Brimstone Seduction by Barbara J. Hancock Page A

decades ago.
    He’d told Katherine that Grim was a portent of ancient pathways. It wasn’t a myth. It was true. Grim was the key he used to traverse the globe on his deadly mission to eradicate the names on the daemon scroll. The hellhound had been a gift to the Severne family when his grandfather had signed a deal in Severne blood with the Council that had overthrown Lucifer.
    He followed Grim easily through the shadows in between this location and that on pathways through the world no one else could see. He’d often come here to run, far from home. This time he realized he’d come too often. Two figures detached themselves from park trails flanking his on either side to veer toward him. Their move was sudden and aggressive and far too coordinated. They were together even though they ran apart. His path would put him between them. Their legs pumped with purpose and a sudden burst of speed unlikely to indicate a casual change of direction.
    They meant to intercept.
    Grim was ahead of him, somewhere in the mist evaporating off the black river. It rolled wetly across the park, thick and hazy, providing enough cover that no one would see what happened when the two approaching runners converged with him.
    He didn’t slow his stride. He didn’t speed up. If he’d wanted to outrun them, he could have. Even drained from a long workout, his Brimstone blood would give him an edge unless... Closer now, he could see their speed was inhuman. Just this side of a blur. He noted that the dark clothes he’d assumed were sweat pants and hoodies were actually combat trousers and hooded snoods he’d seen before, a glint of familiar metal at their necks. They would have crisscrossed daggers at their backs in hidden sheaths close to their bodies.
    Lucifer’s Army.
    Assassins sent to stop him from fulfilling a centuries-old deal with lower-caste daemons that had ripped the greatest of the fallen from his throne. A Council now ruled in Lucifer’s stead. His mighty shorn wings were encased in bronze as a gruesome symbol of fraternity. The Council sought to eradicate all his loyal followers. Severne had stood before them once as a child. He’d never forgotten the burn. It didn’t matter that it had been Severne’s grandfather who had chosen a side in a hellish revolution.
    Now John Severne had to fight.
    When Brimstone-tainted blood met the same, it bubbled and sizzled as if the individual cells fought to occupy the same place. The sound hissed in the air as blood was let on all three sides. John felt the slicing burn of a blade across his shoulder, but the other three blades met daemon flesh as he deflected them back on the creatures that brandished them with well placed blows to their lower arms. One sank deep enough into the sternum of the left daemon that he cried out as all the Brimstone his body contained flared out and up in a column of fire. He was consumed completely until nothing but dissipating smoke remained.
    â€œGood talk,” Severne grunted as he grappled with the remaining assassin.
    Grim was more than a key, more than an omen of crossroads and pathways. He was a guardian. He was death. As John held the wrists of the daemon that struggled to bring two wicked blades with serrated edges down to impale him through the vulnerable flesh at the points of his collarbones, Grim leaped from the mist.
    His great gaping maw closed on the daemon’s throat. The hellhound wasn’t fazed by the inferno of released Brimstone. It barely singed his charcoal fur. John was left with daemon blades and an ancient brooch at his feet. Forged of a metal like iron with a bold, stylized L in its center, the brooch had been what had gleamed at the assassin’s throat. Another lay a few feet away, where his partner had vanished in a flash burn.
    John gathered the brooches and the swords while Grim watched with a curl of stinking smoke rising from his muzzle, joining the morning mist rising to