him to his feet.
“It’s past time. The Council grows impatient. Your father should have done this well before now,” the old man had growled.
He’d had a booming voice up until the very end, when its deep resonance had morphed into high-pitched screams.
He’d done his best to keep up. His father had always warned him not to anger Thomas Severne. With his bushy brows and wild hair over ruddy cheeks, the old man had featured in many of John Severne’s nightmares even before that night.
More than once, in fevered dreams, his grandfather had picked him up and tossed him into a roaring fire.
John didn’t dare cry even when his knees bled. He didn’t dare protest even when his elbow popped out of joint from a jerk too hard and sudden to anticipate. Agony flared, but he didn’t cry out loud. Instead, he hurried as fast as he could, all the way down to where his father had always forbidden him to go.
The secret catacombs beneath l’Opéra Severne.
These dark, endless caves were filled with chill shadows his father warned him might not be as harmless as they should have been.
The giant door protested when Thomas Severne pushed it inward and open.
John had mindlessly held back. His instinct to fear the catacombs was greater than the order always to obey his grandfather when he couldn’t avoid him.
Thomas Severne jerked even harder on his arm. The dislocated joint screamed. He bit through his lip to keep from crying out at the pain. He stumbled after his grandfather, knowing he was in great danger, and his father couldn’t save him.
“It’s a good thing your mother is dead, John,” his father always said. “She would weep to see what has become of us.”
But John prayed for the angel of his mother to save him from his grandfather that night. They’d practically run through the catacombs to answer the Council’s call.
“You will serve them, as your father serves them and as I have served them. It is the price we must pay for our success and longevity,” Thomas Severne said.
His grandfather’s shadow was thrown crazily onto the walls by the lantern he’d taken up in his other hand.
John thought his legs would give out before they reached their destination. He’d thought he would pass out from the pain. He knew his grandfather would continue to drag him on the hard, uneven ground of the catacomb’s floor. He’d run his first marathon that night, his legs pumping, his scuffed boots flying. His knees would hurt worse if he didn’t stay on his feet. His arm might actually be ripped from his body. He focused on those two horrors rather than shadows and his grandfather’s crazed urgency.
Finally Thomas Severne stopped in front of what John thought at first was a door as black as pitch. Only there was no door. Instead, there was only an opening made of flat, solid darkness. He never would have tried to walk through it if his grandfather hadn’t tugged him roughly into the black.
But it was the pause before the tug that made his stomach fall away. This was the first time he’d seen his terrifying grandfather afraid. Thomas Severne squared his shoulders and took a deep breath. His fingers tightened around John’s fingers.
Then they stepped through the doorway.
His arm was a white-hot agony most adults couldn’t have endured.
His knees bled.
But in those moments, as he passed through the doorway with his grandfather, every cell in his body screamed in pain.
They came out on the other side, into a high-ceilinged chamber that had no end to his child’s eyes. His grandfather pulled him forward to a long pathway that stretched far out of sight between two rows of stadium seating filled to capacity with a silent, faceless crowd. John felt the weight of thousands of eyes. His grandfather ignored them. He pulled the tiny child at his side along.
But they walked beneath those stares. Calm and slow. With only his grandfather’s tight grip to show that the calm was a lie.
Thomas Severne was still afraid.
To John, the dais they finally reached with its massive table was made for giants. But the men who sat along its intimidating length were normal-sized.
They spoke.
His grandfather replied.
And then he was grabbed under his armpits by Thomas Severne and lifted high off the ground. He cried out at last. The move cruelly wrenched his arm, and it was almost a relief to shout. His grandfather didn’t care. The man at the head of the table came to take him. As he was lifted even higher, he saw the bronzed wings hanging on the wall above the Council.
He’d thought of his mother and of angels, but not for long.
The other men at the table rose and came to where their leader held him. They wore plain black clothes, but when they rolled up their sleeves and drew blades across their wrists, their blood was brilliant flame.
He screamed and screamed.
The Brimstone entered him though every opening in his skin. His pores. His nose. His mouth. That moment supplanted his nightmare of being thrown into fire.
He choked on the hot coals of his breath turned to embers.
That’s when he knew the men were not men. As he choked, he heard Thomas Severne laugh.
His father had wept when he’d come home. But his training had begun. Grim came soon after, a dark gift that nonetheless soothed his pain.
Levi Severne hadn’t saved him. But he’d tried. Where Levi had failed, John was determined to succeed.
* * *
His grandfather might have deserved to be completely consumed by Brimstone’s fire, but his father didn’t deserve the torture that lurked, waiting to claim him if his son failed to fulfill the contract before he died.
He wasn’t sure how much time he had. His grandfather had signed his deadly deal just after the Revolutionary War. Levi Severne was only five at the time. Such a small boy. Innocent. But condemned by his father’s greed. His mind had started to fail when he reached two hundred twenty-five years old. The Brimstone prolonged their lives, but it didn’t hold off the price of age forever.
Severne clenched his fists against the damnation looming so close to his father. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and Levi Severne had called for his nurse in a small voice that seemed to come from the boy he’d been so very long ago.
He’d done his part. He’d hunted daemons for decades. He’d taught his son how to fight. He’d shown him how to handle the terrible burn of Brimstone in his blood. He’d taught him to look away from the walls of l’Opéra Severne as the burden of years and souls began to weigh him down.
He’d tried to teach him how to hope. Levi had always been an optimist. He’d met and married a beautiful Southern belle, thinking he’d be free from the contract before they had a child.
He’d been wrong.
She’d died in
