Brimstone Seduction (21 page)

Chapter 29

T
hey didn't have Grim to guide them. They had to press through fire and smoke. Debris fell before and behind, impeding their progress. Kat cried out several times as blasts of heat hit her face, but her cries were lost in the cacophony of destruction.

“We have to find Eric. We can't abandon him,” Kat shouted. “I won't leave without him.”

“You have to get out now. I'll go back for him,” Severne insisted against her ear so that she could hear above the din.

He loosened his arms and let her slide down his body to find her feet. They were in the original corridor she had traversed when she'd first come to Severne. He had carried her far enough for her to make it out of the building alone. She nodded. She agreed. But when he no longer held her, she was suddenly bereft. It would be better to burn together than die apart.

Severne looked at her for as long as he dared before he leaned to touch his mouth to hers. It was a desperate press of their ash-coated lips, but she ignored the ash and the smoke. All that mattered was feeling the connection they shared, perhaps for the last time. She let him go when he pulled away. He ran back into the heart of the burning building to search for Eric before he was crushed beneath its collapse. She'd wanted the kiss to go on forever in case they had no chance for future kisses, but there was no time to call him back.

He was gone.

And her heart was still beating.

Fear almost made it impossible for her to move, but she had to make it to the exit in case there was any chance that they might all make it out alive.

Before she could continue to make her way to safety, a dark figure stepped from the roiling smoke, directly blocking her escape.

No.

Not now.

She couldn't call Grim from the baby's side. Severne had to find Eric before it was too late. Somewhere deep within l'Opéra Severne, her precious cello burned. She had no defense left against the evil monk who approached through the fog of chaos.

“Katarina, how I have missed you. You don't look well. These last days have fatigued you. Consorting with the devil is never advisable. Bad for your health. There's always that pesky possibility of your blood turning to ash,” Reynard quipped.

Kat could feel the tremendous heat at her back. But she couldn't escape it by running into Reynard's grasp. She wouldn't. She refused. Better to burn.

“He's gone back for the child? You must take me to them. Allow me to finish what you so rudely interrupted before,” Reynard said. He looked in the direction Severne had disappeared. He took several steps toward the damned man she loved and the poor daemon child she'd tried to save. “Once we've dispatched the daemon, you and I will return to the enclave to ensure that Samuel's gift is passed to the next generation.”

The inference in his words made her stomach twist with nausea. Her mother had been forced to conceive and bear Katherine and Victoria, but at least her husband had been a young man who had cared for his wife in the end. Reynard was a monster. The idea of him as her husband sickened her to the core. She would never be his Katarina.

“How about one last game of hide-and-seek instead?” Kat muttered. She backed away from Reynard. Her movement caught his attention. He turned and followed.

Her only hope to help Severne and Eric was to lead her lifelong tormentor away from where they might be. Into the fire. Into the flames. What she'd most wanted her whole life was to escape Reynard, but now it was up to her to use his habitual dogging of her footsteps against him.

“Catch me. Catch me if you can,” she said.

He actually laughed. A sound she remembered from her nightmares. She didn't pause even when crashing timbers drowned out the sound.

Her mind quickly cataloged all the places she'd been in l'Opéra Severne. She couldn't risk going back down to the catacombs alone. She might get lost. She settled on the one other place she could think of that might provide the perfect place to lead Reynard on a fruitless chase.

The props warehouse.

She raced for the stairs and was relieved to find them intact.

Fire was a threat, coming close and closer, and smoke hung in the atmosphere like tendrils of fog above a dismal swamp. Ribbons of gray crept in sparkling with dust motes in the flickering light. The ribbons penetrated, curling up into all the lofted naves and nooks of the opera house the human eye could hardly see.

She had one opportunity to lead Reynard away from where she thought Eric might be. But that didn't mean she wanted to be found by the murderous stalker she could never seem to escape. She hoped to avoid Reynard among the funhouse jumble of garish props.

Kat had left him behind, but she could hear his whistle in the distance.

He was a madman. How could he whistle a jaunty tune while the rest of the opera house was in a tumult of fear and evacuation? How could his unhurried footsteps echo behind her on the wrought iron spiral stairs as if he was only on a boring tour while a mother fled with her newborn child and Severne searched for Eric in the flames?

This time she hurried into the warehouse not even bothering to try to silence the massive doors. The rows of vintage costumes hung on their racks, indifferent to the fire that would soon consume them and uncaring of Kat's fate. They were ghostly vestiges of the opera house's past, forgotten and still while the living rushed for their lives several floors above.

Last time she'd been here, she'd laughed silently to herself because the dust motes in the ghost light's glow had been like the caterpillar's smoke from
Alice in Wonderland
. Now, she cringed at her earlier fancy.

Severne's fairy-tale memories would burn away.

She drew up short as she realized her mistake. Her rush to the warehouse had been instinctive, like a wild animal searching for a hideaway that had offered it safety before. But there was no place safe to hide from Reynard. There never had been.

She was stuck with her choice now, a fairy tale that would become a nightmare when Reynard invaded it.

Kat plunged into the costume racks in order to get quickly to where the props loomed on the other side. Mothball-scented cloth of every kind clung to her body as if to prevent her passage. Scratchy starched lace and moldering velvet, musty furs and the cold brush of buttons, feathers from ostriches so long dead the quills were yellowed and cracked—Kat pushed through them all. She couldn't prevent the overburdened rack from shaking on the chains that suspended it from the vaulted ceiling.

Reynard would see where she'd passed.

There was no other way.

The obsessed monk was behind her. She could still hear his whistle in the distance even above the shuffle of movement she assumed was the evacuation.

She finally extricated herself from the costumes and came out on the other side where the strange arrangement of theater artifacts waited, a forgotten city of backdrops and scaffolding, statuary and artificial trees.

The huge head of Mephistopheles dominated the tableau. The hulking face of the figure used in the final act of
Faust
tilted to one side of the warehouse like a reclining evil emperor. The encroaching smoke swirled around the ram's horns and curled out from the holes of its empty eyes where red lights would gleam during the show.

Kat avoided the face, choosing instead to crouch behind a table of goblets, each blackened by the pyrotechnics used to make them flame when it was their turn to be a part of the show. The chorus always coughed and complained at the goblets' sulfur smell. It seemed a foreshadowing now of the fire that raged upstairs.

How many times had
Faust
been performed at l'Opéra Severne? It was the company's specialty. Fitting, but it made Kat shudder to think how the opera mirrored Severne's life, a constant reminder of the nothingness that threatened to consume his father and him when it was time.

Now it was Kat's turn to feel haunted and hounded by the devil. Reynard had manipulated them for his dark purpose their whole lives.

She had to stay lost while Eric was found. She believed in Severne. It was new, a blossoming in her chest she'd never felt before. He'd given Grim as a guardian to Michael. That heroic sacrifice stole her breath. No matter what happened to her tonight, that part of the fairy tale was real.

Or maybe that was the daemon mark expanding in her chest, crowding out the oxygen and her life.

Her hand was crippled and curled against her side, the opera house was on fire, Eric was missing and her greatest enemy stalked her in creepy shadows, but she hoped. She avoided Reynard to buy time for Severne, her sister and Eric, but she didn't hide.

She hoped.

Her heart rushed with the thrill of it.

But she was also afraid.

Some props around her were damaged. Ragged canvas fluttered in unseen wafts of air that might have been caused by the doors of the warehouse opening and closing when Reynard came inside. The movement drew Kat's eye. She tried not to see Reynard with every harmless shift of smoke or paper. She failed. She saw him everywhere. There, only it wasn't his robe but a playbill that drifted down from some disturbed place she couldn't quite see. Had Reynard brushed against it so that it fell? There, only it wasn't his steps—it was a settling of the rafters far above as the opera house began to lose its structural integrity to flame.

Kat could draw Reynard's attention for only so long before she condemned herself to burn with him.

“You have run down the rabbit hole, Katarina. Such a warren you've discovered for yourself. Has your daemon-loving sister left you to burn? And what of your lover? Where is he while you cower here with me?” Reynard called. His voice echoed. Kat couldn't see the monk himself. “Oh, yes, I know you've been tempted by darkness. You'll be punished for that, but don't worry. In the end, your blood is too valuable to waste.”

The props created the perfect place for both of them to remain unseen if they wished.

Her gaze was drawn again and again to the wide-open grin of Mephistopheles's gaping mouth. She could hear the same grin in Reynard's voice.

“My patience grows thin. As thin as the air in this place. Do you feel it? The way the oxygen leaves us? The time has come for you to leave with me and quit your games,” Reynard said. “You have a duty to perform, as do I.”

He began to hum. Music from Gounod's
Faust
. No doubt inspired by his surroundings. The hum came and went—farther, then closer—as he searched for her. And still she couldn't see him.

Had Severne found Eric? Had her sister and the baby escaped with Grim?

“Your mother tried to stand against me, you know. She died for her treachery. Her blood still colors my hungry blade. Fitting that it should join with that of the daemons I've sent back to hell,” Reynard said.

Kat clenched her fists. She had known. Her heart had known even before she'd found her mother's letters. She'd always feared Reynard for good reason. Her mother had died trying to save the daemon she'd loved.

Victoria hadn't been able to save the father of her baby. Their mother had failed to save them. Kat wondered if her mother's daemon love was trapped in the walls of l'Opéra Severne. All because of Reynard. Poor baby Michael. He would never know his father.

Kat rose and stepped from behind the prop's table. Smoke rolled around her ankles. The air was thicker. Reynard had been right. There wasn't much time. Her movement wasn't immediately obvious to the stalker who hunted her. She waited in the open, unhidden, for Reynard to find her.

Severne, Eric, her sister and Michael. Even Sybil. They would all live. It was time for Reynard to be stopped. It didn't matter if she had to die to ensure it.

“You are very like her. More like her than your father. He was a weak man. Never able to control the wife he'd been given. I think he might have loved her in the end. He refused to kill her after she'd given birth to more biddable daemon detectors. He rebelled against the Order. Even suggested we not hunt and kill the daemon she loved,” Reynard scoffed. “So he was punished, of course. He died from the lashing we gave him. Weak to the end. And the woman he'd tried to help didn't even mourn his death.”

Kat knew he was wrong. Her mother had been in mourning her whole life. She'd only expressed it in song.

So he was responsible for her mother's death and her father's.

And he might kill her after she'd given him children to pass on Samuel's gift, but not before she tried to end his madness for good.

“My affinity is the greatest in my family. Victoria and my mother knew it. That's why we separated often. I was the one who was most often drawn to daemons,” Kat said. Her eyes strained to find her tormentor in the darkness. His disembodied voice was impossible to track, but she looked at Mephistopheles again and again as he spoke.

“You betrayed them. It was you I was most often able to track. You are quite the magnet. I can attest to that,” Reynard said.

When he stepped from the mouth of the devil in a revelation of parting smoke, she felt no surprise. His serrated blade was drawn. He held it up as if prepared to attack. Perhaps he wasn't as smoothly confident as he had seemed.

“Come with me before the whole building is engulfed. Stay with me. Be my willing instrument and my wife and I'll let your sister remain free,” Reynard said.

Another bargain.

One that would have been tempting if it didn't include being in a partnership with her parents' murderer or allowing him to come anywhere near her.

“We should go now,” Kat temporized.

She knew what she had to do. He approached her with his knife still drawn. She tried not to look at its stained blade.

“Then you agree to come with me?” he asked.

Kat had learned to be cautious in her dealings with the devil. Just because Reynard was a human didn't make the moment less treacherous. She chose her words carefully.