by SM Reine
“What are you doing here?” Seth asked.
The stag shifter gave him a flat look. “I am getting my woman.” He held out a hand, and Ariane obediently took it, allowing herself to be pulled against his chest. She was as narrow as he was broad, like a tree trying to date a boulder.
“That’s not what I mean,” Seth said. “What are you doing here?”
“We expected you to be in Ransom Falls,” Marion said. Seth doubted anyone else would notice the stress lines that had appeared between her eyebrows, or realize that she was taking a seat on the four-poster bed because her knees were too weak to let her stand.
“Ransom Falls?” Adàn looked too confused to have heard about this before.
“Mother?” Marion asked.
Ariane didn’t look nearly as guilty as she should have. “You know as well as I do that preparing to ask for favors is a long game.”
“The Genesis warp is about to open! You can’t play a ‘long game’ with your boyfriend of the week when the universe depends upon it!”
“I came when you summoned me with my potion, didn’t I? It’s rich for you to criticize me when you should be thanking me for saving your life.”
“Yes, that was quite a gamble,” Marion said. “You assumed that the Godslayer wouldn’t want you to die, and that your own life would serve as sufficient leverage to save mine.”
Ariane smiled thinly. “My gamble was that the Godslayer would believe I’d do it. My life was never on the line.”
Marion tensed all over.
Seth knew exactly what she was feeling. He’d felt it a thousand times—every single time he’d realized how little his own mother valued his safety.
That was the kind of bargain that his mom would have pretended to take. She’d have loved feeling like a martyr. And she would have let Seth die before killing herself, too.
“The point here is that we’ve got no support in Ransom Falls,” Seth said, moving to stand beside Marion. It was the smallest sign of solidarity he could offer. “Have you even told Adàn what’s going on?”
“I don’t need Ariane to apprise me of global intelligence,” Adàn said. “I’m aware of the developing situation in Ransom Falls. I know what is coming, and I know the numbers of angels involved.”
“Then you also know that we need your help to clear a path,” Seth said. “There’s someone important going to Ransom Falls right now who needs safety and—”
“No,” Adàn said.
“Genesis won’t happen if Benjamin Wilder doesn’t enter the warp in time,” Ariane said. She was looking at her partner as though she’d never seen him before.
“I told you that I know all about this. Whatever game you thought to play, don’t waste your time.” He released his arm from around her and stepped back.
“You don’t want Genesis to happen?” Ariane asked.
Again he said, “No.”
Now the two of them were facing off like Civil War soldiers on a battlefield. The affectionate bond they’d shown had vanished with that one word from the stag shifter. No.
“I don’t understand,” Ariane said. She looked suddenly shrunken and old standing in front of the still-open portal to the Nether Worlds. “We just got Sheol—we have what we want.”
“I want my family back,” Adàn said. “If preventing Genesis gives me a chance to do that…”
Marion was so rigid at Seth’s side. Exactly like Ariane. The two of them seemed to have gone into shock, which left nobody to argue their cause except for Seth.
“Preventing Genesis will destroy the world,” he said.
“I’d risk destroying the world for the smallest chance to see my wife again,” Adàn said. “And believe me, Ariane, when I say there is nothing that I want more than that. Nothing and no one.” He stepped back from her. “I don’t care for games.”
He turned and slipped back through the portal.
Ariane stared, open-mouthed, her hands frozen to her heart.
The portal rippled and then closed.
LCI wasn’t coming.
Benjamin and Abel were on their way to California at that exact moment, and they were going to be met by vengeful angels when they landed at best. At worst, the Godslayer might beat them there too.
Marion rose and went to her mother. If she’d been planning to laugh in Ariane’s face, it would have been well deserved. Seth might have even been tempted to join her after everything she’d said.
But she just put an arm around Ariane’s shoulder, and they pressed their foreheads together.
“I’m sorry,” Marion whispered.
Ariane could only keep staring at the place the portal had been minutes earlier, as if she still couldn’t understand what had happened. “I think he just left me.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Watching Marion soothe Ariane, listening to French words they murmured between themselves, Seth could only think of what Adàn had said. It was so similar to James’s sentiments. That some people were worth destroying worlds over.
Was that what Seth was doing when he trusted Marion? Was he risking the world?
Was anyone worth that?
The bell chimed for dinnertime moments after Adàn left. Ariane chose not to leave Marion’s bedroom—possibly the first time the woman had missed an opportunity to rub elbows with the powerful. It seemed that, despite her earlier criticism toward her daughter, she couldn’t control her emotions enough to be seen in public.
“I won’t be here long,” Ariane said. “I should get back.”
“Not to Sheol?” Marion asked.
Her mother’s expression shuttered. “To Earth. I still have a house there.” She brushed a kiss over Marion’s temple. “I’m done.” She didn’t say what, exactly, she was done with, but Marion didn’t argue, and Seth wasn’t sorry to see the woman go.
He wouldn’t have gone to the dinner either if he’d had any alternative. But he couldn’t leave Marion alone, even when she was at Konig’s side in such a public setting.
Maybe especially not when she was at Konig’s side in a public setting.
Seth watched the victory speech from the fringes of the patio, amid a densely packed crowd. If it hadn’t been for the ash that contained his pounding heart, he was certain that he could have died from the way his breast ached.
“I know that many of you are grieving,” Konig said. Magic enhanced the volume of his voice, so even though he practically whispered, the words carried all the way to the ocean. “It’s difficult when passing time ends an era. But this is the start of a new day. Winter’s yielding to spring, and the growth that comes with it.”
He delivered that line like he was expecting applause.
The reaction was utterly silent.
Death hung over Alfheimr’s patio. The fountains of wine had dried up. Steel thorns curved from the trellises, slicing away the shriveled remnants of vines. There was only one throne, and Konig sat upon it, forcing Marion to stand at his side like she was a decoration rather than his equal.
This was the man who had killed his father and nearly gone mad facing the truth of it. He’d decapitated seelie royalty while surrounded by people who’d loved them, and he’d gotten away with it. Somehow he’d pulled the scraps of his mind together so that he could give a coherent speech. But Seth knew the truth.
“We’ll spend the next week in mourning to recognize the family that we’ve lost, even though they were traitors,” Konig said. “When the week passes, my queen and I will begin to grow everything anew.”
He lifted his hands to gesture toward the woman at his side.
Except that Marion wasn’t the only woman standing alongside his throne. That one archer was there too. The one who wore pants made of Hound hide. It was like women were starting to line up behind Marion to take their turn as queen.
Marion had to know what Heather Cobweb’s presence meant, but she showed no sign of fear or uncertainty. She had a hand resting on Konig’s shoulder. Her curled fingers stroked the back o
f his neck. She was smiling at her people in this gentle, beatific way, both celebratory and sympathetic.
She was good at hiding her real thoughts.
Too good.
Marion wasn’t the only one so good at hiding what she thought. Konig must have still been screwed up from being abandoned at the edge of death, but he looked almost normal. Almost functional.
It would have been easy to chalk the haunted look in his eyes up to invading Alfheimr, and killing a pair of rulers who he’d regarded as family. Not to mention the hundreds of others his army had stomped flat.
Seth knew the truth, though. He knew exactly how fucked Konig’s head was, even if there was no way to see the dripping, moldy swamp that his skull contained.
He used to think he knew what was inside Marion’s head, too.
Now he stood in the audience looking up at her, and he could only think that she looked at Konig much the same way that she looked at Seth. That was love in her eyes. Real love.
She was an expert in deceit. She’d been raised by a mother who pinched her when she didn’t lie convincingly enough, and forced to claw for survival from birth. A disingenuous air hung over her on the best of days.
There were reasons that nobody trusted her.
It was different with Seth. He really thought that it was different, and that Charity was wrong, and Rylie was wrong, and…
At what point did Seth need to consider that he might be the one who couldn’t face the truth?
He didn’t know whom to trust anymore.
“Do you have anything to say, princess?” Konig asked, his hands closing tightly over Marion’s wrist.
“It’s a blessing to have secured our homelands at long last,” Marion said, flashing a dimpled smile at the sidhe sitting around the patio. “Now we will live in peace under King ErlKonig, long may he live.”
She was so damn convincing.
But Seth knew for a fact that Marion’s death was still out there, waiting to happen somewhere cold and dark. He could summon the feeling of an arrow puncturing a lung effortlessly. Even while he saw Marion standing beside Konig’s solitary throne, he could also see her bleeding to death on the ground.
Maybe Marion was up to trouble, and maybe she wasn’t.
Either way, she was going to die if Seth didn’t save her. And no matter what she did, or what she planned to do, he couldn’t let Marion go.
Not like this.
21
Seth had spent enough time laboring over the Pit of Souls to recognize a graveyard when he saw it. The rose garden trapped beyond the boulders on the Summer Court’s beach was a graveyard.
Tender care had obviously been applied to sculpt the bushes, the swirling rock paths, the signs that named each type of flower. When the garden had been alive, it must have been lovely, and beloved.
But now it was as dead as the people who had made it. The only things that remained were memories and a handful of blades beginning to bud from the soil.
A graveyard.
There was a woman in the graveyard. She looked suitably like a ghost in a silk dress that hugged her lean form, and she was as lonely as the wandering dead. Marion had somehow slipped every guard except for Wintersong, who stood atop the rocks facing the ocean. He was within earshot even though he wasn’t looking in Marion’s direction. It wasn’t safe enough for Seth’s taste.
“You have to be more careful,” Seth said the instant he entered the garden. “You can’t walk around alone like this. You’ll raise suspicion.”
“Let people suspect. I have already performed unreasonable acts of self-sacrifice to convince my people I was worthy of the king who did this to them.” Her eyes tracked over the dead rose bushes. There were swords growing inside some of the shriveled buds. “I am due every poisonous thought they have for me.”
How could she be that radiant queen on stage and this soft-spoken waif in private? She reminded him a little bit of the way Rylie had been when she was young. And maybe Marion knew that. Maybe Marion was behaving in exactly the way she needed to in order to make Seth love her.
This self-deprecating, vulnerable woman could have easily been the lie.
The queen could have been the truth.
Seth walked closer, searching for some sign in Marion’s face, her posture. She looked like she felt horrible. But she was good at faking moods. She could have been faking that, and faking her weakness in the bedroom with her mother, and faking vulnerability in the face of the Godslayer.
He just didn’t know.
A wind blew hard off the ocean. It was colder than any summer wind had a right to be, carrying the bite of winter on it. Konig’s unseelie power crept everywhere. But it still wasn’t as cold as the place that Marion would eventually meet her death.
Marion shivered hard. She glimmered faintly with magic, but it wasn’t enough to keep her warm. The cold had gotten inside of her.
“Where’s Benjamin?” she asked, wrapping her arms around herself. “You should be with him.”
There were a lot of shoulds that applied to Seth. “Abel’s probably driving from Sacramento to Ransom Falls as we speak. Benjamin’s safe with him. Even if Leliel’s built a wall around the warp, they’re going to get there in time.”
“I don’t trust Abel,” Marion said.
Seth couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Neither do I. But he’s my brother, and I know him. I know what he’s going to do. He’ll make sure that Benjamin is in Ransom Falls on November fifth.”
“You’re certain he knows that the Genesis warp opens on the fifth? At midnight? And they’ll hide out until then to make sure that nobody can get to Benjamin?”
“That’s what I told them. They know what they’re doing.”
Marion opened her mouth, but then closed it again, as though she thought better of what she was going to say. “You know that Abel can handle Leliel. Can he handle the Godslayer?”
“The Godslayer won’t be there. I don’t think she’s worried about the warp. She’s worried about you.”
“She’d have killed me today if she could have.”
Charity’s earnest, worried face swam through Seth’s mind. “She could have killed you. She could have cut your head off before anyone intervened.”
“She wasn’t going to do that while you watched,” she said. “The Godslayer knew your retribution would have been immediate.”
“That avatar was only made to kill. I don’t think Elise would care if her avatar were destroyed once it fulfills its function. No—I think she was going to abduct you.”
“Why would she do that?”
Because you’re planning to do something horrible. Seth swallowed the words down. “I don’t know,” he croaked.
It wasn’t a lie. He didn’t know. But he did have suspicions.
“Terrible things happen, but as they say, every cloud has a silver lining. For every steel blade Konig grows on seelie soil, there is a geyser of honey breaking through the cliffs to nourish new flowers.” She sat on a rock beside one of those bushes, tracing her fingers up the edge of a tiny sword. “If you trust that Abel will be able to survive the Godslayer and reach the warp on the fifth, then I’ll trust you.”
Pain flared sharply, forming a momentary break in her health. The taste of death flitted between them. And the infernal soul within Seth yearned for it.
“Careful,” Seth said, grabbing her wrist.
Her fingertips had already been sliced open on the sword. Thick blood welled from the cut. In the darkness of a winter-touched summer night, it was neither red nor silver. It was black on white. It left a ragged-edged droplet on the bottom hem of her robe.
“I spoke to Konig during dinner. He’s given me permission to take part of the army to the Genesis warp now,” Marion said. “They’ll leave when the witching hour strikes.”
“What happens after that?”
She flicked the blood off her hand. Folded her arms, elbows braced on knees. “They’ll hold the warp until Benjamin goes through.”
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“I mean after that, too.” Seth sank to his knees in front of her. “You stuck with Konig because you needed him for this. You needed his resources. Are you going to need him once the warp closes?”
Marion rested her chin on her arms. She was curled into a position that was nearly fetal, and the dress rippled around her, tugged by that bitter wind. “Konig is king because he’s married to me. If I left him, his rule would fall apart.” Her eyes fluttered shut. “The entire Middle Worlds would fall apart now.”
He sat back on his heels. “Sounds like you want to stay with him.”
Marion’s eyes popped open. “Does it look like I want to stay with him?”
“You look like you love him,” Seth said. “I saw you on the patio together.” It didn’t make him as jealous as he’d have expected. It wasn’t that he liked Marion being with Konig, or because he thought she was faking it. Marion did as she wanted with herself. She didn’t belong to Seth.
That was one of the few things that Seth could feel with increasing conviction.
Marion didn’t belong to him.
“You can’t tell me that you think I’m really in love with Konig. You know I’m forced to play a convincing part to maintain my control,” she said.
“How do I tell the difference? Between what you’re doing with Konig, and what you’re doing with me—what’s the difference?” He stood up and swallowed hard. “Is there a difference?”
Her face crumpled as she stood, gazing down at him with pain in every line of her body. “After your Lucas Flynn avatar died, I was left in a position where I had to prove my loyalty in order to maintain control over the army. I could only use them at that time—and now—if I convinced them that the feelings I professed for Konig were genuine. I learned to make it look real.”
Marion stepped hesitantly toward him. Had Seth been smarter, he’d have moved back.
Hell, he’d have moved into another plane of existence.
“Do you know how I learned to look like I’m in love?” she asked.
