by SM Reine
“Indulge me, please. Tell me what you remember.” She couldn’t help but utter the last word with some longing.
Geoff lifted a hand as though to rub his face, then stopped. He couldn’t move that far with the IV in his wrist. “I took a train to Billings. Me and Vasicek, we took the train together. Wait—Vasicek—is he—?”
“Dead.”
Geoff didn’t look disturbed. “We found you because you’d emailed another woman about meeting her.”
Marion knew that part. She had gone to Original Sin to talk to Nori in neutral territory. Vasicek had fired into the crowd in order to drive Marion into the back alley, where Geoff had been waiting to kill her. Nori had been able to relate all the details up to that point.
After that, things became fuzzier.
Marion only knew that someone had killed Vasicek, disabled Geoff, and stolen her memories. She didn’t know who or how. “Someone attacked me after you left, and I believe you saw it. You’re the only one who may have seen it.”
“I did, but she didn’t attack you. All I saw was that you talked to her.”
Her heart leapt. She had begun to suspect who might have taken her memories weeks earlier, when she’d returned from the Nether Worlds. Who would have had the strength to defeat Marion? Who could have excised her memories and jammed them into an artifact like the Canope?
Probably the same people who had sent Marion after Seth Wilder—the man who was most likely the third god of the triad.
Geoff’s use of a female pronoun made Marion think specifically of her half-sister, the woman who had once been Godslayer. Elise Kavanagh.
“Tell me everything you saw,” Marion said.
“I saw…” He stared blankly at the ceiling. Words failed him. He shook his head. “I don’t know what I saw.” Thoughts flickered over the surface of his mind. He knew what he saw. He just didn’t want to say it.
“Tell me,” she urged.
He shook his head again.
Marion glanced at the clock at his bedside. She was too busy to coerce honesty from a petty mercenary. As a half-angel, she should have been capable of simply plucking the knowledge from his mind, but she had overextended herself waking him up. She was still weak from the sanguine needs of Niflheimr’s wards.
Luckily, Marion had access to some enchantments she’d cast before losing her memory. She extracted a metal bracelet from her pocket and clasped it on Geoff’s wrist. Magic sparked.
“Tell me what you saw,” she said again.
Spells seethed within the atoms of the bracelet, shooting swirling tendrils into Geoff’s mind. That magic was capable of compelling truth from anyone who wore it.
Even petty mercenaries.
“A goat,” Geoff said.
“A goat? Not a woman who looks like me, but with redder hair?” Marion asked.
“She was the size of a child, with creepy little human hands, and a goat head. I know it sounds stupid. I feel stupid saying it. You’d just thrown me across an alley with lightning, so chances are pretty good I was imagining stuff, but that’s what I saw. A goat-woman.”
He couldn’t be lying. The bracelet made that impossible.
But a “cloaked goat-woman” was impossible, too.
Nobody should have been able to defeat Marion except her godly half-sister.
She slipped the bracelet from his wrist again, and only then did Geoff seem to realize what he had done. He looked angry. “You happy?”
“I’m grateful.” She pocketed the bracelet. “Thank you, Mr. Samuelson. You’ve been most helpful.”
“Get me doctors,” Geoff said. “I want out of here. I want my family.”
“You’ll be out of here soon enough.”
Marion didn’t shut the door behind her when she left.
There were agents from the Office of Preternatural Affairs waiting in the hallway with Nori. They were easily distinguished from hospital staff by their all-black clothing, lapel pins with the sword-and-shield logo, and their enchanted guns.
Marion had been forced to call in several favors to get access to Geoff Samuelson before his arrest. They’d given her five minutes—generous, considering they’d owed her none.
“You can have him now,” Marion said to the nearest of the agents. “Thank you for your help.”
The woman in charge, Agent Bryce, didn’t meet Marion’s eyes. Like most people, she seemed to find the ice-blue of angelic irises unsettling. “Thank you, ma’am.”
Marion stepped aside to let the agents move into Geoff’s room.
Nori rose from a chair, wringing her hands together. “Did you learn what you needed?”
“Yes,” Marion said. She wasn’t wearing the bracelet, but that was the truth.
Marion had learned what she needed, even if the information wasn’t exactly what she wanted.
Nori carried Marion to Niflheimr, arriving on the landing pad that they’d chosen as the safest point of entry into the world. It was the most intact balcony they’d been able to locate in the sprawling towers, and reasonably near to the throne room. They’d placed plywood across the holes in the floor for safety’s sake, but Marion still shuddered when she reappeared with her toes inches from one edge. She took a hurried step back.
Niflheimr had been grown through magic, and that meant the balcony was at a height only reachable through magic, too. If Marion fell, she’d have a long time to regret it before smashing into the frozen ocean.
Nori whipped furs out of a chest just inside the tower and settled them over Marion’s shoulders. “Five minutes. Do the wards quickly.”
“I don’t need to be reminded,” Marion said without any anger. She didn’t need to be reminded, but it didn’t hurt these days. It was impossible to tell what Marion would know and what she didn’t. Part of her had been killed in Sheol and could never be resurrected.
Nori’s reminder helped on another level. It was tempting not to refresh the soul-linked wards even though they’d placed an altar on the balcony to make the ritual as convenient as possible—which was not convenient at all. There was nothing convenient about having to bleed every time she returned to the Winter Court. When Nori prompted Marion, she couldn’t pretend to forget.
Marion took a dagger from the altar. She slashed her palm and blood dribbled down her wrist. Magic shocked through Marion when she touched the altar, opening her mind.
In that instant, the icy towers were her bones. The frozen ocean was her flesh. The forest, from the Coronal Ridge to the Wilds, was her hair, her eyelashes, her fingernails.
Her hand was healed when she stepped away, but not before she’d spilled a fair amount of blood. Again. Just as she had every time she left and returned to the Winter Court.
Every time, the shock of magic was weaker. The wards were weaker. They weren’t intended to be linked to the soul of someone who wasn’t sidhe, after all.
Nori was wringing her hands again. “Did it work?”
“It worked this time.” No promises for next time. “Lead the way.”
Nori led Marion down the tower’s spiraling stairs to the courtyard. They’d temporarily housed refugees there, but the only remaining sign of their camp was a memorial commissioned from unseelie artists. Marion had been quick to have the wreckage from Leliel’s assault tidied by the Raven Knights.
Another of the unseelie families had returned to the courtyard to mourn that day. Marion recognized Rhiannon and Morrighan, a pair of sidhe who had originally been found in Leiptr. They were sobbing over fresh additions to the memorial: a photo of an old man hugging a girl surrounded by candles, flowers, and sprigs of berries.
“Three minutes.” Nori tapped her wrist even though she didn’t wear a watch.
“I know.” But Marion didn’t follow Nori. She longed to join the grieving families and offer another apology. A thousand more apologies. There weren’t enough apologies in the universe for the harm Marion had inflicted upon them with her selfishness.
Rhiannon and Morrighan weren’t the only
ones in the courtyard, though. A small figure flitted through the shadows beyond twisted columns.
It was a boy-child who was perhaps five feet tall and well built for a six year old. He was camouflaged against the icy castle by his blue skin, translucent hair, and dark eyes. Ymir was a young frost giant born after Genesis who had never known anything but the Winter Court, and one of the few witnesses who had survived Leliel’s attack on Niflheimr.
He hadn’t spoken to Marion since the deaths. Not once.
“Two and a half minutes,” Nori said with more urgency.
Ymir was looking her way with obvious longing, and Marion owed him so much. The least she could give him was her time.
But then Ymir looked over Marion’s shoulder. His eyes widened.
He turned and vanished into the halls.
“Princess,” said a masculine voice.
Marion turned to find Prince ErlKonig of the Autumn Court striding down the stairs.
Even now, he took her breath away. The sidhe were hedonists in the truest sense of the word, reveling in all things self-indulgent and luxurious, and the bloodlines bred with similar priorities. Konig had been birthed from Genesis with all the beauty that the faerie courts could muster.
Perfectly symmetrical features were framed by blue-black hair that shouldn’t have matched his coppery skin or the high-saturation violet of his irises. The colors should have looked ridiculous, even on a man attractive enough to grace the cover of any magazine on Earth.
Konig didn’t look ridiculous, though. Especially not when he was looking at Marion like…that. With that heat in his eyes. Like the energy between them might melt all of Niflheimr. It was a wonder that the Winter Court hadn’t been baked into summer with the heat that flowed between them.
He was holding a bloodstained card in one hand.
“We have a problem,” Konig said.
Marion stretched onto her toes to kiss him. He tasted of the spiced wine made in his childhood home of the Autumn Court. Konig normally had a sensuous way of moving his lips that brought intimate things to Marion’s mind—and between her legs—but he was restrained today.
He must have been worried.
“What is it?” Marion asked.
He lifted the card so she could see. It was one of the invitations for their impending nuptials. “A message.”
She took the card with the nails of her forefinger and thumb to avoid touching the blood. Someone had written “I’m coming for you” on the RSVP line. It was edged with jagged warlock runes, the dark mirror image of the angel magic Marion should have been able to cast.
“It’s Arawn,” Konig said. “He’s planning to strike our wedding.”
The jagged lightning strikes of the letters scorched into the stationary did look rather Arawn-like, but it wasn’t signed. “We’ve gotten threats from too many sources to say that this one is coming from him.”
“I know for a fact that this came from Arawn.” Konig raised his voice to a shout. “Heather!”
His favorite personal guard, Heather Cobweb, descended the same stairs that he had. She wore pants of fox-fur and her hair in two long braids. She was also carrying the corpse of a massive white dog across her shoulders. Its furry ears were tipped in a shade of red similar to the blood on the invitation. “I found this dead on the edge of the Wilds.”
“Gods above!” Marion stepped back even faster than when she’d been trying to avoid the holes in the balcony above. The white dog was a Hound—one of Arawn’s. They’d nearly killed Marion in Sheol. “How did Arawn get that close?”
Heather let the dog slide from her shoulders. It flopped to the ground at her feet. “I have no clue. But there it was, among the trees with that note attached to its collar.”
I’m coming for you.
Marion shivered and hugged her arms around herself. “Why would he want to attack our wedding?”
“My first guess? Revenge,” Konig said. He and Arawn had clashed in the Nether Worlds. Konig had walked away winner and Arawn was too prideful to let such an insult stand.
“What’s your second guess?”
“The darknet,” Heather said. “He must think he’ll be able to get people into Niflheimr to attend the wedding, and then he could go after the servers.”
The darknet was a private network that connected preternaturals across all Middle Worlds and Nether Worlds, and mercenaries found their marks on its forums. That was where Leliel had posted the bounty that had led Geoff Samuelson to attack Marion.
Everyone said that the darknet servers were housed in the Winter Court, but Marion hadn’t seen them. True, Niflheimr was labyrinthine, so it was possible they were still hidden. Possible, but unlikely. “Arawn is much too smart to wage war over servers that nobody is certain are in the Winter Court, and we have no reason to take such a leap in logic for his motivation.”
“Not too much a leap. We know for a fact that the servers have put a target on your royal backs.” Heather stroked a hand through the fur of the dead Hound. “The guest you’re about to meet brought an entourage with her, and the Raven Knights already caught one of them snooping in the dungeons. Jolene Chang claimed to be lost, but…”
The dungeons were so far from the social areas of Niflheimr that Marion couldn’t find them without help of a map.
“You think she was looking for the servers too?” Marion asked.
“Guarantee it. The AGC has been trying to shut the darknet down for years. They’re taking advantage of your diplomatic handshake to take another shot at it.”
“That doesn’t say anything about Arawn,” Nori said. “What can we do about him?” Marion had forgotten that her half-angel assistant was still there. Nori had been lurking near the edge of the courtyard looking miserable ever since Marion and Konig’s intimate greeting.
“For now, we must attend our meeting and ask about Jolene Chang,” Konig said. “But after that…” He glared at the Hound.
After that, they’d have to contemplate what a dead Hound meant, and what Arawn might do to their wedding.
“Let’s go meet with the leader of the American Gaean Commission,” Marion said. “What was her name again?”
“Deirdre Tombs,” Konig said. “We’re going to meet with Deirdre Tombs.”
3
Niflheimr’s throne room had changed drastically in the last month, more so than any other part of the palace, thanks to Konig’s mother. Violet had moved in during Marion’s recovery and taken charge of decorating for the wedding. However, many of her touches were clearly meant to be permanent, from the tapestries of nymphs that concealed the cogs of ice to the furniture scattered around the nave.
The queen herself was seated upon the throne when Marion and Konig arrived. “You’re late,” Violet said.
“Barely.” Deirdre Tombs offered a smile to Marion. “I’ll forgive you for it this time, I guess.”
The shifter leading the American Gaean Commission was startlingly young—which said a lot, considering Marion had yet to hit her twentieth birthday. Deirdre wore chunky combat boots, leather leggings, a leather jacket, and a tight leather corset. She looked like she should have been heading to a vampire bar for a night of bloodletting fun.
Deirdre jerked a thumb at the ornate chair Violet was sitting in. “Good move not doing another ice throne. I’ve got no idea what they were thinking the first time around, making a seat that melts.”
Marion extended her hand to shake. “I’m so grateful that you were willing to have this conversation here. I know it’s not convenient for gaeans to travel between the Middle Worlds.”
“Really?” Deirdre looked at her hand, laughed, and pulled Marion into a hug.
“Oh,” Marion said, surprised.
Deirdre looked just as surprised when she stepped back. “What’s wrong?”
Marion hadn’t inferred a friendship with Deirdre Tombs from reading her own journals, which had been written in a code that assigned obscure nicknames to everyone Marion knew. If they were friends, M
arion surely would have written about it. She’d have to figure out what she had called Deirdre to know their history.
At least the AGC chair was greeting Marion with a hug instead of a gun.
“Wedding planning is overwhelming,” Violet said when Marion failed to think of a response. “I’m afraid my future daughter-in-law has been distracted these past few weeks.”
“Thanks for the help, Mother,” Konig said pointedly.
Violet gave him a thin smile and finally stood.
The Onyx Queen was the obvious source of her son’s otherworldly beauty. White hair flowed around a face shaped like his. Chains dangled from her tiara, just above the delicate bridge of her nose, and the fullness of her lips was the color of roses faded in sun.
When she slid down the steps from the throne, she was trailed by voluminous veils that made Marion’s dress look like something she’d picked up at a gas station. It was the kind of descent that would have made anyone stop to stare. “Jolene Chang has already been released back to Earth,” Violet said. “We couldn’t allow her to stay. She wouldn’t answer any of our questions.”
Deirdre folded her arms. “What did you ask?”
“The wrong questions,” Violet said. “If we’d asked the right things, we’d know why she was in the dungeons. Did you sanction her spying? Is that why you agreed to have this meeting in the Winter Court?”
“Mother,” Konig snapped.
“It’s a fair question,” Deirdre said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “Jolene thinks she can find the darknet servers.”
Heather had been right.
“Then you did sanction it,” Violet said.
“No, I told her not to run off. If the darknet servers really are in the Winter Court, then they wouldn’t be easily accessible from Niflheimr, and we’re not in the habit of spying on allies,” Deirdre said. “I’m sorry for Jolene’s behavior. Thanks for taking it easy on her.”
Violet inclined her head in graceful acceptance of the apology. “Then what do you want, Deirdre Tombs?”
“I was hoping I could just talk to Marion,” Deirdre said. “Marion and Konig, if he’s still speaker for the unseelie. And the talk should be alone, ideally.”
