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 you 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.
Some of the Rogues had run away, but most lay on the floor as rubble fell all around them. He had sold his soul to reclaim power for the Order of Samuel. It was the Order of Peter in his mind now, although no one had gathered to officially change the name. He was the one who would rebuild and rekindle their purpose to defeat all the daemons and claim dominion over the earth. He only needed Samuel’s daughter, and with her he would control Rogues and Loyalists alike.
The shadow had devoured all the heat in the cave. Peter shivered and dropped to his knees as a great wing stretched toward him. He reached for the doll and cried out in pain as his hand closed around it. His vision blurred, but he thought he saw his fingers turn black as if the blood that flowed in his veins was instantly frozen to ice and no longer able to feed his extremities.
When he fell, he fell far and long with the tiny kachina doll clutched against his chest.
* * *
The last murmurs of protesting earth faded away and Lily lowered her flute from her lips. She blinked and focused on Grim, lying by the enormous palace fireplace that made him a hulking black dog-shaped silhouette. Suddenly, her head grew light and her legs softened, but then there was a hand on her back. She didn’t even try to step away from Michael’s help. Unfortunately, accepting his chivalrous hand on her back too easily became stepping into his heated embrace.
They were safe. For a time. And until Ezekiel responded to their arrival, they were also alone.
Lily placed her flute in her hip pocket, and then twined her arms around Michael’s neck while he seemed to wait and watch to see what she would do. Once he determined that she wasn’t going to pull away, he strengthened his hold, pressing against her back with the palms of his hands to bring her fully against his chest. There was no reason they couldn’t allow their affinity to rise and Michael’s Brimstone to burn except for a million rational arguments she could think of if she allowed herself to debate the logic.
She looked up and met Michael’s gaze instead. The leaping flames of the giant fireplace were no competition for the Brimstone glow in his eyes. All too soon he closed them, but it seemed to take forever for him to bridge the gap between her mouth and his. This time was slow. A steady claiming of this safe spot they’d found to fully explore her tender lips with his tongue. She gasped at the coil of heat that rose from her own depths to join with his Brimstone burn. But when he deepened his tasting past gasps and sighs to tease his tongue into her mouth, she wondered at his control over the fire in his veins.
He was hotter than hot, but he didn’t burn her.
Together, their affinity amplified, but it was his concentration that buffered his burn.
While their mouths tasted and slid and sucked, Michael’s hands roamed down her back to cup her bottom and lift her against him where a rampant erection distended his low-slung jeans. Lily moaned into his mouth and wrapped her legs around his waist to settle her ache against him.
His head fell back and he looked up at her from under hooded lids.
“I’m beginning to find that the palace is a much more pleasant place than I remembered,” he said.
Tension claimed Lily’s body and ice replaced heat in her veins. She pushed against his shoulders and he released her so she could drop to the ground. She backed away a few hurried steps to stand shivering by a fire that couldn’t warm her. Ezekiel had known exactly what he was doing to use her and her affinity to lure Michael into wanting the throne.
“I’m dead on my feet. I need to rest and refuel,” Lily said. “And you’re the one who needs to deliver the wings to your grandfather.” She tried not to notice how the dancing light from the fireplace illuminated the perfect angles of his cheeks and jaw and his lips swollen from her kiss. He nodded, but his intense stare saw through her excuse. Her body and her affinity cried out to step back into his arms. He had to hear them. And she’d even hinted that her heart would like to be there cradled against him.
She should tell him about Ezekiel’s schemes. She should confess that she was torn between resisting them or succumbing for all that they would bring to her.
Instead, Lily turned and walked away.
She hadn’t gone far from the light of the fire and the glow in Michael’s eyes when her foot tapped against something in the dark corridor that led to her rooms. She stopped and bent down to retrieve the object that had rolled from her foot to the base of the carvings on the wall. Her hand recognized the warrior angel kachina before her fingers closed around it. She gasped in surprise and lifted the doll to the soft glow of light fading behind her.
The tightness in her chest eased as she saw the tiny doll hadn’t been damaged. None of the other dolls had come through the sipapu portal, but somehow she wasn’t surprised that this kachina had managed to follow her here. The light from the fire in the great hall didn’t illuminate the hallway very well. As she straightened with the doll in her hand, her eyes skimmed the riot of carved stone all around her. The walls and ceiling were covered in the faces and limbs and figures of condemned Rogues—some would say damned—and her pause to pick up the kachina had nearly given her time to bring individuals into focus. Fortunately, the odd shadows created by the shifting flames of the distant fire kept the faces indistinct.
Lily shivered as one particular shadow passed near her on the wall. It was only the cold kachina in her hand that caused her chill, not the shadow. But she backed away from the wall, blinking, as the shadow seemed to grow larger and larger. It was only her imagination that gave the shadow a set of enormous wings beginning to unfurl. She blinked again and it became more of an indistinct blob once more.
Clutching the precious kachina that had somehow found its way back to her, Lily hurried on her way. Her rooms would be warm and welcoming and shadow-free. She never felt comfortable near the carvings for long. The smooth walls of her bedroom called. She needed to recover before tonight. If she knew Ezekiel, there would be a dinner fit for a king to welcome Michael “home.” There might even be D’Arcys already at the palace in preparation for the Brimstone prince’s birthday celebration.
She would meet the “daughters” Ezekiel loved for the first time, and one of them happened to also be the mother of the man she couldn’t allow herself to love. She had to bolster her nerve and brace herself. The tiny warrior angel doll wasn’t much to carry with her into a challenging evening, but it was better than nothing at all.