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

by SM Reine

  “It’s about Deirdre Tombs’s preternatural cooperative,” Marion said.

  “I thought it would be. Tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Rylie poured a cup for herself and sat back. “You must be wondering why I agreed to Deirdre’s council. Right?”

  The reasoning behind Rylie’s support of the council was unimportant. It was too late to undo any of that. “Actually, I’ve come to explain why you must vote for Konig to remain Prince of the Autumn Court.”

  “I’m listening,” Rylie said.

  “I’ve done what I can to protect the Winter Court refugees, but my control over the plane’s magic is limited. I was unable to stop Leliel from invading Niflheimr. Many refugees were lost.”

  “I heard about that.” Rylie’s voice had gone softer. “I’m sorry, Marion.”

  “Once Konig and I marry, he’ll be able to take over the wards,” Marion said. “He’ll be able to reinforce them and allow the unseelie to flourish in the Winter Court again. Also, the Ethereal Levant has a peace treaty with the Autumn Court. If we can extend the peace treaty to the Winter Court, then we can ensure that she doesn’t hurt us again.”

  “I understand that extension of the peace treaty is the only reason why you’re planning to marry Prince ErlKonig.”

  Marion was prepared for that accusation, gentle as Rylie made it sound. “I won’t deny it’s a factor, but Konig and I plan to marry because we love one another.” Never mind the fact she would have dumped him on his ass if Leliel hadn’t attacked. She was glad for the outcome, in a morbid sort of way. Things had never been better with Konig.

  “I’m happy for you.” It sounded genuine. Maybe. It was hard to tell. “I got your invitation, by the way. Thank you. I’m thrilled to attend.”

  “That’s assuming the vote doesn’t ruin our plans. Did Deirdre frighten you with the idea of a second god-scale disaster?”

  “She tried,” Rylie said, “but I knew Elise and James as well as anyone. Elise is a true hero. She would never hurt anyone unnecessarily. In her hands, we’re safe.”

  “Then why the vote?”

  “I know Deirdre very well, too.” Rylie took a long drink of her tea, but it wasn’t enough to mask the lines of tension between her eyebrows and bracketing the sides of her mouth. She was upset about something.

  Marion wondered if Deirdre had blackmail material on Rylie. What could the werewolf Alpha have done that would be worthy of such a drastic vote?

  It was hard to remember that Rylie wasn’t as pure as she looked. This was the woman who’d cheated on Seth and fallen pregnant with his brother’s get. She’d left him at the altar. And he was still broken over it years later.

  Rylie was better than Marion at pretending to be innocent, but Marion knew the truth.

  “Help me protect the refugees. Endorse Konig and publicly bless our wedding.” Marion hadn’t meant to be as blunt about the request, but now that the moment had arrived, she didn’t know how else to ask it.

  “Are you sure you don’t want tea?” Rylie asked.

  “Very well,” she said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice and off of her face.

  Rylie poured. Her graceful movements were most likely calculated, part of the same maternal image she cultivated in her dress and speech. As she took care of the tea, she said, “I can’t make a public endorsement. It isn’t shifter business. I’ve already planned to vote in your favor, though.”

  “You have?”

  “I told you that I know Elise well,” Rylie said. “The woman I remember wouldn’t cause another god-level tragedy over your wedding. She’d want you to be happy, Marion. She’d support your marriage to Konig if that was what it took to keep you happy.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Marion murmured into her cup of tea. The sip she took was especially bitter.

  A hand touched her knee. The last time someone had done that to her, it had been Seth, trying to comfort her after his inability to diagnose her memory loss. But this was Rylie. Their contact made the guards nervous. For the first time, they moved against the walls, rocking on their feet, reaching for weapons.

  There was nothing but kindness in Rylie’s eyes. “It’s okay to be afraid. All the sane people are afraid to marry under normal circumstances. You’ll have the eyes of the world on you during and after.”

  She clenched her teacup in both hands. “I’m not afraid.”

  “Marion…” Rylie shifted onto the couch next to her. She wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “You’re going to be okay.”

  Unexpected tears plucked at Marion’s eyes.

  Maybe this was why Marion had written that Rylie was like her mother, but better. Because this was exactly the kind of conversation Marion would have wanted to have with Ariane, if Ariane would have reached out to her. But Ariane was conspicuously absent and nobody knew how to reach her.

  “How do I know if marriage is the right thing to do?” Marion asked.

  “You don’t. Nobody does.” With one more squeeze, Rylie let her go. She stood and became formal again. Rylie glanced at the clock on the wall, positioned between the shoulders of two of her silent guards. “I regret to run so soon, but I have plans.”

  “Can I stay for a little while?” Marion asked. “I’ve been trying to spend some time in places I used to know well to see if they’ll jog my memories.”

  It was such a bold lie that Rylie must have been capable of scenting it, but the werewolf Alpha didn’t look at all suspicious. “I understand completely. Please feel free to explore. My people will be happy to get you back to the ley line juncture whenever you’re ready—no rush.”

  After Rylie left, Marion wasted time by wandering through the Sanctuary Academy. The gardens were tended by young witches and were almost as lush as anything in the sidhe courts. Many students were already studying outside, lolling in the warmth, wolf among human, panther and deer curled together.

  There was a quality to the air that exhilarated Marion—something that was not quite smell, nor was it the musical hum of magic from the Middle Worlds.

  She circled the halls, trying to figure out what she sensed that so excited her. Marion’s fingertips tingled with it.

  A voice caught her attention, and she stopped in front of a door, peering through its window. The students were seated in a circle of power. One of them was in the middle, caught mid-shapeshift, while the instructor lectured on what was happening.

  The light of rapt attention glowed around the students.

  Learning.

  That was what so enticed Marion. It was the heady buzz of knowledge blooming. Being exposed to it made Marion feel more refreshed than if she had slept twelve hours and woken to espresso and an hour of yoga.

  If she hadn’t had an agenda, she could have lingered to watch the students learning to shapeshift for days without end.

  Marion must have required little coercion to spend a year studying at the Academy. Between Rylie, the mother-who-was-not-her-mother that actually gave Marion the attention she craved, and an environment fertile for learning, it would have been relative paradise. Far from the lonely libraries Marion kept at her home on Vancouver Island, the Academy was vibrant and alive.

  She must have loved being there.

  Nothing looked familiar during Marion’s laps, but she hadn’t expected anything to. There were no memories to jog within Marion’s skull. They hadn’t been lost in some shadowy corner of her brain like books improperly catalogued in a library. They had been extracted and stuck into the Canope.

  Now the Canope was broken. Those memories were gone. The best she could hope to accomplish was studying her journals the way a medical student studied anatomy and pretending that she knew what she was doing.

  There were other things to get from the Academy, though.

  Marion had found diagrams of its layout before her visit, and those guided her through the halls. She had a very specific destination: the administrative offices on the first floor, opposite the gender-se
gregated student dormitories.

  Marion didn’t look at anyone as she glided through the halls. She kept her back straight, chin lifted. Many students looked at her, though. They lived there during the school year—the period of time that fell between August and May—and they knew when people were neither staff nor student.

  Someone would also know what her eyes meant, so whispers about her presence would spread quickly.

  She needed to be out of the administrative offices before that happened.

  Her visit with Rylie Gresham had been timed for eleven in the morning, and the administrative offices shut down at noon for lunch. Marion had allowed enough time to pass while exploring. She reached the office when a man wearing business casual was hanging an “out to lunch” sign on the outer office doors.

  “Can I help you?” He smiled at Marion.

  She smiled back at him and let the full force of her energy shine. “No thank you.”

  He looked dazed, but managed to walk away without falling over.

  Marion took his place in front of the door and knocked on it. Nothing happened. “Merde,” she muttered.

  Her ability to open doors by knocking was god-given, and that meant that if the gods weren’t paying attention, it had zero impact. Elise didn’t care if Marion got into the admin offices.

  Marion reached into the energy that flowed through the Academy as one of its witch students might, tapping into it as she focused on a rune.

  “Open,” she said as she grabbed the knob.

  The lock opened with a flare of magic that any witch in the Academy would feel if they were paying attention.

  Marion was in.

  She didn’t waste time with the computers in the front offices. She went straight to the principal’s room in the back, whose name (“Summer Gresham”) suggested more than a hint of nepotism at work at the Academy.

  Who was this Summer woman? One of Rylie’s actual daughters? Someone who had grown up adored by a powerful, maternal Alpha werewolf? Marion was shocked by how jealous it made her feel to know there were people who had grown up in the privilege of Rylie’s care. People who were not Marion, rejected by a mother who wouldn’t even attend her wedding.

  At least Rylie would be there.

  Marion grabbed the doorknob. “Open,” she said again.

  And it did.

  Summer Gresham’s office made it look as though she was working from the inside of a giant computer. Every wall was covered in metal cages filled with a tangle of cables, blinking lights, and buzzing fans. Her floor was twelve inches above the floor in the hallway outside. The temperature was warmer and dryer than outside, too. Her desk was little more than a chair in front of a table big enough to hold an energy drink.

  Strange as it looked, the office glowed with as much knowledge as the more rustic classrooms outside. Regardless of her title, Summer Gresham was a woman in the business of acquiring information. The lifeblood of angels.

  Marion’s nose wrinkled as she swept the trash off of Summer’s desk. She used a tissue to wipe down the keyboard. Then she sat gingerly and rolled up to the monitor.

  Summer had left herself logged in.

  “Such trust,” Marion murmured. But why shouldn’t she trust? She was in the heart of the blissful shapeshifter sanctuary, an area secured against all enemies.

  There was an icon for the OPA database on the desktop. Marion clicked.

  The interface wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. Marion had been required to fill out a few forms on computers at the United Nations during the summit, and it seemed to use the same sort of program. She easily found the database search.

  “Goat…woman…” Marion said to herself as she typed. She felt a bit stupid about it.

  She felt slightly less stupid when the search brought up several results.

  Five individual demons, one entire class of demons, and three shifters.

  “Oh my.”

  Marion took out her cell phone and plugged it into the computer. She didn’t need to be a hacker to copy the records over within minutes.

  That should have been all that Marion risked. Sanctuary witches may have already alerted Rylie to what she was up to. It was time to run home to study the files on goat-looking women. But she had access to so much information, and she was still giddy from the brush of energy she’d felt in the school.

  Marion typed her own name into the OPA search field.

  There was one primary record, which she copied over to her phone’s memory. That one file took much longer than the nine listings for “goat women.”

  While it downloaded, she skimmed the notes.

  There were a staggering number of personal testimonies submitted by OPA allies talking about Marion. The testimony at the top had been submitted by Rylie. It was a video, which played as soon as Marion clicked on it.

  Rylie had been filmed somewhere that looked like a living room. “Now?” she asked the camera, patting her straight blond hair to neaten it. “Right now?”

  A voice off-screen said, “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Yes, she’s dangerous,” Rylie said, as though answering a question that had been asked before filming. “I’ve watched her grow up, and she’s had sleepovers with my kids, but—what do you expect me to say, Fritz?”

  “I want to know if you think we can trust her,” said the man, presumably Fritz. “What threat level is she?”

  “The highest,” Rylie said. “You should absolutely be prepared to kill her. I have been for years. We’d be stupid if we weren’t prepared to kill Marion Garin.”

  7

  Most people stopped when they hit Rock Bottom. Seth went lower. He wrapped his wounds in cotton and leather and descended to the recesses of his past.

  With a snap of his fingers, he returned to the werewolf sanctuary.

  Seth remembered the last time that he had visited the sanctuary outside Northgate. He’d left Las Vegas while UNLV had been on winter break, hoping to get insight into a case he was working with the police. It hadn’t been the case that had broken him—the one with the vampires, with all the blood—but it had been the one right before that. And he had been considering moving back to the sanctuary.

  He’d arrived from dry, barren Nevada to find Northgate buried under snow taller than he was. Everyone at the sanctuary had been assigned to shoveling duty. Even after Genesis, when Rylie had snowplows at her disposal, the pack had still preferred manual labor.

  Seth had grabbed a shovel and jumped in out of habit. That was just life at the sanctuary. Everyone worked together to make things happen. They were one big family, even if it had become far bigger after Genesis.

  Rylie had been working one of the smaller side roads. The Alpha still hadn’t been too good to do her own work, and she’d been happy to have Seth join in.

  “Our security’s been great,” Rylie had said to him. “The wards do a lot of the work. Then we rotate out nightly schedules with patrols, just like we used to with the cooking.” Her hair had been trapped under a saggy knitted hat, but a few flyaway strands had floated around cheeks pinkened by cold.

  Even wrapped in multitude of layers of winter gear, her form had been petite but strong, both fragile and unbreakable.

  Her belly must have been swelling with her next child, but Seth hadn’t been able to tell that under the jacket.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Rylie had asked, not unkindly.

  He hadn’t been. He’d just been looking at her, drinking in the sight of the woman who had once been his world. “Sorry. What did you say?”

  She’d reached up to pull his hat over his ears, then swipe her gloved hands over his shoulders to clear snow away. “I said security is fine. Everything is fine. Thank you for checking. That’s not the only reason you came back, is it?”

  Not the only reason, but the most important.

  Seth had been imagining that things couldn’t be going well at the sanctuary after Genesis. Rylie had been put in the position of handling thousands upon thousan
ds of new preternaturals—mostly shifters—and the volume should have been overwhelming.

  He’d spent all semester at UNLV imagining the struggle at the sanctuary. Having Abel for support couldn’t have been much support at all. Abel had always been bad at logistics, and thinking, and anything else that didn’t involve shooting things.

  Seth had expected Rylie to ask for help.

  She hadn’t.

  Rylie had said, “Everything is fine.” And she’d kept shoveling, accompanied by hundreds of shifters.

  That had been more than a decade ago. He hadn’t gone to the sanctuary since, nor had he spoken to Rylie. But he returned to the sanctuary after his talk with Lucifer at Rock Bottom.

  Seth arrived on the road from Northgate, right where it broke through the pass. He was surprised that he could get there. Nobody should have been able to teleport inside the wards—even Seth. But he couldn’t even feel them pushing back. One of the benefits of being a god, he supposed.

  So he appeared on the road in a swirl of brimstone smoke, about two miles closer to the sanctuary than he’d expected, and the sight of his past basically punched him in the face.

  Everything was old, but new.

  The same mountains, the same waterfall, the same fields. Same old cottages that he’d helped build by hand.

  But there were new cottages too, and even an apartment building. He saw a white square of a building that must have been a hospital—something they’d never had in his time there, since it wasn’t like the average shifter needed much medical care. Even though he couldn’t see the school from there, a sign directing him up the road toward the Academy meant it existed. That had always been Rylie’s dream. A school. A way to teach the shifter kids. A place for them to belong.

  She had everything she’d always wanted.

  Ten years later, Rylie still didn’t need Seth.

  He saw nothing but unfamiliar faces on his way into town. New people were weirder than new buildings. Seth had always known the entire pack.

  He hadn’t called ahead, so Rylie wasn’t expecting him and he didn’t have a meeting place established. But he knew where she was. He could feel her presence in the way that he could feel all of the other lives around him—the long threads unspooling as time marched onward. All were vibrant in the way that only gaean lives could be.