CHAPTER 1
Interesting. The Holy One and The Poison Devil.
The strange match-up was cause for a hefty vial of curious suspicion. Fate grunted or smirked when it looked Lesion’s way, and now it was smiling. Not at him, but The Holy One, he was sure.
But why such a match? What was fate up to now? First their Eveque finds love, then said love casts some noxious spell on the lot of them, plucking them from peaceful celibacy and planting them into blind marriages with strangers. Lesion was steeped in the process of uncovering what type of lunacy the swamp was entrapped in and realized he was being given an opportunity. Regardless of fate’s intentions, he’d gather as much as he could from The Seer and his Eveque and add it to his findings for an antidote.
What aspect of his expertise did Revelator need was the curious thing. The Seer was the tracker. That he asked him to bring an arsenal of anodynes meant he didn’t intend to sedate her and drag her back, which begged the question, what sort of fuck was he headed to? The kind that allowed him to test the new tricks up his apothecary sleeve, maybe. The ones that required human subjects for testing, something Lesion had a difficult time procuring outside of war.
Fate may not be smiling right at him, but Lesion didn’t mind standing just behind The Seer and catching a ray off its fussy grin.
Lesion put it all aside and packed for the trip. He’d go light but lethal with a dash of humanity for those not requiring eternal sleep in under a minute.
****
The second he realized Cherie was missing, Revelator’s gifts exploded in ways he’d never experienced. The surprise of being able to taste her scent made him forget his gift of touch, costing him precious time. It wasn’t until Bishop agreed to come with him that he remembered his dominant gift and hurried back in the diner where he frisked every person there for clues while Bishop followed him apologies and vague explanations. He approached the last waitress who held up both hands with a worried look as he grabbed her shoulders and froze. Closing his eyes, he realized. “You saw her,” he whispered, focusing harder. “She entered the kitchen and left out the back door.” He moved her aside and followed the path Cherie took. Out back, he searched for more clues, his bones humming with a building chaos.
“Anything?”
He spun to Bishop and shook his head, unable to unhinge his jaw.
“What about the things she touched, her fork, her cup.”
Revelator shoved past him and hurried back to their table. “Don’t touch it!” he yelled at the waitress clearing it. It was the same lady he’d just groped and she again stepped back with her hands up while Bishop thanked her for being so understanding.
Revelator sat in her chair and brought her coffee cup to his mouth and closed his eyes, moving it along his lips. At encountering her taste, his pulse boomed in his head, her essence moving along that miraculous conduit inside him. Panic shot him out of the seat and hurried him out the diner.
“What did you see?” Bishop demanded as he followed him to the truck.
“I saw her intentions,” he said, climbing in and starting the truck. “She’d planned to call her father and use his fucking mercy to determine her next move.” He threw gravel as he headed toward the Dry Dock for Lesion. “If he didn’t show her mercy, then it meant she needed to face her past and quit running.”
“What does that mean?” Bishop wondered, clicking his seat belt in.
“It means she’s going to New Orleans and turning herself in to those demons.”
“Fuck,” Bishop said.
“She’s been a walking guilt-fest from the day we met. How I didn’t see her doing this is what you should be dumbfounded over. She needed mercy one second and punishment the next. But with me she forgot her past long enough to taste mercy and she loved it. And I loved giving it, I loved what I knew, what I sensed, what I saw, what I didn’t see. I lovedher and she…”
Silence hovered in the air like doom. “She loved you,” Bishop finally muttered, making Revelator need to kill something for the beautiful, painful truth.
“She left.” Fresh anger mixed with his panic and the concoction made him want to vomit. “I won’t forgive her for that easily,” he assured, shaking his head.
“You can figure all that out when you get her back.”
“We had a deal and she broke it. I didn’t kill that demon vessel and she agreed to stay. I was going to get to the bottom of her pit of lies and show her the truth. There’s no mess she’s made that God can’t clean up.”
“You can still show her that.”
“And what if she doesn’t want that?” Revelator had to voice the thing fueling his fears.
“When snatching one from the fires, we don’t usually wait for permission.”
Relief hit him and Revelator nodded. “My thoughts exactly. She’s coming whether she wants to or not. If she still wants to leave after that, then I’ll find a safe place she can go and start over.”
The idea that she may not want to stay ate at him but he wouldn’t give it more energy than he already had. She was a smart woman but she was also very confused and hurt and even scared about her past. “Can you check with 8-Bit and let him know to keep digging. I need to know what crimes she’s committed, what the fuck I’m up against.”
“What we’re up against. You’re not alone in this, your problems are the whole Hordes’ problems.”
And he couldn’t thank God enough for that. Revelator had been alone all his life in his conflicts but this one was different. It was more than him, bigger than him, and he’d take every help offered when it came to Cherie. She was a moving target, a shooting star he had to snatch before he lost her to that dark vortex she’d just foolishly dove into.
****
Lesion wasn’t sure how he’d feel about being on a job with the Holy One and The Eveque, and after tossing his things in the back and settling between the two of them, he decided definitely odd. Those men were two opposing properties that worked with a volatile perfection within certain chemical parameters. Lesion felt like he was serving as that parameter.
“What’s the plan?” Lesion asked as the truck sped at an urgent velocity.
“New Orleans,” Revelator muttered. “Thanks for coming on short notice.”
“Can use a break from the swamp air.” The half-truth applied more in the change of scenery for his work, otherwise, the swamp air was his life force. “What’s in New Orleans?”
“Where I think she’s headed. Previous contacts and work. Did Bishop fill you in?”
“I wasn’t sure what you wanted him to know,” Bishop said.
Lesion listened as Revelator informed that they were headed into the devil’s lair to fetch a maiden in distress regardless if said maiden wanted rescuing. As the details came, his mind organized his potions accordingly. Persuasive potions for procuring information, and a concoction for subduing his woman. Then there were his favorites. Paralysis then a very painful entry into eternal rest.
He”d packed more than was needed in case fate decided to get dramatic on him. The Hag ingrained theunexpected throughout his lessons. How does one prepare for the unexpected? By not expecting it, of course. It was a backwards art. Like seeing everything by not looking at anything.
****
A sick dread brought Cherie’s heart to a wild tempo as she waited for Darius in his private room at the top of The Bijou Noir. Why did she go there? What was she expecting to happen? Nothing good would come to her from the likes of Darius.
The permanent lump of grief in her throat made it hard to breathe. Unshed tears filled her eyes as her father’s merciless judgment and biting rejection cut new grooves in her heart.
The door opened and stole her breath. Too late. Everything was too late.
The pain driving a rod of fearlessness through her backbone turned to ash as the man of her nightmares entered like silent death behind her.
Finish it. You have to finish it.
She held her spine straight, flinching at the glide of his cold finger along her cheek. He stopped next to her and she looked up at him through unshed tears.
“My sweet decadent Cherie.”
The icy silk greeting with his ghostly smile made his face haunting. “Darius,” she whispered, following his graceful stride around his boat-sized desk. He hadn’t changed. The gold and scarlet tie with his black suit was a small part of what made him the Creole King. The rest of that reputation was found in the sad remains of his Belle Esclaves De Amor, both living and dead. She’d once been counted among his best and he’d not been happy that she’d left. She wasn’t even sure if he even cared that she killed a customer. Rumor had it she was his favorite but what that meant to a man like him Cherie never wanted to learn. But she was about to.
After he sat at his desk, his dark gaze immediately imprisoned her. “Oh, how I missed you.” He added a tsk with the barest shake of his head, the first hint of his disapproval.
“I’m here to explain.”
A single brow rose but it was all mock.
“The man I killed…he tried to hurt me. I was defending myself.” It was part true. He was a sadist, pushing the boundaries. She hated the man and what he’d stood for and pain in sex was a trigger. “I have…things in my past that resulted in trauma and anytime somebody hurts me, I…”
“Kill them?”
His amused half smile didn’t reach his dark eyes. They weren’t calculating, they were already decided. There was nothing to calculate other than the particulars of what he’d determined, whatever it was.
“I’m here to pay you back what I owe.”
“Such a brave Belle Esclave. I always did like you, Cherie. You knew this, yes?”
She nodded a little, swallowing.
“It broke my heart when you did this,” he added.
His heart was in his pride and pocketbook. She didn’t imagine she’d made him a ton of money, so she must’ve taken a mighty chunk out of his pride. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, able to hold his gaze only because of what she was sorry for. Surely not any pain she’d caused him. At that moment, she allowed it to be for Samuel. She allowed herself to imagine his pain and the tears fell silently without effort. As if her heart had always been his. Her beautiful angel of the bayou that tried so hard to save her.
Darius rose to his feet and came to her. He knelt before her chair, his soft shhhh’s sending shivers of dread along her skin. “Of course I will take you back. Such a risk you have taken Ma Belle Esclave. Returning here so bravely. But you have committed a grave crime. And I cannot let it go unpunished. You know I am a man of fairness. Eye for an eye. But since you are one of my special ones, I will make an exception, yes?”
She forced herself to look at him and nodded. “Whatever you think is just and fair,” she barely whispered, praying the man would have a rare moment of mercy.
She closed her eyes when he took her face in his cold hands, making her shiver. “I think the man you killed suffered a lot of pain. And you should at least repay this, yes?”
Her stomach clenched, making her breaths shallow. She gave the only thing there was to give. “Yes.”
“Do not worry Ma Belle Esclave,” he cooed. “I will raise you to the top again.” He sucked in an excited breath, his dark eyes brightening. “You, Cherie, will become the first Queen of The Dark Den. Reine De L”antre Sombre.”
Darius giggled when she gasped on sheer terror.
“Don’t look so horrified, Ma Belle Esclave. You are stronger than you give yourself credit. All these issues in your past that make you do these terrible things to people will be purged away. You will be free,” he whispered, sliding his thumb over her cheek, smearing the tears. “Pain and suffering will become your second skin. And your sins and fears will all be washed away. You will be… a brand new spotless angel in my courts.”
The final words of her sentencing were given in breathless reverence for all that is evil. The Dark Den. That’s where mercy and forgiveness was taking her. To the ugliest hell where the worst of New Orleans Sadists played. The women he fed to that darkness were eventually spit out amongst the living, broken beyond recognition. The rest were devoured whole, never to be seen again.
Oh God, what have I done?