by SM Reine
“Move an inch this way and I choke her,” Nathaniel said, locking his free hand on her throat. Marion gave a tiny squeak.
“Just go in and kick his ass!” Benjamin shouted at Seth. “There’s nothing stopping you!”
“He can’t hear you,” Nathaniel said. “Nobody knows I’m not alone. They think I’m talking to myself. Look at how much they pity me.” That did look an awful lot like pity on Marion’s face right there. And also like fear. Probably because a total madman was sitting on her chest.
Seth hung back anyway. He folded like a collapsing house of cards, shadow folding inside shadow until he flattened out into a three-dimensional shape of a man. “Let her go,” Seth said again, “or I’ll kill you from out here and figure out how to fix the universe later.”
“You’d really do that?” Nathaniel asked. “If I don’t go through the Genesis warp, everybody you know will cease to exist. Including Marion.”
“I’ll figure it out,” he said.
But still, he didn’t move.
Neither did Nathaniel.
Marion shifted under his grip, enough that she could move her jaw to speak. “Look at me, Nathaniel.”
His gaze snapped down to hers. “What?”
“Ariane told me of a witch who was born before me—a powerful child who entered the Origin to become God and went mad from loneliness.”
“You don’t know who I am,” he hissed.
“But I do,” she said. “We are much the same. We have been taunted by the promise of power, and we have seen what a punishment it is to gain it.”
“Bullshit. I have Benjamin’s memories. My memories. I know more about you than you could ever know about me, and I know how much you fucking love power.”
“I have used it,” Marion said, “but I don’t love it.” She touched the chain of her necklace. “These gemstones hold passive magic. Glamours. They’re working while I’m in the cage. You’ll see all my secrets if you break them.”
Nathaniel slammed the wooden knife into her necklace’s gemstones. The impact was hard enough that Marion cried out, and her breastbone would surely be bruised. But that would be one more bruise indistinguishable from a thousand others.
The glamour in her necklace fell away, and Benjamin sucked in a hard breath at the same time as Nathaniel.
Marion had been beaten all to hell. She had a swollen lip, a black eye, and cuts all over. Many of the bruises were healed around the edges even though the cuts had yet to scab. She must have been attempting weak healing magic on herself. Healing had never been one of Marion’s strong suits.
“Konig,” Seth growled from outside the circle.
He pushed against the perimeter.
“Stop!” Nathaniel yelled, lifting the knife again. But there wasn’t as much resolve in his eyes now. Much less madness, too.
“These are only the wounds you can see,” Marion said. “There are others inside me…and inside you.” Her fingers spread over his chest. Benjamin’s chest, Benjamin’s heart. “Godhood is not easy.”
She was looking at Seth when she said that.
Nathaniel was shaking now, and Benjamin shook with him. Both of them hurt. Their hearts ached.
“They abandoned me in the garden,” Nathaniel whispered.
Marion’s eyes shimmered with tears. “I know. They abandoned me there too. And they abandoned me as an adult as soon as I became inconvenient to the ways of the gods.”
They shared a long moment between them—a silent moment with the weight of lifetimes.
For the moment, neither of them seemed to be aware of Seth. But Benjamin was. Seth was edging himself behind Nathaniel inch by inch, making sure that he could enter the circle unseen.
“I do understand you, Nathaniel Faulkner,” Marion said. “I also believe that Benjamin Wilder understands me. Let your halves reconcile. Let us be at peace. We are not enemies—we have the same goals.”
Nathaniel was quiet for so long that Benjamin was convinced that hell was about to break loose.
All the elements were there for it. Seth was simmering outside the perimeter of the cage, and Nathaniel’s arms trembled with desire to drive the wooden stake through Marion’s throat.
Someone was very close to dying. Benjamin didn’t need to be a god of death to see that.
But Nathaniel sat back on his heels.
Marion pushed up onto her elbows with a faint grimace. Her fingers wandered to her ribcage, where another injury was probably hidden by her dress. “Believe me when I say I don’t want to be a god. I have no plans of entering the Genesis warp. We can still help each other.”
“All right,” Nathaniel said. “Maybe we can.”
She held her hand out, as if asking for the wooden knife.
He tucked it in his belt.
And he shot a smirk at Benjamin.
Nathaniel had given up on killing Marion…for now. But he wasn’t giving an inch. Not one gods-damned inch.
12
Seth dived into the circle as soon as Marion didn’t have a blade at her throat. Marion was on her feet when he got inside. Seth threw away all ideas of “should” and “shouldn’t” and seized her in his arms, dragging her body against him as gently as he could without giving her room to escape.
She was broken. Her body was broken, and her heart was broken, and it was Seth’s fault.
He’d left her alone, and Marion had been beaten.
It was all his fault.
Marion didn’t seem to blame him. She pressed against him with as much desperation as he pressed against her, hands wandering over his chest. “The ash—is it…?”
“Fine,” Seth said. She didn’t need to know what he’d done. She didn’t need to know how little remained.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for holding yourself back. If you’d burst in before I talked him down…” She squeezed tighter. “He’d have killed me.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Seth said.
“Because you trust that I can take care of myself?”
He wished it were for reasons that benign. In truth, it was because Shamayim was not cold enough to be the place that Marion died.
Seth traced his hand down her arm, from shoulder to wrist, feeling the bones underneath. At least one was fractured. The muscle was swollen. She must have been in immense pain. “Benjamin didn’t do this to you.”
She pulled away, and it took so much strength for Seth to let her go.
“Nathaniel? Benjamin?” She kneeled in front of him.
Benjamin lifted his head. He’d had it bowed to his knees, hugging his legs to his chest in an upright fetal position as though trying to gather his mind. “I’m Benjamin.”
“You spoke as though you were Nathaniel,” she said.
“I’m just confused. You’d be confused if you had two souls on the inside too.” Irritation twisted his mouth. “Sorry, Em.”
Marion patted his shoulder. “I’m the one who owes you an apology. We’ve gotten locked inside a near-inescapable cage I intended for a different angel.”
“Near-inescapable?” Seth asked.
“I’m not oblivious to the fact that I’m a half-angel who created her own potential downfall,” she said. “Of course there is a way out.”
“Then why’ve you got us locked in here?” Benjamin asked. “Sick sense of humor?”
“Because I am not the one who can open it.” She turned to Seth, reaching for his chest. He caught her hands before she could probe his ash heart. “Bring a strand of balefire from Ransom Falls to burn the ground away.”
“Would that work?” he asked.
“Balefire can cut through anything,” she said.
Literally anything.
Including a half-angel mage.
Seth’s fingers clenched on hers. “I could kill you both if the balefire goes wild.”
“You won’t let it,” Marion said.
“Balefire’s uncontrollable. Sure, I can move chunks of it from one place to another, but it’s practi
cally a living thing. It crawls.”
Yet there was such trust in her eyes. Maybe even something that resembled worship. “You were once a great doctor, Seth, and you are capable of wielding power as a scalpel.”
He was tempted to refuse.
There were still several days until the warp was meant to open, and that was a lot of time to think. To seek out alternatives.
It was also a lot of time to leave Marion confined with Benjamin in his madness.
A lot of time for Rylie to continue worrying over her son.
A lot of time for the Godslayer to find the entrance to Shamayim.
“You won’t hurt me,” Marion said firmly.
“I already have.” Seth’s hands encircled her waist, fingers sliding up to her ribcage. He could sense the wound underneath. If she’d been hit harder, the bones cracking inward could have punctured an important organ, and she’d have died of internal bleeding. The Death side of him was attracted to it. “I didn’t protect you.”
“This is my choice.” She moved his hand to her hip. Away from the worst of the wounds.
“The same way a fox chooses to chew off her leg in a trap,” Seth said. “I mean, Jesus, Marion—he got at you, and I knew he could get at you, and—”
“And far worse will happen if you don’t let us out,” Benjamin said.
Seth still didn’t trust the kid. The shift into compliance was barely a shift at all. Benjamin was crafty—he’d have gotten that from being raised by Abel, who was a survivor at his core. He hadn’t let Marion go because he felt understood. He’d let her go because she was his best shot at escape.
If Seth let Marion out, he’d be letting Benjamin out too, with Nathaniel riding shotgun.
Would Marion really be safe if he left her in the circle, though?
“Move to the center, as far from the edges as possible,” Seth told Marion. She edged to the middle, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders to steady her. She was limping now.
In truth, Shamayim was the perfect place to house the balefire from Ransom Falls. It had already escaped from Sheol once when Seth had attempted to contain it there. But that was because there was a physical door between Sheol and Dilmun, giving it access to Earth. There was no such physical access for balefire to creep from Shamayim to Earth.
Not unless it went through the Middle Worlds first.
And right now, burning Konig’s kingdom to the ground sounded like a great fucking idea.
Seth gestured to Benjamin. “Stand with us.” The boy started to move next to Marion, and Seth shook his head. “On my other side.”
While he relocated, Marion’s hand crept to Seth’s stomach underneath his shirt. Her thumb slid up. Toward his sternum.
She felt the sliver from the Tree of Knowledge.
“Hey,” he said.
But her fingers had already felt around its edges, briefly probing its limits. Worry darkened her eyes. “Oh, Seth. Moving the balefire will only make this worse.”
Seth hoped his smile was reassuring. “I know.”
Then he willed balefire into Shamayim.
That was all it took. A whim.
Balefire lifted from half of Ransom Falls. There was nothing to salvage underneath; it had torn away massive chunks of the ground while traveling from the forest, and left no buildings behind.
It was nothing like a scalpel.
Seth could ball it up, stretch it out, move its location in the universe. But he couldn’t dictate where it ended up with any precision. The balefire bucked against him.
He willed it to break through the ground underneath Marion’s circle.
She cried out at his side. They were momentarily surrounded by balefire again, just as they’d once been in Myrkheimr, and it was so bright that mortal eyes would have been seared.
But then it was gone. Seth shoved it into the ground underneath the empty lake, letting it boil away whatever fluid remained. The air of Shamayim cleared in its absence.
The cage was broken—half its stones simply gone, the same way that parts of Ransom Falls were missing.
And the Metaraon statue had been sliced in half.
Destroyed.
Seth gave Marion time to mourn the statue of her father. He waited by the empty lake while she kneeled at Metaraon’s severed feet, her face blank of emotion, fingers combing through what little rubble remained.
He’d broken Marion and Benjamin free of her cage, but he still managed to feel like total shit.
“You know she’s using you, right?” Benjamin asked. He’d wandered down to the edge of the lake with Seth, for all appearances totally sane.
Seth glanced at Marion again. Her mask was slipping. A single tear tracked down her cheek.
“You don’t get to talk,” Seth said.
“Unless you want to kill me, I can do whatever I want,” Benjamin said. “I was God before you were. And when I go back through the Genesis warp, I’m going to be God again, and you’ll be mortal. Who says I shouldn’t seek you out and kill you before you’re reborn like this?”
“You’ll have to hurry if you want to kill me before Elise does,” Seth said.
“You’re not taking my threat seriously. I don’t think you believe me.”
“I think that you genuinely believe that you’re Nathaniel Faulkner. I think that you’re having a breakdown because you’re figuring out your destiny and it looks hideous.” Seth rested his hand on Benjamin’s shoulder. “Nobody’s going to blame you for struggling through this, man. Destiny’s hard.”
“Don’t touch me,” Benjamin said.
Seth dropped his hand. “We can help you prepare for time travel. Even when you’re facing down Genesis—again—you don’t need to be alone.”
Benjamin’s face twisted. It might have been anger, or fear, or grief. “Easy for you to say. You don’t have to jump through that tear in time and give yourself up.”
“I don’t. But I mean it when I say you don’t have to do any of this alone. You’re not alone, kid.”
He recoiled. “Fuck off.”
All right. Seth remembered that expression, that tone of voice. It was Abel through and through.
“Wait here,” Seth said.
He went to Marion’s side. She was holding a piece of the statue’s base cupped between both hands that looked like a chunk of dried-out marrow. She had already stopped crying.
“I suppose it was foolish to hope I could get anything from my dad post-mortem,” Marion said. “Ridiculous to think that studying his statue would be like having him teach me directly.”
There was an aching lump where Seth’s heart should have been. “I’m sorry. I tried to control the balefire.”
“You did well.” She pocketed the statue fragment and stood. “You’re alive and your chest is deteriorating. I take it that means your return to Ransom Falls was a success.”
Success? No way. Success would have been protecting Marion. Success would have been stopping all this death, and securing the Genesis warp so that Benjamin could pass through safely.
“The Godslayer wasn’t there,” Seth said. “I had to use cosmic power to evacuate the town.”
Marion looked dismayed. “You wasted your time evacuating mortals?”
“Patients from my hospital. Members of my community.”
“I don’t understand your priorities,” she said.
That made him angrier than he’d have expected. “You’re my priority, and you weren’t protected. I shouldn’t have trusted your sidhe allies to help no matter what you said.”
“Are you blaming me for what happened? Do you think I let Konig beat me?”
“The only person I blame is Konig. And me.” He stroked his fingers down Marion’s cheek, letting his hand rest on her jawline. He wished that his touch could take all those bruises away. “I don’t like feeling like this, Marion. I’m supposed to be all-powerful, but I feel like I’ve got no control here. Like I can’t help you.”
Without the glamour, she looked so pale and
sad. Especially in the washed-out light of the balefire. “It’s not control or help I want from you.”
She wanted trust. Love.
“I’m not going to take chances again,” Seth said. “We’ve got to get you and Benjamin to safety.”
“Perhaps moving him to my abattoir in Niflheimr—” she began.
“No,” Seth said.
“Konig won’t hurt him.”
“That’s not what I’m afraid of,” he said. “Don’t you know how close Konig’s been to killing you?”
“He still loves me. He wouldn’t kill me.”
“Do you really think that?”
Marion closed her fingers around the broken necklace, and as Seth watched, its gemstone healed. And then she appeared healed again—skin unbroken, eyes bright, hair perfectly arranged. There wasn’t even a sign of her struggle with Benjamin.
“Niflheimr will be safe for Benjamin, I swear,” Marion said, trying to clasp the necklace behind her neck. Her hands were shaking too hard for the fine motor control. Seth took it from her.
“Turn around.”
She did, sweeping her hair over her shoulder. She bared the long line of her neck. It looked flawless now, but Seth could remember the bruises vividly.
He was very gentle putting the necklace onto Marion.
“We’re not taking Benjamin to Niflheimr. There’s no guarantee he’d get to the Genesis warp in time from there, especially if Konig realizes he’s got an asset that important.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“I do, in fact,” Seth said.
Marion waited, as if expecting him to tell her. He didn’t speak. He knew she wouldn’t like it.
“Where?” she asked.
“I’m taking him home to his mom,” Seth said. “Rylie will be able to get him to the Genesis warp on time. And she’ll be able to protect him from the Godslayer or anyone else.”
Horror dawned on Marion’s face. “No, Seth, you can’t—”
But he wasn’t putting this point up for debate.
He snapped his fingers, and with a swirl of brimstone, all three of them appeared at the heart of the werewolf sanctuary on Earth.
