Brimstone Bride

by Barbara J. Hancock

  And, yet, she didn’t keep the daemon blade close only because it was a dangerous object that might harm anyone who stumbled upon it. She kept it close because she’d been alone for far too long. The warmth of Brimstone came from a stepfather she’d never been allowed to know, but his strangeness didn’t negate his offer of paternal affection.

  He was a creature from the hell dimension. But he had loved her mother and he now offered that love to her and her sister. They’d never had family. They’d never been allowed to grow roots. Their lives had been about running. The daemon king offered his home and his Brimstone heart. It was a dark gift. One she was pretty sure they should never accept. But it was a gift all the same.

  She kept the backpack close because she treasured and feared the offer at the same time.

  The narrow hallway was lit by dim lights in the ceiling and skylights that showed the starry night sky far above the train. The openings were spaced far enough apart to cause swaying shadows with the movement of the train as they passed cities and towns. The doorways to all the cabins were closed, but Victoria was conscious of them as she passed, one after another. Behind any of them might lurk a monk or a Rogue daemon waiting to strike. She had never been safe from her stalkers, but this wasn’t about using her affinity to hunt daemons. They hunted her now to keep her from removing her son from their clutches.

  She walked down the center of the aisle directly beneath the ceiling lights, glancing from the blur of stars above to the doors on either side. Any movement above her head had to be caused by exterior lights. Even a Rogue daemon wouldn’t be comfortable on the top of a speeding train. There would be no pale angry face glaring down at her. Yet she checked and checked and kept the daemon king’s blade pressed close against her.

  The bathroom was empty when she reached its door. She engaged the lock that would show a red occupied disk to anyone walking down the hallway. It took her only moments to use the facilities and wash her hands, but when she turned the latch and opened the door, the hallway was completely dark. All the lights had been extinguished.

  She wasn’t alone. Lit only by starlight and lights from the town they passed, Victoria reached inside her backpack and provided a warmer, redder glow to the ambiance. She’d drawn the daemon blade just in time as a hulking dark form rushed toward her from only a few feet away.

  Victoria wasn’t a warrior. But she had a warrior’s heart and a warrior had given her his blood. Her affinity hadn’t warned her about her attacker’s presence, but it sang a cry to battle when the large man threw her against the wall.

  “You defy Malachi. You work against him with one of his greatest enemies, but I’ve watched and waited until Turov slipped up. You’re alone now. You’re mine,” the hooded man hissed against her ear. Relief flooded her when she realized she wouldn’t have to fight a Rogue daemon. The Order of Samuel was her lifelong enemy. And one monk alone would never take her. In the garden at Nightingale Vineyards, Adam had beheaded her stalker to save her. But she didn’t require his sword this time. She had her own blade.

  The monk had begun to violently fumble with the fastenings to the pants she’d pulled on when she’d come in search of the bathroom. He obviously intended to rape her against the swaying wall of the train’s dark corridor. The Order had always seen the D’Arcy women as vessels for their seed. No. More. She was finished being anything to them, but most of all manipulated and abused. The daemon king’s blade pressed easily into the monk’s black heart. He croaked in surprise and reared back, bathed in the glow of the nearest skylight full of distant stars. She must have pierced a lung as well because blood trickled from his lips as he moved them to try to speak.

  “Your mistake... I’m not alone anymore,” Victoria said.

  She wasn’t talking about Ezekiel or Adam. She wasn’t alone because she had a child to protect and care for. He wasn’t physically with her, but he was always on her mind and in her heart. She would never be alone again.

  * * *

  Adam helped her dispose of the body once she woke him and explained what had happened. The monk had fallen faceup with his back slumped against the wall. The faded scarlet carpet with its black paisley design hid any sign of blood. She wasn’t strong enough to lift and carry the monk to the connecting doors at either end of the car, but Adam easily wrapped the monk in his own robes and carried him while Victoria handled his feet. Adam kicked open the maintenance access door between cars. Air and noise buffeted against them, but they managed to drop the monk from the speeding train. Darkness ate his body. A fitting funeral for a rapist.

  “You should have woken me. I would have watched the hallway while you—” Adam began.

  “You could have killed him deader than I did?” Victoria interrupted. “Severed heads roll. They get blood everywhere. A small daemon blade is very discreet.”

  “I’m sorry I slept while you killed a man,” Adam said.

  Victoria took a deep breath. He understood the weight taking a life left behind.

  “You’re beautiful when you’re sleeping. I watched you for the longest time. I wonder that the monk didn’t expire from impatience waiting for me to leave our cabin,” Victoria said.

  “I’m going to finish the night in the hallway outside our door. Go back to the bunk and get some sleep,” Adam said.

  He was all business. Gone was the lover who had unzipped her pants so slowly she’d thought she’d die. The monk had done something to put the lights out in the corridor and she was glad. She didn’t want to see Adam’s eyes gone distant and cold. The fire from his Brimstone had been banked against it. His flames burned low, merely a flicker at the edges of her perception.

  She moved to him anyway. She lifted herself on her tiptoes and pressed her lips to his. He jerked in response, uncrossing his arms as if he would hold her, but only for a second before he crossed them back tighter than before. He held himself back. His body was stiff beneath the hands she pressed to his broad chest to leverage her move.

  But his Brimstone sizzled.

  “I’m only a few steps away,” she said.

  “Close the door behind you,” he said.

  “You told me you’d never close a door against me,” she reminded the muscular Russian who frowned at her in the darkness. Starlight and ambient light from the city outside bathed his face in alternate patches of glow and shadow, glow and shadow. She didn’t close the door. She walked into the cabin and left it hanging wide.

  Adam was the one who reached to slowly and firmly push the door closed behind her.

  * * *

  A rosy glow woke Victoria. She was alone in the car. The sun was only beginning to rise, and a very green scene greeted her outside the window when she rose and washed. The water was lukewarm, but it trickled in a steadier stream than the night before. No doubt fewer passengers were using water at the crack of dawn. She saw evidence of Adam’s ablutions. A damp towel and water droplets on the side of the small sink. Whatever toiletries he’d used were already packed back in his bags that sat at the ready by the small outer door.

  The mountains were majestic in the distance. As she brushed her hair before twisting it up and clipping it practically out of her face, the train brought them closer and closer to Budapest, Hungary.

  Their destination was Poprad-Tatry, a city in Northern Slovakia at the base of the High Tatras Mountains. Adam had avoided the airport there, opting for a roundabout approach in order to arrive undetected. The extra time necessary for caution caused Victoria’s gut to ache, but she also knew Adam was right. Their train had debarked from Romania nearly seventeen hours ago. Every minute of the long trip wasted precious time, but hopefully bought them the element of surprise.

  Landing in the Poprad-Tatry Airport in the Turov private jet would have been an invitation to every monk and Rogue daemon in the region. The trains were probably routinely patrolled, but there were far more train
s and passengers to oversee. They had been unlucky to run into one hunting monk. To meet an expectant army would be much harder to handle.

  Adam planned to take a car to Poprad from the Budapest train station. Those three hours would be the worst. Confined in a small space with the damned man who had taken her to paradise multiple times in the night while she ached for all that might happen and all that could never be.

  Years of stepping onto the stage in front of demanding audiences helped her to exit the sleeping car like a casual traveler and go in search of food and coffee. And Adam. Part of her worried that he might have somehow exited the train while she lay sleeping. That he’d decided to forfeit his soul to keep her safe in spite of Ezekiel’s warning.

  When she saw him seated at a small booth with a steaming cup and a plate of scrambled eggs and sausage in front of him, she breathed a sigh of relief. Though her stomach ached, her chest was no longer constricted. Adam’s lovemaking had released her song. It fluttered in her throat as she approached him. He glanced up and then back down at the newspaper he held in his hands.

  “Good morning,” he said as she took the seat opposite him in the booth. “The coffee is good. The eggs aren’t.”

  “You didn’t jump off the train,” Victoria said.

  A waiter in an old-fashioned white uniform brought her a cup and poured from the stainless steel pot already at the table. It sat on a raised edge coaster that was fastened to the table so that the rocking of the train didn’t budge the hot beverage server.

  “Thank you,” she said to the waiter. But she looked at Adam when she said it. He lowered the newspaper to meet her gaze.

  “I have no intention of abandoning you in Eastern Europe, Victoria,” he said.

  This morning he was dressed in clothes that might pass for relaxed traveling attire, if a person didn’t notice the extra pockets and rugged material of the pants that made his khakis more like fatigues and the rough wool of his sweater that made it more survival gear than fashionable.

  “But you do want to protect me,” she noted. She was going to ask the waiter for a menu, but another server was already approaching with a plate of toast points and jam in a single-serving glass jar.

  The plate was presented for her approval and she nodded to indicate it could be placed in front of her on the table.

  “I asked them to bring you something besides eggs,” Adam explained.

  She wanted to sing to him but, instead, she spread some sort of black jam on her toast. A battle was coming. One with the Order of Samuel and one with a hundred-year-old man who thought he knew best how to protect her even if it meant sacrificing his soul. If he hadn’t looked so normal and civilized, she might have climbed onto his lap and kissed him until he admitted he had every intention of keeping her out of the fight.

  But she needed to mimic his calm because they were trying to travel discreetly beneath the Order’s radar. Bad enough that they’d allowed the affinity and Brimstone to bubble up and boil over...repeatedly...the night before. For now, she had to bide her time and wait to counteract whatever measures he took to protect her and go for her son alone.

  His concern for Michael caused her stomach to ache in unexpected ways. Michael’s father had been killed before he’d ever known his son. Before she’d ever experienced what it was like to have a partner in caring for her child. Adam’s determination to help Michael interfered with her equilibrium. She needed to be on guard. Instead, she just wanted to kiss him.

  He reached for his cup and drank the dark, thick liquid as if it was ambrosia. For several seconds, she watched him close his eyes, lick his lips and swallow. She blinked and looked away when he opened his eyes and caught her staring. She picked up her own cup and sipped, but the brew wasn’t as delicious as Adam seemed to think it was. She coughed against the strong flavor of the beans that had been ground to make it.

  “This is the taste of home. My mother’s coffee was just like this. We would use half a cup of sugar to make it palatable, my father and me,” Adam said.

  Victoria accepted the heavy porcelain container full of sugar packets that Adam slid toward her once he set his cup down. She added one after another as he watched until she was certain that he wanted to knock her out with a blood sugar crash in order to go to the mountains alone.

  “You haven’t mentioned the firebird keys,” she said. “I’m sorry I stole them. I never would have disturbed your mother’s things if it wasn’t for Michael. I thought she’d understand. Especially after...well, there was an unusual incident in the garden. Night before last when I found the tunnel to the wine cave in the root cellar. The tunnel isn’t the only thing I found,” Victoria continued.

  Adam had placed his newspaper to the side as he drank his coffee. He cupped the white porcelain mug in his palms now. His vivid blue gaze was as bright as the cloudless sky that showed in the rectangular windows around them. More people were joining them now and her nerves bombarded her with unnecessary warnings just as they had the night before. Her gaze constantly flickered to the people entering the dining car. Were any of them dangerous? She detected no Brimstone, but in all honesty she had to admit that Adam filled her affinity and her senses. She wasn’t sure anyone but the daemon king himself would have enough Brimstone power to show up on her radar with Adam so close and burning so bright after last night.

  Because his casual appearance was a lie.

  He was as torn and tangled beneath the surface as she was.

  His Brimstone burn caused his cup to steam even though he hadn’t freshened it from the pot. Her coffee had already cooled. The steam from his cup worried her, but she needed to talk to him about what she had seen. She needed to return the firebird brooch she’d found. It had been his mother’s. She was sure of it.

  Victoria shifted and reached into a small pocket of her backpack. When she pulled the firebird brooch free, Adam sat straighter. His jaw hardened. His eyes glittered in the morning sunlight streaming through the window’s glass. She had brought the brooch with her because it seemed disrespectful to leave it behind.

  “I found this after seeing...a figure...near the entrance to the cellar that night. Almost as if someone was leaving me breadcrumbs in the way I should go,” Victoria said.

  Adam reached to take the brooch she offered in the outstretched palm of her hand. The ruby-and-emerald jewels of its body and tail sparkled. Its sapphire eye twinkled.

  “You’ve seen the photograph of my mother in the hallway outside her sitting room? She wore this always. My father gave it to her shortly after we came to America. She’s wearing it in that photograph,” Adam said. “What you don’t know is that she was buried wearing it.”

  Victoria’s stomach dropped. Tears gathered in her eyes. She knew better than to think anyone would disturb Elena Turov’s grave. Except, perhaps, the ghost of Elena herself.

  “She has showed herself to me a few times. Only when there is great danger or pain. Most often she’ll leave clipped roses in unexpected places. I think she’s also the one who always makes sure every single birdcage is kept open. I used to close this one or that one. Just to test her presence. But that was long ago. I’ve accepted it now. She’s tied to Nightingale Vineyards because of my damnation. I don’t think she’ll be free until I have regained my soul,” Adam said.

  Victoria watched the man across from her place his mother’s colorful brooch on the table beside his coffee. His internal control had strengthened. She could feel his Brimstone burn cool. His cup no longer steamed.

  “She helped me find the monks. She led me to you that night,” Victoria said.

  Adam looked from the brooch to the passing scenery outside. They were nearing Budapest. Bucolic scenes of pastures and hillsides had been replaced by urban sprawl.

  “She would want me to save your son. I have no doubt. No matter if it meant she would be kept from peace in heaven. She under
stands the loss of a child. She knows the evil I’ve seen. She tended to my back when the wounds were fresh,” Adam said.

  “She lingers to watch over you. To save you. She understands my maternal feelings, but she doesn’t want you to burn forever. She gives up her peace to watch and wait for you to reclaim your soul. Not for you to accept eternal damnation,” Victoria said.

  Adam rose. He left the brooch on the table.

  “We’ll be arriving at the station soon. Be ready to disembark quickly. I’ve already messaged ahead. There’ll be a car waiting for us,” he said.

  Victoria rose as well. Her stomach hurt and toast points weren’t going to change that. Adam was leaving the brooch because he intended to damn himself to save them. It was a final goodbye to the mother he’d never join in heaven.

  “I’ll stay close to you. I wouldn’t want to get separated in the chaos of a busy train station,” she said.

  Adam turned to walk away, but Victoria took the brooch from the table and placed it in her pocket before she followed him out of the dining car.

  * * *

  His preparations fell into place as they always did. He had a hundred years of practice with international travel and it was common for him to travel circumspect routes to avoid being followed. Though he wasn’t at his best. He was distracted. His companion’s song was seductive even when she didn’t utter a note out loud. It was almost like his blood could hear her sing on a subliminal level and the Brimstone responded by boiling him alive.

  He led Victoria to an alley several blocks from the train station where one of his people had left a car that couldn’t be traced. It was an older model white compact with no distinguishing features. His effort was divided between practiced movements and tamping down on the urge to carry the woman who followed him away from monks and daemons until they were alone as they’d been last night.

  Once Victoria had settled into the passenger seat and he had smoothly inserted the car into the honking chaos of Budapest rush hour traffic, he saw dozens of similar cars winding their way between beaten-up taxis and bikes. He managed to avoid the traffic jams that were common this time of day as parents drove children to school and commuters avoided the notoriously overcrowded public transportation system.