Cast in Angelfire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 1)

by SM Reine

  She flipped it open and searched for Seth Wilder’s name. He was all over the early chapters. Rylie introduced Seth Wilder as the brother of the pack’s Alpha male—a human man who helped run the pack in its early days. Seth Wilder was described as compassionate, kind, and intelligent.

  She didn’t immediately see any clues as to how such a man might be able to help Marion get her memory back, but it did say that he’d lived at the shapeshifter sanctuary at some point. A map in the appendix showed that the sanctuary was in a range called the Appalachian Mountains.

  Marion needed to buy the book. Luke would understand if she used his money for that.

  She flipped to the first page as she wandered to the cashier, drinking in the foreword, which had been written by the current Secretary of the Office of Preternatural Affairs. Fritz Friederling’s writing style was clipped, unsentimental. He didn’t mention Seth Wilder. He did, however, say that Rylie Gresham was the single most important preternatural to have ever been born.

  “I don’t serve your type.”

  Marion’s gaze snapped up to the woman at the cash register. “Pardon me?”

  “We don’t deal with your kind of ‘people’ in these parts,” the bookseller said. She jerked a thumb toward the paper sign that said “We Report Preternaturals.” The confusing words took on menacing connotations in light of the clerk’s tone.

  Marion’s cheeks went hot. “I would like to buy this book.” It came out in French because she was so flustered. It took effort for her to remember how to say it in English. “Please, I’d like to buy this book.”

  “I don’t want your money.” The bookseller was flushed, too. Her mental signals were blazingly obvious, even easier to read than Nurse Charity Ballard’s attraction to Luke had been. She was offended that a preternatural had wandered into her rural town and dared to patronize the bookstore.

  Marion hugged the book to her chest. “Can I just—”

  “Get out of here!” The woman reached over the counter to wrench the autobiography from her grasp. Marion didn’t let go of it. She wanted that map.

  Rationally, she was aware that there would be other copies of the book at other bookstores. She didn’t need this one. But this appalling red-faced woman was struggling for the autobiography, and Marion’s only instinct was to clutch it closer.

  Then suddenly, the woman let go. She sat back on her stool, staring beyond Marion.

  Luke had appeared behind Marion, glowering with fury. The “We Report Preternaturals” sign was crumpled in his fist. He set it on the counter. Then he set a twenty-dollar bill beside it.

  “Come on, Marion,” he said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and guiding her out the door.

  The cashier was left spluttering behind them.

  The jingling of the bell over the door was much too cheerful for Marion’s mood. Her tremors had nothing to do with the cool forest air.

  “Get in the pickup,” Luke said.

  She stopped to stare at the bookstore again. “What was that in there? What did that sign mean?”

  “It means people are terrible, that’s all. I told you to get in the pickup.”

  She hesitated by the tailgate. “But…”

  “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Marion scrambled into the passenger seat. Luke gunned it out of the parking lot as she buckled. “Are there laws against preternaturals buying from bookstores?”

  “No. And there are no mandatory registration laws for preternaturals anymore, either. That woman belongs in a goddamn museum.” Luke peeled around a corner, and that tiny town in the middle of Oregon nothingness vanished between the trees. His eyes flicked to hers. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, but…confused.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said forcefully. “Read the autobiography. It’ll explain most everything.”

  Marion opened it and she read.

  * * *

  Unfortunately, the autobiography did explain most everything. It explained how most people hadn’t known that demons and angels existed before Genesis. They had been considered mythology and little more.

  Until a demon publicly assassinated a state senator.

  Then the ugly truth had become public: humans weren’t alone in the world, and the things that went bump in the night sometimes weren’t friendly.

  Legislators had missed that “sometimes” part. They had responded to the assassination with hostile legislation involving registration, travel restrictions, and even taking children away from preternatural families. There hadn’t been time for preternaturals to fight back before Genesis birthed a thousand new breeds including urisk, vampires, and sirens.

  Much of the damaging legislation had vanished with the rebirth of the world, as gaeans now matched mundanes in number. As Marion had seen at the bookstore, fear lingered where laws did not.

  She looked up to find that they were still driving through forest, which hadn’t changed since she’d started reading. “The autobiography doesn’t talk much about Genesis itself. What is Genesis?”

  Luke’s eyes flicked her way. He had one hand on the wheel and the opposite arm resting on the pickup’s door, tapping out a rhythm like a heartbeat with his fingertips. “It was the end of the world. Gods got to fighting. The old ones were killed by the new ones and everything got remade. Most people believe that the new gods died during Genesis because they haven’t been seen publicly.”

  She closed the book slowly.

  War between gods? That was a lot to take in.

  “Where were you when Genesis happened?” Marion asked.

  “I was dead.” At her expression, he laughed. “Everyone died in Genesis. There was a thing called the Genesis void—this blackness that devoured the entire world. If you died because the Genesis void took you, then you were reborn. If you died because of something else, like getting run over by a truck in the chaos, you stayed dead.”

  “No wonder people cling to hate and fear. It sounds incredibly traumatic.”

  “It was,” Luke said.

  He was focusing on the road, so she had carte blanche to stare at his sculpted profile. A sly smile crawled over her lips. “How did your girlfriend handle Genesis?”

  “No girlfriend. I’ve been single for years.”

  “I can’t imagine someone like you being alone for long,” she said, wrapping a lock of hair around her forefinger.

  “I wasn’t always single, no. I had a fiancée once.” There was such grief in his voice that Marion immediately felt guilty for probing. She should have realized that “everyone” dying in Genesis might have included people who mattered to Luke.

  “Gods, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s not like that. My ex is alive.” He focused on the road so hard that it was like his gaze could burn a hole through the asphalt to the core of the Earth. “We didn’t work out, though.”

  Marion hesitated before venturing, “Because of something she did?”

  “Someone. My brother.”

  That was almost worse than his ex-fiancée dying.

  It was obvious he still loved her, this woman who had left him for his brother. When he spoke of her, there was so much emotion rippling over his brain that Marion couldn’t help but pick it up. Until that moment, she hadn’t felt much from Luke’s thoughts at all.

  And as Luke said, he’d been single for years. His ex might have moved on, but he hadn’t.

  “Why haven’t you found someone to love again?” Marion asked.

  “Personal choice. I made an oath to myself to find a way to be happy while alone.” His tone was as empty as his brain was wracked with chaotic emotion. “I wouldn’t survive all that crap again.”

  “You shouldn’t be afraid to love again. Heartbreak hurts, but it can’t kill.”

  Annoyance touched Luke’s memories of heartache. “How do you know? Are you getting memories of being a love expert?”

  He had a point, but Marion wasn’t going to let that deter her. “Do you wish you’d ne
ver treated Elena Eiderman, even though your final shared moments were sad?”

  “I’d never regret knowing Mrs. Eiderman.”

  “Of course not. We love, and we lose.” Marion crossed her hands over her chest. “We carry those who have gone within our hearts for the rest of our days. I’m certain of this.”

  “Are you, now?” His tone was still strangely flat.

  “I am,” she said firmly. “You’ll love again, Dr. Lucas Flynn, and it will be all the sweeter when you do because you’ll understand what it’s like to have lost it. Love and loss are two halves of a whole, a critical part of the human experience. Genesis happens to us all on a personal level a thousand times over. I don’t need memory to know that.”

  Luke didn’t respond. Marion felt like she’d overstepped an important boundary, but it was too late to take it back.

  Oh well.

  She plucked Rylie Gresham’s autobiography off of the dashboard. She’d dog-eared the last page where she had seen Seth Wilder’s name, making it easy to return to that position. “She didn’t deserve you anyway,” Marion added. “You’re much too good for a woman who’d leave you for your brother.”

  He made a weird sound. It took a moment to realize he was choking back a chuckle.

  “Well it’s true,” she said defensively.

  “Read your book, Marion.”

  “I could read it aloud, if you like,” she said. “This road is very long. You must be bored.”

  “Thanks but no thanks. I’m not interested in politics.”

  He punched the button for the radio with a knuckle. Sports reporting came on. She tried to immerse herself in the book—not just in Seth Wilder’s story, but in Rylie Gresham’s, and the history of the frightening world she’d woken up in.

  But she never quite dropped her attention from Luke Flynn at her side.

  Even though he didn’t look her way again, she thought that she had his attention, too.

  * * *

  Luke and Marion stopped for the night in Port Angeles, a town on the coast so close to Vancouver Island that its shore was a dim line on the horizon.

  “There aren’t any ferries until morning,” Luke said as he slid into the driver’s seat. He had stepped out to speak to the people working for the ferry line, and despite what had looked like an attempt to bribe them, he’d returned disappointed. “We’ll have to be here at first light if we want to get across.”

  “What if we go back down the Olympic Peninsula and leave from another city with a ferry?” Marion asked.

  “We’ll still have to wait until morning.” He shifted the pickup into gear. “We’re just lucky that Canada’s not a thing anymore.”

  “Canada?”

  “Before Genesis, there was no North American Union. There were multiple countries on this continent, and we’d have both needed a passport to get to Vancouver Island.”

  “Lucky indeed. I don’t have a passport.” Chances weren’t terrible that she did have a passport, but she had no clue where it was. Much like the rest of her life. And her memories. So the existence of a passport was neither here nor there.

  “Neither do I. It wouldn’t have been the first time I jumped a border without the paperwork, but any time I don’t have to skirt the law is a good day.”

  “Canada.” She mused the name. “Why’d it go away with Genesis?”

  “It went away after, actually. A few years after everyone came back, the border’s restrictions started to dissolve. There were too many preternaturals crossing to stop them. North America had already started working in tandem to provide a benefits system for preternaturals, so instead of cracking down on border controls, they removed them.”

  “Interesting solution.”

  “Smart solution,” Luke said. “That’s something Rylie Gresham did, actually. She probably doesn’t talk about it in your copy of the book. That edition was published ages ago.”

  Luke parked around the corner of a nearby hotel as the sun dipped behind the trees. He checked in while Marion read a pamphlet for the ferry over and over again, wishing that she could change the operating hours by force of will.

  She was so close to home—so close to answers. Family was waiting for her, along with her home.

  All she needed was a boat that would take her across the bay.

  Ferries weren’t the only things that could cross water. Marion toyed with the idea of chartering a boat, or even stealing one. She didn’t know how to drive a boat, but she also hadn’t known how to speak English at first. Stubbornness could clearly take her all sorts of interesting places.

  Through the hotel’s window, she could see Luke getting a room in the lobby.

  If she went to her home on Vancouver Island, her time with the doctor would be over.

  She folded the pamphlet in half, creased the seam with her fingernails, and tucked it neatly into the folder where Luke kept his insurance. Moments later, the doctor emerged from the hotel holding a key card. His smile of greeting was heart stopping.

  No, Marion was not interested in hastening her separation from Luke Flynn.

  The hotel room was repulsively musty, though she liked its tall windows overlooking the ocean. There was only a single queen bed, and inspecting the couch didn’t reveal a pullout. “I’ll sleep on the floor,” Luke said, catching her worried frown. “You can catch some rest if you want.”

  The bed held no appeal for her. For the first time since waking in the hospital, her stomach was grumbling. “How do you feel about going to dinner?” Marion asked, picking up a menu by the phone.

  Luke glanced at the ocean through the windows, then whipped the curtains shut. “We can order in if you’re hungry.”

  “I don’t think a town this size has much by way of takeout aside from pizza. I don’t like pizza.”

  He smirked. “When’s the last time you had pizza?”

  “I don’t need to remember disliking pizza to know it’s foul.” Marion rubbed her hands on her jeans, imagining the grease and tomato sauce she would get on her fingers. Disgusting.

  “It’s not safe for us to go to a restaurant,” he said.

  But they had gotten all the way to Port Angeles without being attacked again, leaving behind Nurse Oliver Machado, the urisk, and the attempts on Marion’s life. She was nearly home. And in a few hours, she would part ways with Luke—possibly forever.

  Marion was not going to sleep.

  “I don’t want to sit in this room all evening. We’ll go somewhere they would never expect to find us,” she declared.

  “They’d never expect to find us eating pizza and watching Mythbusters in a Best Western,” Luke said.

  She looped her arm through his and pulled him back toward the door. “Come, Dr. Flynn. We’re somewhere new and I want to explore.”

  “That’s not a good idea.” A note of warning had entered his voice, but it wasn’t without that soft edge of patience he always had while speaking to Marion. He wasn’t telling her no. Just “probably not.” As far as Marion was concerned, anything that wasn’t a firm refusal was as good as cheerful consent.

  “If someone attacks, I’m sure you’ll save my life again,” Marion said with a smile she hoped he’d find charming.

  Charmed or not, he didn’t argue. It was as good a start as any.

  7

  Marion picked a bar in downtown Port Angeles using the map, claiming that any place with “Barnacle” in the name was bound to be disgusting and therefore not a bar where assassins would look for her. She dragged Luke down the hill with all the enthusiasm of a local, though she clearly had no idea where she was going. They kept getting lost.

  Luke didn’t mind. He liked seeing Marion in such a good mood. The crisp ocean air brought color to her cheeks and the wind frothed her hair around her face like sea foam. Her laugh carried for blocks.

  But he couldn’t share in her cheerful mood. He’d felt an uneasy, itching sense of wrongness ever since entering Port Angeles, and he kept having to resist the urge to look be
hind them.

  There was something there—something nearby. He suspected that even if he looked, he wouldn’t see anything.

  Whatever Luke felt wasn’t human.

  He made sure that Marion was on his left side in order to keep his right hand free to draw a gun.

  On one of their random diversions down a side street—which Luke was becoming increasingly suspicious were not random at all—Marion’s eyes suddenly brightened. “Ooh, wait!”

  She ducked into a clothing shop before Luke could stop her. The sign was in French. They were selling wares expensive enough that they didn’t dare put them on mannequins in the windows.

  Luke couldn’t resist the urge to scan the street for attackers any longer. Nobody was looking in their direction. There were certainly no sidhe nearby. Hell, there weren’t even any shifters, and those had become a dime a dozen in the world outside Ransom Falls.

  Port Angeles was a boring, mundane place. Nobody wanted to kill Marion there.

  He followed her inside.

  Marion was whipping clothes off the rack and measuring them visually against her body. A fashionable, rail-thin clerk waited nearby, eager to help her spend money.

  Luke leaned an elbow against the changing stall. “Is this the time for shopping? You can’t even pay for it.”

  “I must have money,” Marion said.

  “Not on you, you don’t.”

  “Well…on you.” She all but batted her eyelashes at him as she snagged a few more hangers off of the rack. She whirled to face the clerk. “I want to try these on. Will you help me?”

  Both women vanished into the changing room.

  While Marion tried on clothing, Luke watched the windows to the street. There was still nothing to see outside and his sense of being watched had faded. If assassins were stalking them, they found the idea of lurking while Marion tried on designer clothes just as boring as Luke did.