by SM Reine
“Please, don’t hold your opinions back.” It was hard to be offended about his remarks on her backside when he was right—she really did have no butt. But it was the best non-butt in all of the Winter Court, she liked to think.
“We are making our debut as king and queen on this day. This is history. Everything needs to be perfect, including this.” Konig goosed her.
“Can I get out of the dress now?” Marion directed that to Luciana, but it was Violet who answered.
“Might as well,” she said.
A lascivious smile twisted Konig’s lips. “Let me help.” He reached behind her neck, unclasping the delicate jewels that held the diamond choker in place. He peeled them down and kissed along her collarbone.
At another time, Marion would have welcomed the gesture, even if she’d been avoiding sex with him. She needed to feel needed. Wanted. Even liked a little bit. But his mother was watching. Even though Violet was the type to have public orgies on a whim, it was still strange.
Marion leaned away from his lips. “Thank you. I’ll let the dressmaker do the rest. I don’t want anything damaged.”
“Prim, prudish Marion,” Konig said.
Nori snorted from the corner.
Marion clenched her teeth. “I need to talk to you, Konig. Ideally it would be a private conversation.”
“We’re in private,” Konig said. Sidhe had very different ideas about privacy than Marion did. There was no point trying to debate that with Konig again, though. He was Marion’s match when it came to obstinacy.
“You told me that Charity died when Leliel attacked the Winter Court,” she said as quietly as she dared. “Seth says that she’s alive.”
Konig’s face blanked. “You didn’t tell me that you saw Seth.”
“I’m telling you now,” Marion said. “That’s beside the point. He told me—”
“Why would you keep that a secret?”
She huffed. “He thinks Charity is alive.”
“He’s seen her?”
“No, but he can feel that she’s alive, because he’s…you remember what I told you.”
“He’s mistaken.” Konig’s violet eyes narrowed in such a way that made it clear he was still hung up on the fact that Marion had seen Seth at all, rather than Seth’s claim that Charity was alive. “Where did you meet him?”
“He was with Rylie at the shapeshifter sanctuary,” Marion said with a pang of annoyance. She wasn’t sure if the emotion was directed at Konig or Seth. “They used to be engaged. She’s now mated to his brother. It’s complicated.”
“Complicated,” Konig echoed, still looking at her a little too hard.
Marion glanced at Violet and Nori in the mirror. They were talking to the dressmaker about some fiddly details on the train. “You’re sure that Charity died?”
“To be honest, I can’t be sure of anything. She was there before Leliel attacked. She wasn’t there after Leliel disappeared. After everything that happened… I can only assume.” Konig clutched at her hands. “You don’t think that Leliel took her, do you?”
Marion couldn’t think of any logical reason for the angel to abduct a revenant. If Leliel had planned to run after making her strike, she wouldn’t want to be saddled down with a victim.
Violet returned to the couple. “What’s taking you so long to remove that? There are other dresses you need to try on.”
“I’m only having one wedding,” Marion said.
“We’ll be hosting a gala the day preceding the event. I’ve extended invitations to everyone on the council, as we don’t have time to lobby for votes unless we bring everyone to us. There’s no better way to curry favor than by plying people with unseelie wine.”
“You didn’t tell me about that,” Konig said.
“You’re marrying, precious. This is the last thing you should worry about leading up to the happiest day of your life. Don’t worry.” Her lips spread in a smile that looked ominous along with her blank eyes. “I’ve got everything under control.”
“I don’t need your help, Mother.”
“Then what’s your plan for not being stripped of your title? What have you done to take action, aside from letting your bride-to-be run around Earth on unrelated errands?”
“I was getting votes,” Marion said. “I already have Rylie Gresham.”
“You’d have had her anyway. You two should be thanking me for giving you the benefit of my experience as queen.”
“Just like I should thank you for the benefit of your interior decoration skills?” Konig snapped. “Is there anything you won’t control?”
“I can’t do anything about how ungrateful you are,” Violet said.
Konig flung his hands into the air. “I won’t listen to this in my palace!”
He slammed the door behind him on the way out.
A crack shivered down one of the mirrors, slicing Marion’s white-gowned figure in half.
She wished that she could have stormed after him too, but with the weight of the dress and all its pins, she wouldn’t have been able to do anything but hobble pathetically.
No, Marion was stuck with her future mother-in-law.
Violet was serene as her fingers flew over Marion’s bodice, undressing her dispassionately. “Half the job of being a queen is managing our kings. You’ll do fine with it. If you can convince everyone that you and my son are a happy couple at the gala, you’ll be able to survive anything.”
Marion blinked. “We are a happy couple.”
“Oh.” Violet smiled as she peeled the diamonds away from Marion’s shoulders. “Of course you are.”
It only took a few minutes to undress her.
Marion shivered in the dressing room while she waited for the next dress to be readied. Luciana and Violet were arguing about which one Marion needed to try on next. Nobody was paying attention to her.
Motion flitted past the mirrors.
It was a familiar small figure—Ymir, whom Marion hadn’t been able to pin down for weeks.
She grabbed a robe and ducked behind the mirrors. “Ymir?” she whispered. He was standing against the wall, gazing up at her with big eyes. “What is it?”
He didn’t speak. He pointed to his forehead, and hers.
“I don’t understand,” Marion said, kneeling in front of him.
How had he even gotten into the dressing room? He’d come from the opposite direction of the door, and there were no others that Marion knew of. Yet he had sneaked in without being seen.
Nori called from the other side of the mirrors. “Marion? Where did you go?”
Ymir jerked away at the sound of Nori’s voice. He fled into the shadows.
“Wait!” Marion called.
He vanished.
She tried to follow him, only to realize that he was truly gone. There was a floor tile dislodged, though.
A secret passage.
It would be too narrow for most adults to fit through comfortably, but not too difficult for the little frost giant.
Nori poked her head between the mirrors. “The next dress is ready.”
“Coming,” Marion said.
She stared hard at that dislodged floor tile, reluctant to leave.
Everyone thought the darknet servers were in the Winter Court, but Marion hadn’t been able to find them. They weren’t in any of Niflheimr’s mapped rooms.
But neither was that passage under the floor.
11
The foggy Nether Worlds enveloped Seth in sultry darkness.
He’d appeared in the hive the last time that he visited, so that was where he returned, preferring a familiar destination. The narrow tunnels teemed with demons of all flavors—the ghostly spindles that reminded him of Nyx, creatures that almost passed for human, the insect-like ones with moist eyes rolling atop shiny carapaces.
Just like at the werewolf sanctuary, nobody looked twice at Seth. Teleporting into a public area didn’t faze demons. For all they knew, he’d come from some other part of the Nether Worlds.
He found his way past the shops, past Arawn’s uninhabited tower, and out into the edge of the hive. From there he could see across the lacework of rivers to the hill where Duat rested, the Bronze Gates thrusting from murky fog as though it was floating atop it.
The Dead Forest rested between him and Duat.
It was impossible to make out the spikes of the trees among the fog at that distance. He remembered the silence under its canopy, though. He remembered the Hounds hunting him at its edge. It would have been easy to walk into the Dead Forest and let the Hounds find him again. One short stroll, and his mortal body would no longer hold him down. He’d be a god.
That was where the problems could only begin.
Where was Elise? Her presence cast an oppressive shadow over recent events, but the Godslayer hadn’t made a personal appearance. She wasn’t speaking to Marion. Dana claimed to talk to her, but Dana wasn’t without her own agenda. Even Seth, who was on a one-way trip to omnipotence whether he liked it or not, hadn’t seen Elise around.
The gods didn’t seem to be interested in or capable of interacting with the world directly.
Seth could imagine being in eternity with Elise and James, watching everything happen from a distance, but unable to influence it.
He’d watch Deirdre Tombs assassinate Rylie without the ability to step in, whenever that happened—in the far future, he knew, but how far he did not.
He’d surely be able to see Charity once omnipotent—whatever had happened to her—but not save her, if saving needed to happen.
He’d watch Marion’s wedding to Konig and be unable to reach out.
Or else he just wouldn’t care.
Giving up his body wouldn’t just be surrendering a body. It would be surrendering his entire life. He’d wanted to help people as a doctor, not retreat to some Mount Olympus and loll with ambrosia while others suffered.
Seth didn’t go near the Dead Forest.
He leaped across Mnemosyne and arrived on the grassy banks outside Duat.
He nearly walked right into balefire.
“Jesus,” he said, taking a quick step back.
The glimmer he’d thought was the Bronze Gates at a distance was a sheer wall of fire. It was heatless, even just a few feet away, but completely solid. It must not have been true balefire, if what Dana said was true. It encompassed all of Duat without consuming its surroundings. Seth might have been able to walk through it. He wasn’t going to risk it.
“Charity?” he muttered at the wall of balefire.
Seth opened his senses enough to feel for the threads of life around him.
It was hard to give into his godly urges after struggling so hard to ignore them. Slowly, his awareness of demons throughout Sheol surged to the surface of his mind, like stars appearing after sunset.
Charity was among them.
Her death was in her past, bright and shining, just as it had been with Lucifer. There would be a death in her future too, but Seth couldn’t sense it at the moment.
She was alive.
If he wasn’t mistaken, she may have been inside Duat, too.
He walked outside the Bronze Gates, seeking the origin of the balefire. It had sprung from warlock runes the last time he’d seen it. If there was something similar creating this new bubble, then he might be able to tear it down, penetrate it—something that would let him reach Charity.
The sphere was a smooth, solid mass with no obvious spellwork creating it.
There had to be a way inside. He’d spent some length of time in Sheol before substantiating into an avatar and must have been able to control the environment. Seth was a god even if he couldn’t remember it.
His gaze tracked across the grassy banks outside Duat toward Mnemosyne again.
They’d lost Marion’s memories in Sheol, but Seth’s might have still been available for restoration.
He trudged away from the wall of balefire and wavered on the banks of Mnemosyne, knees in the mud, heel of his palm sinking into the damp loam.
With his other hand, he scooped water out of the river. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t warm. It felt like touching nothing at all, even though he could see it shimmering in his palm.
“Here goes nothing,” he muttered.
He drank.
Memory flitted through him, little fireworks of flashing color that began slowly.
The first of it was the time his mother had locked him in the crawl space under their singlewide, chained up with the spiders. A strange place for memory to start. But perhaps that was where the god had been made: not the moment he’d tumbled, wailing, from between his mother’s legs, or in the instant Elise bestowed eternity upon him; it had been when he’d realized that life was as cruel as his mother’s cold heart and that he wanted to change it.
He could have done without the memories that followed that one. Unpleasant as it was to be reminded of his now-dead mother, he preferred that to reliving the moment he’d proposed marriage to Rylie Gresham—on one knee in a cattle pasture, while she stared at him in shock.
The first thing out of her mouth after his question had been Abel’s name.
Seth remembered the last time they had sex, and how he’d clutched at her with denial, and need, and even a sense of joy he found horrible now, because he hadn’t believed that would be the last time.
Since then, nobody had touched Rylie like that but Abel.
Since then, nobody had touched Seth like that at all. Brianna had offered during the week they’d dated, and he’d politely turned her down. There’d been other offers, too—none of them tempting.
Seth’s memories skipped from his death before Genesis to waking up in the werewolf sanctuary after Genesis.
It was like every fiber of his being resisted showing him what had come in the gap between.
He scooped more water out of Mnemosyne. He drank.
He guzzled.
Nyx was in those dark places.
She had been the first demon Lord of Sheol, stronger than Arawn in her way. She’d been ruling in Hell before it became the Nether Worlds. She’d been Death. And it had worn on her.
Nyx had been happy when Seth sought her out. “You can have it all,” she had said, sweeping a hand over the Pit of Souls. “Anything you want.”
That had been Seth’s Plan A.
He’d thought he could get away from Elise and James by going into the Nether Worlds and taking charge of Death. And he had. Seth had done it for years. Time had a strange flow for gods. Epochs lost in moments, moments stretching to millennia.
That hadn’t been enough.
Seth had spent the long heartbeat of Genesis’s blackness, when the Nether Worlds and the Pit of Souls had been reformed, learning the ropes of Death alongside Nyx.
He’d hated it. The killing. The dying. Feeling like he wasn’t saving anyone.
And then Plan B had come to him: substantiation into an avatar, which meant a return to life, mortality, humanity.
Not before he’d seen how everyone would die, though.
Omnipotence and omnipresence: the twin curses of a god that permitted him to suffuse every moment that had ever been or ever would be.
He saw Rylie dying as though he were standing over her body, because he had been there, in a way.
Rylie was prone, as she’d been so many times when she and Seth had made love together, with all the youthful eagerness that resulted from the discovery of sex’s newness. She was no longer young. She was no longer new. And she was not rapt in his arms, but staring blankly at the sky, a hand over her heart, a hole in her forehead.
Deirdre Tombs had instigated this moment. She was braced over Rylie, feet firmly planted in combat boots, curves of her body spilling through tight leather.
She looked grim, but almost as peaceful as Rylie. Her finger remained tensed on the trigger in that instant. There was gunpowder residue on her creamy brown skin. There was blood under her fingernails.
Seth was watching. He saw Rylie’s death, and he let
it happen.
The woman he’d hoped to marry and be buried alongside once they both died.
He watched her die.
Rylie was already dead, at some point in eternity, and Seth had allowed it.
Lucifer was in the exact same chair at Rock Bottom when Seth returned, as though he’d been waiting there for days. “Made up your mind?” the vampire asked, hunched over the TV. He had a glass of blood on the table. Seth could tell it wasn’t synthetic. “You stink like the Nether Worlds, so you must have been thinking it over.”
Seth had been thinking it over all right. As soon as he’d shaken off the memories that drinking Mnemosyne had brought over him, he’d walked laps around Duat searching for any way inside. There hadn’t been one that he could find.
All the walking in the world couldn’t change what he’d learned from that river.
Charity was still missing and Rylie would someday be dead. Seth was unable to address either of those issues at the moment. But he could keep himself from ever being omnipotent again—all-knowing but all-uncaring, watching the woman he loved die without intervention.
“What’s it mean, being a vampire?” Seth asked. “How’s the hierarchy? The cravings? The symptoms?”
Lucifer turned the volume down on the TV. “Do I have root access to the darknet?”
“Marion said you could have it.”
“Great.” The vampire slapped a pad of paper on the table. “Write down the login.”
Seth squared his shoulders. “She doesn’t know where the servers are and wouldn’t know how to log in as an administrator even if she did. Other factions have been looking for the servers, though. Marion has only agreed to give them to you.”
Lucifer tapped his pen on the edge of the notepad. “Who else is trying to get to the servers?”
“She suspects the angels. The American Gaean Commission for sure. Does it matter?”
“Oh yes. Most certainly. And you don’t want those people to have access.” He waved down one of the other vampires in his murder and whispered to him. The vampire left after a moment. “I’m going to get you a USB drive with a virus on it. Plug it into the servers and it will do the work.”
