by SM Reine
“We’ll have to see if that rings any bells for Marion,” Seth said.
“It won’t. Bells wouldn’t ring bells for Marion. She’s not there anymore.” Dana tapped her temple.
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
“You might think this braindead Marion is cute, and that’s fine, but it’s not Marion. Don’t try to dispute me on this shit. You don’t know my sister like I do.”
“You’ve given up on her, so you can’t know her that well.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” Dana said.
She was taking Seth down a familiar hallway—the same one where Marion had led him during the engagement party.
Dana stopped at the corner and peered around the side. “Shit. The Hardwicks’ apartment is being guarded by Raven Knights.”
That was easy enough to get past.
Seth grabbed her elbow and phased again.
They reappeared in the rooms past the guards. He’d taken care to materialize in the bathroom, just to be sure that they wouldn’t get caught, but nobody was inside the room.
“The servers are in here?” Seth asked, stepping out of the bathroom.
Dana shoved past him. “The entrance to the server room should be. I’ve got a lot of triadist friends, and one of them told me that Pierce Hardwick had a secret passage.”
She flung the pantry door open. There were still old utensils scattered across the dusty floor from when Marion had tripped. It had been too dark for Seth to see that one of the floor tiles was discolored in the back of the pantry, and set a few centimeters higher than the others.
No wonder Marion had tripped. She was ordinarily so graceful, it was hard to imagine she could have stumbled over her own feet.
Dana took a stone key out of a pouch on her belt and tapped it against the tile.
Unseelie magic flared. The tile melted away, revealing a tunnel underneath.
“Ta-da,” she said. “You coming?”
Seth felt Lucifer’s USB drive in his pants pocket. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
Dana dropped down first, and Seth followed second. It wasn’t a long drop. The hallway underneath was darker and chillier than anywhere else he’d seen in the palace. It also branched off in three directions.
“This way.” She led him down the left-hand hall. It was so long that it vanished into darkness. “Five miles that way, under the ocean, behind a big-ass door. That’s where the servers are kept.”
“Do you have a map?”
Dana pulled one out. It wasn’t magical, like the one she’d loaned him for use in Sheol, but hand-drawn. It only showed the sub-level that they stood on. That was probably because the rest of Niflheimr was too complex to be mapped properly.
“Here’s where we are.” She pointed at one end. “And here’s where the tunnel is.”
Seth could visualize it, but he really hated teleporting places he’d never been before.
“All right.” He took a bracing breath. “Let’s do this.”
He grabbed Dana’s elbow a third time.
They phased.
And they reappeared without ground under their feet.
Seth didn’t even have an instant to swear out loud before they plunged into black water so frigid that it should have been solid. But it wasn’t. It consumed their bodies instantly.
Water flooded his nose and throat. It flooded the wound on his belly, exposed underneath the glamour, and blinded him with cold.
Dana’s arm slipped out of his hand. The bubbles of her breath escaping her lungs slid past him, silver in the darkness.
Wearing stone armor made her drop fast.
Seth propelled himself toward her, feet kicking and arms outstretched. He had never tried to phase underwater before. He didn’t know if attempting it would displace the water or if it would fill him—maybe even finish killing him.
He could only swim. Dana sank faster than he did, and the black water seemed bottomless.
She faded out of sight.
Seth kept swimming, kept pushing, even when his lungs strained for air. He couldn’t give up. He couldn’t tell Marion her sister was dead.
And then the water churned around him.
Dana reappeared, shoved upward by frothing sidhe magic. She caught him in hands gauntleted by stone, nearly wrenching the arms out of his sockets by the speed of her rise.
They erupted on the surface together. Their gasps for air echoed into the lightless cavern.
“I’m sorry,” Seth panted, treading water. Water plastered his shirt to his shoulders. His booted feet were sluggish. “I must have missed. The map—I’m bad with maps.”
“You didn’t miss.” Dana sounded a hell of a lot calmer than he was. “Grab my belt and hold on.” He did as instructed. She reengaged the sidhe magic, using it to push them across the surface of the water. “That five-mile tunnel was flooded halfway down. I’d planned to use these spells to get me to the surface before I ran out of air.”
“You knew it was flooded? And you didn’t tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.” Dana got them to a narrow stone platform and hauled herself out. She offered a hand to help Seth too, but he escaped on his own.
He lifted the hem of his shirt to check the wound. Water seemed to be seeping out of his skin, but he couldn’t see any sign of additional fraying around the glamour.
“Your six pack is still intact,” Dana said dryly, tossing a witchlight onto the ground between them. It lit up the disc of the floor they stood on—barely twelve feet in diameter—and a single computer workstation at its center. The light illuminated Dana from underneath her chin, casting long shadows onto her forehead that made her look downright demonic.
“This is the server?” Seth asked. The computer didn’t look like it could host websites that caused as much trouble as those on the darknet.
She dropped into the chair and cracked her knuckles before resting her fingers on the keyboard. “It’s just the access point.” It looked like a normal computer, as far as Seth could tell—aside from its position under the ocean in the Winter Court. The monitor was old, probably almost as old as Genesis, and its cables led into the stone under their feet.
Dana pressed the power button.
Lights arced up the walls around them, which Seth hadn’t been able to see until that moment. The cavern was wider than a football field and shaped like they were inside of an egg.
The walls were made entirely of servers.
“Oh my God,” Seth said, turning where he stood. He gazed up at the flashing lights in shock. He’d never seen so much equipment before. It hummed like a snoring giant.
A login screen blinked to life on the monitor. Dana started typing.
“My wife’s a computer nerd, so she just needs one special account on here to download all the data that’s ever touched the servers,” she explained. “And the security on the darknet systems isn’t as good once you’re in here because nobody should be able to get in, between the magical and physical barriers.”
“Wait,” Seth said.
He took the USB drive out of his pocket. It didn’t look damaged, but he shook all the water out of it before plugging it into a port on the side of the monitor.
“What are you doing?” Dana asked.
A window popped up on the screen. Text scrolled quickly by. Seth didn’t understand it, but he assumed it was Lucifer’s program going to work. “I don’t just want information on balefire. I promised a vampire that I’d get him access to the servers in exchange for getting turned.”
“Turned? Into a vampire?” Disgust curled her upper lip. “Why in the hells would you want to do that?”
“I can’t die,” Seth said, patting his chest.
“Fuck that.” She reached for the USB drive to unplug it, but Seth caught her wrist.
“Please,” he said. “I need this.”
“You don’t want to be one of the bloodless. I hunt them for a reason. Being undead is miserable! And if you turn your avatar into some corpse, you might ne
ver die, and never go back to being God.”
“That’s kind of the point.”
The chair’s legs squealed as Dana pushed it back, standing up to stare Seth in the eye. “I can’t believe you’d rather be a vampire than a god.”
“If I become a vampire, I’d get to keep the life I’ve built,” Seth said. “My life…and Marion.”
Doubt flickered through Dana’s eyes. “It’s like that, huh?”
“She needs me right now. That’s all I’m saying.”
“You’re fucking stupid,” she said matter-of-factly. But she sat back down and didn’t try to pull out the thumb drive. “Extra stupid because I can’t find nothing about balefire while this program is running, and I can’t give Penny a login either. Great job, Einstein.”
“You can ask Lucifer for a login,” Seth said. He doubted that Lucifer would give Dana anything, given her propensity for vampire slaying.
She seemed to take that as a challenge, though. Mirth smoldered in her eyes. “Sure. I can ‘ask.’” Dana leaned back in the chair, folding her arms across her chest. “What are you going to do about my sister?”
“She asked me to reveal myself as God and endorse her wedding,” Seth said.
“Will you do it?”
He ran a hand down his chest, feeling the convincing glamour Sinead McGrath had made for him. “If Lucifer changes me, I can’t go around claiming I’m a god, can I?”
“Seems like you’ve got a problem, then,” Dana said. “Because if you endorse Marion’s wedding, she’s gonna get married. But if you don’t, you’re gonna lose her even if you do become a vampire.”
His mouth was dry. He swallowed hard. “Yeah. I know.”
“Then it sounds like you’ve got a decision to make.” She laughed. “Sucks to be you.”
18
Konig didn’t return to Marion’s bedroom after their fight. She didn’t know if she should have been grateful for that or not.
The argument seemed like such a simple misunderstanding, requiring minimal explanation to sort things out. But she needed his patient attention in order to do that.
Marion could forgive him for the incident, if he’d forgive her for hurting him first.
It was all so fixable.
Wedding preparations churned on.
Heather retrieved Marion from bed at first light. “Can’t sleep in on your wedding day,” the archer said.
Marion hadn’t slept at all. She’d spent the night hugging her pillow, watching the curtains flutter, and wondering if she’d made a mistake. There hadn’t been anything else she could do.
It was likely that she should have spent those hours talking with the council in order to squeeze a few last-minute votes in her direction, but she hadn’t been able to move without grimacing. That last strike Konig had flung in her direction had left her badly bruised.
She kicked the sheets off. “Oh, thank you,” she said when she realized Heather had brought breakfast in on a tray.
“You need your strength,” Heather said.
“Not that I don’t appreciate the gesture, but where’s Nori? She usually assists me.”
Heather shook her head. “Busy with other wedding stuff. I think she’s assisting Konig today.”
The mere mention of his name made Marion’s stomach flip. She didn’t have much of an appetite.
It wouldn’t do to faint when she was walking down the aisle, though.
Marion ate on her balcony, where she could watch the rest of the Autumn Court bustling with activity. Security had tripled overnight. The forest outside her balcony teemed with people, most of them human-looking, though it was hard to tell preternaturals at that distance.
She could tell when the other guests began arriving from Earth specifically because security began swarming her lawn, forming rings of protection. They were sparing no expense to ensure Arawn couldn’t reach her.
The guards shouldn’t have worried. Arawn’s people couldn’t touch sunlight, and it was a sunny day in the Autumn Court. Nothing stood between Marion and her wedding with Konig.
Marion was safe. She had never been safer in her life.
Why did she feel so vulnerable?
“How are arrivals going?” Marion asked.
“Great. We’ve got every ley line wide open and everyone in the court is helping escort guests. You wouldn’t believe who Violet managed to talk into attending.” Heather ticked the list off of her fingers. “Actors, human politicians, the press, some great bloggers, sidhe from the other courts…”
“Lovely.” None of those people were showing up for her. They were just there to see the event of the century. “I trust that there’s no sign of danger if you’re here with me.”
“We’ll know if anything happens. I’ve got all my people on the lookout.” Heather leaned her elbow on the balcony, smiling down at Marion. “They’ll be your people soon. You excited?”
“I am,” Marion said. That wasn’t even a lie. She’d soon be wearing the diadem of a queen, on a throne overlooking a mighty kingdom, and that was where she was meant to be.
Excitement wasn’t her only emotion, though.
“These eggs are overcooked,” Marion said.
Heather picked up the plate. “I’ll have new ones made. Be right back.”
As soon as she left, Marion went to the overnight bag she’d packed for the wedding. She had brought the bottle of water from Mnemosyne as an afterthought without expecting to need it. But now Marion was going to marry Konig, and she wanted to do it remembering everything.
Marion needed to remember how she’d loved him. Their first meeting, the first swoons of passion, their long nights together. Whispers shared one long day in Konig’s bedroom weren’t enough to comfort her anymore. She needed to become the old Marion again—the woman whom everyone hated.
Better hated by everyone than petrified of marrying Konig.
She twisted the cap off of the bottle. Seth had filled it to the point where the surface shivered a centimeter from the mouth.
“Please,” Marion whispered, unsure of what she was asking for.
She drained the bottle, throat working, lungs tightening, heart pounding.
The memories seemed to radiate from her stomach where the water settled.
Marion remembered that garden again—that vast, blue-tinted expanse with trees thicker than any on Earth. She remembered running with a boy much older than her. Playing with him. Laughing.
She also remembered sitting beside a lake with Rylie. She remembered the Alpha sharing words of warning with her, though not the specific language. Rylie had looked stern. She had looked angry. And Marion remembered feeling surprised that Rylie could get that kind of angry, because Marion had never seen her in such a mood before.
None of that was as important as the toddler that was seated beside Rylie’s legs as she spoke. Like the teenager Marion had seen in the garden, he had soft black hair and brown skin.
The Wilder coloring, Marion now knew.
And she remembered dreams of war and fire, and standing among a field of bodies while feeling responsible for what had happened to them.
Those memories were things she’d remembered before—back when she’d touched Seth, skin to skin, before knowing he was Seth.
Some of the things the water of Mnemosyne made her remember were from that time, too.
Waking up in the Ransom Falls hospital with Seth’s name on her lips.
The doctor, Lucas Flynn, remaining by her side through medical testing. His reassuring presence hadn’t waned in the days that followed, like at the bookstore where the seller had hated preternaturals. Or when she had almost been killed by an assassin in the Autumn Court.
Seth was everywhere in her mind—filling every nook and cranny of who she was.
There was nothing from before.
Marion dropped the water bottle with a gasp, shocked back into her skin.
The river hadn’t helped her remember because those memories had all been taken away, destroy
ed in the Canope. There was nothing to restore.
She didn’t feel differently about Konig.
And she definitely didn’t feel differently about Seth.
Heather knocked on the bedroom door. “I’ve got your eggs.”
Marion swiped her hands over her cheeks, rubbing away moisture. Then she tossed the bottle into the recycling. “Come in.”
The archer brought eggs that were slightly runny, which was perfect. They didn’t look remotely appetizing.
“Better?” Heather asked.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Marion said. “Bring in the stylists. I want to get dressed now.”
There was no point delaying the inevitable.
“Tip your head,” said the hairstylist. Marion obediently did as told, allowing her hair to spill down her back.
The stylist was one of a dozen attendants working on Marion in a flurry of wild activity. They were tugging on her hair, brushing makeup over her eyes, concealing tiny blemishes on her chin.
At some point, she’d been instructed to step into fancy underwear, and she had. They hadn’t been able to cinch it yet. They were waiting on a healer to repair the bruising that Konig had delivered the night before. Nobody had asked how she’d been injured. They’d just seen the mottled markings and called for a witch.
Once she was healed, the dress itself would come next.
“I don’t feel well,” Marion said, pressing a hand to her stomach. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
“That’s normal.” Heather reclined with her boots propped up on the vanity, still wearing the Hound-hide trousers. “Everyone feels like that when they’re about to get married.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Chin up.” Nori’s tone was a little too sharp to be consoling. She’d arrived to help dressed in the gown selected for Marion’s bridal party, which was an icy shade of blue to honor the Winter Court. “You’re about to marry the most desirable member of the sidhe royal families. You’ve got nothing to be nervous about.”
