Cast in Balefire: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Mage Craft Series Book 4)

by SM Reine

  Marion.

  That name came from the god, and Konig couldn’t describe how he heard it. He felt it.

  Seth bowed, and he kissed Marion as she slept. Color returned to her cheeks.

  Everybody saw it. Every single pathetic little demon, every blasted sidhe in Konig’s court, everyone. That included Hooch and Nikki, who had only come because they believed Konig when he said his love with Marion was true.

  They all saw Marion kissed by her god.

  “No,” Konig tried to snarl.

  Seth Wilder’s voice responded from oblivion.

  Konig.

  There was the sound of death in his name, and Konig felt as though he’d been stamped with an unknowable date. He was now on borrowed time. His heart could only give a few more finite beats before it would terminate.

  He was marked to die by Death himself.

  In a blink, the dark presence vanished—and he took Marion’s limp body with him.

  23

  Marion returned to consciousness at home. She was sprawled under a steely sky that wept chilly rain onto her face. Mud clung to her hair as she sat up to look around, and even though it dragged at her, there was no comparison to the gravity at the bottom of the Pit of Souls.

  The tangled trees of Vancouver Island haloed her white-roofed mansion. She was sitting in the back, between orchard and vineyards, right where there was the most mud because so little foot traffic passed through that area.

  She was filthy, but alive.

  There was only one way she could have gotten out of the Pit of Souls.

  Marion wobbled as she stood, trying to squeeze the mud out of her hair with some dignity even as she searched for any sign of him.

  He wasn’t there. She’d known he wouldn’t be there. Gods couldn’t substantiate on Earth without help.

  “Wait,” she said, fumbling at the quiver on her belt.

  Marion had packed more than just her mother’s potion bottles on the trip to Dilmun. She’d taken the gris-gris with her as well. She couldn’t put words to the reasoning behind it—she’d just felt like she should.

  What would the Old Marion have wanted to communicate to her through memories?

  What sort of spell could be so important and immense as the one that Marion had drawn?

  She extracted the gris-gris. Even though she had been in Sheol and submerged in the waters of the Pit, the gris-gris was still as bright with magic as it had ever been. Now she knew with utter confidence what the bracelet was meant to do.

  Marion clutched the bracelet in one fist. She activated it with a thread of magic, and the interwoven spells took over from there.

  A man suddenly stood between two apple trees, watching her. He was barely more than shadow in the shape of a human.

  He stepped into the light.

  The gray-tinted sun didn’t fully illuminate his flawless brown skin. He was followed by a shadow all his own. He’d never looked so grim as in that moment, even though he looked otherwise exactly the way that he should have. He wore a black t-shirt and Carhartts in a horrifying disregard for fashion that suited him perfectly.

  “Oh my gods,” she whispered. “Seth.”

  As long as their eyes were connected and her fingers remained tight on the gris-gris, he was solid. He was there, really there, in her garden on Vancouver Island, standing in a misty drizzle that smelled of petrichor and seaweed.

  Marion didn’t know what to do with her hands. She didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t sure she could breathe without hyperventilating.

  He was there.

  The air between them shrank. Marion had no clue who approached who, but where there had been meters of space separating them like a chasm moments earlier, there were now barely millimeters.

  Marion’s fingers trembled as she hovered them over Seth’s collarbone. His t-shirt clung wetly to every valley of his muscles. The rain beaded on his forearms. She could smell gunpowder and leather. There was even body heat radiating into the air.

  “Seth?” Marion asked again.

  His hands encircled her arms. “You’re real,” he said wonderingly, even as her body began to shake. Those were really Seth’s fingers cuffing her biceps.

  You’re real.

  Marion collapsed into him, the gris-gris rattling as she flung her arms around his neck. She could even feel a heart beating against hers. They were on the exact same speedy, jittering rhythm.

  There was stubble scraping along her neck when he buried his face into her shoulder. His shaved-short curls smelled like coconut oil. Worn canvas pressed against her bare legs.

  It was so authentic that Marion wanted to believe every iota of it.

  And yet.

  Even while she clung to him, and he to her, there was another sense missing. Marion couldn’t read anything off of his mind. Their cheeks were pressed together, separating their brains by two plates of bone, and she heard nothing.

  “Tell me that it’s you,” she said, digging her fingernails into his hair, scraping against his scalp. Her eyes were hot, her throat tight.

  “It’s me,” Seth said. “I think it’s me. I don’t feel right.”

  Marion started to release him, but Seth tightened his arms.

  “Wait,” he said.

  It wasn’t just any word. It was a word, and it was spoken throughout the entire garden, making the leaves tremble. An apple snapped off of its stem and bounced off the ground, rolling to Marion’s toes.

  “You don’t have an avatar,” she said. “Do you? This is you, it’s really you.” He was Seth-as-god, not Seth-as-doctor. The gris-gris hadn’t made him into his avatar again.

  “Please don’t let go,” he said. There was incredible depth to his eyes, and none of that had to do with godhood. “If you let go, I don’t know what will happen to me.”

  “I can do that,” Marion said, shoving the gris-gris onto her wrist.

  She could hold on to him. It was easy because she never wanted to release him. Any excuse to feel the solidness of knees bracketing hers, and the warmth of breath along her neck.

  They’d never hugged like this, hanging on for so long. Marion had always been afraid of what would happen. “What happened?” Seth asked without pulling back. “I can’t remember what happened with Arawn in the Autumn Court.” He wasn’t sure what had happened after he’d inconveniently died at her wedding.

  She swallowed hard. “All right. You killed Arawn, though it doesn’t seem to have stuck. Violet is dead, meanwhile, and everything has been a nightmare since the coronation. I just don’t want to think about any of that.”

  “Coronation,” Seth said.

  “Yes, I’m the unseelie queen now,” Marion said.

  And then it sank in. The meaning of Seth’s lifted eyebrows. The loss of intensity in his eyes.

  Coronation.

  “You married Konig,” he said.

  “I had to,” Marion said. “Myrkheimr was collapsing, people were dying—”

  “You’re married to Konig.” He released her, as though he needed space between them. “He beat the shit out of you.”

  “You were gone, Seth. But you’re back now. You’re back and—”

  “And you’re married.”

  “But you’re back,” Marion said. “You’ll be able to help me put the Middle Worlds to rights. You can fix everything like—like that.” She snapped her fingers to illustrate omnipotent will. “You can shove all of my enemies out of the Wilds—we’re fighting the Summer Court, you see—and then you can—”

  “I can’t,” Seth said.

  “Of course you can. You’re God.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. I can’t fix everything with a thought—there are rules.”

  “What rules? The rules that the gods, including yourself, have established for the universe?” Marion asked.

  “Do you want to piss off Elise and James?” Seth asked.

  “Maybe I do. I’m surprised that you don’t.”

  “It’s not about what I want,�
� he said in a low voice that rolled all through the orchard. “Elise has declared that gods need avatars if they want to interfere in mortal affairs. I’m not an avatar right now. I could change everything via omnipotent will, but it’d piss Elise off, and she might straight up pulverize you.” Seth cupped her cheeks in his hands. “She told me to kill you.”

  Marion felt cold. “What?”

  “It’s something I remembered when I fell into the Pit. She didn’t give me the order to pull the trigger, but she said that when the time came, I’d have to do it.”

  “Is that why she sent me to find you? So you could kill me?” It seemed insane that Marion could have been set upon her journey solely because she was meant to die. After all she’d done with Seth—after all she’d done in Niflheimr—didn’t Marion deserve so much better?

  “We’re just going to take care not to piss Elise off,” Seth said. “But I can help you. I will help you. If your life is in danger, I’m not going to leave you hanging.” He swallowed hard. “Not again.” His hands mounded her hair, pushing it out of her face, lifting it from her neck. It was wet and heavy. He couldn’t seem to stop touching it. “What the hell were you thinking, Marion? Diving into the Pit of Souls after me?”

  “I was pushed.” She tried to swallow but couldn’t. “I’d have jumped sooner if I’d realized I could get to you like that.”

  He searched her eyes. “Why?”

  Why? For the exact same reason that Marion didn’t care that she was sitting in the nasty, germy mud, getting gods only knew what on some very nice clothing.

  “I needed to be with you.” The rest of the words were in there, so big, and so oppressive. They had been haunting her for months. She’d put every effort into trying not to think them, much less speak them, that it hurt when she finally shoved them out. “I love you, Seth.”

  Seth had gone from an enormous, quivering force too big to fit within the walls of Marion’s home to something much smaller, something much more real. If gods struggled to exist on the mortal planes, then the intensity of his physical form must have meant he was focusing very, very hard.

  But he didn’t reply. He didn’t say anything for so long that Marion began contemplating killing herself just to end the pain of waiting.

  His thumb trailed along the line of her jaw. “Marion…”

  The wards pinged.

  That first sweep of magic down her spine wasn’t enough to make her pull back.

  Seth was stroking her hair again.

  Another ping of that magic.

  Marion opened her mind to the wards, and Seth’s appearance flickered as her attention redirected. She connected with the security system. Her magic had sensed activity in the ley line by the nearby shore, and multiple sidhe had materialized.

  It didn’t feel like Konig was among the new arrivals, but it was difficult to tell. Marion’s senses were still dominated by Seth. She feared they might always be, dulling her awareness of anything beyond his buttery leather smells. “They’re looking for me,” she said.

  The force of the sidhe had crossed Marion’s nearer wards. They were almost there.

  “I can take you away,” Seth said. “We’ll go anywhere you want. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I told you, I can’t leave Konig. The kingdoms—”

  “Forget the kingdoms!”

  She wavered. The sidhe were on the premises now, blasting open her front door to storm inside. She could go with them—or stay with Seth.

  She spent too much time thinking.

  Her home shook. The sidhe were about to burst into the orchard. “Hide, Seth. I don’t want them to attack you.”

  The door burst open a moment later.

  A pair of seelie sidhe stepped outside. It was always shocking to see the seelie, since Marion was accustomed to the sensual chill that haloed those of the unseelie courts. The seelie shone as bright as sunrise. “You,” snarled the one on the right.

  He stalked toward Marion, lifting a sword.

  A Raven Knight stepped in between Marion and the seelie.

  Shocked, she backed away from all of them. “What…?”

  She didn’t recognize this Raven Knight. He wore the right uniform, but he wasn’t one of her regular guards. It was a man with brown crew-cut hair, a heavy brow, and a look of pure murder on his face.

  When Marion breathed in the scent of buttery leather and gunpowder, she understood: Seth was hiding in plain sight. Trepidation melted to a profound sense of safety that Marion hadn’t felt in months, maybe ever. She gripped the back of his jacket and she was safe.

  “Who are you?” Seth demanded. “What are you doing here?”

  “Move aside. We’re here to speak with the queen.” The man on the left sheathed his sword. “We come in peace, for the most part.”

  “The Summer Court sends its army to arrest me as a gesture of peace?” Marion asked. The mention of arrest turned Seth’s muscles to steel.

  “We’re not here on behalf of Titania.” The unarmed sidhe stepped forward, hands spread out to show his empty fingers. “We’re here on behalf of Rylie Gresham. She wants to speak with you. Benjamin Wilder is missing, and you were the last person to see him.”

  The seelie sidhe found Marion first, but as Konig often pointed out, all sidhe were family. Once she’d been located by Trevin, it took no time for Heather Cobweb to arrive with Marion’s usual Raven Knights.

  By the time they appeared, Seth had switched to the version of the uniform with the hooded jacket, pulling it over his eyes to disguise his identity. Everyone was too relieved to find their queen safe to notice that their number had increased by one.

  Marion tried to ask Seth how he knew about that variant of the Raven Knights’ uniform. She’d only opened her mouth when he said, “Omnipotence.”

  “Oh, right,” Marion said, feeling stupid. “Whose face are you wearing?”

  “His name is—was—Yasir. This was the first face that occurred to me. He was my best man.” At his wedding to Rylie, she assumed. Seth was a little bit hung up on weddings at the moment.

  He still hadn’t told Marion what he thought about her confession.

  There was no time for that now.

  The sidhe took Marion to Niflheimr as soon as she finished showering and dressing. She arrived in a gown the color of midnight ice. She didn’t shiver once while waiting to be draped in furs, despite the fact that the Winter Court’s wind blew as cold as ever.

  Marion descended the tower to the throne room, where Konig waited with the Alpha.

  Rylie Gresham was drenched in magic the way that old ladies drenched themselves in perfume before church. Her protective wards were strong enough that she neutralized her immediate surroundings. In the inches surrounding Rylie, Marion could see the Winter Court for what it was: towers of bone, frozen and gray, with icicles of blood dangling from rusted blades.

  The Alpha didn’t recognize Seth as Yasir. Even her keen sense of smell didn’t pick up a god in disguise.

  It helped that Rylie was distracted by a conversation. She stood beside Konig, the only person that Marion was less excited to see.

  Konig was no good at shielding his moods. He was the son of the man they called Rage, after all. Even in his stillness, with the blank glare he cast toward Marion, he was dangerous.

  For once, she was grateful to have the handmaidens jump all over her. The chattering tide of them shielded her from view of Konig, and even sheltered her somewhat from the press of his magic as she approached.

  “Are you okay?”

  “You survived!”

  “I heard there were demons everywhere!”

  The only Raven Knight who managed to stay within the handmaidens was Seth. The others fell back. Even hardened warriors were not up to the might of flighty, fashion-obsessed gentry.

  Marion chose not to dismiss her handmaidens. She greeted them with cool smiles and answered their questions as quickly as possible.

  “Yes, I’ve recovered. It wasn’t so scary. I’ve be
en in Sheol before. Of course it hurts—angels in infernal territory cope terribly. I’ve done it before and would do it again, though.” Her eyes flicked toward Seth. He was watching her over the shoulder of a handmaiden.

  Rylie pushed her way through the throng. “We don’t have time for you to catch up with your friends. Where’s Benjamin?” She hadn’t even done her hair and makeup. She must have slapped on the magic and bolted to the Winter Court as soon as she realized Benjamin was missing.

  “We were separated. I left him in safety,” Marion said.

  “I thought I could trust him with you!” Was she beginning to lisp? Rylie had her hands clenched together, but Marion noted a drop of blood slithering down the inside of her wrist. The Alpha werewolf was losing control.

  “Am I his babysitter? He’s an adult, and an adult raised by the likes of you, no less. If Benjamin was lost in the fight, he survived and is looking for his way back now.”

  “He is not an adult,” Rylie said sharply. “He’s only sixteen years old!”

  Marion’s innards curled into a ball of eternal cringe. “Sixteen?” He’d said he was going to college, and he’d been permitted to witness the sidhe orgies. She’d assumed that both meant he was eighteen.

  I kissed a sixteen year old?

  She needed the kind of long, hot shower that was not available in the Winter Court.

  “We’ll search the desert,” Marion said.

  “Konig’s already taken care of that,” Rylie said. “They only found that vampire friend of yours from the summit. She’s already been questioned. She tried to leave with Benjamin but was knocked out somehow.”

  “Charity? You found Charity?” Seth asked.

  Marion shot a horrified look at him. He still looked and sounded like Yasir, but none of her knights should have been familiar with the vampire.

  His posture was identical to the other Raven Knights. The only thing that made him look different was the way that his searing eyes were locked on Marion and Rylie.

  “She’s safe in the palace,” Rylie said slowly. Weird smells or not, she realized something was awry. “Benjamin isn’t. We need to find him.”