by SM Reine
He touched her hand. “Ask you what, princess?”
“Ask me to marry you.”
Konig’s eyes widened. “You were right when you said it shouldn’t be like that. When we marry, we should do it for love.”
Seth’s expression in the Dead Forest swam to the forefront of Marion’s mind.
Chemistry, he had said.
There was chemistry between them.
But this? This was so much more than whatever she felt for Seth.
“This is about love,” Marion said. “Love for the people we can save by going over Leliel’s head and making a real, proper alliance with the angels.”
“Princess…” Konig’s Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed hard. “I wish I had a ring, or—it will just have to be like this, won’t it? Marion Garin, my princess…will you marry me?”
She clutched Konig’s hand, standing among the dead with their blood on her fingers.
She looked at poor little Ymir, alone again in her shattered palace.
And Marion said what she should have said long before.
“Yes.”
* * *
Seth appeared on Earth.
When he’d fled from Marion’s bedroom in the Winter Court, he hadn’t been aiming for anywhere in particular. His only thought had been to get away.
He’d gotten away. So far away that he found himself in desert that was unmistakably Nevadan, most likely outside of Las Vegas, and distant enough that the city’s lights barely lightened the horizon. He was kneeling on packed desert soil and surrounded by sagebrush.
Seth was also bleeding.
“Oh shit,” he groaned, clutching at his stomach.
The bite wounds that the Hounds had inflicted upon him had hurt again. It turned out that he wasn’t immune to pain after all—as long as the pain was the sort that came from one’s intestines flopping out of the abdominal cavity.
He clumsily tried to stuff everything back where it belonged, but it was like trying to pile spaghetti noodles into fishnet. It all kept flopping out again.
I should be dead.
People didn’t survive these kinds of wounds. Newborns could live through something similar. It was called gastroschisis, when they were born with their internal organs bulging through the navel, and was best resolved by covering the intestines until they naturally reduced into the stomach cavity. But adults, no. Never adults. Not when everything was perforated and dribbling onto the desert.
Seth wasn’t exactly an ordinary adult, though.
The night weighed heavily on him as he wrapped his arms around his body. Large intestine slithered through his fingers like giant earthworms. The warm desert air stung inside of him, biting at places that never should have been exposed, even as the moon bore upon his flesh.
He could still taste Mnemosyne on his tongue, lingering underneath the flavor of Marion’s blood.
That was the worst of it. The fact that he had bowed his head to Marion’s throat and drank from her when she was most vulnerable.
She would never forgive him.
Hell, Seth would never forgive himself.
The more that he struggled against himself, the more wounded he seemed to become. Despite his lucidity, he was still distinctly dying. The skin was peeling away. Blood was gushing out of him.
He pressed a hand to his chest.
His heart wasn’t beating.
“I can’t,” he whispered. He wasn’t sure how that sentence was supposed to end, but those two words summed up all of his feelings about the situation.
I can’t be alive right now.
I can’t be what Marion thinks I am.
I can’t be a god.
Headlights fell on him, so bright that they blinded. He flung a bloody arm in front of his eyes to shield them.
For a wild instant, he thought that it was the Office of Preternatural Affairs seeking retribution for his attack on their detention center. Las Vegas wasn’t all that far from their facility in the Mojave. There were surely security cameras that had caught sight of his face.
Then the off-road vehicle’s lights angled away, allowing Seth to see that it was covered in leopard print. That wasn’t the OPA’s style.
A door on the side of the ATV opened and shut again. Sagebrush rustled.
Seth fumbled to draw a gun, but his underarm holster had been destroyed by the Hounds, and the Beretta was gone. He was still patting his body in search of a weapon when a woman stepped into the beams of light.
It was a stocky, square-faced woman with spiky hair and stone gauntlets. She was checking the time on her phone.
“Finally,” Dana McIntyre said, shoving her cell into her back pocket. “What took you so long?”
Seth gaped at her. “I was—I mean—you know I had been in Sheol. How did you find me?”
“I was told where you'd show up."
"By who?" he asked.
Dana didn't answer the question.
She didn't need to. Seth already knew.
"I have two things to say to you. First thing: you better have brought my map back like you promised. Second thing: Elise says that she hopes you’re done being a little bitch because it’s time for you to go back to the garden. She misses your punk ass. And it’s time for you to be God again.”
* * *
Marion has agreed to marriage in order further her political goals. But her sacrifice isn't enough to make the new alliance go smoothly. Between Konig's betrayal and a gaean revolt, Marion will be lucky to escape with her life intact, much less save the ethereal species from extermination.
Marion’s story continues in Cast in Faefire.
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