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Brass pulled his sword free of its baldric and called upon his angel fire until he was a raging inferno from his toes to the tip of his blade. With a war cry that sent the larks scattering from the trees, he exploded through the small door.
Ivory skin flashed in the firelight. Curves caressed the hourglass of a woman’s naked backside as it rose and sank above a man’s bare body. Chestnut waves fell to the dip in her waist in tantalizing tendrils, gripped at the ends by large meaty hands. Her face, a mix of fairy features and sensuality, was lax with ecstasy before her dark eyes alighted on her intruder with shock.
The man beneath snarled and bucked her off immediately. Then the light of the flames illuminated the rest of him. Sickly pallid skin swirling with gold and teal tattoos stretched across unnatural strength. A hairless scalp, fuming gold eyes, and three gilded bands corded around his neck and biceps marked the male for what he was: an apex demon.
Brass erupted, shooting flames of angel fire into the prone charmer’s chest. The apex, whose body was still sluggish from sex, reacted a breath too slowly. The inferno engulfed him before the first of his cries reached the buckling roof rafters.
“No!” The woman, now covered in a hunter’s cloak, screeched a wail of agony while Brass’s power ignited the small cottage into tinder. Before the roof collapsed, he’d rushed forward, grabbed her about her trim waist, and shuttled her outside as the apex smoldered into ashes along with the structure’s remains.
“You . . .” the woman breathed once Brass unhanded her. “You killed him. He was my sword. My salvation in what was to come. My lover! And you killed him!”
Wind whipped through pine boughs on a furious sea gale and battered Brass’s skin with unrelenting pressure. Trees toppled around him, crashing to the earth with the rage of a thunderclap.
Her lover? An apex? Who was this woman?
Brass had never contemplated love for longer than it took to lace up his boots or sharpen his blades. He was a fallen sentinel angel. Immortal and doomed to wander the mortal realm, hunting down charmers while searching for sparks severed from the Eternal Flame that would one day return him to the Empyrean. What use had he for such an emotion? Certainly, not the kind that evoked such torment that wailed forth from the woman before him.
A woman who clearly spoke of madness.
“How is this possible?” he cried. “Who are you?”
A frightening cackle rent the night sky, infusing the crisp air around him with shards of ice that pricked his skin and tore at his lungs. Wrath stretched her features into savage snarls. “May you forever know my name, sentinel, for it will haunt you all your days. I am Ragana, goddess of death and witches.”
A . . . goddess?
Brass sent bolts of flames at her from every angle, but they no more scorched her skin than they heated the winter’s air around her.
Then she was flying, her pale toes levitating above the earth, while that crippling chill burrowed farther under his skin. She stretched her arms wide as if in offering or bestowing an omen. “Hear me, sentinel! You have taken from me, and so I shall take from you. Burn! For two thousand winters, you will burn with your fond fury, until it claims what is left of your humanity. Hear me! Hear me!”
Brass shuddered awake with Ragana’s tormenting cackle still resounding in his mind. Sweat dampened his chest and soaked through the sheets beneath his thighs.
Then came the pain.
Blinding agony contorted his muscles, anointing them with a new master. When he levered out of bed, he didn’t recognize the man in the mirror who stared back at him. Teeth bared. Eyes wild. Nostrils flared like a bull eyeing down a matador.
No . . .
The nightmare that plagued him in sleep for two thousand years had gotten its act together and finally decided to fuck him over in the land of the living. Looking for something, anything, to fight off the rage curling up his spine, he reached for his nightstand. Not the lamp on top of the nightstand but the solid piece of mahogany furniture itself. With one hand, he lifted the thing and hurled it at the mirror. The glass practically atomized on contact.
The seal had officially broken.
The oak armoire was next, its perfectly crafted doors turned into little more than driftwood. The suite of rooms became a den of destruction as he fired his fist into anything smart enough to splinter into pieces at the sight of him.
“More,” he roared, twitching his head from side to side. “More!”
A muffled murmur pressed against his senses with frantic insistence. Something soothing, familiar, a sound that caressed his temples with tenderness and evaporated the red haze painting his surroundings.
“Brass . . .”
The dulcet lullaby of a woman’s voice, this one a sweet serenade to the harpy’s cackle, pulled him back from the tantalizing flames.
“Brass!”
Molly.
Her warm hands grabbed his face and yanked him toward her. The instant she touched him, rage fled the scene, but oh, it didn’t go quietly. This time, his mind’s captor snaked a curved talon along the edges of his soul, whispering promises of mine and soon.
Brass collapsed onto the bed, sweat coating his skin and blood funneling to far too many parts of him all at once. As if on cue, his suite’s door slammed open to allow entry to three very bloodthirsty armed motherfuckers.
