Her mother had loved this intimidating creature. And his love for her mother must have been the reason Lucifer’s Army was on the river boat that night. They hadn’t been sent to harm her. They’d been there to protect her from the Council’s daemons. They’d withdrawn when they saw she was unharmed and in good hands with Severne. The idea warmed her, and Katherine had named the baby after him, but she still stood between the daemon king and her child.
For a king was what he had to be.
“Lucifer’s wings were shorn and bronzed to hang above the Council as a macabre prize and a symbolic crown,” Kat murmured to herself. “John told me about them. He saw them when he was child.”
Ezekiel wore Lucifer’s wings. Only the ancient daemons had wings. The ones that had fallen from paradise to rule in hell. The Council had cut them away from Lucifer before they had bled him completely of his Brimstone and left him to die. Her sister’s lover, Michael, had reclaimed his in death. He’d been a ghost with mighty wings when she’d known him as an icy shadow.
“I will never harm him. He is my grandson in every way but blood. I’ve only come to offer him a gift,” Ezekiel said.
At his words, a snuffling growl sounded from the doorway, and a black-muzzled nose poked its way into the room, followed by a dog the size of a German shepherd. Only its movements revealed its true nature as a puppy. It was clumsy and quick, tumbling over its big paws. It was also occasionally transparent, winking out of their world and into another in turns.
This was how Grim must have looked when he first came to Severne all those decades ago.
Tears burned behind her eyes. She hadn’t realized how badly she’d missed the monstrous hellhound until now.
“Will you permit this gift, Katherine D’Arcy?” Ezekiel asked.
Sammy gurgled and rolled over in his sleep. The hellhound came and stood by the cradle just as a much more adult Grim would have done. Paws planted. Legs stiff. Muzzle down.
“Yes, we will,” Severne said from the bedroom just off the nursery. “If Kat approves.”
Daemons couldn’t be trusted.
“What will you ask for in return?” Kat asked cautiously.
Ezekiel, Lord of Hell, Prince of Darkness, or whatever his title, looked askance. One eyebrow lifted in surprise.
“So many daemons were trapped in l’Opéra Severne’s walls. It was a cursed and cruel purgatory. You freed Lucifer’s Army. The battle we waged to overthrow the Council is responsible for my scars. They were defeated. That wouldn’t have been possible without your help,” Ezekiel said.
“That’s why my contract turned to ash,” Severne said. “It never would have burned in ordinary flames.”
“And why the tally marks disappeared,” Kat said.
He’d come to stand by her side. Baby Sam had woken, but he only kicked his legs in the air and gurgled at the vigilant shadow of puppy nose on his bed. He was either unaware or unconcerned that the Lord of Hell considered him beloved.
“For us in hell, the battle raged for centuries. For you, it was an instant conflagration,” Ezekiel said. “The pup is a thank-you. No more. No less. We owe you that. I feel a personal interest, but this is no daemon bargain you have to fear. This is a gift from a grandfather,” he said.
“A daemon king,” Kat surmised.
Ezekiel inclined his head.
Kat looked at him through narrowed eyes. Not damned. Only different. But they were fallen. There was mystery in that, and danger. Daemons were beautiful and tragic. Much like l’Opéra Severne. She could feel Ezekiel’s Brimstone burn. She was glad when he ordered the pup to stay before turning away.
“Samuel was born with an affinity for daemons. He was taught to fear us and fight us, but the affinity led him to love us instead. It also led to his death, but not before he passed his ability to your grandmother,” the daemon king said.
“The gift he gave us wasn’t the ability to find daemons,” Kat whispered.
“It was the ability to love us,” Ezekiel said.
“And overlook the Brimstone blood,” Severne said.
“Or crave it.” Ezekiel laughed darkly. “And once you’re daemon-marked, you’re never forgotten. Your family will always have a hint of Brimstone. A remnant. Consider it a gi—a mark of favor,” he said.
Katherine had experienced both pleasure and pain from daemon marks, but she wasn’t afraid. Even without Brimstone, her blood was bolder than that.
* * *
The baby had fallen back to sleep with his new hellhound by his side. Kat imagined Michael slept with Grim in much the same way. Her sister’s lover was gone. Unlike the other daemons that had been trapped in the walls, Michael must have used the last of his immortal energy to manifest as the icy shadow. She still shivered when she recalled its nearly fatal freeze. She still wondered at the great love he’d had for his child.
Kat would always wonder how much of the daemon had been left in the winged threat that had almost killed her several times. She now suspected that he had stalked her through the catacombs. She knew that if she hadn’t invoked Victoria’s name, the shadow would have frozen her to the marrow in her bones. But it had tried to watch over Victoria and her baby. Michael had been gone, but his will to love had lived on. She would remember his angelic face on l’Opéra Severne’s wall. He had been an ancient one. He had loved her sister. His son lived on.
Both of their sons would be touched by the gift Samuel had given their family. Only time would tell how love and curses mixed.
Severne took Katherine by the hand and led her onto the balcony and into the sun. When he kissed her, she tasted wood smoke and his unique masculine flavor. She also caught a hint of dramatic dust and powder, rosin and aged timbers.
Across town, the opera house was being rebuilt. Severne was helping in its construction. The opera master dirtied his hands every day with mortar and bricks, and there wasn’t a single workman who could boast a stronger back or the ability to work longer hours. He’d been honest with her the evening he’d told her he wanted to build a perfect place for her to play with his own two hands.
It had been a sexy promise. Though they’d both fought the emotion behind it, she’d never forgotten the way he’d kissed the callouses on her fingers when he’d made it. And the fulfillment of his promise was even sexier.
There was no sign of where the catacombs had been. Only solid ground. The foundation had already been put into place where the new l’Opéra Severne would rise. It would be built from the blueprints of the old building, but both she and Severne had insisted on no cherrywood. The walls would be plastered and wallpapered with vintage Victorian paper. Flowers. Hydrangeas and calla lilies.
Kat wanted no faces on the walls.
Severne had been the master of the opera house for so long, she imagined the old haunted building would always be a part of him. Since she’d loved it in spite of its forbidding atmosphere, she didn’t mind. But just as the day they’d first spent in Baton Rouge away from l’Opéra Severne, she was glad to see Severne’s dark hair shine in the sun.
He raised his lips from her and looked down into her eyes for a long time. She could still see all the long years of stark loneliness he’d endured in the depths of his gaze. But then he sank back down into her kiss, and their lips reignited the Brimstone burn. Heat flared between them.
No cello necessary.
He’d spent his long life burdened by hell’s most wanted, but they’d found what each of them wanted most when they allowed the music to bring them together.
Some tragic pairs were meant to be together after all.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from THE IMMORTAL’S HUNGER by Kelli Ireland
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The Immortal’s Hunger
by Kelli Ireland
Chapter 1
Gareth Brennan considered the frost-rimed grass, yellowed and made brittle by a persistent cold no summer month in Ireland had ever seen. Toeing the edge of the macabre pattern of cracked earth with his booted foot, a hard shiver raced up his spine. The Old Ones, ancestors lost long before the modern day, held that a man knew when someone passed over his grave. They’d known with certainty what time such events occurred and disbelief at the myth had turned into an old wives’ tale, suggesting that the connection between life and death was so thin that the soul rebelled at death’s most subtle threat.
Gareth had died here a little more than six months ago. And he’d been resurrected. His connection to this very place had been cemented that day. Whether anyone believed in the old legends, or his reactions, was irrelevant. Gareth knew every time man, animal or...other...crossed this ground.
Clumps of dark, cracked soil broke away as he continued to think. The ground seemed to sigh, exhaustion bleeding out of the unnatural fissures. It shamed him that fear, not fury, was his immediate response to that sound, the sound that called up memories of his death. The goddess, Cailleach, bound millennia before to the Shadow Realm, had sought to break her chains and return to this plane. She’d sought to displace the gods and remake the world to her satisfaction, placing her and her siblings as rulers over mankind.
Gareth hadn’t been of an accord. And he also hadn’t been willing to fight her, not when she’d possessed a woman who bore no responsibility in the merging of souls beyond having been born to the wrong bloodline at the worst possible time. He couldn’t condemn her for something so beyond her control. Well, that and the fact the Druid’s Assassin, Gareth’s boss and brother by choice, loved the woman. That had certainly influenced him, as well. As Regent to the Assassin and his Arcanum, second in command in all things, he’d made an executive decision. Dylan’s happiness trumped the man’s loneliness. So Gareth didn’t fight back, instead allowing the woman to run him through with a sword. A large sword. Bloody bad idea that had been.
He kicked at the earth again, and it did, indeed, sigh.
His fear intensified at the sound, one so familiar to the breathy voice that haunted him both waking and asleep.
Death.
Phantoms.
The goddess.
War.
Gareth shuddered and took a step back as he considered the scarred soil.
How much stronger was the connection between life and death if a man experienced death and rebirth in the same spot? How tightly bound would he be to the place if the Goddess of Phantoms and War herself told him she’d see him here again come Beltane?
There wasn’t an easy answer. He only knew that each time someone crossed this patch, his entire body shuddered with repulsion. His breath stalled. The goddess breathed into his ear, her voice as chilling as mortals believed it should have been hot.
“Beltane.”
Always the same singular word, and always uttered with the same undisguised intent.
She’s coming for me.
He fought the urge to run, to get in his car and drive, to get away from Ireland by plane or by sea and never, ever look back. But to what end? History had proven over and over that there was nowhere one could run to that death couldn’t find him. The goddess was cagey like that.
Bitch.
He backed away several feet, eyes on the ground as if she’d emerge at his unfavorable thought. When nothing happened, he turned and stalked toward the giant keep.
Mortals, and particularly tourists, who came to the cliffs saw only a decrepit building of tumbling stone and vine. If they came too close, a sense of bowel-loosening foreboding repelled them. And if they persisted? A little magickal push from one of the Assassin’s watchmen sent them on their way.
He saw the place, known as the Nest, for what it was. A rather foreboding castle, it had a tower on all four corners. The courtyard had been enclosed to make a huge foyer over two hundred years prior. The garage was a bit archaic seeing as it had, for centuries, housed horses versus horsepower. And Wi-Fi had gone in—thank the gods—four years ago. The place was still a drafty monstrosity, and it always would be. But it was home.
He jogged through the front doors, fighting the compulsion to keep his jacket on. He was cold, was always cold, now.
“Yer late,” a thunderous voice called out, and he knew for whom that particular boom tolled.
“And you’ve no cause to announce to the world I’ve come to drop my trousers for you,” Gareth countered.
The burly man grinned as he stepped full out of the doorway to the infirmary. “Ye’ll drop yer drawers because I’m the only one who can give ye what ye need.”
“Yep, your reputation’s toast,” an identifiable male voice called from an invisible point and was followed by general male laughter.
“Shut up,” Garret called, shaking his head. “Bunch of tools.”
He strode into the Druidic version of a physician’s office. The eye of newt was missing, but beyond that, it was relatively similar to that which a nonmagickal person would expect. Natural remedies, crushed herbs and preserved root stock shared space with modern medical equipment and, in some cases, drugs. In the midst of it all stood Angus O’Malley, the Druid’s version of a physician and owner of the voice that had started the trainee assassins chattering in the hallways.
“Did you have to call out like that, Angus? You know they’ll fear coming in here now.” Gareth nudged the door shut with his hip and, with reluctance, shed his jacket. The cold that had chilled him became abrasive and he couldn’t repress a hard shudder.
Angus looked him over with a critical eye. “No better, then.” A statement, not a question.
“No worse,” Gareth countered.
“Yer optimism’s noted.” He jerked his chin to an exam table. “Drop your denims and assume the position.”
Scowling, Gareth undid his jeans and braced his palms on the table edge. “You know, I hate this. Just get it over wi—ow! Fecking hell,” he said, teeth gritted, hands clenching. The burn of the injection and the subsequent medication was almost as painful as Angus’s warm hand laid against the bare skin of his hip. He thought it possible he melted under the incredible heat of the healer’s touch, was less than a breath away from calling stop and begging to have the needle removed, when th
e large man pulled it free of his flesh.
Gareth yanked his jeans up with enough force he doubled over with a grunt. He shot a sharp look at Angus. “What was in that bloody injection? Hydrochloric acid? Perhaps a little potassium sulfate to enhance the burn?” He rubbed his hand over the offended butt cheek. “Gods be damned, but in the course of this...this...nonsense, that was the most painful ‘treatment’ yet!”
“‘Nonsense,’ is it?” Angus asked as he skewered Gareth with a sharp look. “As Regent, the Assassin’s second in both rank and command of the Assassin’s Arcanum, and considerin’ yer one o’ the brighter men I’ve yet tae meet, I believe I’m safe in saying the problem’s no’ the mix. The problem centers around yer fear, Gareth, and well ye know it.”
Heat, unusual and yet welcome for its rarity if not the cause, burned across Gareth’s cheeks. “Tell a soul I’m scared o’ needles and it’ll mean fists between us, auld man.”
Sighing, Gareth tucked the tails of his henley under his waistband with fierce jabs, retied his combat boots and—more gingerly—situated his pants legs before facing the man who’d treated his every injury since childhood. He propped one hip on the exam table and crossed his arms over his chest, mirroring Angus’s posture. “Is there anything you’ve found in treating me, anything so wrong that himself’s a need to know this very minute?”
Besides the fact the phantom goddess marked my soul as hers, sealed the claiming with forced sexual contact and has promised to fetch me home by Beltane? Sure, and there’s that.
Thank the gods he’d shared that with no one. “Well?” he pressed Angus.
The healer rolled his shoulders forward, lips thinning. “Nay.” He shoved meaty hands into hair that resembled the topknot of a Highland steer. “That doesna mean yer symptoms aren’t worsening, though. Only that I doona know best how tae treat ye.”
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