danger,” he said, so close now that the statue pressed between them was even more useless than before. He didn’t make her put it down. He ignored it. As if he knew she wouldn’t give in to fear. As if he expected her to be braver than that.
She would have to be braver, because the real danger was Severne and her reaction to him, and there didn’t seem to be any escape from that.
“I don’t trust Father Reynard, but I don’t trust daemon manipulations, either,” Kat said. “Did you kill him?”
He paused. Hesitated as if her words had stopped him. Maybe she shouldn’t have spoken her suspicions about him and what he was...but the thought disintegrated when he lifted a hand to touch her face.
“No. He isn’t dead. Only slowed down for awhile,” Severne said. “I’m sorry.”
She let him touch her. She didn’t cringe away. As his warm fingers lightly trailed across her skin, Kat suddenly thought of the graceful but deadly way he’d dealt with Reynard in the alley. He was a daemon. It didn’t matter that he had helped her. She wouldn’t trust him. She hadn’t even fully seen him yet in a night of shadows and flickering light...
She could tell his hair was dark. Not whether it was black or brown. His eyes were dark mysteries. They could be any color. They held all his secrets in depths that appeared onyx in the night.
When he leaned down to press his lips to her temple, then to her cheek, then to trail them along her jawline as if to trace her face in the darkness...she didn’t protest. Was he comforting her? His lips were warmer than they should have been. The heat caused a responsive flush to rise on her skin. Her affinity kept her from reacting the way she ordinarily would if a man she’d just met had been so bold. It was a secret pulse between them, heightening a natural flare of chemistry, drawing them closer, sooner, than it should.
“Don’t be sorry,” Kat said. “I think he can’t be killed. He’s like Death himself, a Grim Reaper I can’t escape.”
He was all relaxed grace, taking the statue and placing it on a nearby table. She was all adrenaline and trembling sighs, but when both hands were free, she kept them at her sides. Not pulling him closer. Not pushing him away. Only refusing to hold on with all her might. He warmed her in ways that went beyond mere physical heat. Her usual affinity was magnified by his touch. It rose up and rushed through her veins almost as heated as Brimstone until she had the crazy urge to surrender to it and press herself closer into his arms. She saw it again in her mind, the way he’d braved Reynard’s deadly blade.
Those images held her still for his kiss.
Or did they? Her body mocked her need for an excuse. This—the heat, the masculine aura drawing her in, the night-cloaked scent that clung to his earthy skin and his hair and clothes—wasn’t he enough?
Right now, he was everything.
Because by then his soft, tracing lips had discovered her mouth in the dark, and a more intimate exploration of it had begun—lips, teeth, tongue. So velvety and alive with tremors and gasps and the sudden moist dip of his tongue.
A hot coil unfurled in her abdomen, her nipples peaked and her knees grew weak.
Then Severne pressed the handle of her cello case into her right hand. Her fingers curled around the indentions they’d made over fifteen years of constant companionship to the leather-bound grip.
“Never trust a daemon bearing gifts, Katherine D’Arcy. There’s always a price to be paid,” he murmured into her hair when she slumped loose-limbed and faint against the firm wall of his body.
“No,” she protested. But it was too late. She’d accepted the cello like a long-lost love. The Order warned against communicating with daemons. Hell was structured around a complex system of negotiating. She could feel daemonic power like static in the air as some unspoken bargain physically materialized around them, beginning with her acceptance of her case from his hand.
He lifted her and the cello easily. He cradled her against his chest, but she couldn’t make her body resist or her hand release the cello. He carried her and the instrument upstairs and placed her beside the boy on the bed with the cello case cool and lifeless on the other side.
Then he made the trade.
He picked up the daemon child.
Kat couldn’t move. He was no longer touching her, but his heat had remained, leaving her lethargic and weak.
Somehow she had agreed without meaning to. The cello for the child. The daemonic bargain held her in place. She couldn’t fight its power.
“Come and play for me in Baton Rouge, Katherine. We have more bargains to make. I can help you find your sister,” John Severne said.
“Never trust a daemon,” Kat promised her pillow. She refused to let her tears fall. Or maybe it was daemon manipulations that suspended each perfect droplet on her lashes as Severne walked away.
He could hear the siren song that sounded when her heart beat, when she inhaled and exhaled. But that wasn’t what called him to her. It was the subtle scent of her, beneath soap, blended with a hint of verbena perfume. Like cotton warmed by the sun, but cooled by the breeze on a spring day, there was a freshness, a goodness to her, untouched by Brimstone.
Untainted.
And she thought he was a daemon.
He settled the boy with the costume matron, Sybil, who had been at l’Opéra Severne almost as long as he had. She’d always appeared as an older woman with that particular blend of sternness and maternal habits that made everyone defer to her in case she should decide to box their ears or swat their behinds. She looked no older than she’d looked the day he’d been ushered into her care when he was about the age of the boy he’d brought from Savannah.
Katherine D’Arcy was wrong.
No surprise that his Brimstone-tainted blood had fooled her. He wasn’t a daemon, but his grandfather had inked a deal with the devil in Severne blood. The Brimstone had come after, scorching their veins with its invasive mark.
He was only an heir to damnation, but Katherine D’Arcy was associated with the Order of Samuel, and in such a woman’s eyes there could be little difference.
Once he’d settled the boy with Sybil, he made his way back to the suite of rooms that made up his apartment several stories below and behind the grand opera stage for which the house was famous. The seemingly endless levels of basement beneath the opera shouldn’t have existed in a city that itself was beneath the flood plain of the mighty Mississippi, but nothing followed natural law here.
The opera house was a universe unto itself, influenced by its damned denizens and masters.
Its gilded mahogany columns and highly polished boards held ground against elaborately carved wainscoting more baroque than anything else you’d find in the river city. The carvings seemed to gambol and change as you passed, often reflecting your own experiences and thoughts back to you as if some long ago sculptor had chiseled out premonitory dreams in a laudanum haze. And all the shadows were draped in heavy layers of black-and-crimson satin and velvet curtains, which in spite of being impeccably maintained
