it. I’ve always credited the music for keeping it in check. My music soothes it. Or so I thought,” Michael said. He’d taken two more steps. He was directly in front of her now. She had to lift her chin to look up into his eyes. They glittered in the firelight. He didn’t have to tell her that his Brimstone was burning nearly out of control. She could feel it. The heat came off of him in waves and nothing could have stopped her from taking the last step between them.
Her affinity had blossomed up and out. Her body hummed with it. No song necessary at all. She took that step and Michael sucked in a deep breath in response as her breasts touched his chest.
“Daemons are drawn to me. It’s something bequeathed by my father’s blood,” Lily confessed.
“Samuel’s Kiss bequeathed an affinity to my mother and her sister through their mother. A dying man saved my grandmother. Gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but he gifted her something else with those life-saving breaths,” Michael said. “She passed it to her children, and my mother passed it to me.”
Lily hummed out loud when his hands came up to cup the sides of her face. Moisture filled her eyes. She’d never known her father was responsible for gifting the D’Arcys with affinity. Ezekiel had never told her. Michael’s human grandmother. The passage of time in the hell dimension didn’t match with the passage of time on earth.
“My father’s name was Samuel,” she breathed out.
“How is this possible? Samuel died before my mother was born,” Michael said. His mouth was so close to hers that his warm breath caused her lips to tingle.
“I don’t know,” Lily lied just as Michael leaned to press his lips to hers.
The moisture in her eyes wasn’t for the loss of her father. He’d already been gone a long time. She’d shed all the tears she could shed for him years ago. Her eyes filled because she knew in that instant that she’d been right about the daemon king’s manipulations. Michael wasn’t some random prince she’d met in the desert night. He was the reason she’d been allowed to leave the palace. And it didn’t matter that his likeness was nestled with her kachina dolls in a dusty backpack on the sand.
He wasn’t meant for her. Her destiny might be twined with his but not for reasons of the heart. He was meant for the throne. And the daemon king expected her to help him force Michael to accept it. His Brimstone blood made him vulnerable to her powerful affinity and that made him vulnerable to the daemon king’s manipulations, if she didn’t resist them herself.
His lips were full and warm against hers. She didn’t reject the intimacy of his moist, hot tongue. She opened for him. She eagerly met his tongue with flicks of her own. She pressed into his muscular body and his arms fell from her face to her back, where they smoothed and molded the curves of her body to fit against him. She had been forced to find haven in hell, but she tasted heaven on Michael’s lips. It was a paradise flavored with salty tears.
She would be damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.
Her father had made a deal with the daemon king to protect her. For Lily, it had been fifteen years ago. On earth more time had passed. Enough for a Brimstone prince to be born and grow to his majority. And now Lily could guess what price she might have to pay for Ezekiel’s protection.
* * *
The hellhound saved them. He leaped through the fire, scattering embers and sparks and coals in his wake as a ferocious growl erupted from his chest. They broke apart and he landed between them on stiff legs with his back hunched high.
“What the hell, Grim?” Michael protested.
“No. He’s right. We can’t burn so bright. It’s time to go,” Lily said. She was already finishing the job Grim had started, kicking apart the fire and burying the coals with desert sand.
“We don’t know which direction to take yet,” Michael protested.
“Away. First we go away and then I’ll take the time to determine specifics,” Lily said. “Rogues always find me. You found me. More will come. Especially if I don’t tamp the affinity down.” She stomped on the buried fire as if to physically illustrate her point. Then she stilled and closed her eyes. She actually knew when he took a step toward her. Lily raised her hands and held them up to ward him away.
He might have gone to her side anyway except Grim was staring out into the desert night growling at the darkness. Something was out there stalking them. Probably more than one thing.
“Right. Come on,” Michael said.
It took only seconds to grab their things. His guitar. Her bag. Grim growled louder, deep in his chest, an obvious warning to whatever approached. Lily glanced one more time at her dented SUV, but it was too far away. Michael had climbed onto his motorcycle. It was a decision of the moment to hop on behind him and wrap her arms around his chest. He didn’t seem surprised. The machine roared to life beneath them as daemons appeared from the shadows.
Michael wasted no more time. He pointed the motorcycle to the road and goosed the accelerator. Lily held on tight as they narrowly escaped dozens of daemons they couldn’t have possibly defeated even with Grim’s help. The hellhound must have been able to count. Lily saw him materialize on the road beside them, already running full speed, his legs a blur of shifting smoke.
They drove until dawn, which arrived in a burst of russet hues from umber to golden orange, but in the hours of road-eating travel Lily failed to figure out how she could break it to Michael Turov that he’d just rescued the woman who would be forced to seal his hellish fate.
Chapter 3 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
Michael instinctively headed to the nearest redoubt he knew. Lily needed a protected place to perform her ritual and he would need to switch the motorcycle for a vehicle that could hold supplies for two. When he’d started touring the Southwest, he’d decided to travel light, but he’d also wanted safe places to crash in between gigs and inevitable clashes with Rogues. He’d found the perfect place already built by a wealthy survivalist with an environmentalist streak outside of Phoenix, Arizona.
He pulled the motorcycle into a drive that had been created with packed earth and crushed gravel as reddish brown as the surrounding sand. He felt Lily become more alert behind him after the mind-numbing miles they’d traveled. The sun was rising, but the earth-sheltered home built into the ground of the Sonoran Desert would be a cool respite. Especially if they went to separate rooms. A glittering expanse of glass greeted them, but between the layers of glass were blinds that automatically opened and closed when necessary to keep the temperature of the home consistent. The thick cement construction was hidden by earth and the roof was covered with desert grass with only strategically placed skylights to indicate the home beneath the ground.
Like an ordinary dog, his beloved Grim waited at the sliding glass front door. The hellhound could have morphed through in a swirl of smoky shadow. Instead, he watched and waited for them to climb off the motorcycle and walk to his side. Michael watched as Lily approached the massive, ugly creature carefully, but without trepidation. Hellhounds were rare. He wasn’t surprised she’d never seen one. He only knew of one other in existence besides Grim. His cousin, Sam, had been given a hellhound puppy when he was a baby. There was much to admire in Lily’s attitude toward the beast that was as tall as her chest. When she actually reached to place her hand lightly on the top of Grim’s head as if a hell-spawned dog was nothing to fear, Michael stopped and stared.
She was petite. Her jeans were dusty and torn at the knee. Her pack had seen better days. But as the sun rose it glinted off her hair the way the lantern light had the night before. It created a halo effect that caused him to blink and look away.
He clenched his jaw against the burn in his blood. Samuel’s daughter. Had the affinity in her blood been so powerful that it affected her aging the way Brimstone did with daemons? He’d heard of Samuel’s Kiss his whole life. It had changed the course of his family’s history. His mother never would have fallen in love with his daemon father if it hadn’t been for the affinity Samuel had bequeathed to her. He had mixed feelings about that.
The door opened with a whoosh of displaced air. The passive solar home was always a perfect, comfortable temperature. It was his inner heat that caused perspiration to dot his upper lip.
“Make yourself comfortable. There should be food, drink, towels...anything you need,” Michael offered. He was already retreating to the master bedroom, where hopefully a cold shower would help him regain control of the lava in his veins.
* * *
Lily showered and put on a fresh change of clothes from her backpack. She washed out the clothes she’d been wearing and hung them in the spare bathroom to dry. She found canned fruit in the kitchen and sat down to eat a bowl of peaches while water ran in a nearby room. She needed calories to deal with elemental spirits, and eating redirected some of the tension from resisting Michael’s Brimstone pull.
Had the daemon king meant to throw them together? Would he spell out what he expected from her or was she supposed to play this by ear? The debt she owed him would have its price. She’d always known that.
Once the water had been turned off for a long while, Lily went in search of her host. She didn’t want to set up her mother’s kachinas and play her flute without warning the daemon prince to brace himself against her affinity’s call.
She found him bare chested and tending several minor wounds in the master bedroom in front of a full-length mirror. He’d pulled on a pair of slim-cut jeans after his shower, but they rode loose and low on his hips. So loose and so low that she could see the muscular plane of his abdomen and the dusting of golden hair that disappeared into the waistband of his pants. He was lean, hard, beautiful...and scarred.
Lily stopped in the doorway with an inadvertent gasp on her lips.
His body was amazing. Muscular and obviously toned for something besides strumming the guitar. No wonder he’d been able to fight the Rogue daemons with his bare hands. His arms bulged and rippled as he moved to place a bandage on a cut on his side. But there were other ripples, too. Burn marks dimpled his skin on his chest and back. Similar marks lightly streaked his arms and his abdomen.
“From a time when I didn’t know how to control the burn. It almost consumed me,” Michael said. He answered a question she never would have asked. “My father was a daemon. I’m not. I never will be,” he continued. “The Brimstone doesn’t rule me.”
“Daemons aren’t inherently evil, you know. They’re not human, but Brimstone doesn’t actually signify damnation...” Lily began.
“I can fight my blood and I will,” Michael interrupted.
Lily nodded as if she understood why he would reject his heritage. She had run away from hell herself. She should understand. But his burn was already such a part of the man she had just met that she couldn’t believe he would be so deluded about who and what he was.
“Let me help you with that,” she offered. She came into the room where he was trying to reach one last cut on his back with an antiseptic wipe.
“Be careful. Sometimes my blood can be dangerous,” Michael warned.
“It seems fine right now. No smoke. No fire. Look. The bandages aren’t turning to ash,” Lily teased. She dabbed at the cut and listened to his very mortal hiss before reaching for the bandage he’d already taken from its wrapper.
“For now. I’ve got it under control,” Michael said. She could hear the tension in his voice. He spoke with a tight jaw and narrowed eyes.
If so, he was doing better than she was. Her heartbeat had quickened. Her lungs had tightened. She was as close to him as it was possible to be without embarrassing herself and it wasn’t close enough. She’d had several months of practice dampening her affinity, but that practice fell to dust with Michael. Her hands trembled as she placed the bandage over the cut on his back.
But worse than the tremble that betrayed his effect on her...she allowed her fingers to brush over the ripples of his scars. His chest expanded in a sudden gulp of air at her touch. She shivered. Her affinity tuned her in to the agony of his long-ago pain. No wonder he rejected the heat of his Brimstone blood. It had almost burned him alive from the inside out.
Their gazes met in the mirror and Lily’s hand paused. She didn’t jerk it away, even though his skin began to heat.
“You want the bandages to scorch?” Michael asked. His voice had gone deeper and more melodic than before.
If she’d been honest, she would have told him she was a full-on pyromaniac in that moment. She’d been sheltered from this burn her entire life even though she’d been raised in hell. The daemon king had buffered and dampened and kept her safe. She’d run away from that refuge. She’d run from the frying pan into the fire. And she wanted Michael to burn. Her father had used the last hours of his life to bargain for her safety, and now all she wanted was to step into this dangerous man’s arms and throw away all thoughts of a safe haven.
Even so, alarm flared in her breast when Michael stepped forward, nudging her body toward the mirror with his. She didn’t resist. She backed up until she was pressed between the cool glass and his hot chest. Her hand had fallen away from his back, but now she lifted both of them. She meant to press her palms against his shoulders to hold him back. But the move became another caress of sensitive fingers down the scars on his arms.
He trembled beneath her touch and she looked up to see that he’d closed his eyes.
“This won’t be a refuge for long. We have to determine where we go from here,” Michael said. His voice was only a rough whisper. It revealed what her touch made him feel, but he didn’t lean to kiss her. She could feel the desire in his body. She could tell that he held himself in check even though he was pressed against her. The glass at her back no longer felt cool. His Brimstone heat had transferred to her. She wondered that the mirror didn’t melt, because she felt as liquid as lava.
“I’m going to have to play the flute. My affinity will fill this place,” Lily warned.
“I’ll be outside. For as long as I can manage to resist,” Michael said.
But he didn’t immediately move. Their respiration synchronized. They breathed in and out together. Each slow, shaky inhalation was a confession. Each exhalation seemed to invite and encourage their lips to draw closer. Tingles of awareness charged her skin as he drew nearer. Their mouths were only slightly apart, their gazes locked, their breath coming faster and shallower when Michael finally moved away. The cool rush of space between them was harsh. They had stood together far longer than they should have. The pause hadn’t been innocent. It had been a test of self-control—for both of them.
Lily shivered, suddenly chilled.
She watched as he pulled on a clean T-shirt and called for Grim. The hellhound rolled into being from the paws up as it moved toward the door. She’d been sheltered in the palace. She’d never seen one of the giant creatures until today, but he still reminded her of home. She touched the top of his head earlier because there was something familiar about the frightening beast who obviously loved his master. Touching Grim had soothed her. Touching Michael had left her completely undone. He was scarred from his own Brimstone, in and out.
She was already certain there was no way she would be able to fulfill her guardian’s wishes if what he asked was for her to throw Michael into the flames he’d spent his whole life resisting.
Chapter 4 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
Her bag was a trusty familiar tool she approached with more caution than she’d used before. Michael’s presence and the daemon king’s possible manipulations were added elements that caused her previous work with the elemental spirits to seem like child’s play. A child who had no idea she had been playing with fire.
This time she dug deep into her pack to draw out the oldest kachina first. She’d never dared to use it in a ritual and she certainly wouldn’t now that she’d met its living, breathing embodiment. But she couldn’t resist unwrapping its familiar shape and tilting its face toward the light. Sun beamed into the room, softened by the tinted glass of the skylight above her. The kachina’s carved features were barely illuminated. She’d memorized them long ago, but now she’d seen the sharp angles of cheek and jaw in real life. The tightening of anger and concern. The softening of humor...and desire.
She’d tasted Michael’s lips. She’d craved the heat of his tongue. Lily had grown up in a palace in hell. She called on Earth, Wind, Fire and Water and they answered her call. But this tiny figure come to life had shaken the fabric of her reality until it seemed the very shadows whispered with secrets she could almost hear for the first time. The recessed skylight was framed by several feet of packed earth encased in adobe that had been painted rich, deep ocher. Desert grass moved in an outside breeze she couldn’t feel and its swaying created a dance of shadows across the kachina’s face.
A warrior angel. A daemon prince. Its black wings boldly arched over its muscular back. Lily closed her fist around the doll, feeling its weight and shape in her hand. Every curve, every angle fit perfectly into the soft crevices of her palm as if the lines and indentations had been made to hold it.
She had no time for this reverie.
Sunlight wavered, painted dark by grass shadows and passing clouds. She quickly rewrapped the kachina and vowed not to take him out again. Instead, she reached for the wrapped dolls that represented Earth, Wind and Water. She imagined she could feel heat rising from the wrapped form that represented Fire as her hand hovered over it. Her fingers were a hairsbreadth away when she fisted them and pulled them away.
She would leave Fire in her pack, unsummoned. She’d had enough heat for one day. Her lips still tingled and no amount of moistening kept her from feeling a parched ache for a forbidden sweetness she suspected only a daemon prince’s kiss could satisfy.
Her flute was cool to her touch when she slid it from its pouch. The dolls were easily placed in position. Dancing shadows painted their blocky features with darkness and light. The earth-bermed home surrounded on the top and three sides by packed desert dirt was ideal for the ceremony she would initiate to call for the spirits’ guidance. It wasn’t a kiva, but the earth embraced it. Lily dropped her pack on the bed and sank down on a woven rug that was only the thinnest of barriers between her and the packed-earth floor.
This time she softly trilled an ironic measure of a classic tune about stairs to heaven. Spirits were playful. They wouldn’t mind. And she needed to settle her nerves. Affinity took the tune from there, quickly morphing her wry beginning into a complexity of air and vibration that claimed her entire body from blood to breath to bone. She communed with the universe by sound. Her music was a prayer. She combined the teachings of her mother with the power gifted to her by her father to come to a deeper connection with the spirits than others had achieved before. Her ability was unique, but that meant it was a challenge to navigate. She felt her way through every possibility as she went along.
Hair began to move around her face, tossed by a breeze that was both as natural as could be and eerily impossible in the closed room. Beneath her the earthen floor trembled, and moisture began to coalesce in the air around her until her parched lips were dampened and her lashes sparkled with what felt like unshed tears.
Lily paused in her playing. She held her breath. The last note faded and she carefully lowered her flute from her lips.
“Lucifer’s wings,” she whispered into the silence that seemed heavy with humidity from an approaching storm. The complex challenges she faced made the words seem more curse than request. The wings had to be meant for Michael Turov. They wouldn’t be a means of escape or a bargaining chip he could use to barter his way out of hell. They would seal his fate. Michael Turov’s rejection of his daemon legacy was well-known in the hell dimension. He’d visited. He’d walked away. No one expected him to return for good...except the daemon king.
“L-L-Lucifer’s wings,” she said again. Her hair whipped around her cheeks now. It had grown damp and stung her eyes and skin like a thousand tiny lashes. The earth rumbled. A crackle of electricity charged the air as if lightning was seconds away. A wash of ozone rode the elemental breeze.
Her pack at the edge of the bed behind her tumbled to the floor and landed open beside her. The two dolls she’d tried to leave wrapped and hidden rolled out. The warrior angel figure stopped against her shoe, still wrapped, still unsummoned. But the doll that represented Fire was loosened. Its burlap wrap was scorched and blackened. Smoke curled from it into the air.
Lily grabbed for the smoking doll, but it was too late. She cried out and pulled back burned fingers as the wrappings burst into flame. More smoke than the fuel justified billowed upand rose into the spirit-tossed air, but Wind and Water didn’t touch the rolling gray smoke. It had a life of its own and it was soon evident exactly what...or whom...the smoke would become.
Lily stumbled to her feet and backed away as rain began to fall. Her wind-whipped hair was plastered against her face, but she saw the smoke come together to form a familiar figure. The grumble of the earth seemed a herald of sorts, more powerful than a plague of angels’ trumpets as the smoky form became solid walking toward her.
He moved like a king before he was any more than ashy smoke. As his muscular body solidified, he conquered the room by right and by the price he’d paid evidenced by every scar he bore—both seen and unseen. Lily knew Ezekiel’s heart was as craggy as the battle-marked planes of his chest and cheeks.
She had summoned the daemon king. Or had she? She doubted if her guardian had to be called. He’d arrived at his own appointed time.
“Sir,” Lily said. If her earlier “Lucifer’s wings” had been a curse, this was a prayer. Because she dreaded the price of the protection he’d given her these last fifteen years.
“You are well. Your mother’s request might have been lethal,” Ezekiel said. His voice was deep and rich, warm with an interest that could be terrifying if you weren’t braced for it. Lily had the practice of years behind her, but she still blanched. Her cheeks chilled and her head went light. Her mother had wanted to preserve the old Hopi sites from daemon destruction. But mostly Sophia had wanted to help Ezekiel against the Rogue threat. It had been a last gesture of unrequited love. Lily had agreed because she owed her guardian everything, even though Ezekiel’s distant devotion was difficult to bear. Hadn’t she seen her mother suffer for years because she had fallen in love with a “man” who merely cared for her as a means to an end?
“She wanted me to help you, but she also dreamed that one day I’d be free,” Lily said.
Her guardian was fully formed now and his worn leather armor told much about his mood. He was perfectly capable of manifesting ordinary, everyday clothes. He didn’t always dress like he sat on a medieval throne.
“The only way you will ever be free is to die. I’ve promised to prevent that for as long as I’m able,” Ezekiel said. “But your affinity is your jailer. Not I.” His scent was familiar. Wood smoke tinged with a hint of sulfur, ancient leather, and a metallic hint of blood. Yes, her childhood had been interesting. The daemon king smelled like home.
“So you haven’t come to punish me for running away?” Lily half joked. She feared his devotion to the D’Arcy family he’d adopted because of his love for Elizabeth. Its ferocity. Its fire. She feared his expectations would consume her as she burned herself out trying to repay him. Never did she fear he would purposefully harm a single hair on her head. But he might inadvertently scorch her and everyone else on the earth to protect and promote those he truly loved.
“I would sooner slay an entire army of Rogues bent on my destruction,” Ezekiel replied. “Alone. With my bare hands.” He cared for her. Not in the way that he cared for the D’Arcys, but he did care. It had always been obvious that she and her mother were mere obligations. He’d disappeared for years at a time to watch over the D’Arcys while she and her mother stayed in the palace alone. She’d learned early on not to expect visits or attention. She hadn’t learned not to be hurt by the neglect.
Lily could no longer hold herself back from the pull of the only familial affection she’d known since her parents’ death. She threw herself into the daemon king’s arms and he held her to his armored chest with a fierce grip just shy of being painfully ferocious. It was startling. He’d never been demonstrative with her in the past. She’d expected him to stiffen and hold her at arm’s length.
“I worried,” he said into her drying hair. The earth had quieted. The air was still. None of the spirits dared to make a peep in Ezekiel’s presence.
“And yet you let me go,” Lily said.
“Never trust a daemon,” they both whispered together.
And then he set her from him, maintaining only one of her hands in both of his.
He was a daemon. He was the daemon king. He could care for her as a guardian more deeply than any mortal father and still he would use her to order the universe to his liking. Daemons were chess players with an eye for the long game—centuries long—and the game Ezekiel played held the balance of worlds in its outcome.
“You will help him retrieve Lucifer’s wings with no reservation, no equivocation. But you already knew I would ask this of you,” Ezekiel said.
She pulled her hand from his and turned away. Unfortunately, the tiny bedroom gave her no place to flee. Even if she’d had the whole palace at her disposal or the entire desert, there was no place she could go to escape the obligation to the daemon king. He’d saved them. He’d shielded them. Her mother had fallen madly in love with Ezekiel, and he’d never hurt Sophia even though he hadn’t loved her in the same way. Daemons loved long, and Ezekiel had loved Elizabeth D’Arcy and only her. Forever.
Elizabeth had been Michael’s human grandmother. Ezekiel’s love for her lived on in her children and grandchildren.
Yet the daemon king had been tender toward Sophia Santiago. The mighty warrior had treated her like a queen all the days of her life and he’d held her hand when she died. She’d known he didn’t return her love, but the pain of that had been softened by his protective care for her daughter.
Lily loved him for that even though she feared him for his devotion to the D’Arcys. She knew her place in the scheme of things. She’d always known. She was the daemon king’s ward, an obligation, no more, no less. It didn’t negate her debt. Her father had made a deal with the devil and now she would pay the price.
“I will,” Lily agreed.
Any freedom she’d contemplated turned to ash in Ezekiel’s presence. He was her guardian. He was the only father she’d known for a very long time. Her affection and her affinity bound her to him as surely if not more so than her real father’s daemon deal.
She would never be free. But it wasn’t stalking rogues that damned her. Or a deal struck between Samuel and Ezekiel years ago. It was Ezekiel’s scarred heart and the D’Arcys’ claim on it. She wasn’t immortal, but she was afraid she would strive to earn her place in his affections every day of her short life.
“It is done,” he said, and no throne was necessary to make his words a royal decree.
His legs began to dissipate as he turned to walk away. Lily fought the tears that filled her eyes. Not because she didn’t want him to see her cry, but because she couldn’t stand to see him untouched by her tears.
“And then I’ll come home,” Lily promised.
The daemon king was already nothing but smoke and yet he replied, “Of course. The palace was built for you eons ago, after all.”
* * *
After Ezekiel vanished—literally going up in smoke—Lily washed her face in the master bathroom sink and reset the ritual, this time with deadly seriousness. This time the elemental spirits cooperated immediately with no stormy hijinks. No doubt the spirits were as cowed as she was by the daemon king’s visitation.
Wind and Earth created a recognizable channel in the floor of the bedroom and water rose up to flow along its curves. Words came from Lily’s mouth, placed there by her ancestors’ ancient knowledge of heaven and earth.
“The Colorado River,” Lily whispered, but her voice was unfamiliar, colored by the spirits of all who had come before her. The path was revealed with no reservation, no equivocation. Her short-lived taste of freedom was over. She would never be free from the terrible weight of expectations from the only father she’d ever known. No matter what deals were struck and fulfilled, she was bound by her unrequited love for the daemon king. And to defy him more than she already had might mean losing him forever.
Chapter 5 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
Spirit summoning made Grim nervous. The great ugly hellhound Michael loved stood stiff-legged and quivering as he stared at the adobe home for almost an hour while his master played.
Only the music kept Michael from responding a couple of times when he felt Lily’s call all the way to the boiling marrow in his bones. He played obsessively until sweat ran down his cheeks and his body trembled against the pull he resisted.
“You aren’t helping, you damned mutt,” he ground out between his teeth.
Grim whined, but only came to lie at his feet when Michael thought his hellhound might never turn toward him again. Only then did Michael allow his fingers to still on the strings. The sun had set. The nocturnal activity of the desert came to life around him. Scurryings and scrapings, scufflings and squeaks began to fill the air with soft sound.
“She’s done, isn’t she?” he asked. Grim chuffed and collapsed as if he’d run a million miles with the intensity of his watch. Michael understood. His muscles ached from tension when he uncurled from around his guitar and stood.
The sliding glass door opened and Lily stepped out into the deepening night. Lanterns at either side of the entrance illuminated the beautiful young woman, and Michael slowly lowered his instrument to the ground as he stared.
She was soaked. Her hair and clothes plastered to her petite body. Steam began to rise from her as the cool night air hit her curves. But it was her haunted gaze that captured his attention. Her eyes were dark in the lantern light. Their brown irises deepened to a dusky midnight. And they were rimmed with red as if the water on her face was...tears.
He didn’t think. He didn’t hold himself back. As Grim bristled and let out a sound that was half growl, half whine, Michael strode forward to meet Lily and he was there to catch her when she stumbled forward into his arms.
“My God, woman. That wasn’t a marathon. It must have been a crucible,” he said. The sound of his own voice shook him as much as her appearance. He was hoarse. All the tension of the day spilling from his lips.
She was pale and clammy against him and her body shivered.
“I might need more than a protein bar this time,” she said. Her teeth clicked together as she spoke.
Lily didn’t resist when he gathered her up in his arms. She was limp. What had he done? Was his freedom worth hurting an innocent woman? The Brimstone in his blood burned him with shame. He’d done this to the daughter of a veritable saint with his selfish demands. Maybe he deserved to sit on the throne of hell. He was no better than his grandfather. Ezekiel’s attention could focus on a goal with no consideration for those he burned out in the process. His mother had warned him about that since he was a small boy.
“Come on, Grim. I’ve got a job for you,” Michael said.
* * *
She’d sipped a cup of soup before she was fully conscious enough to realize it. She came awake to a full stomach and the fiery heat of a massive hellhound snuggled against her side. When her eyes opened, Grim’s glowing red irises blinked at her as if to say, “I’m a useful monster, aren’t I? By the way, I know your secrets even if my master doesn’t.”
Then she noticed she was bundled in a clean, dry sheet and nothing else.
“Um. Little help?” she asked, muffled beneath sulfuric fur.
“Grim, that’s good. You don’t have to smother her with your devilish charm,” Michael said.
The hellhound heating pad slowly got up, stretched and moved away. Lily blinked against the sudden light that glared from the fireplace once the hellhound wasn’t shielding her from its glow. Michael sat on the hearth. He sipped dark wine from a glass. She noticed the sip first. The slow, savoring movement of his mouth on the rim of the crystal and the glistening moisture of the crushed fruit on his lips. The flick of his tongue. The intimacy of his throat as he swallowed.
Then she noticed the tape on his fingers. Every pad was bandaged, and the white of the bandages was stained with blood.
“Your hands,” Lily said. She gripped the sheet around herself and rose to her knees. She and the hellhound had been lying in front of the fire so the move brought her to Michael’s legs.
He didn’t move away. He simply placed his glass to the side and waited to see what she would do. Lily held the sheet across her chest with one arm and reached for one of his hands with the other. He didn’t resist. She looked from his taped fingers up to his shuttered eyes.
“I played to drown out your call,” Michael said.
Her hair had dried in a riot of waterfall waves around her face and shoulders. She didn’t have enough hands to hold her sheet and his hand and push back her hair. As if he noticed her quandary, he reached up with his free hand to softly brush waves back from her face. But he paused in the middle of the move when his hand glanced against her cheek. He released her hair to cup her jaw as if he couldn’t merely perform a practical move when he was distracted by touching her instead.
“I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Not for Lucifer’s wings. Not for me. Ever again,” Michael said.
“You hurt yourself for me,” Lily reminded him. The hand on her face was bandaged, too. She couldn’t imagine the intensity of his playing if it had hurt the hand that held the neck of his guitar.
“Purely selfish. I was protecting myself,” he said.
She didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was probably only the daemon king’s presence that had dampened the Brimstone pull and the affinity’s call between them so that he could resist. She didn’t want to mention Ezekiel. Not while Michael’s hand was on her face. Not while his warm gaze searched hers. It was the daemon king’s manifestation that had drained her to the point of collapse. Summoning the devil himself took a lot out of a girl. Especially a girl with an affinity for Brimstone already strained by kisses from the future Prince of Darkness.
“Where are my clothes?” she asked instead.
“On the chair behind you. They were cold and damp,” Michael explained.
“I’m warm now,” Lily said. She was on her knees between his jean-clad legs. Warm was an understatement. The fire behind him was meaningless. The fire in his blood called to her and the daemon king was long gone.
Heat rose in her cheeks and spread down to her chest. His gaze tracked the movement as her skin flushed. Or did the track of his gaze cause the flush with its intensity? The sheet was a pristine contrast to the way her skin revealed her way-less-than-pristine thoughts.
His hand slid from her jaw to the nape of her neck beneath her hair. When the move tilted her face up, she didn’t fight it. She should have. She should have pulled away. Stood. Put distance between them. There was no buffer here. Allowing the heat to build between them was suicide.
Her affinity was a beacon for Rogue daemons.
She both feared immolation and craved it. Feared it from Rogues. Craved it from Michael. When he leaned down to give her the burn she wordlessly begged for, on her knees and as supplicant as she could allow herself to be, the thought of Rogues was scorched away.
For the first time in her life she was free.
His lips were hot from Brimstone and dusky sweet from exquisite wine. They were also perfect. Full and masculine and so familiar she could close her eyes and explore with impunity. He gasped when she boldly traced their carved curves and swells with the tip of her tongue. Then he urged her closer until her stomach was pressed to the intimate swell of the erection between his legs. He curled down to deepen the kiss.
Suddenly, he was the royal. He would claim her. He would take control. She might be caught in a devil’s bargain that would lead him all the way to hell, but in this—kissing, touching, claiming—he had the upper hand.
Lily held tight to his muscled legs, but his heat called and she allowed her palms to press and slide. Closer and closer along his thighs to find him, and measure the length of his penis caught and contained away from her by his jeans.
He growled against her mouth and moved his hands to her shoulders to urge her back. She went with his urgings. She made room for him to leave the hearth and join her, on his knees. Now they were both supplicant. Both begging. Distantly, Lily heard Grim whine, but she could only focus on getting closer to Michael’s heat. All rational strategy was forgotten. Her vision of the Colorado River boiled away to nothing. The daemon king’s manipulations paled in comparison to the demands of her and Michael’s bodies.
Her sheet had fallen away.
She was naked for her Brimstone prince and when his lips left hers to trail down and claim her breasts with his mouth and hot, wet suction, she thought she would die. Her heart raced. Her lungs hitched. Her body burned.
Lily reached for him and even through his clothes his rising body heat transferred to her fingers. When she stroked her palms down from his shoulders to his bare arms, his skin was feverish to her touch. Impossibly hot. She brushed down the slightly roughened skin of his scars anyway. Learning, exploring and burning all the while.
But Grim’s whine erupted into growls and Michael pulled away before she had even begun to know him as well as her affinity drove her to. He rose and went toward the hellhound.
Once their bodies were separated, she could feel the Brimstone burn of the intruders that were causing Grim such concern. Rogues. Here. No doubt called by her affinity that sang with an almost audible hum in her body when Michael touched her.
“We’ve got trouble,” Michael said. He’d moved to the front window to place his hand on Grim’s head and look outside.
“More than you can possibly know,” Lily replied. She was already shrugging into her clothes, which were stiff and warm from drying by the fire. The fire’s heat paled in comparison to Michael’s Brimstone burn. She shivered at the loss of his touch in spite of the warmed clothes. Her fingers fumbled on the buttons while Michael turned from the window where he’d shrugged into his jacket to grab up his guitar. She hadn’t noticed it leaning by the hearth. It was such a part of him. Like a shadow that moved when he moved and stilled when he stilled. He placed his arm through the tooled leather strap and settled the instrument against his back, where it fit perfectly as if made to match his planes and curves.
“How many?” she continued. Her own pack settled against her back with a weight that had become familiar over the past few months. Her affinity didn’t tell her the odds. It was only a magnet that drew her toward daemons and their Brimstone blood. In the past, her father’s affinity had been used to hunt and destroy daemons until he’d decided to fight the violence and hate. He’d split with the hunters. And his decision had led to his death at their hands.
“Too many to fight. Too many to face. We’ll have to take the back way out,” Michael said.
As if Grim understood his master’s words, he turned from the window and ran toward the back of the earth-bermed home.
“I thought we were surrounded by dirt on three sides?” Lily said.
“I grew up on a vineyard estate. Playing in wine caves. Other kids had tree houses. I had tunnels and cellars. A maze of them beneath the vines. And I played hide-and-seek with a hellhound for fun,” Michael explained. “Hidden exits are a family tradition. I had this one installed shortly after I began using this place.”
He took her hand, and she let him pull her after Grim toward what seemed like a dead end at the back of the house where even the skylights failed to illuminate the shadows with moonlight. The fire still crackled and burned in the front room, but they stepped into chilled darkness that smelled of earth. She pulled her hand from Michael’s when they paused. Touching him caused her affinity to flare. There was no logic in being any more of a beacon for the Rogues than she already was.
Loud thumps came from the front of the house. Rogues were at the door. Maybe they had seen Grim at the window and they were reluctant to break through the glass where he might be waiting.
Michael pushed aside a large cloth that hung on the earthen wall. She’d thought it was a Navajo blanket, but up close, even in the shadows she could see it was a woven tapestry of European origin. She reached up to touch the figure of a bird created with bright crimson plumage at the center of the piece.
“It’s a Russian firebird,” Michael explained. “That folktale has special significance to the Turov family.” But he was already disappearing into the gaping hole he’d uncovered behind the tapestry. Lily followed as the sound of breaking glass came from the bedroom behind them. The skylight. One of the Rogues had decided to come through the roof.
She followed the prince through murky subterranean shadows. Grim had stopped in front of them. Michael pushed past his hellhound and she went with him. She couldn’t be sure in the dark, but she thought the large creature was guarding their retreat.
The tunnel narrowed and dropped, taking them deeper underground. Her hands rose instinctively as they hurried along. She could barely see. She had to feel her way. Her fingers trailed across packed earth. Claustrophobia threatened. She tried to breathe normally but her respiration was hurried. In and out with every quickened step.
“Only a little farther,” Michael said. His deep voice was contained by the small space around them. The weight of the earth trapped the sound, making his melodious accent muffled and strange.
“What about Grim?” she asked. And suddenly her voice echoed as they exited the tunnel into a more cavernous space.
“Grim doesn’t need a car to escape,” Michael said.
And that’s when Lily saw the gleam of chrome and glass and steel.
The vintage muscle car was black, or she might have seen it right away. Once her eyes had adjusted to the difference in the quality of light between the tunnel and the cavern, the car’s striking curves and angles reproved her inability to see and appreciate right away. Rogues were only a few hundred feet behind them. A hellhound prepared to defend their retreat. But Lily still paused as Michael opened the driver-side door and tossed his guitar in the back seat.
Beside the car, Michael was also all striking curves and angles. The leather of his jacket gleamed. His teeth flashed in a quick, savage smile at her surprise.
“Run with me?” he asked.
She didn’t need to be urged twice. There was no time to contemplate daemon deals, guilt or loyalty. In seconds she had ripped open the passenger door and tossed her pack in the back beside his guitar. They both sank into the buttery cream upholstery at the same time. Before she could close her door, growls and screams erupted from the tunnel. Lily almost got out of the car. Grim was in trouble. Michael reached to stop her.
“He’s got this,” he said. He had already closed his door. Now he reached across her body to pull the passenger-side door closed with a decisive thud. “He’s much older and wiser than we are. He knows what to do.” Even with the doors closed, the ferocious sounds of fighting penetrated the confines of the vehicle. “He’s just buying us time.”
Lily wasn’t so certain. She’d never heard such horrible screams and she’d grown up in hell. If the ugly beast died at the hands of the Rogues she had lured with her affinity, she would never forgive herself.
“Buckle up and hang on,” Michael said.
The car roared to life beneath them and Lily did as she was told. She’d never ridden in a sports car before, much less one that looked as deadly as this one.
“Also a Firebird, by the way. 1968. My father says it was a very good year,” Michael said. He shifted the car into Reverse and they roared backward with no further explanation.
Lily yelped and grabbed for the dashboard. She expected to hear the crunch and slam of destruction as the car rammed into the solid earth wall behind them. But instead they whooshed from zero to sixty along another tunnel. This time the tunnel rose up instead of down. She was glad she forced her eyes open when they flew out into the night, because for long seconds the vehicle seemed suspended in starlight surrounded by the endless midnight blue of the desert sky.
When they slammed down into a road carved into the sand, adrenaline soothed the jarring of her body and soul. Sure, she bit her lip and tasted blood, but it was worth the moments of flight.
“Grim?” Lily shouted above the engine’s roar.
“He’s with us. Look,” Michael said.
Lily looked out the window to see a blur of smoke and ember eyes running alongside the car.
* * *
He would have had her in front of the fire. The flickering flames reflected in the warm brown of her eyes had only matched the flames beneath his skin. She wasn’t frightened by his heat. And that gave him permission to burn.
The flavor of familiar wine had changed against her tongue. It had become sweeter, richer and more intoxicating. Especially when she had explored his mouth with sensual, darting flicks that sent desire hotter than Brimstone straight to his...
They were running for their lives and he was lost in the physical sensations of what might have been if they could have continued to indulge.
He’d been careful to take no liberties when he’d stripped off her wet clothes. Oh, he’d noticed her lush beauty. He wasn’t blind. But his primary drive had been to help and protect her. When she’d knelt between his legs, his drive had shifted.
She’d welcomed his touch. She’d welcomed his mouth on her perfect breasts. He held himself as still as possible as the memory rocked him with shudders behind the wheel.
His control hadn’t been shaken. It had been boldly thrown aside. Worse than that, if he were free to pull the car over right here, right now, he’d continue where they’d left off.
Her lips had opened so hungrily. Her hands had eagerly reached for his erection. They were running for their lives, but he couldn’t focus on the road because of the woman beside him. He could no longer pretend that he didn’t want to burn with her again. He wanted to taste her and touch her. He wanted to bring her to trembling pleasure again and again.
But only by choice. Not driven mindlessly by his Brimstone burn. Never that. He was a man, not a monster. If he couldn’t pleasure Lily as a man, then he wouldn’t touch her at all.
Chapter 6 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
The sun rose until heat waves hovered above the ground, causing it to shimmer in the distance as if this world was only a too-bright illusion, one that would disappear if she blinked or shielded her gaze. She played the game of not blinking until her eyes burned with unshed tears.
Run with me.
She would hear those words forever.
They would haunt her. As would the flash of mischievousness that had lit his eyes for a split second when she’d jumped into the car.
Grim was fully materialized now except for the blurred movement of his giant legs as they churned up dust beside the highway.
“How did he get away?” she asked when the world seemed real enough to risk speech once more.
“Hellhounds can travel between worlds. Between time and space and Lord knows where else. They use pathways we can’t see. He and I often travel that way,” Michael explained.
“So why did we have to run for the car?” Lily asked. “He couldn’t take me, too?”
Michael downshifted on a rise. He glanced sideways at her, but only for a second before his attention was back on the road as he accelerated once more.
“Grim could take you. But he won’t. Hellhounds are...unpredictable. He’s led entire armies through those pathways,” Michael said. Through the tinted windows, sunbeams glinted on streaks of hair that had been naturally highlighted by his time on a motorcycle without a helmet. Lily narrowed her eyes, but she still fought the constant need to blink. She had lived her life in darkness. She might never acclimate to the desert sun.
“He wouldn’t take me,” she said.
How cruel to be pained by both sunlight and the rejection of a monstrous creature of shadowy darkness.
She belonged to no world and no one.
Grim knew. Her obligation to Ezekiel might be a secret from his master, but the hellhound knew she had divided loyalties. From what she’d seen of Michael’s hellish companion, the beast would brook no shades of gray. He might be an ugly monster spawned in the depths of hell, but he was pure of heart. More pure than Lily Santiago, the daemon king’s ward who would die trying to earn a place for herself. Here. There. Anywhere. Her life was one long, ritualized sacrifice. If she played, summoned, served with all her heart perhaps one day she’d get love in return.
“He’s always been temperamental,” Michael said. Her silence was heavy in the car. She couldn’t hide her dismay. “I blame it on the whole ‘bred in the fires of hell’ thing.”
The vintage Firebird he drove as beautifully as he played and sang rolled to a stop. Lily was startled by the sudden cessation of movement and her game of not blinking was lost. Thankfully the moisture in her eyes had dried and no tears fell to betray her feelings. She could blame her sudden blinking on the sun. She looked around. Michael had pulled into a shabby gas station with two pumps and a peeled and cracked fiberglass statue of a man holding a wrench.
“He doesn’t trust me,” Lily said, softly. She didn’t turn back to Michael. She spoke as if to the hazy reflection of herself in the tinted glass. Her voice was as cracked by circumstances and expectations as the fiberglass statue of the mechanic was worn by time and desert wind.
Not to mention tension.
She was drawn to Michael. And the daemon king had known she would be. It wasn’t only her affinity for the Brimstone in his blood. The man was as appealing as his daemon heat.
“Lucifer’s Army he trusts. But he’s leery of a petite woman with a flute and a bag of dolls,” Michael said. “Maybe it’s because you’re way too young to be Samuel’s daughter. There are things about you that don’t add up.” She glanced at him. His hands were still on the steering wheel. He looked easy in the driver’s seat as if there was no place he’d rather be. Yet she knew he belonged on stage, playing and singing for an adoring crowd. Of course, the whole world was Michael D’Arcy Turov’s stage. She knew that even though she’d known him for only a short while.
“I’m going to freshen up,” Lily said. What else could she do or say? She couldn’t tell him she’d grown up in hell where time had flowed differently. She pushed open the car door and escaped only to find herself cornered by the very creature who seemed to know her secrets. Grim had solid legs again. He padded up to the car, panting lightly like a German shepherd who’d taken a quick morning jog.
“The daemon king is your rightful master, too, you know,” she muttered to the suspicious beast.
Grim licked his lips and sat back on his haunches. His fiery eyes were toned down so that any humans in the vicinity would think him hideous but not hellish. How the attempt worked she’d never know. He was obviously supernatural, and even acting casual his whole demeanor was more Big Bad Wolf than ordinary puppy.
Michael got out of the car to pump gas. He watched her skirt the giant hell beast and make her way inside the gas station. She walked as normally as she could with two sets of eyes setting her back on fire.
The less-than-shiny restroom had only one working sink. She managed to get a small trickle of water to flow and she splashed it on her flushed face. It didn’t do much to cool or calm her.
Rogues were drawn to her. They had been since she’d run away from the palace. There was no buffer for her on earth. Worse, Michael seemed to function as the opposite of a buffer. He enhanced her affinity’s call. He was half daemon. His biological father had been an Ancient One. He’d chosen to fall in order to rule with Lucifer in the hell dimension. They’d given up their places in heaven for autonomy in hell. Rogues were younger daemons. They resented the Ancient Ones’ choice. They wanted to take over the hell dimension, but their desire to rule hell was only a stepping-stone toward claiming heaven. Rogues had killed Lucifer. Lucifer’s Army wanted autonomy. Rogues wanted dominion.
Ezekiel was an Ancient One who needed a Loyalist heir to keep Rogues from power.
No. A little gas station sink water wasn’t going to absolve her sins. Both Michael and Ezekiel wanted her to help find Lucifer’s wings. But Michael didn’t want to wear them. He wanted to deliver them. He’d never made any secret of his distaste for the throne.
Run with me.
He hadn’t meant it in the way her soul had heard it. There was no “away” far enough for her to run from Ezekiel’s expectations or Rogues’ hunger. But Michael was a powerful lure and her soul ached to answer his call. He was a what-if she wasn’t free to explore. There was no future for her that included a man, a car and a hellhound’s devotion.
Grim was right not to trust her. She looked into the smudged and cracked glass as water swirled down the gurgling drain. She would fulfill her bargain. She would pay the price Ezekiel asked for his years of protection. Then she would go back to the cold, dark palace alone.
Her guardian’s heart had always been out of her reach. He had been a distant figure always too busy to provide the time and attention she craved, but she owed him her life and her mother’s life. It didn’t matter that his time had always gone to the D’Arcys. She couldn’t refuse him. Not when his request was to help him save the one place she’d ever called home.
* * *
Michael had pulled the car away from the pump and parked it to the side. Lily walked toward it slowly, squinting her eyes against the sun, but soaking up the heat. She’d been cold since the Rogues had interrupted her and Michael by the fire. It was possible now that her body had tasted his Brimstone burn she’d never be warm without him again.
He was propped against the hood of the vintage car. He wasn’t playing his guitar. His arms were folded over his chest. His boots were crossed at the ankles. His jeans matched his boots. Worn and scuffed. They spoke of the dust of miles traveled. He was waiting for her.
Run with me.
If she were free to run there was no way she could resist him.
“So we haven’t had a chance to talk about your ritual... How did your summoning turn out?” Michael asked.
Lily stopped in her tracks. She held on to the straps of her pack. The wrapped dolls were dormant. Silent. All her secrets hidden. For now. The daemon king was supposedly back in hell where he belonged. She was standing in the sun. She wanted to belong, but didn’t. Not here. And not there. She was as in-between as the pathways Grim traveled.
Grim knew shadows.
He came around the bumper of the Firebird with his nose in the air, sniffing out the hint of sulfur on her skin she could never quite wash away.
“The Colorado River will lead us. The clerk had a map. I can show you,” Lily offered. She pulled the map she’d gotten from the service station counter from her back pocket. She forced herself to approach the car as she unfolded the map with each step. Michael pushed away from the fender with his hip and stood up straight to meet her. Grim paced a few steps away. His eyes were watchful.
Lily spread the map on the hood of the car. She was careful to keep some distance from Michael. He had tamped down his Brimstone heat and his affinity, too. His guitar was in the back seat. It sat there like a special passenger. Its seductive song silenced...for now. She was pretty sure it was unnatural for him to leave it there, neglected and unplayed.
It didn’t matter.
All the self-control in the world—hers and his—didn’t stop her body from humming in his presence.
She focused as much attention as possible on the map. It would have meant nothing to her without the spirits’ guidance. Geography of his world wasn’t her strong suit. It hadn’t been her home for a very long time. Thanks to her elemental guides she was able to point out the exact route she’d seen traced in the dirt of Michael’s bedroom floor.
“The Grand Canyon leads to heaven?” Michael asked.
“The river leads. The canyon is incidental. The carving of it a side effect of the river’s flow.” Lily shrugged off one of the wonders of the mortal world.
“And you couldn’t follow that path to lead me to Lucifer’s wings?” Michael asked Grim.
The hellhound tilted his head, but arrogantly. He was a creature of hell. What did he care about pathways he was forbidden to take?
Without being conscious of her actions, Lily had shrugged out of her backpack and placed it on the hood to hold down one corner of the map. Michael called her attention to the bag and its contents when he suddenly placed one hand over the lumps that showed beneath the worn canvas.
“If I hadn’t seen you summoning with my own eyes, I would think you were going to lead me on a superstitious version of a wild-goose chase,” Michael said. Every inch of her body tensed and Lily held her breath. His hand was directly over one of the larger lumps that indicated dolls other than the tiny carved representation of himself. She had no idea how her treasured warrior angel would react to Michael’s touch. It had never reacted to hers. Unlike the other dolls, it seemed to have no powers whatsoever. Part of her fascination came from its silence.
She hurriedly grabbed for the backpack, more out of embarrassment than fear. She had no idea what Michael would think of the likeness, but she’d prefer he never see himself in a tiny doll she’d treasured for so many years. She was too hurried. Her rushing made her clumsy. Her whole body brushed against his and her hand tangled with his fingers. Had she actually wondered if this world was real all morning? Because it was suddenly ferociously real... Her skin flushed, her breath caught, every muscle tightened. There was no breeze—the air stood still—and yet she felt a rush of response lift her hair.
At first she thought her sudden movement had caused Grim to growl low in his chest. That maybe the contact of her against his master had worried him. The hellhound was up and pacing. Grim’s hackles had risen and turned to something more like smoke swirling on his back. Michael narrowed his eyes, but his focus wasn’t on the bag she had pulled away from his hand to clutch to her chest. Rather he looked back down the highway the way they’d come.
“It’s time to go,” he said.
The map resisted being folded correctly when she grabbed it off the hood of the car. She was breathing again, but her respiration was rushed and her fingers were clumsy. Grim was all swirl now. He hadn’t disappeared, but he looked like nothing but smoke and ember eyes.
“Keep an eye on them,” Michael ordered. Grim had vanished before his master finished speaking.
“It’s getting worse. I don’t think we’ll be able to shake them as long as we’re together,” Lily said. She sounded winded. She was winded. That slight contact between them had left her oxygen-deprived. Michael had already opened the passenger-side door for her. A prince to her princess. His consideration was salt in the scratch of her reaction to him. She wasn’t sure if she would have been able to operate the door handle herself.
“We have to be very careful. When we touch, the affinity is amplified,” Michael warned. It was the understatement of the century. Did his body still vibrate as if it was an instrument’s string? She wondered that hers wasn’t quivering for the world to see, still reacting from the slight brush of her body against his.
As he crossed around to the driver’s side, Lily swallowed. The distance between them was still negligible. Because it wasn’t from the earth to the moon. She didn’t have the guts to tell him actual touching might not be necessary at all. She still felt amplified. Every cell in her body seemed tuned to the possibility of the future touch and taste of him, but even if those touches never happened, the memory of previous ones might well keep her affinity vibrating forever.
There was a time she’d felt safe, if a little trapped, behind the palace’s walls. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever feel that way again. She’d flown with Michael, silhouetted against the desert sky. His burn and the adrenaline of that moment might be with her forever after.
Deep down she thought this new fear was a small price to pay for the exhilaration of that flight.
Chapter 7 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
Peter could taste the wild, sweet affinity on the back of his tongue every time it was unleashed. He’d traveled across the world to this godforsaken desert before Samuel’s daughter had even met the half-daemon prince. Her blood alone had lured with a purity of call he’d never sensed from others.
She’d been sheltered from detection for years. Hidden. Kept by Ezekiel. They had never suspected. Samuel, once the mightiest daemon hunter, had allied himself with the heir to Lucifer’s throne. Such an alliance had been unexpected, as the Order of Samuel was already dismantled. Scattered to the winds. So few brothers were left to carry on Reynard’s work. That great man had been murdered by D’Arcys and Loyalists. As had most of his followers.
Peter himself had been close to giving up. But he’d remained faithful. He’d survived by selling his soul to Rogues. In that he’d also followed in Reynard’s footsteps.
And now he had hope again for the first time in years.
He traveled in a fleet of gleaming black vehicles with a group of Rogues more ruthless than any he’d known. They’d been on the trail of Samuel Santiago’s daughter for months before Michael Turov had found her for them. The second he’d touched her they had pinpointed her exact location. Together they burned with the heat of a thousand suns. Residual desire coursed through Peter with the memory of that burn. The Rogues were like a pack of hounds on her scent and he, too, panted. But the Brimstone his deal had accepted into his blood was for the Order of Samuel. With Samuel’s daughter he could rebuild what they had lost. Perhaps, in time, he could turn on the Rogue allies and purify the earth of the daemon scourge once and for all.
The Rogues could have heaven. What did he care of that far-off realm? He would rule a new order on earth. He wanted to bathe in Samuel’s daughter’s affinity, and when he no longer needed her, maybe he would bathe in her blood. All the years of powerless fury he’d suffered would be soothed.
They were close. So close. And other Rogues were close to a different prize they’d sought. Lucifer’s wings were almost within their grasp. Ezekiel would be brought to his knees. But he wouldn’t be bowing before Rogues. He would be bowing before a new order of saints. One led by Peter himself.
* * *
He hadn’t had the flame nightmare in a very long time. When it visited him with a vengeance, as if to make up for years of leaving him in peace, the vivid memory of pain seared along the tracks of his scars and woke him with the sound of his own screams. Grim was there before the sound died down and the hulking beast almost smothered him with his concern. He pressed his great hairy body against Michael’s arms as if he were putting out actual flames and not the memory of a first Brimstone burn that had almost annihilated a toddler too young to control it.
One of Michael’s first lucid memories was of his mother’s soothing song and touch. She’d held him in spite of the danger. She’d risked being burned alive in order to bring him back from the brink of combustion. Rogues had taken him to get to her and the daemon king. Adam Turov had helped Michael and his mother defeat the Rogues that had also tortured him as a child.
His stepfather also had scars from his time with the Order of Samuel. But the beautiful opera singer, Victoria D’Arcy, had helped the daemon hunter to heal. They had raised Michael together even though his biological father had been a daemon. He’d had love, stability...and the looming threat of a grandfather who wanted to bequeath him the throne of hell on his twenty-first birthday.
Thankfully he’d been sleeping outside the roadside hotel to keep watch and to keep his distance from Lily Santiago when he woke screaming. The night air helped to cool his skin, and no one saw the glow along the tracks of his scars caused by the Brimstone in his blood rising to the surface.
Lily didn’t have to touch him. Ever again. Keeping his distance did nothing. The memory of her touch was enough. He’d fallen to sleep hotter than he’d been in a very long time. Thus the dream. Thus the burn. He rose and went for his guitar for comfort. The music and the affinity his mother had bequeathed him held the Brimstone burn at bay.
Of course, the music did nothing to erase the memory of Lily’s taste on his tongue.
* * *
Sometime after midnight, Lily woke suddenly with her heart pounding. Her fists were clenched, but the only intruder in her room was a stray shaft of moonlight beaming through the slim opening between the heavy motel drapes. It wasn’t the first time she’d woken afraid from a sound sleep since she’d left the protected confines of the daemon king’s palace. She’d been hunted from the start. Rogues craved her ability to lure and hunt daemons because of the power it would give them over Loyalist enemies. But their desire to use her was at war with their more personal desire to claim her affinity for their own pleasure.
Reason to run, for sure.
But running with a half-daemon prince wasn’t exactly salvation, especially when she found herself uncomfortably close to having those same thoughts to covet and claim. She was no greedy Rogue daemon, but Michael’s Brimstone was alluring.
Michael would have been alluring if his blood was cold as ice.
Lily rose from tangled sheets that spoke of her restless dreams and tiptoed to the window. She twitched the curtain just enough to look down on the Firebird gleaming in the pale moonlight. She hadn’t expected to see Michael leaning against the hood in a familiar pose, his legs crossed at the ankle. She eased back, but he wasn’t looking up at the window where she stood. He was concentrating on the guitar in his hands.
She couldn’t hear his song. Not with her ears. But she suspected she’d woken with his playing, attuned to him in ways she couldn’t understand. He played to quiet the Brimstone in his blood. To soothe away the burn. Knowing he was as restless as she was didn’t help. He was used to controlling his burn. She was less practiced at pretending. Especially when she wasn’t at all sure the attraction between them was something they could fight.
That’s when she saw Grim. She’d been too distracted by the striking figure of a daemon prince curled around his guitar at midnight. At first she hadn’t seen the giant shadow of his constant hellhound companion. But, unlike his master, the hellhound had seen her. His snout was pointed toward the window and for a second the burning coals of Grim’s eyes met hers. He had been sitting at Michael’s feet. He rose and walked several stiff-legged paces toward the hotel. Lily heeded the warning. Her fingers slid from the curtains and she turned away from the beautiful prince playing by the light of the moon.
Her backpack was only a few steps away. She kept it close at all times. In addition to the kachinas, her father’s sword was stowed in a side pocket that served as a sheath. Only the top of its hilt protruded, but it was within easy reach should she need it. It was probably a mistake to pick up the pack and bring it with her when she climbed back into bed. She did it anyway. It wasn’t safe to stare at Michael. But there was an alternative. She’d been staring at his kachina-doll likeness her whole life.
So why did the beat of her heart kick up again when she pulled out the tiny burlap bundle to unwind it? Why did every slow revolution of the doll as she freed it feel like a risk she couldn’t afford to take?
The room was dark, illuminated only by the moon on one side and the soft glow of emergency lighting from the interior corridor on the opposite side.
She saw the doll with the pads of her fingers more than her eyes.
It was still a treasure, but it was no longer as compelling as it had been before. Now she’d seen the real warrior angel in action. She’d heard his song. She’d felt his burn. She’d tasted his perfect lips. But more than that, she’d felt his scars. The tiny carving hadn’t revealed those scars to her. She’d had to see them on the real man in real life. Something deep in his changeable eyes told her there was much like the scars about him. Things the kachina doll had never revealed in spite of her familiarity with it.
She had to obey the daemon king.
But as she held the doll in her hands the smooth statue suddenly grew cool in her fingers and she trembled. The chill was unexpected. The real man could warm her if it wasn’t forbidden in so many ways. The hellhound knew her secret. But Michael was the true mystery. A daemon prince determined to run away from the throne of hell. He was scarred by his past. He fought his future. Yet he’d had the kind of familial love she’d never known.
The doll was too cold to comfortably hold and she rewrapped it, puzzled by the sudden change. What could it mean?
Ezekiel had a plan, and she was entangled in his scheme because love and gratitude bound her. She’d run away only to find that her guardian wouldn’t set her free. Whether Grim approved or not, one of her ancestors had seen the daemon prince in her future. Was he her destiny or would she be his damnation? Was the sudden chill from the doll meant as a warning?
She wanted to warn Michael. It wasn’t the Brimstone in his blood he should fear. It was her place in Ezekiel’s plan and the power she might have to overcome his resistance.
Chapter 8 (#u5232f25a-0f0a-577b-b7cc-37200b3f461a)
It wasn’t safe for her to travel alone. She couldn’t fight off an army of Rogues with her father’s blade. She wasn’t sure how much sleep they’d managed between them, but they were up before dawn to meet at the car as they’d planned. Grim had disappeared. She blinked at shadows to determine if the hellhound was lurking near his master, but couldn’t decide if her gooseflesh was in response to the cool morning air or the beast’s stare.
“We should separate and meet at the river, but I don’t want to leave you on your own and Grim won’t cooperate,” Michael said.
Lily wouldn’t have been keen to travel alone with the hellhound anyway.
“I’ll think cold thoughts,” she promised, knowing it was a lie.
“Will you?” Michael challenged. He had placed his guitar in the back seat and he braced his hands against the top of the car on the driver’s side. Lily stood in the open door of the passenger side and met his gaze over the dusty roof. Something in his narrowed eyes spoke of tension and she dropped her eyes, but that only led her to look at his white-knuckled grip.
“Maybe you’re the one that needs to chill?” Lily suggested.
“I’m working on it. Trust me,” Michael said. He pushed away from the car and got behind the wheel in one fast, fluid motion. Lily swallowed. If this was him working on tamping down his Brimstone burn, she couldn’t imagine him letting go. Couldn’t, but did for several long moments as she tried to remember how to get into the car like a woman who wasn’t lost in thoughts that could get her killed.
Only the sudden thought that the daemon king had known exactly what he was doing when he’d thrown them together spurred her to take a deep breath and get into the car. He wanted them harried and hounded by Rogues. He wanted them drawn together. He wanted them to crave the forbidden fruit while they went for the wings.
A mantle fit for a future king.
She’d wondered what Ezekiel’s entire scheme entailed and maybe she was beginning to have an inkling of an answer. It was in the flush on her skin as she sat too close to Michael in the enclosed space. It was in the deep breath she took as she buckled her seat belt, already craving the scent of his skin, warmed from the outside by sun and from the inside by his fire.
Ezekiel was an Ancient One. He’d fallen from heaven to rule in hell. He’d battled Rogues for centuries. But he was a complex being with many facets all tilted toward strengthening his kingdom.
Michael’s reluctance as the prince and heir of the throne was well-known, but Ezekiel was determined that he would be a king. Ezekiel had ruled alone for too long. He might want more for his beloved Elizabeth’s grandson.
The idea of her royal guardian as a nearly immortal and unpredictable matchmaker caused panic to rise up in her chest.
“Hang on,” Michael said. “The sooner we get to the wings the better.”
Her body was pressed against the buttery leather by their momentum as the Firebird sped from the hotel parking lot. Her head grew light and her palms pressed against her hollow belly as her stomach dropped. Michael drove down the Arizona highway with a hound of hell literally at his bumper urging him on.
But would her task be over once they retrieved Lucifer’s wings? She was afraid that leading Michael to heaven was only the beginning of her torment.
Ezekiel had said the palace had been built for her. She was used to the temporal tricks and treats of the hell dimension, where time was amorphous and seemingly unrelated to time on earth. The palace had seemed ancient and always. Built long before she’d been born.
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Barbara Hancock
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A match made in hell… The adopted daughter of the daemon king, Lily Santiago has lived her life in darkness. After one glimpse of desert sunlight, she begins to understand what she′s been missing.Michael D′Arcy Turov might be heir to the throne of hell, but he has firmly rejected that legacy. All he wants is to play his guitar… Until he meets Lily, and her kiss awakens the Brimstone burn he′s long suppressed. A pawn in the war between her foster father and rogue daemons, Lily is determined to let Michael keep his freedom. But what if his desire for her is enough to take him back to hell?