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

by SM Reine

  Everyone else had already gone, including Charity, leaving Seth alone in the kitchen. The house stood empty. There were no demons, stag shifters, witches, vampires, or revenants left to bully into obedience, which would have been a marvelous distraction.

  Marion settled for watching the rain intensifying from the living-room window. To her left, there was a fireplace adorned by another of those repulsive animal-skin rugs. Those would need to go once the house became hers. Or, at the very least, they would need to get sterilized.

  One thing that didn’t need to change was the kitchen to her right. It was smaller than Marion’s Vancouver Island kitchen, which had made it initially appear inadequate. But the longer she looked at it, the more she realized how elegant its design was for cooking and entertaining. It was leanly efficient with less waste. Not very Marion-like, but perhaps her tastes would change.

  Seth was still in the kitchen. He was another feature that would not need to change about the house. He was far from the solidifying effect of Marion’s gris-gris, but he looked distinctly human as he searched the cabinets.

  The rain drumming against the windows was quieter in the kitchen. Marion watched Seth from the doorway, stomach twisting. He was aware of her presence. She could tell because he was looking at her even as he searched—the many-faces-of-God kind of thing. The most unsettling part about Seth’s ephemeral form was how Marion didn’t find it unsettling at all.

  Other things were bothering her.

  There were so many questions. So many.

  She settled for the easiest question. “What happened between you and Lucifer?”

  “Everyone wants something,” Seth said. “I looked to see what it was. It will happen. I don’t have to change anything to make it happen.”

  She sat down at the kitchen island. “But what was it?”

  “Marion,” he said. Just her name. Marion. Seth had a way of setting boundaries without making her feel small about it. He would not discuss the private matters of anyone, even a vampire, and even with Marion.

  She used to like when he did that. Now it felt like being trapped within one more box, even if it was the nicest box that she’d ever met. “My handmaidens would tell me. They give me anything I ask for.”

  His eyes unfocused momentarily. “They’ve been blackmailed into being your friends.” When he focused on her again, he looked guilty. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “I think Aoife really likes me,” Marion said. “That is to say, I don’t think she would spend time with me unless she, at the very least, not-hates me. She most certainly hates the situation, but I am not the most offensive part of it.”

  Seth didn’t even have to say her name that time. He just looked at her, waiting for her to think her statements through.

  A look turned into…well, looking.

  The kind of looking that made Marion’s cheeks go hot and her entire body feel uncomfortable, as though she’d just stepped on-stage to perform karaoke with a song she didn’t know.

  “You must realize that your plan to utilize this auxiliary army is never going to work,” she said, dropping her eyes again. She couldn’t handle that much staring. “The timing will be too narrow if we arrive simultaneously with the Summer Court. Further, our borrowed army will be too weak to be effective in the Middle Worlds. I have to convince the unseelie army to work in my favor.”

  “The only way to do that is through Konig,” Seth said, “and I’m not going to leave you with him again.” He took tumblers out of a cabinet. “Want a drink?” When she nodded, he set a glass in front of Marion and one in front of the bar stool beside her. “We don’t have to talk about the affirmation, by the way.”

  “You know about that?”

  “I do,” Seth said. “I know Konig’s set a time. And I know that I’m racing against the kingdom’s failure to fix everything. Not just grab Shamayim, but find a way to help the Middle Worlds without pissing Elise off. I’m working on it.”

  He already knew that the kingdom would dissolve if she didn’t screw her husband. Gods, Marion couldn’t have been more embarrassed. Damn the sidhe. Damn all of them and their perverted ways.

  Wintersong was currently petting one of the bearskin rugs in the living room.

  Okay, we don’t have to damn all of them, she decided silently.

  “Konig is my husband,” Marion said, looking into the bottom of the empty glass. She felt like she had a lot in common with that glass. “I can’t avoid him forever.”

  “Forever is my specialty.” Seth’s search through the cabinets resumed. He soon came up with an ice bucket, which he filled from the refrigerator. He poured whiskey over ice.

  “I’d prefer a Long Island,” Marion said.

  “You’ll have to find someone who knows how to make one.” He poured a second whiskey over ice.

  “You’re a god. You don’t know how to make a Long Island Iced Tea?”

  “We hire staff for the bar in Godville,” Seth said. “Catering too. Nobody cooks.”

  Marion rested her chin on her hand, gazing down at the whiskey. “Godville.”

  “Niflheimr sounds just as weird.”

  “It’s a real name, though. None of you call eternity ‘Godville.’”

  He slid onto the stool next to hers. “You wouldn’t know. You haven’t been there in a while, have you?” He closed his hand around the second tumbler, but didn’t drink.

  “You didn’t hesitate to take Jibril’s soul, and now you’re making jokes about Godville,” Marion said. “Your time in the Pit has made you more comfortable as Death.”

  “Not more comfortable. But…” Seth slid the glass along the top of the island, letting it glide along the moisture that had pooled underneath. “I have to be practical. I’ve already killed him before.”

  “Leliel killed him,” Marion said. “Not you.”

  “I killed him. I kill everyone. I’ve already killed you.” The look in his eyes was so remote that it felt like Marion would never be able to reach him where his thoughts had gone.

  She swallowed hard. “Konig murders me. Doesn’t he?”

  Seth took a long drink. He set it down hard. “You’re not going back. That’s all.”

  The whiskey burned when she sipped it. Heat pricked at her eyes.

  “You could fix this with a blink,” she whispered.

  “I already told you. I’m helping as much as I can while obeying the letter of higher law.”

  Despair sank into her bones. “Why bother at all, if the situation is so delicate?”

  “Because you’re important.” Seth’s fingers curled through hers, the tips pressing lightly against her knuckles. “Please make it easy for me to protect you. I didn’t mark you for fun.”

  They were inches apart. It was as though the floor between their bar stools had disappeared. “You didn’t mark me for fun, but what about…” Marion swallowed hard. “You kissed me outside of Sheol.”

  Seth wasn’t looking at her, but he wasn’t letting go of her hand either. “Yeah.”

  “That one act has ruined my life. Perhaps not that one act alone, but it is the straw, and I am the camel broken under its weight.”

  “I know. Sorry.”

  “That’s all you have to say? Don’t you think I’m owed an explanation?”

  “I don’t have one,” Seth said.

  “I do,” Marion said.

  She leaned forward and caught his lips.

  He was momentarily still. The moment lasted long enough that she withdrew, cheeks heating at her foolishness. Apparently Marion hadn’t truly been humiliated enough that day. She had returned for round two and it was even more painful than the first time.

  But Seth grabbed her by the back of the head and pulled her back for a kiss.

  When a god was concerned, it could never be just a kiss. When they hugged or touched hands, it was not just skin on skin—it was something that reached deep into her skull and pulled her open. It was an off-switch for rational thought that
reduced Marion to raw sensation.

  He withdrew his lips, but left his forehead pressed against hers, the bridges of their noses butting against each other. Like he was trying to resist the urge to kiss her long enough to make sure she was all right.

  Marion wasn’t all right.

  Gods, nothing was all right.

  “I love you too, Marion,” Seth said. “I feel like it’s gotta be a bad idea, but there you go.” In the moment he spoke, he looked one hundred percent human and mortal. The most focused he had ever been.

  Marion was focused too. It would have been hard not to obsess about her shattering heart.

  “Please don’t say that,” she said.

  “Why? It’s true.” He lifted her hand, and his lips trailed over the marks he’d left her. Seth clutched her fingers as though he planned to never let go.

  It was this feeling that Ariane Kavanagh must have been hunting her entire life: the sensation of being loved and protected and wanted and important.

  Yet it was bigger than that too.

  Seth loved her. Seth did.

  Marion wasn’t used to feeling like she didn’t deserve something.

  It wasn’t as overwhelming when Seth kissed her again. They’d lost some of the desperation, and the shock of the newness of it. Her mind wasn’t breaking, even if her heart was. His hands were gentler when they stroked through her hair too. And he pulled back before she ever needed to struggle to breathe.

  Marion slid her hands underneath the illusion of a shirt to feel his skin, just to remind herself that she had a body, even if she wasn’t sure that Seth did. It felt like he was going to vanish. Like she was experiencing the most visceral dream of her life.

  Her lips tasted salty. Her cheeks were hot. “I love you too, Seth…but you already knew that.”

  He was standing up when she took the gris-gris off of her wrist and tossed it against the wall.

  Seth vanished.

  That was all it took, even now. His grip on the part of reality that Marion lived in was so tenuous that—even after they’d been kissing—as soon as she lost contact with the gris-gris, Seth was back to the Pit.

  She could have gotten his attention back. If not the gris-gris again, then she was certain that knocking on a door with her newly marked knuckles would bring him this time.

  Marion didn’t knock.

  Wintersong returned Marion to Niflheimr with only an hour to be bathed and anointed for the affirmation.

  The handmaidens bolted to their feet when they entered her bedroom. They’d been sitting on the edge of her mattress, whispering urgently. There was a lot to whisper about between the death of an angel and all the people who had gone missing from Niflheimr.

  Aoife recovered from her shock first. She moved forward to receive Marion. “What the hell?” she muttered under her breath, making sure that the other handmaidens wouldn’t hear. “Are you insane, coming back here?”

  She couldn’t be insane at the same time she felt so damned empty.

  Heather shoved into the room, out of breath and red-faced. She must have sensed Wintersong’s return. “Handmaidens, out! Now!”

  She clapped her hands at them when they reacted too slowly. Maddisyn flinched at the cracking sound, but then scurried away.

  Heather barely waited for the last hint of Tove’s retreating back before rounding on Marion. “Get naked.”

  Marion hadn’t expected that instruction. She touched the neck of her dress and barely even felt the silk. “Are you going to anoint me?”

  “Should I? Are you going to affirm your love tonight?” Heather asked. “Do me a favor and don’t answer that. I don’t know what screwed-up games you and Konig are playing, but I sure hope that you haven’t forgotten how many people are going to die over your little spats now. You guys aren’t adorable teenagers courting each other in the king’s gardens anymore. You can’t do this shit!”

  Marion let the dress fall from her body. Cold prickled over her skin in a sure sign that the tropical climate of her bedroom was finally succumbing to Konig’s power.

  That wasn’t why she was shaking.

  “Anoint me,” Marion said, because it was the only thing she could get out without any emotion.

  Heather carried a bottle of oil over, running her finger inside its lip and streaking the residue over Marion’s collarbones. “I’ve put up with this crap between you two for years, but no more. I won’t be a pawn, even for Konig.”

  Faint alarm wiggled inside Marion’s protective numbness. Her shields cracked. “Has Konig been playing games with you?”

  “I’m not having sex with him.”

  “It’s not what I asked,” Marion said. Another affair from Konig was inevitable. But Heather didn’t deserve to fall victim to it. The archer had done nothing wrong but give her loyalty to a serpent of a man when she’d been too young to know who he would become. “Gods, Heather, please—be careful with yourself. Stay away from him.”

  “Yeah, right. I should totally trust you more than my life-long best friend.” Heather dotted the oil on Marion’s forehead.

  “Please listen to me now if you listen no other time.” Marion drew in a shaking breath. She shut her eyes to let Heather anoint the lids. “Just…be careful.”

  She didn’t open her eyes until Heather finished adorning Marion’s body with sidhe magic, placed a sheer robe over her body, and rested the diadem over her head.

  When she looked again, she found that Heather had brought a mirror. Marion barely glanced at herself. She could take no pride in a perfect reflection when she knew what she needed to do.

  She stepped into the kitchenette momentarily. Most of the potions that she’d stolen from her mother had already been used when she’d gone to Sheol. One remained. It was one of the few forbidden bottles, warded against Marion’s use. The protective spell had been easy to strip. Marion was much better at wards than Ariane.

  Uncorked, she smelled parsley, grave dirt, nightshade. It was a contraceptive potion that tasted even fouler than it smelled, but she still made it vanish in a single swallow. Marion tossed the empty bottle into a trash can, and it landed softly on a bed of Three Musketeers wrappers.

  There was only one candy bar remaining in the kitchen. It had been left in the empty case. Her heart contracted when she realized that Ymir had left one bar deliberately because it was sitting on top of a note. It took her a moment to interpret his sloppy, childish handwriting, but then she realized it had her name on it. Ymir had also drawn a few hearts.

  She had no taste for candy, but she nibbled the end off to erase the potion’s flavor from her mouth.

  As chocolate spread over her tongue, certainty settled into her bones.

  Marion was doing the right thing for her kingdom, and for its people, even if it felt like she was about to die.

  Heather was still waiting impatiently in the living room.

  “Give me gloves,” Marion said. Heather did. They were white and elbow-length and decorated with diamonds.

  The archer didn’t speak to her again. Not while they left her room, or when they crossed the hallway to Konig’s bedchamber. They entered the double doors just as the clock struck nine o’clock in the evening.

  Hooch and Nikki were waiting as the promised witnesses. The handmaidens were in attendance too. Including the Raven Knights protecting each cardinal direction of the bedroom, there were ten sidhe who would see Marion’s most difficult performance as unseelie queen.

  Konig wasn’t there.

  It was his room. He should have been early.

  Marion was risking a lot by showing up. If Konig didn’t come too, then the witnesses would see her rejected. They would see the marriage unravel before their eyes, as a sidhe marriage necessarily must without ongoing expression of consent. They would see Niflheimr begin to collapse.

  And if Konig did show up, then he might make good on his promise to kill her.

  “I do not understand why we are here,” Nikki said. She was seated beside Hooch, wra
pped within the protective blanket of his enormous arm. “They do not love each other. Everyone knows this. We are wasting time that could be spent running.”

  Such a nasty prophecy delivered in such clipped tones might have stirred a reaction from Marion at any other time.

  She still felt empty.

  “The love I share with Konig may not be the love you’re accustomed to seeing,” Marion said, “but you will know the truth of it tonight.” She touched the diadem centered over the bridge of her nose. “We will march in the morning as a united family, assuming the army keeps its side of the bargain.”

  They didn’t look like they believed her.

  In truth, Marion wasn’t sure she believed it either.

  The doors to the antechamber whispered open. They parted wide, revealing a room filled with dangling swords on the other side. The points of them were so low that anyone taller than six feet would need to navigate carefully to avoid injury.

  Konig entered from between them.

  He was anointed similarly to Marion, though he also wore an enormous velvet cloak. The gold threads picked against a maroon field looked like a forest between seasons.

  There was more incredulity than hate in his eyes.

  Incredulity. Marion could work with that.

  She didn’t look away from Konig’s face, but she let her mind drift. She had to push the numbness away in order to immerse herself in recent memory—the memory of holding Seth’s hand in the kitchen, and the way that his black eyes had glimmered when he said he loved her.

  The king’s bedroom illuminated, awash with the shimmering glow of her diadem.

  Konig nodded once at Marion. He was acknowledging her gesture.

  He must have known it had nothing to do with him.

  Nobody else did. The murmur that rolled through the room was astonished. They’d seen Marion with Seth, and they hadn’t believed she’d have enough love to fill a thimble, much less a diadem.

  “It’s been three months and six moons since we married,” Konig said. “Do you consent to continue?”

  She dropped the robe. She was naked before the witnesses of the court and her king.

  “I consent,” she said.