When she’d been a girl, she’d read a story about a labyrinth and a monster. In her child’s mind, she’d imagined the sort of maze a mouse might be put into to test how well it could find a block of cheese.
The reality of a labyrinthine network of tunnels was much worse.
Sybil had given her a small flashlight, but its beam lit just a few yards in front of her. All else was echoing darkness.
Kat could only follow the faint call of daemon blood and hope that she’d find her sister. She couldn’t imagine what else she’d find. If Michael was with her sister, was he friend or enemy? A lover could be either or both. She knew that now.
She missed her bracelet. It was crazy to long for its sound. To miss her pretty chains. She missed the chime of it when she moved. She missed the respite she and Victoria had managed to achieve whenever they’d escaped Reynard’s detection. Rome, Paris, London, Austin, Tokyo, Sydney, San Francisco and Savannah...they’d fled around the globe many times.
Her fingers missed her cello’s strings. It hadn’t been long since she’d played. But it felt far longer. An age since the music had carried her away from fear.
She pressed on.
She might encounter Grim or his dark master around this corner or that. She longed to see Severne again and dreaded the possible confrontation. She tripped often on the uneven floor of impossible tunnels that seemed hewn from solid rock.
There were no sconces in the tunnels she traveled. She had left them behind in the main part of the opera house. The flashlight in her hand was the only light in the labyrinth. The shadows it created leaped and cavorted on the walls in dark mimicry of the murals elsewhere in l’Opéra Severne. Her cautious figure crept along, but all around the shadow her body made, less definable shapes flew, dipped and dived with the movements of the light in her hand.
She walked for what felt like days. With each turn she chose, the maze took her farther and farther away from sunlight and life. The night she’d spent on the river with Severne was eons ago. Could it have been only hours since she’d held him in her hand? Since she’d experienced the betrayal of his true nature and purpose?
When her flashlight flickered, she stopped midstep. Her breath caught in her throat. The light came back on, and she breathed again. But her heart was racing. If her batteries died, she would have to feel her way with only the rough-hewn walls to guide her.
Feel her way.
There were no faces carved in the catacombs. There were no murals here.
The reassurance didn’t help.
She didn’t want to run her hands along the sides of the maze in the dark. She too easily recalled the cold feel of Lavinia’s wooden fingers.
Her steps were quicker after that. She hurried toward the faint call of Brimstone. It seemed to get no stronger, but she refused to give up.
Even when the flashlight began to flicker with every stride.
Where was Victoria?
Why had she deserted her only sister?
After the intimacy she’d allowed herself to share with Severne, the cold tunnel felt even more isolated and lonely.
Cold?
She stopped in the middle of the tunnel that had narrowed around her. The flickering light in her hand cast her shadow as a huge hulking shape on the wall.
But it was her shape.
She raised her other arm to be certain. Yes. The shadow moved with her. It was hers. Yet gooseflesh had risen on her skin in spite of the jacket she wore. She breathed out as a tentative test, and her quavering release of air was suddenly visible in the chilling air in clouds of white.
She’d walked a long way.
She was deep underground, but there was no logical reason for the cold creeping over her skin with insidious, icy fingers. She circled the light around her body. It wavered, off and on, off and on, in her hand. The tunnel in front of her was empty as far as she could see, but she’d just made a turn. The gaping mouth of the tunnel she’d left was black as pitch.
As black as a shadow she could feel but not see.
Kat edged away from the black hole.
She was too far from Severne to survive the shadow’s touch. Her respiration betrayed her fear. It was fast and light, each breath revealing the cold that foreshadowed a worse freeze to come.
If the shadow was here...
If it touched her...
Her flashlight flickered again. This time it came back on dim and low. She felt relief, but that changed to despair as the light faded, faded, like invisible, malevolent fingers dialed it down.
The dark claimed her.
The light was gone.
Her fear was too great to shake the flashlight in her hand. But even if she could have moved, she wouldn’t have, because instinct warned her to stay perfectly still as a greater cold approached. She felt its strong presence at her neck and back, and then the chill circled around to her face. She imagined the giant winged shadow crouching down to look into her wide, staring eyes that could see only endless dark.
She held herself quiet and still.
The cold was bad. To touch the shadow accidentally in the dark would be worse.
“I love you, Victoria,” Kat said through chattering teeth. It was important. If she failed to find her sister, if she was frozen to death in this spot, buried beneath l’Opéra Severne, she wanted her sister to know she’d tried. She hadn’t stayed hidden. She had come to help.
Another name was spoken by her slowed, thudding heart. She kept it secret. Her icy lips pressed against a truth no one needed to hear.
Her flashlight flickered to life at the same time the cold faded back and away. She shivered, but her respiration was no longer apparent in white puffs from her lips.
There was no shadow. None that she could see. Only her movements showed on the wall. But she blinked and tested with a raised arm again because for several seconds she thought she’d seen vanishing wings.
Kat moved slower for several yards while feeling returned to her stiff legs. The light remained strong. She tried not to think about why it might have failed.
She heard the singing long before she saw a light. An old French lullaby lilted hauntingly down the passages around her. It came from far ahead but seemed to surround her. It was the daemon call she still followed because the direction of the singing was indistinct.
She stepped quietly, afraid that her sister would run away as she’d run before. There was no mistaking the beautiful voice. Even the echo couldn’t disguise the lilting purity of tone so many treasured, including her. In spite of her determination, a part of her had been afraid she’d never hear her sister sing again.
* * *
The scene was unexpectedly peaceful when she finally rounded a last bend that brought her into a deep underground chamber. There were colorful Persian rugs on the walls as well as the floor and a fireplace where a small blaze burned, vented, no doubt, miles above their heads or into some other hellish dimension she hoped they’d never see.
A four-poster bed sat in an alcove off to the side, framed all around by overflowing bookshelves full of everything from magazines to antique tomes to art and bric-a-brac. She was certain she glimpsed the work of masters placed haphazardly beside plastic toys from fast food restaurants. Near her sister’s rocking chair was a table set with a silver tea service fit for a queen.
But it was the rocking chair, the singing, and the nearby cradle, which Victoria nudged with a gentle foot, penetrating the shocked fog that had threatened for several seconds to claim Kat’s consciousness.
There was no one else in the room.
No dangerous daemon.
No solicitous lover.
“Victoria,” Kat whispered. Horrible, wonderful knowledge exploded in her mind. The truth of why her sister had run even from a beloved sibling. She might even have begun to suspect when she’d first heard the lullaby their mother had sung to them so many times as they’d grown. Maybe her suspicions had caused her to approach slowly more than her fear of scaring her sister away.
A baby.
A precious, innocent baby.
What else would have caused Victoria to run and hide from the one other person on Earth who might have been able to lead daemon hunters to the father of her child?
An innocent half-daemon child caught up in a terrible war.
“You have to go,” Victoria said. “I knew you’d find me eventually. And I wanted to see you. But you have to go.” Kat could see tears of joy and fear on her sister’s face. Joy at reunion. Fear that their reunion might endanger her child.
It wasn’t a rejection. Together, their affinity would attract dangerous attention to the baby’s location.
“You should have told me. You should have warned me away,” Kat said.
Her throat burned. Her chest was tight. Her legs carried her numbly across the room. She had to see the baby. But she also knew she needed to run away. She endangered the baby by simply being in the room.
“It’s okay. We’re hidden well. His father saved him from Reynard,” Victoria said. “He sacrificed himself for us. I’ve waited until he’s strong enough to move. We’re going to slip away. And you’ll have to let us go, Kat. It’s the only way. Bad enough that I have to be with him until he’s older. He needs me. I can’t let him go. But it would be worse for the both of us to be together. You know Reynard always finds us more easily when we’re in the same place.”
Katherine tiptoed to the cradle and looked down. He. Victoria had called the baby he. Kat’s nephew was nestled in the cradle as it rocked. His sleepy eyes glinted in the soft light above cherubic cheeks and the bow of a tiny newborn mouth.
“Where is Michael?” Kat asked. Her mind was already formulating ways to fix this. To help them. To make the evil of the situation go away.
“You mean the baby’s father? Reynard killed him, Kat. When we realized I had conceived after a night in one of the suites of The Blues Queen, we were going to run away together. He said it wasn’t safe for the baby at l’Opéra Severne. He said we had to leave. But Reynard found us in Shreveport. He killed Michael.” Tears coursed down Victoria’s face, but her foot remained calm, carefully nudging the cradle so the baby wouldn’t be startled. “I ran away and came back here. This alcove was Michael’s secret. He said no one else knew about it. And no one has ever bothered us here.”
She continued to rock the baby, but she looked up at Kat. How many times had Katherine seen this exact look on her sister’s face after she had sung the role of Juliet? Perhaps her penchant for the part had been a dark premonition.
“We met during a rehearsal of Roméo et Juliette. The university had borrowed the stage of the opera house, and teenage performers were taking instruction from some of the singers. I had slipped up to one of the private box seats to watch them. You know how much I love that role. He found me there. That was the start of it all,” Victoria said.
No wonder her sister had fallen madly in love with a daemon. She’d been preparing for just such a star-crossed romance her whole life.
Michael was dead. But the name on the list hadn’t been marked through. Severne didn’t have another tally mark on his arm. His grandfather’s contract hadn’t been fulfilled. His father wasn’t saved.
“I’m glad I came back. When I saw you, I knew it was wrong to leave without saying goodbye. I left the bracelet where you could find it. And Mom’s letters. I put the ticket from our river cruise in your cello case. I left the opera glasses on my pillow. I wanted to talk to you, but Michael had said to avoid John Severne and his dog. He said they were dangerous. That they would hurt the baby.”
“No. No, they wouldn’t. Never,” Kat said.
She looked down at the wiggling baby. He blinked up at her and fisted his hands.
“Sybil helped me when I went into labor. She promised she knew what to do. She’d delivered babies before. It was scary, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was afraid to go to the hospital. Reynard might find us again,” Victoria said.
“Sybil helped you,” Kat said. The world dropped from beneath her body. She floated where she’d stood, trying to rediscover the feeling of firm ground beneath her feet. But there was nothing. No support. She was utterly abandoned by the universe.
“Her face was the first face Michael saw when he came into the world, but he didn’t seem intimidated at all,” Vic laughed through her tears. “Even though she’s always frightened me a little.”
“Michael,” Kat said, repeating the name. Wishing it was any other name.
Because she suddenly knew.
“I named him after his father. I wish you could have met him, Kat. He told me such stories. Of a time before time. Of Heaven and hell. He was very old. Very, very old. He had scars on his back where he said he’d once had wings. We were wrong about daemons, Kat. Mom knew. That’s why she risked her life to save the daemon she loved. They aren’t damned,” Vic said.
Only different. So different that a daemon woman would sacrifice an innocent baby to save someone she loved, but she’d need help to do it if she’d made a promise she had to keep. Sybil had promised Victoria that she would help her with the baby. That was why she needed Kat to deliver baby Michael to Severne.
Kat thought she might die the instant she decided to break her bargain with Sybil. Her hand did throb so hotly that she fell to her knees beside the cradle. But she didn’t die. Not yet. She assumed her heart would stop in the next second or the next.
“Please. Please let there be enough time,” she said under her breath so Vic wouldn’t hear.
The little baby looked up at her with nightglow eyes. He would live.
And she would die.
That was a deadly promise she had to be brave enough to make.
“What is it, Kat? What’s wrong?” Victoria asked.
Perhaps she’d felt the chill increasing around them, or maybe it was only the stark look of determination Kat could feel on her hardened face.
But as her sister stopped rocking the cradle, a shadow fell across the wiggling baby. Kat struggled to her feet, adrenaline flooding in to fill the hollow places where only shock had been. She vaguely heard Victoria call out a warning to stay away. The baby wasn’t distressed. He laughed again. He reached up to touch the frigid darkness as if it had tickled his face.
He must have been protected from the shadow’s ice by his father’s daemon blood.
His father. The ancient daemon that once had wings.
Kat saw it then. Above their heads, there was a giant winged shadow on the wall. It hadn’t been there when she’d hurried into the room. If it had been a normal shadow, thrown by the fire, it would have fallen across her sister’s lap and onto Kat. Instead, the edges of it avoided them. It stopped where their bodies began and came into being again beyond them.
Had it followed her through the labyrinth, watching and waiting to see what she would do when she found the baby? Had whatever remained of the father weighed her life in his frigid inhuman mind and decided whether or not to let her pass in the dark passages of the catacombs?
She tasted mortality then, like cold, damp ashes in her mouth.
She’d been right to fear the shadows. But she was glad she’d been bold enough to pass through them.
“I won’t betray them,” Kat said.
The shadow responded. It swelled out bigger and bigger. Then, just as she feared it might attack her to be sure she didn’t threaten the child, it diminished.
“Of course you won’t,” Victoria said. “I told him that.”
Katherine looked at her sister. The other woman didn’t cower from the cold shadow on the wall. She was used to its looming presence.
“It isn’t him. Not really. But there’s something of him left. Like a ghost, but more. I have to admit that’s another reason we haven’t left again. Michael is strong. Stronger than a human newborn would be. He can leave whenever I’m ready,” Victoria said.
Victoria’s clothing finally penetrated Kat’s overwhelmed senses. She was bundled in a thick sweater, and woolen socks showed above heavy shoes. Across her lap was draped a heavy quilt.
The shadow watched and waited.
“You need to be ready. Now,” Kat said.
“I know. I know it isn’t safe. The cold is very bad. Even the fire doesn’t warm me. Only Michael keeps it from stealing my breath,” Vic admitted.
“That’s not the only reason. He was right. It isn’t safe here. I think the shadow has been trying to warn us all along,” Kat said.
She didn’t know how far she would get before her daemon mark killed her because of the broken bargain. She would do all she could. She’d hidden for years. She had to be braver than that now. She had to fight.
Victoria was already dressed practically in jeans along with her heavy sweater. Kat helped her add to a large diaper tote bag while the baby cooed at the shadow on the wall. When Kat moved to pick Michael up, the shadow once again grew, and its wings stretched out to span the room. The warm baby in her arms diminished the shadow’s threat. His Brimstone heat was daemonic, but not monstrous at all. Only different. And adorable.
She would never hold a baby of her own.
Kat pushed that knowledge away.
“We’ll have to separate once we’re away. You can’t try to contact me. Ever again,” Katherine said. With luck, her sister would never discover that Kat had died so she and her baby could live.
She handed Michael to his mother. Victoria took him easily and cradled him close in her arms, already practiced at being exactly what her baby needed.
The shadow diminished in size again when the baby was placed back in his mother’s hands.
Kat couldn’t tell Vic about the daemon mark. Victoria feared enough for Michael. Kat didn’t want her to have to fear for her sister, as well.
She would go. She would help. Until her heart stopped. She would give all to her nephew, as she would if he was her own son. As she wished someone had given for John Severne all those years ago. To save him before he became the tortured, bartered soul he was today.
She held her bad hand against her chest. Victoria didn’t notice. She was focused on the baby in her arms. As she should be. Kat ignored the pain. They needed to find Eric and outsmart Sybil. She was certain the shadow would follow them as they made their escape. It had shrunk, but whatever was left of Michael still lurked on the wall. While they hurried from the last refuge they’d known, she pretended Grim and Severne wouldn’t try to stop them.
She was wrong.