She should have been content to hide in the cottage and catch her breath after pilfering the keys, but an odd restlessness gripped her after her near miss with Turov in the garden. He’d returned to the house. No doubt he was now sound asleep, having completely forgotten about the kiss. Her affinity didn’t seem to seduce her host as easily as Katherine’s had seduced Severne. Either that or Adam Turov resisted more successfully.
She should be glad. Her resistance to the pull of his Brimstone was shaky at best.
When she returned to the cottage, instead of hiding, she used her laptop to chat with Michael and Sybil. She needed to ground herself in the reality of her situation once more. She wasn’t here to seek contentment or romance. Michael was happy to see her. He pressed his chubby hands to the screen and she’d pressed hers against his. He was still too young for conversation. His excited babble had included definite words such as ball and Gim—her son’s name for his ferocious hellhound Grim—but much of what he tried to tell her was indistinguishable syllables.
Sybil filled in the blanks of how her son was spending his days in the Cape Cod vacation house in Massachusetts, far away from their home in Shreveport, Louisiana. Grim filled the screen behind the boy and his daemon nanny, a hulking black shadow with glowing eyes and gleaming white teeth that shone against his smoky fur.
As Sybil spoke of sandcastles and swing sets, Grim settled down in the background and Michael settled with him. Her son fell asleep against the hellhound’s flank, using his hell-spawned guardian as a pillow.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to that,” Victoria told Sybil.
The smooth-faced daemon nanny was hundreds and hundreds of years old. Older than Severne. Nearly as old as Michael’s daemon father, who had been one of the Ancient Ones who had once had heavenly wings. She looked Victoria’s age, but she spoke like a wise woman with many years of experience under her belt. She’d raised John Severne when his mother died. She’d mothered him for two hundred years while loving his father, knowing that one day John’s father would die and leave her to go on without him.
“Grim is the nanny. I just do the cooking and anything else that requires opposable thumbs,” Sybil said.
Sybil had also been the seamstress at l’Opera Severne for a couple of centuries. No big. The dress she wore was old-fashioned, but lovely. Each stitch perfectly placed. Victoria was certain that Michael’s pants had also been hand-sewed by Sybil.
“Thank you for keeping him safe. I know you miss the opera house. I hope you’ll be able to return to it soon,” Victoria said. Her sister and brother-in-law had rebuilt the opera house after it burned to the ground. Sybil had been welcomed back to an even more cavernous costume warehouse where she still preferred to use large wheeled iron ladders rather than the electric revolving racks, shelves and bins that Severne had custom-installed.
“This is a nice vacation. Which I well deserve after a couple of hundred years,” Sybil said.
“He loves you,” Victoria said. “They love you.” She spoke of Michael, but also of Kat and Severne. It was complicated. Sybil had almost hurt them with her daemon manipulations, but she had acted out of long-standing love and loyalty to Severne’s father and Severne himself.
“Love is dangerous, Victoria D’Arcy. Remember that. Love requires sacrifice. Sometimes it seems as if it craves our very blood to sustain it,” Sybil said. “Be careful. Be wary. Guard your heart.”
The daemon woman didn’t know all the details of what Victoria was doing in Sonoma, but it was safe to bet she knew ten times more than she’d been told. Besides her Brimstone blood, her perceptions were heightened by nearly immortal experience.
“Michael is my heart. You and Grim are guarding him. The one that beats in my chest went cold when Michael’s father died. It’s as worn-out and unused as my scratchy voice,” Victoria said.
“You’re too young to speak of wearing out,” Sybil scolded.
“I feel ancient,” Victoria confessed.
In the background, Grim had closed his eyes and Michael’s soft snores indicated he’d fallen into a deep and peaceful sleep. Victoria ached to be there with him. To pick him up and rock him while he slept as she had when he was much younger.
“He is well. He is cared for. Even if there was no danger, you needed to take some time to heal yourself. You haven’t had a moment alone since the opera house fire. You have been sister and mother...you need to find yourself again,” Sybil said. “Reclaim Victoria’s voice.”
“I don’t know how,” Victoria said. On the screen, she could see the smooth porcelain of Sybil’s lovely forehead wrinkle slightly as the daemon frowned.
“I have sewn something for you. You’ll find a red dress packed in your luggage. This is a gift freely given. Or perhaps in exchange for your acceptance of me after I....after I threatened Michael and Katherine to try to help Severne. I warned you about love being dangerous, but I offer it to you. I am a daemon and we feel differently, but deeply. More deeply than we can comfortably express.”
Victoria left the laptop open and turned away to rummage through her luggage. She found a tissue-wrapped parcel she hadn’t noticed in the bottom of one case. She picked it up and brought it over to the vanity to open it in front of the screen.
The string and pristine white paper came apart easily in her fingers and deep red silk fell into her lap like a bright waterfall. She lifted it and drew it to her cheek to feel its liquid softness. She immediately loved and feared it. The old Victoria would have jumped up to put it on right away, but the Victoria she was now hesitated.
“I give you this dress to wear when you will. When you need it, you will have it on hand,” Sybil said. “And now I will bid you good night. There’s a small boy who needs to be carried to bed and Grim doesn’t have the arms necessary to perform this service.”
“Thank you, Sybil,” Victoria said, but the screen had already gone dark.
Thick with emotion, she hung the dress in the closet without trying it on and then went out into the garden. The fans were still in the distance. The rows and rows of grapevines were peaceful and unthreatened on a dry night in spite of the slight spring chill in the air. The main house was dark. No windows glowed. Her footsteps crunched along the path as if she was the solitary being on the planet who was awake and about.
Only the growing moon kept her company and illuminated her way. It was slightly more than a sliver now. Its growth was like her hourglass in the sky.
She didn’t hum or sing. The effort not to express her longing for—something—in song was great. She bit her lip. She clenched her fists against a stomach that swirled with unexpressed lyrics.
The smoky quality of her voice wasn’t unpleasant. It was changed, and while not suited to opera there were other types of music she could still sing. If she would. If her heart wakened and quickened and allowed her to reclaim what she’d lost when she’d lost Michael’s father to Father Reynard’s daemon blade.
Adam Turov woke her affinity. He sparked possibilities with his Brimstone blood that she’d thought lost forever. It wasn’t the red dress she was afraid of. It was the song Turov woke in her heart. The need to sing that he loosened in her breast. That need twined inexorably with her need to feel like herself again and to be a passionate woman, not just an automaton surviving day by day in desperate times.
Michael’s safety came first. His future was paramount. She refused to lose sight of why she was here and the mission she had to fulfill. But Adam Turov was more than just a mission. She couldn’t deny that. He drew her. Oh, how he drew her. And not only because of his Brimstone blood.
But if she freed his prisoners, Turov would die.
While she walked, thinking of the red dress that hung so full of potential in the cottage’s closet, she was suddenly interrupted by a sound in the garden. Victoria stopped. She listened, trying to distinguish what she’d heard when all she heard now was the roaring of blood in her ears and the thump of a quickened heartbeat in her chest.
The sound of metal rasping against metal came from the distance as a breeze lifted tendrils of hair on her cheek and tickled her skin. It sounded like a rusted hinge of a gate. She waited for the clank and latch of the gate being closed, but it never came. The drawn out screeeee had come from somewhere in front of her on the path.
The slowness of it bothered her. It seemed clandestine and sly as if someone was opening a gate that was supposed to remain closed. She stayed still and silenced her breathing. If she approached the sound, she didn’t know what she might find. If she returned to the cottage, the gate opener might follow her. They might intercept her from behind. Victoria was suddenly more conscious of the darkened main house. The desolation of the night garden around her. If the sound had been caused by a monk, she might face an ugly fight.
Working for Malachi didn’t automatically protect her from other monks from the Order of Samuel; she would be seen as a valuable commodity for any monk who wanted to grasp for power now that Father Reynard was gone. And there was always the possibility that a daemon would be drawn to her affinity.
It was also just as likely that the sound had been caused by the breeze that stirred the hair around her face as she stood still, trying not to breathe as if she’d run a marathon.
“I’m not going to run from the wind,” Victoria told the garden.
She made her decision. There was no way she could make it to the cottage if a threat was right around the corner. She decided to face whatever had made the sound head-on rather than flee.
The first step was the hardest. After that, she took step after step toward where she’d heard the sound.
When she came to a branch in the path that led to a large wrought-iron gazebo, she realized she’d found the origin of the sound. The gazebo was covered in ivy, but she could see that it was shaped like a birdcage. The door hung open. She paused for only a second before she forced herself to approach and take the cool iron in her hands. The door to the birdcage gazebo was too heavy to be stirred by a breeze. It protested against movement when she tried to swing it closed.
But the sound was definitely the metallic sound of hinges rasping she’d heard earlier.
All the birdcages in the house and the cottage had been arranged with their doors opened. It was as if someone had let all the birds they might once have held free.
She suddenly didn’t want to close the gazebo’s gated door. She opened it wide instead. The screech of the rusty hinges was loud again in the silent night. The shadowy interior of the gazebo was clearly revealed by the crescent moon. There was no one inside. But there was something. Victoria stepped just inside the door to lean over and pick up a single dark red rose. The skin between her shoulder blades tingled and the hair on her neck rose. She turned to survey the garden behind her. The path was empty. She could see all the way to the edge of the main house, but there were many places she couldn’t see. Buildings and hedges and vines, trees and bushes and deep dark shadows—all of those things were blanketed in midnight mystery.
The rose was different than the dried cherry blossoms. It felt more like a gift than a warning. The garden was filled with roses. She remembered the rose centerpiece in the black-and-white photograph of Turov and his parents. His mother had loved to garden and grow—grapevines and roses.
In the moonlight, the rose in her hands took on the same gray color as the roses in the photograph that had moldered long ago.
Who had opened the gate? Who had left the rose?
* * *
Often, particularly after bloody nights, he made his way to his mother’s study. He wasn’t immortal. He could bleed. He could die. But those he’d loved had been nothing but ash for years. How many times had he seen his mother serve tea from the prized firebird service she’d brought with her from Russia? Yet all of those days had been the blink of an eye. Beneath glass, the vintage set was cold. He hadn’t preserved the warm memories as easily as he’d preserved the gilded porcelain.
He sat in his father’s chair and paged through the fairy tale book. The language and art on its pages soothed him. The pages had remained more vibrant and alive with memories than the tea set.
His mother had always loved the firebird tale, but they had been poor. Peasants. It was after he made his bargain with the daemon when he returned from the Order that he had changed their lives. He had refused to speak about his experience. His injuries healed. His scars were noted with stoic, if concerned, silence. It had been a blessing to be able to provide them with a luxurious life while he lived with the curse of Brimstone in his blood. The Revolution had driven them to America, which had been another blessing in disguise. It had distanced his family from his far more dangerous business of hunting the Order while giving them the vineyards to focus on instead.
His mother had been too observant. She’d known he was somehow not his own man. That’s when her fascination with her favorite fairy tale had grown. She’d filled his home with images of the firebird and a plethora of empty, gilded cages.
She had hated his continued imprisonment even after he’d escaped the Order, but she had loved him all the same.
He missed the family that had loved him before the Brimstone and accepted him after. But he was also conscious of the allure of Victoria. She could never love him, but she was drawn to his Brimstone rather than repelled by it.
See me.
Know me.
It burned him with possibility more than the Brimstone burned.
He paged through the beloved book, but as he did something niggled at the edges of his perception. Time gave a person heightened senses. Like time-lapse photography, a millimeter of movement in a room you’d visited every day for fifty years stood out like a scream. On the shelf, he saw the wooden box his mother had owned before he’d been taken by the Order. She’d made her own wine even then. He remembered the flasks of simple red so unlike the sophisticated pinot noir Nightingale created now. The box was simple. His father had carved it from a dead walnut tree. It was no treasure for a burglar to disturb and yet someone had disturbed it.
Only a nearly immortal person would have noticed the difference in its placement after seeing it one way for so many years and then seeing it tilted ever so slightly another.
He placed the book back on the table and stood. Even before he approached the box and picked it up, he knew what he would find. His mother’s firebird keys were gone. And he knew the beautiful burglar who had taken them.
Victoria had a mission. And now she had discovered the tools she would need to fulfill it. He held the empty box for a while trying to recall the way it had looked in his mother’s hands. It was a distant memory. Hazy and indistinct. He visited the room the way one might visit a cemetery. To pay his respects. To grieve. His mourning had been disturbed by a nightingale who had forgotten how to sing.
He could show her how. He could feel the inspiration he could provide burning in his veins. But he hadn’t been seeking justice for so long that he’d forgotten the lesson of the wildflowers. Burning and burning until they were nothing but ash in the sun.