Brimstone Prince

by Barbara J. Hancock

  She didn’t want to remind him of wings and daemon expectations. She didn’t want to remind him that she might ultimately be a part of his capitulation to the daemon king’s plans.

  This was a simple ceremony she’d performed many times. She was asking her ancestors and her elemental spirits to help her find an open sipapu. One she promised to sanctify and seal when she was finished. To protect the old places. And to limit Rogues’ abilities to travel to and from Ezekiel’s kingdom.

  Often the sipapu she found were amid nothing more than rubble and rocks in a long-ago-looted site. But a couple of times over the summer she’d managed to rediscover pueblos that had been forgotten. She’d been happy to point Native archaeologists to historic places for study and preservation.

  The spirits were less likely to be mischievous if they knew her motives were pure.

  Then again, she was participating in a scheme to place Michael on the throne of hell. Ezekiel had reasons—good reasons—for wanting his grandson to be the next daemon king, but she wasn’t sure if pure could be applied to daemon manipulations. At best they could be ambiguous by human standards because mortals weren’t required to survive and thrive for centuries.

  Only when she had readied Wind, Water and Earth kachinas did Lily reach for her flute. Michael seemed to know when to brace himself, as if he sensed her breathing in behind him. She watched his back stiffen as she brought the flute up to her lips. Just before she released air to blow, he reached to hold on to the rock beside him. It wasn’t a lean. It was a grasp. He held the edge of the rock with tense fingers and white knuckles. His whole body tightened.

  And then her music began to fill the space around them.

  She couldn’t hold back during a summoning ceremony. She couldn’t control her affinity. She allowed the full swell of her power to rise within her and then rode the release of it as an almost visible aura of warmth exuded from her every pore. Her affinity joined the music—warmth and vibration, feeling and sound. Lily tried to focus on the kachinas, but Michael was too close and the stiffness of his posture was too much of a challenge.

  It was too natural for him to be the one she called.

  The aura that wouldn’t have been visible to the naked eye was visible to her heart. Like the heat she’d seen shimmering over the desert, the affinity vibrated the atmosphere between her and Michael. She watched it reach him and envelop him. She watched his tension increase a hundredfold.

  Then he turned, and with his movement a rush of heat rode the invisible waves of affinity back to her. Lily tensed in response. Her eyes closed as Michael’s Brimstone warmed her from her pursed lips to her stomach to then curl enticingly lower. She continued to play, a pied piper who was damned to call, call, call a man who didn’t want to follow her off a cliff.

  But when she opened her eyes it wasn’t only tension she saw in Michael’s broad shoulders and braced legs. His intense gaze was riveted on her playing—the breath that came softly from her lips, the pads of her fingers dancing on silver, the rise and fall of her breasts as she inhaled and exhaled—and in his eyes was anticipation.

  The kachinas were forgotten. The spirits would have to wait. Her ancestors would have to continue to sleep. Because this song was for Michael, for all the affinity and Brimstone fire between them while they could still indulge it.

  She played and he stepped toward her. Slowly but not reluctantly. He wanted to jump off the cliff she created for him with every breath, every sigh, and every slide of her hand. She didn’t pause, although her breath grew lighter and shakier the closer he came. Not until he was standing directly in front of her did she allow one note to trail down to a long soft whisper of sound. Only then did he drop to his knees. With that sudden movement, her last note ended as his hands came up to rest against hers on the flute.

  “One last kiss before we go to hell,” Michael said. “I’ll risk everything for one last kiss.”

  Lily didn’t protest. She had no air left in her lungs to fuel any sound. Michael held only her hands as she held her flute, but she didn’t pull away. She waited as he leaned down to bring his lips near hers. Close. So close. Dangerously close. But not close enough. The heat parched her lips, but he didn’t soothe them. Not yet.

  “One kiss, Lily. Worth dying for?” Michael asked. “We’ve got to be a beacon right now. Just from our hands touching.”

  He was right. The affinity throbbed between them with every beat of her heart. The unseen aura nevertheless burned her eyes with a warm glow that caused them to fill with tears.

  “I could face Oblivion with the taste of you on my lips,” Lily whispered.

  Flames leaped to consume the hazel in Michael’s irises as he moved the hairsbreadth necessary to bring their mouths together. She opened for him, eagerly meeting the hungry thrust of his tongue. It wasn’t tender or gentle. They had no time for slow seduction. He devoured and she hungrily explored all of the silken and rough textures of his mouth while their tongues tasted and twined and danced together.

  Exhilaration claimed her with pounding heart and shaking limbs. Michael held her hands in a grip that was relentless, but that was all. He didn’t embrace her. So she trembled for want of more—his arms around her, his body pressing her to the ground, the thrust of him inside her. But his lips became all of that to her because this kiss was all they had.

  It was too long. Too indulgent. He discovered all the sensitive hidden crevices of her mouth that seemed to be wired directly to her most intimate nerve endings elsewhere when he teased them with his tongue. Her nipples hardened. And she tensed against the ache between her thighs. The vibrations when he groaned at the response of her questing tongue only increased her pleasure. Perspiration rose from their skin as steam. They were surrounded in a humid embrace in the middle of an arid day.

  Lily imagined pulling her hands free from his controlling grip to fumble for the waistband of his jeans. She imagined taking this further than they could. Truly risking the chance of being captured and killed just so she could join with him one last time.

  She whimpered into his mouth. She actually tugged against his hold. But a chill suddenly crept up her spine. Michael didn’t release her hands, but he must have felt the sudden cold, too. He broke the kiss. He leaned his forehead against hers.

  “I would risk death, but I don’t want you at risk,” Michael said. “I’m going to put some distance between us while you complete your ritual.”

  He stood and she rose along with him. Mostly because he still held her hands. Her knees were shaky. It was only with his help that she managed to get to her feet. He backed away, but didn’t release her hands until he was at arm’s length.

  “Grim,” Michael said. The hellhound was beside him instantly. “We’re going to go for a walk while Lily does her thing. Not too far. Don’t attempt too much.”

  Michael didn’t say goodbye. He broke eye contact and followed the beast, who disappeared more slowly than usual as he walked away. Lily watched Michael dissolve from her plane of existence little by little from his ankles up, up, up the long length of his legs and spine. His broad shoulders and the shine of his hair went last.

  He didn’t look back.

  Her body still trembled from his taste and touch even after he was long gone. She had no time to savor or regret. The Rogues would have felt the amplification of her affinity. They would be on their way.

  Lily reset the kachinas that had fallen over. She quickly placed her focus entirely where it belonged. Or as much as she could muster when her body was still tender with needs that might never be met. This time the elemental spirits responded with messages from her ancestors in the form of visions in her mind rather than a map drawn on the ground. They left her with a magnetized feel for the direction she and Michael needed to travel.

  There was an open sipapu nearby.

  She gathered the kachinas and wrapped them
and placed them back in her bag. Somehow the warrior angel had come loose. A flash of black caught her eye. When she reached to wrap it back up, the sting of cold burned her fingers and she drew them back with a gasp to suck them back to life. How could the doll likeness be so cold when Michael was filled with Brimstone’s fire? She thought about how a chill had come between them and how it had caused Michael to back away from their kiss.

  If the chill had come from the kachina, it had probably saved their lives. The warrior angel seemed to become colder and colder every time she touched it, after years of dormancy. She wasn’t sure what its chill meant, but it seemed more and more foreboding. She was used to being hunted by now, but the doll seemed to warn of unseen dangers.

  By the time she was ready to get into the car, Michael and Grim had materialized nearby. This time Grim didn’t climb into the back seat when she opened the door. Michael gripped his ruff and tugged before the beast loped away.

  “He’s going to keep an eye out for Rogues,” Michael said.

  “I’m sure they’re coming,” Lily warned.

  “It was worth it,” Michael said as they both climbed into the car.

  “That’s what scares me,” Lily said. Too softly for him to hear over the roar of the engine. If he was willing to risk death for her kiss, he might accept the throne. For her. She couldn’t allow herself to be the reason for that sacrifice. No matter how it might help her to win Ezekiel’s heart. His fondness was reserved for D’Arcys. If she married Michael, she would be the closest thing to a D’Arcy that she could ever be, but did she truly want his love and approval that way?

  If only he could love her on her own—as Lily Santiago—and if only he would allow Michael to make his choice without daemon deals and manipulations. Then maybe Michael could be free to love her, too.

  * * *

  The Rogues had found where Abaddon’s body impacted the canyon floor. It had been partially burned but mostly intact when he’d jumped from the skywalk. Much trouble had been taken to gather his remains together and bring them back for a ceremony that involved singing unlike any Peter had ever heard. He participated by bowing his head and biding his time. Abaddon’s charred heart had been stabbed through with a daemon blade at the end of the ceremony. To “release” him to a state they called Oblivion. Peter imagined it much more likely he would wind up in hell. He kept the observation to himself.

  “Friends,” he began when the ceremony was over. “I have an idea of how best we can seek retribution for Abaddon’s death.”

  He was rewarded for his service and patience by the gleam of a dozen pairs of daemonic eyes turning his way. Before he had completed his pitch for the continued hunt of Samuel’s daughter, they all felt it—the call of Lily Santiago’s affinity.

  Chapter 18

  The sipapu was perfectly preserved, because the kiva where it was located had been created out of a natural cave rather than a hand-dug cellar. Whether there had been no pueblo above it or those structures had crumbled to dust long ago, Lily couldn’t be certain. She thanked her ancestors and the elemental spirits when she climbed down into the shadowy hole in the earth to find what they’d been looking for. Michael climbed down after her, mimicking the use of naturally occurring rocks and ledges as stairs because the lashed wooden ladder was long gone, stolen or disintegrated by time.

  Grim had already materialized below them. He was getting stronger and faster. More like his healthy self. Lily laid her hand on the top of his head when she passed him on the way to the dark circle of the sipapu portal in the ground. He allowed the pat. He didn’t shy or fade away. They’d come a long way from his initial distrust.

  But he did whine as if to tell her and Michael something.

  “I know,” Lily said. “I can feel them.”

  The Rogues were coming.

  “Grim can help to take us through here where the opening makes his job easier,” Michael said. He didn’t wear Lucifer’s wings. He carried them on his back, but they were wrapped tightly in a scorched white sheet and held like a backpack by ropes across his chest. He had used them to save Grim, but he wasn’t ready to accept them as his own.

  “I’ll need to set up my kachinas here, in this world, and call them to close the portal once we’re safely on the other side,” Lily said.

  “But if the Rogues get here before you finish...” Michael began.

  “They might destroy the dolls before I can close the portal,” Lily said.

  She was already crouched down to unwrap and place the dolls around the circle. She wouldn’t have to use the element of Earth to widen the sipapu. Grim would help them pass. The doorway was open. He would only need to expend the slightest effort to dematerialize their physical bodies so that they could slip through.

  Lily instinctively unwrapped the warrior angel and placed him to watch over the other kachina dolls.

  Michael stood over her and the dolls on the floor. Tall, warm, real. The kachina that seemed to have been carved in his likeness was cool to her touch and it chilled her fingers to the bone. Michael’s expression did the same.

  “Don’t protest. I know what needs to be done,” she said. “He’s been as much of a guardian to me as the daemon king has been. More so at times. He’ll help in this. I know it.”

  “How can ‘he’ help when I’m going through the portal to the hell dimension?” Michael asked. He knelt to look closer at the doll he’d told her to keep wrapped and hidden away. She tried to stop him, but he reached to touch the kachina before she could react. His body jerked and the color drained from his face. He pulled his hand back quickly to cradle his frigid hand against his chest. Lily reached to touch his pale cheek, and when she did a reassuring flush of color returned to his skin. For a second, he leaned into her palm, but then he straightened and slowly stood.

  “Why would a doll that looks like me be so cold?” Michael asked. His color had returned, but she could still hear the memory of ice in his voice.

  She stood to join him, but didn’t try to touch him again. Her fingers still tingled from the brief contact with his skin.

  “I’m not sure. It hasn’t always been cold. It was completely dormant most of my life. The temperature difference began to occur shortly after we met,” Lily said.

  “If it’s representative of me, it should burn when you touch it,” Michael said. It wasn’t meant suggestively. He only stated fact. Yet Lily’s cheeks warmed beneath his direct gaze.

  “It’s a kachina that was carved by one of my ancient ancestors. I don’t know why it looks like you. I only know I’ve loved it since I was a young child,” Lily offered.

  It wasn’t a declaration of affection for the daemon prince. Not quite. But it was more than she ever meant to share with him. This time he lifted his hand, but he didn’t continue the motion to touch her face. He paused with his hand in the air between them. She waited for a touch that never came.

  “You don’t know me,” Michael said softly. His melodic drawl seduced with no help from Brimstone at all. “You don’t know the horrible fire that’s within me or the depths of my struggle to deny it.”

  “Don’t I?” Lily replied. “I’ve had my own struggles sheltered in a dark palace by a man who would be a father to me if only his heart would soften enough to allow it. You and I both fight fires in our hearts. You try not to burn. I try not to love. It’s the same. You’re more successful, that’s all,” Lily said. She turned from his uplifted hand. The one that could have touched her, but didn’t. She knelt again to straighten the warrior angel, accepting its chill and wishing it would reach all the way to her heart.

  “If I fail to control my burn, people might die,” Michael said. To himself? To her? She couldn’t be sure.

  “It feels like death. To always walk alone,” Lily said. “Better to brave the burn. Besides I’ve never met anyone who could control the Brimstone as y
ou do. I don’t believe you’re capable of hurting anyone who doesn’t deserve it. You would burn yourself up first containing the fire.”

  She reached for her flute, and it slid from its pouch into her hand like an old friend eager to play. Michael backed quickly away from her as musical notes rose from the breath she blew into the silver mouthpiece.

  Lily ignored the rejection.

  When the earth began to tremble beneath their feet, Michael called to Grim. She continued to play as she rose to follow. They stepped over the sipapu and even though it should have been too small to accommodate their bodies, Lily’s stomach dropped as her body dematerialized and fell at the same time. Only moments passed before Lily found herself in the familiar great hall of Ezekiel’s palace. There was a roaring fire in a hearth as large as a Volkswagen to welcome them, but she had no time to feel its warm glow.

  Lily continued to play and from far away she heard the sounds of daemon shouts. The Rogues had found the sipapu. Would they destroy the kachinas before they could close the portal? Had she just sacrificed her beloved warrior angel for nothing?

  * * *

  Peter had been afraid they would have to face fire to follow Samuel Santiago’s daughter to the hell dimension. He hadn’t expected ice. Rogue screams ripped through the air around him as a monstrous shadow blocked their paths. Its wingspan was mighty and its reach was everywhere along the walls of the cave. Everyone it touched turned to a fleshly statue that fell stiffly to the ground with every ember of Brimstone fire sucked from their souls. The glow from daemon eyes only compounded the leaping shadows of the flashlights some of them carried so that they cried and shrank away from innocent shadows as well as the deadly one that hunted them.

  “Lucifer! Lucifer is on the walls!” one daemon shrieked before he fell stricken to the ground, lifeless and silent.

  “Lucifer is dead,” Peter protested. He made his way toward the dolls Lily Santiago used to call her elemental spirits. The black one caught his attention, but before he could grab for it rocks began to fall from the shaking ceiling of the cave above his head.