He was gone.
And her heart was still beating.
Fear almost made it impossible for her to move, but she had to make it to the exit in case there was any chance that they might all make it out alive.
Before she could continue to make her way to safety, a dark figure stepped from the roiling smoke, directly blocking her escape.
No.
Not now.
She couldn’t call Grim from the baby’s side. Severne had to find Eric before it was too late. Somewhere deep within l’Opéra Severne, her precious cello burned. She had no defense left against the evil monk who approached through the fog of chaos.
“Katarina, how I have missed you. You don’t look well. These last days have fatigued you. Consorting with the devil is never advisable. Bad for your health. There’s always that pesky possibility of your blood turning to ash,” Reynard quipped.
Kat could feel the tremendous heat at her back. But she couldn’t escape it by running into Reynard’s grasp. She wouldn’t. She refused. Better to burn.
“He’s gone back for the child? You must take me to them. Allow me to finish what you so rudely interrupted before,” Reynard said. He looked in the direction Severne had disappeared. He took several steps toward the damned man she loved and the poor daemon child she’d tried to save. “Once we’ve dispatched the daemon, you and I will return to the enclave to ensure that Samuel’s gift is passed to the next generation.”
The inference in his words made her stomach twist with nausea. Her mother had been forced to conceive and bear Katherine and Victoria, but at least her husband had been a young man who had cared for his wife in the end. Reynard was a monster. The idea of him as her husband sickened her to the core. She would never be his Katarina.
“How about one last game of hide-and-seek instead?” Kat muttered. She backed away from Reynard. Her movement caught his attention. He turned and followed.
Her only hope to help Severne and Eric was to lead her lifelong tormentor away from where they might be. Into the fire. Into the flames. What she’d most wanted her whole life was to escape Reynard, but now it was up to her to use his habitual dogging of her footsteps against him.
“Catch me. Catch me if you can,” she said.
He actually laughed. A sound she remembered from her nightmares. She didn’t pause even when crashing timbers drowned out the sound.
Her mind quickly cataloged all the places she’d been in l’Opéra Severne. She couldn’t risk going back down to the catacombs alone. She might get lost. She settled on the one other place she could think of that might provide the perfect place to lead Reynard on a fruitless chase.
The props warehouse.
She raced for the stairs and was relieved to find them intact.
Fire was a threat, coming close and closer, and smoke hung in the atmosphere like tendrils of fog above a dismal swamp. Ribbons of gray crept in sparkling with dust motes in the flickering light. The ribbons penetrated, curling up into all the lofted naves and nooks of the opera house the human eye could hardly see.
She had one opportunity to lead Reynard away from where she thought Eric might be. But that didn’t mean she wanted to be found by the murderous stalker she could never seem to escape. She hoped to avoid Reynard among the funhouse jumble of garish props.
Kat had left him behind, but she could hear his whistle in the distance.
He was a madman. How could he whistle a jaunty tune while the rest of the opera house was in a tumult of fear and evacuation? How could his unhurried footsteps echo behind her on the wrought iron spiral stairs as if he was only on a boring tour while a mother fled with her newborn child and Severne searched for Eric in the flames?
This time she hurried into the warehouse not even bothering to try to silence the massive doors. The rows of vintage costumes hung on their racks, indifferent to the fire that would soon consume them and uncaring of Kat’s fate. They were ghostly vestiges of the opera house’s past, forgotten and still while the living rushed for their lives several floors above.
Last time she’d been here, she’d laughed silently to herself because the dust motes in the ghost light’s glow had been like the caterpillar’s smoke from Alice in Wonderland. Now, she cringed at her earlier fancy.
Severne’s fairy-tale memories would burn away.
She drew up short as she realized her mistake. Her rush to the warehouse had been instinctive, like a wild animal searching for a hideaway that had offered it safety before. But there was no place safe to hide from Reynard. There never had been.
She was stuck with her choice now, a fairy tale that would become a nightmare when Reynard invaded it.
Kat plunged into the costume racks in order to get quickly to where the props loomed on the other side. Mothball-scented cloth of every kind clung to her body as if to prevent her passage. Scratchy starched lace and moldering velvet, musty furs and the cold brush of buttons, feathers from ostriches so long dead the quills were yellowed and cracked—Kat pushed through them all. She couldn’t prevent the overburdened rack from shaking on the chains that suspended it from the vaulted ceiling.
Reynard would see where she’d passed.
There was no other way.
The obsessed monk was behind her. She could still hear his whistle in the distance even above the shuffle of movement she assumed was the evacuation.
She finally extricated herself from the costumes and came out on the other side where the strange arrangement of theater artifacts waited, a forgotten city of backdrops and scaffolding, statuary and artificial trees.
The huge head of Mephistopheles dominated the tableau. The hulking face of the figure used in the final act of Faust tilted to one side of the warehouse like a reclining evil emperor. The encroaching smoke swirled around the ram’s horns and curled out from the holes of its empty eyes where red lights would gleam during the show.
Kat avoided the face, choosing instead to crouch behind a table of goblets, each blackened by the pyrotechnics used to make them flame when it was their turn to be a part of the show. The chorus always coughed and complained at the goblets’ sulfur smell. It seemed a foreshadowing now of the fire that raged upstairs.
How many times had Faust been performed at l’Opéra Severne? It was the company’s specialty. Fitting, but it made Kat shudder to think how the opera mirrored Severne’s life, a constant reminder of the nothingness that threatened to consume his father and him when it was time.
Now it was Kat’s turn to feel haunted and hounded by the devil. Reynard had manipulated them for his dark purpose their whole lives.
She had to stay lost while Eric was found. She believed in Severne. It was new, a blossoming in her chest she’d never felt before. He’d given Grim as a guardian to Michael. That heroic sacrifice stole her breath. No matter what happened to her tonight, that part of the fairy tale was real.
Or maybe that was the daemon mark expanding in her chest, crowding out the oxygen and her life.
Her hand was crippled and curled against her side, the opera house was on fire, Eric was missing and her greatest enemy stalked her in creepy shadows, but she hoped. She avoided Reynard to buy time for Severne, her sister and Eric, but she didn’t hide.
She hoped.
Her heart rushed with the thrill of it.
But she was also afraid.
Some props around her were damaged. Ragged canvas fluttered in unseen wafts of air that might have been caused by the doors of the warehouse opening and closing when Reynard came inside. The movement drew Kat’s eye. She tried not to see Reynard with every harmless shift of smoke or paper. She failed. She saw him everywhere. There, only it wasn’t his robe but a playbill that drifted down from some disturbed place she couldn’t quite see. Had Reynard brushed against it so that it fell? There, only it wasn’t his steps—it was a settling of the raft
ers far above as the opera house began to lose its structural integrity to flame.
Kat could draw Reynard’s attention for only so long before she condemned herself to burn with him.
“You have run down the rabbit hole, Katarina. Such a warren you’ve discovered for yourself. Has your daemon-loving sister left you to burn? And what of your lover? Where is he while you cower here with me?” Reynard called. His voice echoed. Kat couldn’t see the monk himself. “Oh, yes, I know you’ve been tempted by darkness. You’ll be punished for that, but don’t worry. In the end, your blood is too valuable to waste.”
The props created the perfect place for both of them to remain unseen if they wished.
Her gaze was drawn again and again to the wide-open grin of Mephistopheles’s gaping mouth. She could hear the same grin in Reynard’s voice.
“My patience grows thin. As thin as the air in this place. Do you feel it? The way the oxygen leaves us? The time has come for you to leave with me and quit your games,” Reynard said. “You have a duty to perform, as do I.”
He began to hum. Music from Gounod’s Faust. No doubt inspired by his surroundings. The hum came and went—farther, then closer—as he searched for her. And still she couldn’t see him.
Had Severne found Eric? Had her sister and the baby escaped with Grim?
“Your mother tried to stand against me, you know. She died for her treachery. Her blood still colors my hungry blade. Fitting that it should join with that of the daemons I’ve sent back to hell,” Reynard said.
Kat clenched her fists. She had known. Her heart had known even before she’d found her mother’s letters. She’d always feared Reynard for good reason. Her mother had died trying to save the daemon she’d loved.
Victoria hadn’t been able to save the father of her baby. Their mother had failed to save them. Kat wondered if her mother’s daemon love was trapped in the walls of l’Opéra Severne. All because of Reynard. Poor baby Michael. He would never know his father.
Kat rose and stepped from behind the prop’s table. Smoke rolled around her ankles. The air was thicker. Reynard had been right. There wasn’t much time. Her movement wasn’t immediately obvious to the stalker who hunted her. She waited in the open, unhidden, for Reynard to find her.
Severne, Eric, her sister and Michael. Even Sybil. They would all live. It was time for Reynard to be stopped. It didn’t matter if she had to die to ensure it.
“You are very like her. More like her than your father. He was a weak man. Never able to control the wife he’d been given. I think he might have loved her in the end. He refused to kill her after she’d given birth to more biddable daemon detectors. He rebelled against the Order. Even suggested we not hunt and kill the daemon she loved,” Reynard scoffed. “So he was punished, of course. He died from the lashing we gave him. Weak to the end. And the woman he’d tried to help didn’t even mourn his death.”
Kat knew he was wrong. Her mother had been in mourning her whole life. She’d only expressed it in song.
So he was responsible for her mother’s death and her father’s.
And he might kill her after she’d given him children to pass on Samuel’s gift, but not before she tried to end his madness for good.
“My affinity is the greatest in my family. Victoria and my mother knew it. That’s why we separated often. I was the one who was most often drawn to daemons,” Kat said. Her eyes strained to find her tormentor in the darkness. His disembodied voice was impossible to track, but she looked at Mephistopheles again and again as he spoke.
“You betrayed them. It was you I was most often able to track. You are quite the magnet. I can attest to that,” Reynard said.
When he stepped from the mouth of the devil in a revelation of parting smoke, she felt no surprise. His serrated blade was drawn. He held it up as if prepared to attack. Perhaps he wasn’t as smoothly confident as he had seemed.
“Come with me before the whole building is engulfed. Stay with me. Be my willing instrument and my wife and I’ll let your sister remain free,” Reynard said.
Another bargain.
One that would have been tempting if it didn’t include being in a partnership with her parents’ murderer or allowing him to come anywhere near her.
“We should go now,” Kat temporized.
She knew what she had to do. He approached her with his knife still drawn. She tried not to look at its stained blade.
“Then you agree to come with me?” he asked.
Kat had learned to be cautious in her dealings with the devil. Just because Reynard was a human didn’t make the moment less treacherous. She chose her words carefully.
“Do I have any other choice?” she asked. “You always find me. I’m tired of running. I’m tired of hiding.”
There were always choices. And being helpless never had to be one of them.
She led the way with Reynard’s sharp knife close to the small of her back. He still didn’t sheathe it. He was too used to her slipping away. He didn’t know that this time she was determined to face him and fight him and put an end to it all.
Had Eric been found? Had Severne been able to help the small boy get away? The stairs and halls were deserted as they made their way toward an exit. Smoke became an impenetrable wall. It blocked their way, this way and that, but Reynard pushed her forward through it in spite of coughing and choking and streaming eyes.
He must not have noticed the change in the mural on the wall.
Katherine had assumed the great shuffling she’d heard above her head while she’d been in the warehouse had been people evacuating. But now she saw a different explanation.
Every figure on the walls had moved to face outward. They stood side by side by side. They lined every corridor in a great unending row of lost souls doomed to burn. Nothing could free them. They would be consumed by flames when the opera house burned.
As Reynard hurried her along, it wasn’t only smoke that made Kat’s eyes stream.
She hoped Eric had been right. She hoped Lucifer’s Army didn’t blame her for their imprisonment and their impending demise.
The opera house seemed to be fully evacuated. Every door they passed hung open. Every room was empty. There was no one running around them in the halls. Distantly Kat could hear sirens, but she could also see flame. It licked around the ceiling’s edges. If she didn’t get out soon, it would be too late.
“Hurry,” Reynard urged. Even a madman could see they didn’t have long before the building came down on their heads. Heat had joined the smoke. Tears evaporated off her face as they fell.
Finally Kat saw what she’d been straining to see. Hundreds of daemons were carved into the walls, but she saw Michael easily because he stood by Eric’s mother, a face she would never forget. Lavinia looked at her. Michael was tall and beautiful beside her. Not as beautiful as Severne. Her human lover was all the more attractive because of the vulnerable edge to his hardness. The fact that he’d claimed his perfection with sweat and blood and determination in the face of fear made it even more striking, a human achievement of the most divine. But Kat could see why her sister had fallen in love with her baby’s father. His angelic face was angular and sad. His long hair swept back from his cheeks. The absence of his wings was obvious in the scars on his shoulders. Michael stood as if the weight of his wings was still down his back.
Her sister had loved this daemon. And even though his ghostly shadow had almost chilled her soul to death, Kat thought he might help her now. He was Victoria’s immortal Romeo. He had died for her. He had helped her beyond his death. Would he continue to help her now?
She stepped closer to Michael and Lavinia. Reynard followed. The monk was so used to stalking her, he didn’t think to be cautious now. When they were close enough, Kat pretended to stumble. She fell into Reynard, risking his blade to press his body against the f
igures on the wall. She didn’t know what mighty manipulation of will they’d had to use to move, but she imagined they had waited for an opportunity like this.
Wooden hands closed around Reynard’s neck and arms before he realized what had happened. She saw them move in the same way Lavinia had moved to grip her hand, but faster, as if they had stored their energy for this moment. Did Reynard immediately feel the cold begin to leach his life? His blade fell to the ground at Kat’s feet.
“What are you doing? The Council will avenge me. I’ve been their instrument for decades,” Reynard shouted.
Kat bent to pick up his blade, but Severne stopped her.
“Don’t touch it. It’s a daemon blade. He must be the one who injured Grim,” Severne said.
“I tried to follow that beast after he delivered one of my men back to the Order half-dead from fleeing his evil jaws. He turned on me. I cut him, but he got away,” Reynard said. He continued to struggle against his wooden captors. They held him without expression. Completely still and impossible to dislodge.
“He would have died without Sybil’s blood. She saved him. I think she also saved you, Kat. She unmade the dress. I’ve never seen her so...emotional,” Severne said.
Kat had been using her bad hand. It was no longer painful and useless. It no longer curled against her chest. Her heart beat quickly because of the circumstances, but it no longer pained her with every thump.
“Eric is waiting with Sybil outside. Everyone is out. The building is lost. It will fall,” he said. “There isn’t much time.”
“We can’t let him burn,” Kat said.
Reynard cursed and shouted above the sound of crashing plaster. Deep beneath their feet, the catacombs moaned as air was compressed by the weight of the building preparing to fall.
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