Cast in Faefire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 3)

by SM Reine

  “We aren’t really speakers anymore,” Marion said. “We only fulfilled those roles at the summit.”

  “You’re both still authorized to make decisions for your factions, though,” Deirdre said. “You know your favorite terrorist’s gone legit, right?”

  That was clearly a personal reference Marion should have understood. “Yes, I’m fully aware of your work with the American Gaean Commission. You’re doing wonderful things.”

  Wonderful things, and dangerous things. Deirdre represented direct opposition to Rylie Gresham’s institution. She’d also been gathering faction-free North American Union preternaturals at her back, forming something that resembled a rebellion, if not an overt army. She was chaos in shifter form, as far as the establishment was concerned, but she draped herself in the robes of justice. Democracy.

  Deirdre presented a thick binder with “Proposal for International Preternatural Council” on the cover. “I want to make a permanent coalition out of the people who attended the summit. I think we can accomplish a lot of good for the world with ongoing cooperation. Here, look at this.”

  Marion took the binder and sat in one of the chairs on the floor of the throne room. It was the kind of furniture that Violet liked, all hand-carved wood and hard seats. She was forced to sit very straight or slide off onto the ground.

  She flipped through the pages. It was a lot of information, but as a half-angel, Marion was capable of consuming staggering amounts of information in minimal time. Once she’d realized that she could speed-read at a rate of ten thousand words per minute with a little touch of angel magic, it had made tearing through her old journals a much easier chore.

  Now she employed it to inhale Deirdre’s proposal.

  “It’s good,” Marion said, shutting the binder.

  Amusement touched Deirdre’s full lips. Amusement, but not surprise—she must have known Marion well indeed. “Gotta say, I’m relieved to have your approval. You’re the linchpin.”

  “How so?” Konig asked.

  “In the same way that she ensured the honesty of negotiations at the summit.” Deirdre lifted her wrist to flash a bracelet identical to the one that Marion had used on Geoff Samuelson.

  Marion relaxed a tiny amount—as much as she could while sitting in one of Violet’s stiff chairs. The bracelet’s compulsion meant Deirdre couldn’t lie. When she said that she wanted to use the group to benefit the world, she must have been honest about the good intentions.

  “We’ve also adapted the magically binding contract you wrote up for the summit to create a new contract for this council,” Deirdre said. “I’ve got copies both of you can check out. All the other factions have already signed on, including Adàn Pedregon, and he’s a real pain in the ass.”

  She took a pair of envelopes from her bag, handing one to Marion and then climbing the stairs to give the other to Konig. He’d sat on the throne that his mother had vacated. His lazy rockstar posture, and the fact that Violet had returned to tower at his side, made him look a little too sullen to be king.

  “Here’s the proposal for those who can’t read War and Peace in a half-hour. Each speaker agrees to contribute to a system of checks and balances for the factions. When we vote on something, the vote’s binding, magical-style. If we all vote to say that it’s illegal for sidhe to eat cupcakes, we’ve all gotta enforce that.”

  “I’m not voting against cupcakes,” Marion said.

  “Just an example,” Deirdre said. “Full disclosure, motivated by my fancy-shiny bracelet: the voting body will also be capable of removing people from power. If Rylie Gresham goes nuts, we’ll be able to vote a new Alpha in without a nationwide election.”

  Violet peered over her son’s shoulder at the contract. “This sounds unconscionably intrusive.”

  “It’s a safety net meant to take overwhelming power from any one faction.”

  “It’s undemocratic to take leadership choices away from the people,” Marion said.

  Deirdre smiled at Marion. “The Alpha only became an electable position because Rylie wanted it that way, so she’s still got absolute power. Without this agreement, she can change her mind about holding elections at all.”

  “This would impact the sidhe royal families.” Violet plucked the contract out of Konig’s hands.

  He took it back. “Stop, Mother. This is my choice. You made me speaker for the unseelie. And I have to say, Deirdre, I’m intrigued.”

  “You should be. This could save lives. A lot of lives.” Deirdre planted her hands on her hips. “Look, Genesis screwed everything up, big time. And you know what caused that?”

  “The gods dicking around with reality?” Konig suggested.

  “Pre-Genesis factions pissing off the gods. The angels were getting all up in everyone’s business, and the demons pulled the Breaking thing, and it was a mess. Rebooting the universe was the gods’ solution to cleaning it up. We’re lucky we didn’t get forty days and nights of rain too.”

  “You want to be able to have all of the factions magically bound together to prevent another Genesis,” Marion said.

  “Exactly,” Deirdre said. “We’ll only vote on big stuff like that. It takes ten of the twelve factions agreeing we need a vote in order to do it. Although we can also chat more casually about other stuff—open up more diplomatic relations and stuff.”

  Marion skimmed her copy of the contract. It was bordered with ethereal runes like those she had all over spell books in her private home, back on Vancouver Island. She traced her fingertips along the runes as the internet guides to magic had instructed. The spells whispered their truths to her.

  Despite the simple designs, the magic behind them was immense. The elegance and complexity were breathtaking. Marion had a hard time imagining she’d ever been able to craft such a thing even though her fingerprints were all over it. The spells practically sang in delight at her acknowledgment.

  It would be easy enough to activate the runes in the master contract. Marion could definitely bind the council.

  “This cannot go through,” Violet said.

  “It’s not your decision,” Deirdre said. “Right, Prince ErlKonig?”

  He puffed up at being addressed directly. “Right.”

  “I like the idea,” Marion said. The last thing they needed was another Genesis, and the gods had made it clear they weren’t afraid of interfering when people made them angry. “I have to wonder, though—what’s the specific motivation behind getting this together now?”

  “It was inspired by events at the summit,” Deirdre said promptly. “We’ve got to be able to unite against threats—like demons—that might motivate another god-driven catastrophe.”

  She set the master contract out on a marble-topped table and produced a pen.

  Ten of twelve factions had signed it.

  “I’m amazed you got everyone to cooperate.” Marion had barely survived the week of the summit without punching anyone in the nose, and she wasn’t the nose-punching type.

  “You’re not the only one who’s good at politics,” Deirdre said. “Plus the whole ‘I can set fire to anyone who pisses me off’ thing doesn’t hurt.”

  Marion’s eyes widened. She’d been told Deirdre Tombs was a shapeshifter. What kind of shifter could set fire to people?

  Deirdre misinterpreted her reaction. “I’m kidding. I’ve spent weeks talking people into it. Cupcakes might have been involved—not cupcakes I made, mind you, because I’m awful at baking. Good cupcakes.”

  “You didn’t bring any for me?”

  “I didn’t think they’d last the trip between worlds. I’ll give you an IOU if you sign.” She offered the pen to Marion. “All my work to this point means nothing if you and your husband-to-be don’t join the group.”

  Violet ripped the pen out of Deirdre’s hand. “Where were you, Deirdre Tombs, when the sidhe courts needed to be established? What did you sacrifice to establish benevolent monarchies that would care for the sidhe when nobody else did?”

 
; Deirdre didn’t even blink. “I was getting shuttled between orphanages because Genesis killed my dad and left me without a home.”

  Konig sauntered down the stairs and took the pen from his mother. “I’ll sign, and you will too, Marion.”

  “You’re making a grave mistake,” Violet said.

  Her son had already signed.

  Now he extended the pen to Marion. “Do it, princess.”

  Deirdre was practically glowing as Marion signed. “Now you just have to activate it,” the shifter said. “Go ahead.”

  Marion stroked the page. She felt the instant that the binding spell activated. It locked into her breastbone like an invisible golden chain.

  For a moment, the pain was so immense that she couldn’t breathe.

  It was gone as quickly.

  “Thanks.” Deirdre folded the contract and tucked it into her bag again. “I look forward to seeing you guys at the vote next week.”

  Marion blinked. “Next week?”

  “We’re voting to have Konig’s title as Prince of the Autumn Court removed. He won’t be heir. He won’t hold lands. That way, if the two of you get married, the peace treaty with the angels still won’t extend to the Winter Court.” Deirdre’s shrug almost looked embarrassed. “Sorry.”

  “But…but…” Marion’s mouth opened and closed. The only thing she managed to get out was, “You’re wearing the bracelet.”

  “I told you nothing but the truth, so help me gods. The voting body is meant to prevent god-level disasters again. And like you told us at the summit, Marion: the gods will have blood if you let the angels have the Winter Court.” Fierce light filled Deirdre’s eyes. “I’m not going to let that happen.”

  “That’s not what we’re planning to do.” Marion would never dream of giving the Winter Court to the angels since Leliel killed the refugees.

  “But you could do it,” Deirdre said. “Just like how Rylie doesn’t have to have elections for Alpha because she’s got absolute power. Nobody can have absolute power to ruin the world—even you, Marion.”

  Shimmering magic overcame Konig. Niflheimr trembled with his fury. “I signed your contract!”

  Marion felt dizzy. Ten of twelve people are needed to call a vote.

  Everyone Deirdre had spoken to had agreed that Konig needed to be removed as prince.

  Everyone she had worked with at the summit.

  “Get her!” Violet roared, thrusting a finger toward the shifter.

  The Raven Knights materialized from the ley lines. Even Marion, mostly immune to the reality distortion effects of sidhe magic, found herself incapable of standing when they swarmed in with battle magic flaring. She lost all sense of body. Her eyes and ears overloaded, reducing Niflheimr to fuzzy whiteness.

  She could still see enough to know that Deirdre shifted in a burst of flame. The AGC chair became a firebird—something halfway between heron and hawk, assuming she’d been rolled in kerosene then shot through a bonfire via cannon.

  Deirdre seized the bag with the contract in massive talons and vanished into the night, untouched.

  “So much for cupcakes,” Marion said faintly.

  4

  New York City, New York—January 2031

  A bar called Rock Bottom should have been an ironic hangout for rich kids pretending to be poor, but there was nothing ironic about the lightless dive squeezed into the basement of a bodega. Its dirt-caked windows were tired eyes gazing across cracked sidewalks, while its shadowy interior was its rotten brain filled with the sick thoughts that were its patrons.

  Not ironic, but honest. Refreshing in a way. But mostly depressing because Seth Wilder fit the name perfectly.

  Sunlight burned a square onto the dusty floor when he opened the door to step inside. Mutters of protest broke through the crowd, like it was strange to open that front door during daytime. The dozens of patrons must have never left.

  He walked past the bar and all the pixie liquor, which held no allure for him at the moment. He ignored the naked woman with a tattooed venus mound offering cubes of lethe with blood-caked fingers. He also ignored the gang of vampires blowing clouds of hookah into one another’s faces, but ignoring the vampires was the hardest.

  All the lives in the bar demanded his attention. What they were now, with pallid faces and desperate fingers, was only a small part of it. Their entire lives cried out to Seth: from the moment each individual had been birthed from the waters of the womb forward into inevitably grave futures. The grave times were brightest for Seth, where his heart wanted to be.

  Everyone should have had their graves in the future.

  Vampires didn’t.

  They hadn’t been birthed from flesh, but from dirt. Their bloodless bodies craved fuel to power them a few more days into defiant undeath.

  The strongest of the undead was waiting for him at a table in the back.

  Lucifer was watching the news on an old pre-Genesis CRT television. It teetered on a wobbly table by his side, its power cables running under his feet.

  “You’re late.” Lucifer turned down the volume. He was a whip-lean vampire with slicked hair and a cadaverous pallor. He didn’t glisten anything like the powerful sidhe, or even the colorless beauty of a half-incubus Gray.

  He was dead, and he’d been dead for years.

  Lucifer had acted as speaker for the vampires during the recent preternatural summit held at the United Nations. How he had ended up speaker was hard to pinpoint. Vampires were very loosely affiliated. More of them aligned with Deirdre Tombs’s American Gaean Commission than Lucifer’s people. Yet he’d had enough authority to show up at the summit.

  Somehow, Lucifer was more than the usual petty drug lord feeding off the worst of preternatural society. And Seth needed him.

  Lucifer gestured to the chair opposite his. “Hold tight. I’ll be with you in a second.” He was watching the news while January Lazar, celebrity newscaster who’d made her fame profiling important preternaturals, reported on increasing demonic possessions nationwide.

  “You know anything about what’s happening with that?” Seth asked.

  “I wouldn’t tell you for free if I did.” Lucifer’s crimson eyes finally weighed on him. “Don’t tell me what you want. Let me guess. I’m sure you’re not here for my drugs.”

  “That’s right. I’m not.”

  “Shut up, I told you not to tell me.” Lucifer drummed his fingers on his thigh. “You’re a nice guy, so you don’t want me to knock someone off. You don’t want power because you’ve clearly got enough of that. I’ve only got two guesses: either you want me to hide you, or you’re looking for someone.”

  “Can I tell you now?” Seth asked. Lucifer nodded. “I need black-market magic. Something that will keep me alive.”

  “Shoot, I thought I was good at guessing.” The vampire reclined in his chair, arms folded behind his head. “You’re coming to a dead man for eternal life even though you already have eternal youth. What are you?”

  Seth’s eyes flicked around the bar. There were no familiar faces—no Dana McIntyre—but that didn’t mean there were no triadists who might recognize him for what he was. Lives and deaths whirled around him in dizzying variety.

  “I’m human,” Seth said.

  “Not exactly.”

  “No,” he admitted reluctantly. “Not exactly. I’m human enough that I can die and I don’t want that to happen.”

  “What walks on two legs, is ‘human enough’ to die, but eternally young?”

  “How do you know about the…” Seth lowered his voice. “The eternal youth.”

  “I’m a vampire,” Lucifer said. “I know what it looks like on a man. So tell me, old guy—what have you got hiding under that shirt of yours?”

  Seth glanced down at his shirt. There was nothing to see except cotton. What had given away his injury? Did vampires have acute smell like werewolves did? “All I’m packing is chest stubble. I missed my last appointment with the Bic.”

  “Show me.”
/>   “Screw you.”

  “Show me or you’re leaving here with nothing.”

  “I doubt you have anything.”

  “I do,” Lucifer said. “I’ve got the secret to life. You won’t find out unless you flash me.”

  Seth clenched his jaw, grabbed the hem of his shirt, and lifted.

  He didn’t look down at himself again. He’d spent enough time staring through a motel’s cracked bathroom mirror to have memorized the mire of glistening organs exposed by his chest wound. He’d been torn apart by Arawn’s Hounds in Sheol and wasn’t healing. It wasn’t like the time he’d been stabbed by a sidhe assassin protecting Marion. He’d walked it off after a touch of TLC and a bottle of whiskey.

  This wound was permanent. Worse, it had been degrading over the last few weeks.

  The cage of Seth’s tooth-scraped ribs held light captive, tangled up with his intestines. The pulse of his heart forced unnatural energy like a lightning-ripped storm through his body. Every beat made his skin flake a little more.

  Seth wasn’t dying from the wound. He was dying from whatever was trapped inside of his mortal body. If what followed his death was what Dana McIntyre claimed, he wasn’t ready to face it.

  “Happy?” Seth asked, dropping the shirt.

  “That’s not a word in my vocabulary,” Lucifer said. “Let’s talk immortality.”

  “Vampires weren’t around before Genesis. Staying twenty-five years old for fifteen years doesn’t make you an expert in immortality.”

  “There were immortals before Genesis. Eons-old angels and demons.” Lucifer’s dark eyes gleamed. “There were gods, too.”

  “Are you a triadist?”

  “I know a few of them.”

  “Are any of them named Dana McIntyre or Oliver Machado?” Either would have meant Seth needed to beat a quick exit.

  The pause before Lucifer responded meant that he had no clue who those people were. “I don’t divulge the names of contacts.”

  “People divulge your name,” Seth said. “You get talked about a lot in bad circles. You’re supposed to work the worst kind of miracles. If anyone can make someone—something—like me stay alive, you’ll know about it.”