Dawn lightened the horizon when Victoria slipped out of the main house and into the garden. Roses were heavy with dew, all their bright blooms darkened and drooping as they bowed their heads to pray for the sun.
She hurried to the cottage to change out of her conspicuous rumpled dress. The jar of dried cherry blossoms seemed to chastise her as she showered quickly and pulled on cropped pants, a T-shirt and sneakers. She twisted her damp hair up in a messy bun and grabbed a hooded sweater.
She had no idea how long Adam would sleep. She needed to take advantage of the early morning to explore and try the firebird keys in every lock she could find. The estate had been built during a time when barns, springhouses, cellars and sheds were staples. Those outbuildings still dotted the landscape of Nightingale Vineyards the way follies would have a less utilitarian property. Most of the buildings seemed abandoned now. Her instincts told her the more apparently abandoned, the better.
For instance, it wouldn’t be possible to hide prisoners in the much-used utility shed where ATVs and tractors came and went with such frequency clandestine activity would be impossible.
The wine cave she’d discovered last night beckoned, but it was on the other side of the estate. The only way she could reach it quickly would be by ATV. It wouldn’t be possible to borrow one of those during the day without notice. She would have to plan a trip to explore the cave later when she had more time and the added cloak of night to hide her intentions.
Victoria decided to try the pilfered keys at every building she could reach on foot while Adam was still sleeping, but she wanted to begin at the most likely. She’d already glimpsed a large gardening barn overgrown with ivy vines. The windows were completely covered and only indentions, not glass, showed where they had once been. She hurried there first, jogging down the path as if she’d gotten up before the sun to simply exercise. Once she was parallel with the building, she veered off the pebble path and sidled up to the vine-covered wall. She felt her way along the ivy until she found the entrance where an old iron handle protruded from the greenery. A rooster crowed in the distance and made her jump. She paused for only a second to calm her heart back down from her throat and then burrowed into the vines to find the keyhole beneath the iron handle.
Once she’d found where to try the keys, she dug them from her pocket. After several tries, she found a key that fit, but it took several more minutes of struggle and force to move the old tumblers that had frozen in place from lack of use.
Not promising.
If anyone was using the building, the door would have been easier to open.
She pushed the door inward anyway, forcing the tendrils of vine to stretch and break with the full weight of her body. The interior of the building was musty and obviously undisturbed. A long potting table was the only inhabitant along with the refuse from years of dead leaves and cobwebs. The webs fluttered gray and forgotten in the sudden fresh air.
Some broken pots and a few rusty tools were all that she found besides a scurrying mouse that caused her to jump as it ran away.
“My sleuthing skills need work,” Victoria muttered to the mouse.
She wrenched the protesting door back into place and relocked it with additional minutes of effort. She couldn’t do much about the torn vines, but she tried to arrange them so that her poking around wouldn’t be discovered.
Victoria proceeded around the winding paths of the garden to a much smaller building. This one was a door set into a triangular protrusion from the ground. Nearby was a plot of earth reclaimed by grass, but she thought it had once been a vegetable garden. Slight depressions in the earth still ran in neat horizontal rows. A root cellar would have been a common feature at the turn of the century, even after refrigeration was beginning to take over.
It wasn’t a great leap of logic to imagine that Adam’s mother might have enjoyed growing more than grapes with her own two hands.
The tiny shed that covered the mouth of the cellar had its own curtain of vines, but not as heavy as the potting shed. There was some indication that the door had been opened. She could see where the door had scuffed the dirt beneath it somewhat recently.
The air around had begun to warm. The sun rose and the dew dried. She didn’t have much time, but the disturbed earth at the base of the door and the sparse vines spurred her on.
She hurriedly tried key after key. Other birds had followed the rooster with wakefulness. Their tweets and twitters were tentative, but a full morning chorus would soon come. Finally she found the right key and the tumblers clicked, much easier to manipulate than the previous ones. She still had to jiggle the key, but though the lock was old and finicky it wasn’t frozen in place.
She jerked when the latch gave way with a loud, echoing clank. The door opened outward and fell to the side when she pulled. The echo had told her she was right about the cellar before the open door revealed a stone stairway that led into a dark, dank hole in the ground. The stairs were framed by packed earthen walls.
It was only a root cellar. The kind of place gardeners stored vegetables before refrigeration made a cool hole in the ground obsolete. It would be nothing to use her cell phone’s flashlight and pop down the stairs to look around. Still, Victoria’s foot paused on the first green-tinged step. Not because the growth of green mold or algae tainted the air or made the stone slick, but because something inside her had sent a shiver of warning down her spine.
She couldn’t blame the chill on the morning air or the cool darkness radiating up to kiss her face with damp.
In spite of her sweater, she had goose bumps on her arms and when she forced herself forward, she could have sworn her first breath on the stairs showed in a slight, white puff from her lips.
But that was impossible. She was only anxious. Afraid of the dark and getting caught and what she might find. She was a singer, not a spy. A determined mother well out of her depth.
The light from her phone wavered in her cold fingers, but its unsteady beam revealed only more dirt as she descended deeper into the ground. The stairs were cut much deeper than she’d expected. It felt like she was on a journey to the center of the Earth, but finally she reached the polished earth floor and the large storage room that had been carved cavern-like into the ground. The room was shored up by oak beams.
How solid did oak stay after a hundred years?
Victoria shone her light on the beams, feeling like a she was in a mine shaft that might collapse at any moment. She clenched her teeth against the trembling caused as much by nerves as temperature.
She shone the beam of her light around. The cellar didn’t seem to have another way out. It was a hole in the ground, lined with mostly empty bins and shelves where potatoes and onions and canned food might once have been. All that was left were a few glass jars with murky contents. She didn’t explore those too closely.
The disturbed door hadn’t led her to anything useful.
Victoria turned and made her way back to the stairs. She forced herself not to hurry even though the dank and dark felt threatening and spidery.
“Don’t go. Not yet. We have much to discuss and I’d like to keep our meeting...discreet,” a voice came from the darkness behind her, even though she’d seen the room empty seconds before. Victoria’s foot froze on the first step that would lead back up into the light. She could see the square of daylight above her, far above her, beckoning but out of reach.
She couldn’t move. Motes of dust from decades of moldering vegetables hung in the air suspended in front of her face.
“I haven’t agreed to any bargain with you, daemon. Let me go,” Victoria managed to say through nearly petrified lips. She recognized the pause of a daemon deal forming in the air around her. The universe ground to a halt when a promise was made that couldn’t be broken.
“I am Ezekiel. The daemon your mother loved. I know you’ll agree to talk with me, daughter, thus the deal is beginning to form,” the daemon said.
Her affinity could detect him now. The burn of his Brimstone blood was painful in the confined space beneath the insulating earth. She couldn’t help the whimper of protest that escaped, but she did manage to bite back against the others that rose in her throat. She shook from the effort, burning and hurting and still frozen in place.
“I’m sorry. I needed you to know I speak the truth about who I am. But I’ll spare you from the heat of my blood now,” the daemon said.
Suddenly, the pure fire of Brimstone was gone and she was left frigid in its loss. Even though she couldn’t climb the stairs, her body could quake in the sudden cold and it did. Her teeth chattered. Her breath came from her lips in a fog.
“Will you speak with a daemon king, Victoria D’Arcy?” the daemon asked, formally and loudly as if he spoke for her and the universe to hear.
He didn’t approach her. He stood with the whole length of the storage room between them. But she was still afraid. This daemon was so old and powerful that he could mask the burn of his Brimstone? Her sister had already met Ezekiel and had warned Victoria about his interest in their affairs. He had loved their mother. She had sacrificed herself to save him from the Order of Samuel. They had been fathered by a member of the Order who had performed his duty to provide the Order with more living, breathing daemon detectors. Their mother had been forced to marry him, but it was Ezekiel she had loved.
And he had loved her.
He had been kept very busy since with fighting against a revolution in hell, but he considered himself their stepfather.
He’d helped Katherine by giving her baby a hellhound puppy guardian when he was born. Katherine had named her son after this daemon king and Samuel who had saved their grandmother with his kiss. Her sister was happily married and reconciled with much of what they’d dealt with in their lives.
But Katherine still feared Ezekiel and she’d warned Victoria to be careful.
Daemons were not damned, but they were different, willing to face expulsion from heaven to rule themselves in the hell dimension.
But, really, what choice did she have and what harm could one conversation hold?
“Yes. I will speak with you,” Victoria said. “I’ll hear anything you have to say.”
Her respiration stopped...for a frightening second. Life paused mocking her with what she had to lose. And then she was free to turn around and face the daemon responsible for the horrible pause that represented the sealing of the deal between them.
A conversation with the daemon king.
What could go wrong?
It was only in that second when her lungs expanded once more that she realized she’d agreed to listen without knowing what he offered in exchange.
When she turned, her cell phone light was unnecessary. The daemon king stood in an aura of ember light, his Brimstone glowing fiercely enough to light the darkness around him. Victoria lowered her phone, but she didn’t tab off the flashlight app. She didn’t trust Ezekiel’s aura to be enough light for her too. She needed the glow in her own hands.
“You have grown into a lovely woman. And I know your beauty reaches deeper. To your heart. Like your mother’s did. No wonder Michael fell in love with you,” Ezekiel said.
He was a commanding presence in a plain atmosphere. The earth walls and cobwebs took nothing away from his royalty. He wouldn’t have been more intimidating even if he’d been in a great castle hall on a throne.
Katherine had told her about Lucifer’s wings that the Rogue Council had hacked from his body, bronzed and mounted on the wall above their council chamber. They had killed him during a rebellion fueled by the desire to claim the rule in hell, wage war on heaven and undo the choice Lucifer and his allies had made to leave heaven and rule autonomously in hell. Young Rogues who had never walked in heaven resented the loss of paradise and dreamed dark dreams of rising up to claim a higher realm.
Katherine had been instrumental in freeing Lucifer’s Loyalist Army to fight the Rogues. Now Ezekiel wore Lucifer’s wings as a royal mantle. They covered the scars on his shoulders where his own wings had been.
But there were other scars.
Reclaiming hell from the Council had been a bloody, ferocious conflict—a centuries-long battle, though only a few months had passed on Earth. Down Ezekiel’s arms and across his hard torso were deep white slashes he’d wear forever. Another slash marked one of his lean cheeks.
Ezekiel was a king, but he was also a warrior. His claim on her and her sister felt more frightening than reassuring. Especially when her mission for the Order of Samuel was in direct opposition with his interests and desires. The Order of Samuel worked in league with the Rogue Council. They had hunted Lucifer’s Loyalists almost to extinction before Katherine and her dark opera master had interfered.
“Michael sacrificed himself so that his baby could live. So that I could live. You didn’t do the same for my mother. She died for you instead,” Victoria said.
Ezekiel stilled. The aura around him deepened to a darker shade of red. An angry shade that shimmered with a heat she didn’t feel.
“I didn’t know your mother would risk her life to stand against the Order. I would have stopped her. I would have protected her,” Ezekiel said.
“But you didn’t and you didn’t come for us either. We were left to fend for ourselves. Stalked for years by evil monks who only wanted us for our ability to help them hunt and kill. You wear your scars proudly, but we’re scarred too. Deep. Where they don’t show,” Victoria said.
She didn’t let the angry tears that stung her eyes flow. She cried only onstage when the part demanded it. She’d cried for Michael. Her beautiful fallen angel who’d still remained angelic even when he’d lost his wings. She hadn’t cried since. She might never cry again.
“I was fighting for you. And to honor your mother’s sacrifice. I was reclaiming a home to offer you and your sister,” Ezekiel said. “And your sons.”
“Hell? You’re offering us a home in the hell dimension?” Victoria asked.
In spite of all she’d felt and learned about daemons, she still took a step back.
“You’ll be safe from the Order of Samuel. Your son will be safe,” Ezekiel said. He moved several steps closer to her and her heart pounded. He was even more different than her baby’s father had been. He was obviously older and more hardened by the battles he’d fought. His eyes blazed, reddened by his aura’s light. “Michael is half daemon. The hell dimension is his home. His rightful place. As Anne’s grandchild—as my grandchild—to rule it one day will be his right,” Ezekiel said.
It was a proclamation.
Victoria sank down onto the steps her daemon bargain wouldn’t let her climb yet. Numb horror froze her even more irrevocably than her deal with the devil who offered her son a mantle made of Lucifer’s wings.
“No,” she whispered. She’d wanted freedom for her baby. Freedom from the Order of Samuel. Freedom from their stalking darkness. And now this. Darkness personified come to swallow them with Brimstone’s fire. This was worse than affinity. Worse than evil monks. This was alien violence and awful responsibility. Blood, revolution and death.
“He’s growing, and the Burn will soon be upon him. The Brimstone spark is already in his blood, but it will ignite before his third birthday. It could happen any day now. It would be better for him to be among daemons when the Burn occurs,” Ezekiel warned. “We can help him contain the fire and learn to control it. His father might have helped him if he hadn’t died, but a human will never be able to withstand the heat.”
“Sybil is with him. She’s very old. She can help him when this Burn takes place,” Victoria said, but her body had turned to stone. A mother’s love was no match for what challenges her half daemon son would have to face. More than she’d ever realized.
“Yes. I won’t lie to you. Sybil is experienced in these matters. She probably stays with the child to watch and wait for the Burn. She would know that he shouldn’t be without a daemon’s support when it claims him. His blood will literally be flame in his veins,” Ezekiel said. “But he would be safer in hell. From those that threaten him from without and from the blood that threatens him from within.”
“His safety is my concern. My responsibility. I trust Sybil. She would have told me if we needed to ask you for help,” Victoria said. But deep down, she wondered if the stoic Sybil would have voiced her concerns if she had them. “I’m done talking. I want you to leave now,” Victoria said. She dragged herself to her feet, burdened with even greater purpose. Now she was working on an even tighter deadline. The full moon loomed ahead of them, but so did this mysterious Burn her son had to face.
Ezekiel’s eyes had faded. They no longer glowed red. His aura was softened back to an ember glow. Like soothing firelight. She wasn’t fooled. He could probably protect them from the Order if they went with him to hell, but she was determined to protect Michael herself. Here, on Earth.
“I would like you to leave us as well. This intrusion is not part of our bargain, daemon king,” Adam came down the stairs as he spoke in a formal cadence she’d never heard him use before. He carried no flashlight. He boldly came down into the cellar’s semidarkness as if he knew the way.
“The price of your freedom was service, Adam Turov. Do not stand between me and my grandson now,” Ezekiel warned.
Victoria stood between the daemon king and the vineyard’s master. She straightened her spine and squared her shoulders. Adam’s presence was already warming away her former chill. Neither of them was her ally, but she knew who she would leap to aid if there was a fight.
Ezekiel noticed.
The daemon king’s eyes narrowed at her sudden defensive positioning. A faint red glow began again in his flickering irises. He looked from her to the daemon-marked man behind her. The man he’d marked himself long ago.
“Our bargain has not ended, daughter. We will speak again. This conversation isn’t over. You will listen as you’ve promised and I’ll decide if our discussion should continue in hell,” Ezekiel said.
Never trust a daemon. Their bargains can’t be broken. Their wiles can’t be bested.
She’d known this her entire life. Why had she allowed the daemon king to trick her into a bargain that might condemn her son to a childhood in an alien realm? The bargain she’d made was open-ended. She’d promised to listen to whatever he had to say even though daemons were preternaturally persuasive. She hadn’t considered all the ramifications such as where the conversation would continue or for how long. She hadn’t considered he might offer a throne in hell in exchange for her attention.
“There’s no need for that drastic measure. I’m here. I serve you. I’ll protect your grandson and your daughter,” Adam said. He proclaimed it. He was trying to make a deal in her place. Victoria’s breath froze in her lungs and she reached to grab Adam’s arm.
But no pause came. The universe continued around them. Dust motes floated and fell. Ezekiel didn’t accept Adam’s offer.
The daemon king stepped forward. One pace. Then another. He was taller and harder than Adam, but the man who pulled from her hand to stand in front of her didn’t flinch or cringe. He stood against a near immortal who was fully fueled by Brimstone. Not just a hint or a mark, but a furnace of hell’s flame. Adam was tall and strong and honed by years of sacrifice and battle, but even with the daemon mark of Brimstone in his blood, he was only a man.
And yet he stood.
“I will talk with you again. But you of all beings must recognize the importance of autonomy. I won’t be forced. I must decide for myself,” Victoria said.
“And Michael?” Ezekiel asked. “Will he be allowed to choose?”
“He must have choices. Yes. When he’s older he’ll be free to choose. But, for now, I choose safety for him. And light. All the light I never had,” Victoria said.
“I will give you time before we speak again,” Ezekiel said. “But I will also give you a warning that I am king. Do not try my patience or my resolve to keep you both safe, in darkness and in light.”
Adam reached for her without breaking eye contact with the daemon king. He pulled her up the stairs. They backed away from Ezekiel as if it wasn’t a good idea to turn their backs. He watched them go, but he didn’t follow. He did release the damper on his Brimstone burn and Victoria’s affinity was seared by the passionate emotions he’d held in check. The care and concern of a daemon king stepgrandfather was another danger to Michael she hadn’t known she’d have to face.
What would he do if she not only refused to follow him to hell, but aided and abetted the very Council who threatened to take his kingdom from him before he could bequeath it to her son?
* * *
Her focus was entirely on the daemon king behind her so she failed to read the burn coming off the man beside her. As Adam closed the cellar door, she continued to move away until they were several feet apart. Door closed. Feet planted. Face fully illuminated by the sun, and Victoria still stared at the cellar as if the giant Mephistopheles from Faust would burst out of it to devour them.
“Does he often just appear like that...without fanfare or warning?” she asked.
“He goes and comes as he pleases. He’s a king. A daemon king. And you struck a bargain with him,” Adam said.
His voice was very quiet. Too quiet. And crisp. His accent was as crisp and frigid as mountain snow. Yet she suddenly distinguished his fire from Ezekiel’s as the daemon king’s burn inexplicably faded away.
Adam Turov was furious. Around the edges of his vivid blue eyes a hint of red had begun to glow.
“You as well. He’s the daemon that holds your soul. You serve the daemon king,” Victoria said.
“Yes. I do. And I wouldn’t have recommended it if you’d asked. If you’d listened to my warning and stayed with me this wouldn’t have happened. I told you it wasn’t safe for you to be alone,” Adam said.
There was nothing safe about being forced to stay near him either. But she didn’t want to bring up her hunger for his taste and touch.
“Our agreement is prisoners supplied once a month. He was here weeks early because of you,” Adam said. “You can’t hide from a daemon. You of all people. And once they find you they trick and trap. It’s what they do. You, who have been ensnared your whole life, certainly know what that means,” Adam continued.
He pressed both hands into his already mussed hair. That’s when she really noticed how he’d come to find her. He’d thrown on his singed pants from last night and a stray oxford he hadn’t bothered to button. His movements revealed his lean muscled chest and taut abdomen.
He was also barefoot. Better to focus on his feet rather than how badly she wanted to nuzzle his stomach the way he’d nuzzled hers.
“You know who I am,” Victoria said.
“I basically work for your stepfather,” Adam said. “I’ve served the daemon king for a hundred years, give or take. At some point, you and I were bound to run into each other.”
Victoria looked hard at the rumpled and raw man whose anger over her agreement with Ezekiel could only be rooted in his concern for her. And still she tried to hold on to whatever was left of her disguise. She was a horrible spy, but the stolen keys were still in her possession.
“I came for a vacation. I had no idea it would lead to my son being offered the throne to hell,” she said.
“Only a vacation,” Adam said. His eyes had gone back to pure blue. He approached her and she didn’t back away. The firebird keys were crammed into her back pocket and covered by the tail of her sweater.
Adam hadn’t seen her unlock the door. He might think Ezekiel had opened it to lure her inside. She could still fulfill her mission. In fact, Ezekiel’s threat might give her cover by distracting Adam from her intentions.
He stopped just inches from her. The heat of his body was close enough to make hers hum. She held her breath. He raised his hand to touch her face, and she met his gaze, even though it was a mistake. Suddenly, he was neither warrior, sophisticated business owner nor vintner but an inseparable blend of all three.
She couldn’t see the winglike scars on his back, but she knew they were there. It changed her perception of him. She saw the memory of that pain in his eyes.
“I don’t think you’ve vacationed a day in your life, Ms. D’Arcy. You don’t have a restful bone in your body. You are emotion and movement and always poised on the verge of flight. I find myself needing to touch you just to confirm that you’re here with me on the ground. And when my touch causes you to forget about flying away? That’s when I taste heaven,” Adam said.
He caressed her cheek, lightly, barely touching her skin with the pads of his fingers. The heat flared in her cheek and elsewhere at his allusion to the night before. A wicked smile tilted one corner of his sculpted mouth as he noticed her reaction with an intensity that had her expecting him to take up where they’d left off. Right here in the garden. Her knees turned to liquid and her breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t exhale. They stood without moving except for his fingers, which traced from her cheek down to her parted lips. When he lightly teased across her bottom lip with his thumb, she finally exhaled in a quivering rush. He watched her reaction.
“We both need a vacation. A reprieve. Can you imagine the sabbatical we would make together?” he whispered.
She thought he’d replace his thumb with a kiss, but he stepped back instead. The sudden chill was torturous. Lonely and cold. Reality settled back onto her skin.
“A Rogue daemon. A daemon king. The Order of Samuel. And that’s only the first weeks of your getaway. It isn’t safe for you to be alone. The cottage has several rooms. I’ll move in to one of them for the remainder of your stay,” Adam said.
She couldn’t argue. It made perfect sense. He was a warrior. She was a singer. She would be happy to have his protection if she wasn’t trying to discover and sabotage his secret prison and outmaneuver an overbearing daemon king.
She was doomed.