Brimstone Seduction

She heard booted footfalls catching up behind them as she flew from alley to street to sidewalk, trying to get back to the main thoroughfare where people would be.

If the boy had been a few pounds lighter or a few years younger or less panicked in his struggle against her, she might have made it.

“Katarina!” Reynard boomed close behind her. His pet name for her grated on her nerves as always. Now it was a proclamation of her guilt. She had betrayed him.

Resignation softened the muscles in her legs as adrenaline deserted her. She would never beat him in a foot race, even if she wasn’t carrying the child. Her only hope was to reason with a madman. No hope at all. Fortunately, the lack of hope made her more determined to try. Though she stopped to turn and face him and his blade with a pounding heart and ice in her veins, she couldn’t help noting his giddiness was gone. He was raw anger personified now. The guise of his righteous joy had burned away as surely as the daemon’s human form.

The boy had stopped his efforts to wiggle out of her arms. Perhaps between the man who had cut his mother’s throat and the woman who held him, he chose her.

Being the lesser of two evils didn’t seem a triumph at all.

“I won’t let you kill him, Father,” she said.

She held the boy close. She wrapped him tighter in her arms. She could feel the frantic beat of his heart against her chest, an echo to the thud of her own. She placed a hand on the back of his shampoo-scented head and pressed him even closer.

“I banish. I don’t kill, Katarina. You know this. I send them back to hell where they belong,” Reynard said. He stepped nearer. One stride. Katherine took the same stride back and away. He had always refused to call her by the name her mother had given her. It was as if he attempted to erase her true identity and replace it with one he had created.

But she had nowhere to run. She could still hear traffic and people in the distance. So close and yet so far away. The hum of the city mocked her efforts to defy the man who had dogged her steps from the time she could walk.

“So you say. All I’ve ever seen is the blood. The suffering. The pain,” Kat said.

The boy trembled in her arms. At some point, his small arms had twined around her neck.

“They are deadly. They manipulate us with trickery and deceit. Have you forgotten your mother?” Reynard asked.

Her mother had been killed by a daemon. It was true. They were dangerous. Deadly. But so was the human being she faced.

Reynard held his long blade in a steady hand. She could see the muscle and sinew standing out in his right forearm where his coat had fallen away. He was ready to slit the throat of a child...or her throat if she got in his way.

“A daemon killed my mother. But you were using her to hunt him when it happened. Would she be dead if it wasn’t for you?” Katherine asked.

“She would never have been born if it hadn’t been for Samuel. He gave his last breath to resuscitate your grandmother, a stranger he met on a train. He passed his ability to detect daemons hiding among us to your family. And this is the legacy you spurn.” Spittle flew with the accusation, and then several sudden steps brought Reynard much too close.

There was nothing she could do. Her back was pressed to the grungy brick wall. Only decades of faded graffiti would mark her grave if she continued to fight him. She had nowhere to go, but then again, she never had.

“It’s you I spurn, Reynard,” she said.

Slowly she lowered the child to the ground and pushed him behind her legs. Her body was the only shield she had to give. Her cello case had been dropped back where his mother’s smoke still swirled in the air.

“Your sister has evaded me for a long time. Too long. I begin to wonder if she spurned me only to be killed by a daemon, too. Perhaps your family legacy is one of failure,” Reynard said. The glee was back in his voice, lilting his words.

She thought of her cello, of her mother’s and sister’s singing. They had turned to music to buffer the bloody killings and to mute the daemon’s call. Had they failed, after all? Had all the years of practice and performance been for nothing? Her fingers tingled and ached, reminders of how many times she’d played until the tips bled in order to thwart Reynard.

The boy clung to her legs. She could feel the damp of his tears soaking through the chiffon of her concert gown. It was no suit of armor. No barrier to Reynard’s seasoned blade. She was no match for a killer.

When her sister Victoria had flown to Baton Rouge to take the role of Faust’s Marguerite at l’Opéra Severne, she’d told Katherine not to worry. She’d been gone for months, but she’d kept in touch at first. Kat hadn’t heard from her sister in a few weeks, but with rehearsals and the rush of preparing for performances, she’d hoped all was well.

“Give him to me, Katarina. End this. Embrace your legacy. Do not embrace a daemon,” Reynard coaxed, edging closer.

The idea that Reynard might be right about her sister hollowed out her insides until she echoed. Hollow or not, alone or not, she wouldn’t give up. She didn’t have a parachute to count on. She could only jump and try to fly.

“My name is Kat,” she replied, pressing her hand against the boy’s back and lifting her chin. Whether he accepted it or not, she would claim autonomy. She would follow her heart and her instinct to protect the trembling child behind her.

A sound of disgust erupted from Reynard’s lips and he brandished his knife. Would he slice her throat or stab her through her pounding heart?

Either way, if Reynard had to deal with her, it might give the daemon boy a chance to run.

She braced to push the child away, but before Reynard’s blade descended, an eerie mimicry of his earlier whistle began in the alley behind them. It stayed Reynard’s hand and caused Kat’s breath to catch in her throat. The boy against her leg lifted his head and turned his face to see.

There were few streetlights nearby. Most had been busted. Barely mitigated darkness enveloped them. Only one flickering holdout, the ambient light of the city against the sky, and the humid atmosphere gave them illumination to see. It was light pollution, but it mimicked fog. Through its violet haze and the floating of particles that were probably Brimstone ash, a figure stepped toward them.

The whistle and the posture of the man were casual. Exaggerated ease. He must see the confrontation he’d interrupted. He must see a woman and child threatened by a larger, stronger man, but he acted nonchalant, as if he was only out for a stroll. He must see the knife Reynard hadn’t bothered to hide away.

Man?

Kat’s gift wasn’t one of sirens and flashing lights. She was pulled toward daemons. It was subtle. The tingle, the thrill that shivered along her veins as the man approached was probably only shock that he would stroll past Father Reynard with barely a glance in his direction. A daemon wouldn’t dare approach them.

Closer, she could see that the stranger’s tall form was clothed in evening apparel. The flash of white from his shirt contrasted with the inky darkness of his suit or tuxedo. But closer still, she noted his bowtie was undone at his neck and hung on either side of his collar. So easy. So debonair.

It wasn’t until he stopped at her side that she knew she’d been fooled. He wasn’t relaxed. The tension in his body transferred itself to hers when his arm brushed her elbow. Hard. Prepared. Ready.

He might wear formal clothes, but beneath them he was all warrior. Molded body armor would have been more appropriate to the purpose inherent in every flexed muscle and the energy he exerted to hold himself in check.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Reynard asked.

The blade of his knife had dipped. He preferred an audience of one for his performances. Her. And her alone. Or her sister in turn. Their mother and grandmother before that.

“A bystander who finds himself unable to stand by,” the man said.

For her ears alone he added, “I’m John Severne.”

Memories of the opera house in Baton Rouge teased her mind, but she pushed them away.

She had no time for nostalgia. Worry for her sister wound tighter until her insides were pulled like cheap strings on an instrument’s bridge, stretched to the breaking point. One clumsy finger would cause her to snap.

Severne reached for the boy, but she stopped him. It only took one hand on his hard arm, but touching him felt braver than that. Almost as brave as opposing Reynard. His cultured Southern tones seemed as incongruent to him as his evening apparel. Beneath the polish, he was a man to be reckoned with. She couldn’t see his face...only a suggestion of angles and curves, but as he drew his arm back, she felt what it cost him. He forced patience with her interference. A thrill of cool adrenaline rushed down her spine at his stiffness, his anger. It shored up her nerve...barely. The boy trembled against her, not oblivious to the forces at work above his head.

“You are making a mistake,” Reynard growled.

“I would say the same to you,” Severne replied.

Then he pulled Katherine against him. She’d been right about his tension. She could feel the planned action in his body everywhere it touched hers. Muscle. Energy. Strength. And more adrenaline rushed because she was fairly sure the warning in his words, just like his name, had been for her, not Reynard.

He was warning her it was a mistake to resist his help.

But she didn’t snap like the cheap strings she imagined. She held fast. Unbroken.

“Let me take the boy,” he said for her ears alone, the flow of the Seine even more apparent in an intimate whisper than it had been in his louder speech. He had a Southern accent, but it was old-fashioned, formal and touched with a hint of Paris. Clenched teeth and a hardened jaw and the iron of his body against her offset the softness of his accent.