by SM Reine
Seth hadn’t believed he would ever shatter the universe over a woman.
He gazed at Marion below him, more peaceful than he’d ever seen her. Rylie’s healers had done the best they could on a human without preternatural strength. The best had still left faint bruises and even a few white-lined scars, which Marion always hid with glamours when she was awake.
The scars had a way of humanizing her that nothing else did, even her face slack in sleep, even the vulnerable curl of her fingers in front of her face, even knowing what it felt to be inside of her while she spasmed around him and lost all rationality to orgasm.
Those scars were a reminder of mortal fragility.
To protect Marion—to stay by her side, to lift her from the dangers that threatened her—would have been to shatter the universe. And Seth would have been lying to say he wasn’t tempted.
But still.
There was no woman worth shattering the universe over.
A family, though? Marion’s family, Seth’s family? Every single other family on the planet? Everyone was going to lose their lives if Benjamin didn’t survive to enter the Warp, even if it did violate the Meta to get him there.
No wonder Seth couldn’t see into the time period surrounding the Genesis warp. The paradox must have meant nothing was determined. Nothing was final.
Or else it meant that everyone died in that instant, including the gods.
Seth woke Marion with a kiss, trailing along the line of her bottom lip to her jaw. As soon as her eyelids fluttered open her scars faded from view. The glamours were that instinctive.
It took another moment for Marion to realize Seth was watching her, and she blushed delicately.
“Is it morning?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
She slid an arm under her pillow, reclining like a fragile mortal goddess, and she said, “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
Marion’s time would be up soon. She was going to die.
Seth had seen the blood pouring from her chest, felt the arrow puncturing her lung, known the creep of cold as her heart stopped beating.
In this moment, she was warm. Alive.
Seth sank into his corporeal form bending over her, an elbow braced by her head. She smiled at the sight of him in a form resembling mortal. Marion rested her hand on his chest, right on the ash, where she’d be able to feel the bass thump of a heart underneath.
He could feel her heart beating too.
“I’m leaving,” he said. “Yeah. I have to go protect Benjamin, or a lot of people are going to die.”
“You’ve seen the deaths?”
“Dozens of them.” He took her wrist, lifting it to his mouth so he could kiss her palm. “Including Dana’s.”
She balled her hand into a fist. “Then what are you waiting for? Protect them.”
“Come with me.”
“I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“You’re going to die, Marion,” Seth said. “Soon. It’s coming real soon. It could happen while I’m out with Benjamin, I don’t know how long that’ll take, and—”
“I’m capable of protecting myself here.”
“Nobody can protect themselves against death forever.”
Her lips curled into a half-smile. “I’m not afraid of you.”
That didn’t make Seth feel better. Not in the slightest. But time was wearing on, and somewhere out there, his brother and nephew were trying to get to the Genesis warp alive.
“Chances are good that saving Benjamin means losing the rest of this.” He pressed her fist against the wood from the Tree of Knowledge. “I won’t be able to come back to you.”
Realization dawned. She dug her fingers into his chest, pulled him closer. “Ever?”
“I don’t think so. James is pretty annoyed with me, and there’s complex rules about time that’ll leave me detached from the years you’re alive. Even if he lets me out, and even if I manage to return to your lifetime…”
It probably wouldn’t be for years. Decades.
That was a best-case scenario.
He finished by saying, “We always knew I’d have to leave soon.”
Marion’s face was crumpling with grief and anger and denial that even she couldn’t fake. “I only just got you.”
His heart was hurting. “At least I did get you.” He lowered down to kiss her, and the way that she clung to him was simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming, like being wrapped in a warm blanket stuffed with needles.
Seth had never gotten to feel love that didn’t hurt like that.
She let him go first. She wasn’t crying when he sat up, and he hated how carefully she put her mask back together even more than he hated the grief. For a few shining minutes, she’d been honest. Completely honest. He’d seen all of her, inside and out, and it had been beautiful.
Marion was withdrawing again. She was donning her armor for battle.
“Promise me you’ll never go back to the Winter Court,” Seth said suddenly.
She sat up too. “I can’t do that.”
“Yes you can. Leave Konig right now, hide on Earth, and forget about everything. Retire. Don’t be Voice, don’t be steward, don’t be queen. You’re destined to own that house on the coast—go there, stay there, and live a long goddamn life.” Assuming that Seth could find a way to make life extend beyond the opening of the Genesis warp.
“The Meta says Konig is going to kill me,” Marion said. “If he doesn’t, it’s dangerous.”
“I don’t care. Fuck it. Survive and the universe can work itself out. Can you do that?” he asked. She was obviously opening her mouth to refuse, so he interrupted her. “Do it for me.”
Marion’s shoulders sagged as she stared out at Titania’s old bedroom.
“Okay.” There was a lot of weight to that one word.
She meant it. She was going to finally protect herself.
Relief lifted the weight from Seth’s heart. “Thank you.”
He didn’t let himself kiss her again. Didn’t let himself linger.
Seth faded into the night without saying goodbye.
King ErlKonig of the Middle Worlds was currently working his way through his fourth bottle of sidhe wine, which was being poured into his mouth by the handmaiden Tove. She’d started out drinking with him, listening to his stories, and laughing in all of the appropriate places. The mood had grown more sedate as the bottles had grown emptier. Now she kept pouring cups, handing them to him silently, and then walking off to get the next bottle.
His head was swimming with victory.
With visions of death.
His external environment was a lantern-lit patio where an unusually subdued party was unfolding. He was not the only one who was drinking, though he may have drunk the most. Had he not earned it? This whole world was his. All the courts. Even the Spring Court, even if they didn’t realize it yet.
His internal environment was much darker. It dripped with mold while his father stared at him from a throne of corpses.
Dead.
He had been trapped there with his dead father so long. If he’d believed that visiting his infirm, grieving father in the darkness of his bedroom had been bad, it was nothing compared to being locked in a throne room with the soul of the accusatory dead.
And Rage hadn’t spoken to Konig. Not once. He’d just kept…staring.
“Konig?”
Tove had come back again. He lifted his goblet by habit for a refill, but it wasn’t even empty yet.
He struggled to focus on her face, and when he saw her narrow features, anger responded by bulging within his chest. “What the fuck do you want this time? Haven’t I done enough?”
She bowed her head in obeisance. “I thought you’d want to know…it’s about Marion.”
Marion.
He lurched to his feet. “What did she do this time?”
“She’s in Titania’s bedroom. You have to see it.”
Konig yanked Alfheimr around him. He wasn’t as caref
ul moving it as he was Myrkheimr; the bricks crumbled around him as he wrenched the hallway to him.
He stood outside Titania’s door. The aura of Death hung in the air, but it was not merely some kind of intangible energy.
With a gesture, he ripped the doors open.
Marion lay naked in a bed with tangled sheets. There was sweat on her flesh, her hair a mess, her makeup smeared. She sat up at the sight of him, fists clenched on the pillow next to her.
She was fully naked—naked enough that he could see the marks on her knuckles, which she no longer tried to hide. Marion had given up denying her relationship with Death.
“Run, Tove,” she whispered.
Konig heard footsteps skittering, but didn’t look. He was too busy absorbing the evidence.
The energy, the bodily fluids, the smell.
Everything was so dark. It brimmed with rot. Konig couldn’t differentiate between reality and dying anymore.
She’d been fucking Death.
“This is it,” Konig said. “You crossed the line.”
Marion sighed, her muscles relaxing. She stood from the bed. “Finally.”
23
Konig stepped into the bedroom and slammed the doors shut behind him with a blast of wind. He took away the seams between door and wall. He waved to seal the windows with bricks. He took away every single one of Marion’s escape routes.
And then he punched her in the face.
She stumbled back against the wall. He pinned her by the throat.
The impact wasn’t enough to take away the dark places in his head, and it couldn’t bring his father back. It couldn’t even make Rage’s face vanish from within Konig’s skull.
Glaring at him, blaming him.
It was Rage’s fault that Konig had killed him.
But Death’s fault that Violet had died. Death had put Rage into that madness through grief, and Death had done it for the woman whose pulse was beating wildly against his palm when he smashed her against Titania’s unicorn mural.
“You fucked him,” Konig said.
Marion didn’t try to deny it. She was silent, chin lifted to try to open her airway, eyes silently defiant.
“Does he know that you suck me off to keep me from punching your face in?” Konig whispered into her ear.
Marion didn’t move. Not an inch.
Gods, he wanted a reaction. He needed her to react the way he needed oxygen to breathe.
“What’d you do for him? Was it good enough?” Konig asked. “There’s no part of you I haven’t already used. Whatever holes you let him in, whatever things you whispered to him like they were true—it’s ground I’ve tread a million times.” He nipped her ear with his teeth hard enough that he tasted copper. That was what it took to make her jerk. “Did you tell him you love him?”
She fisted his hair at the nape of his neck. She jerked his head away from hers. “I do love him,” Marion said from a half-inch away, glaring at him with all the fury of an avenging angel.
It wasn’t a shock. Konig had always known.
But it hurt.
It hurt his pride—his sense of self-worth. This idea there was some man who could do better for Marion than he could. That everything she’d done to convince their people—and to convince him—of their love was a lie from top to bottom, performed only to ensure she could shape the world exactly the way she wanted.
The world she wanted to live in hadn’t included his parents.
It didn’t even include him.
He stepped away. She released his hair.
“You’re not good enough for that piece of shit,” Konig said.
Marion pushed away from the wall. “I know.” A tear slid down her cheek. “Believe me, I know.”
“You’re not good enough for me.”
“That is in contention,” she said. “But until this point, we’ve needed each other.”
Danger shivered through the cold air.
“I don’t need you anymore,” Konig whispered.
“Nor I you,” Marion said. “Unfortunately I don’t have the patience or time for a divorce. With that in mind, I demand a duel according to sidhe standards—a duel for honor, to determine the outcome of all this. Just like you did against Arawn in Sheol.”
How stupid was she? “The only reason that Arawn didn’t die is because he was on his home territory. You’re on mine. And I’m much, much stronger than you in every way that counts.” He’d be able to shape the whole world to his will, according to the rules of a sidhe duel.
Marion dabbed lightly at her nose. Her fingertips came away bloody. “I’m aware. Should I win, you’ll retreat to the Autumn Court and limit your influence there. I will place rulers in the other courts. You will accept wards that will contain you in your domain.”
She couldn’t have picked a more insulting outcome.
“When I win, I’m going to kill you,” Konig said.
Marion didn’t flinch at that. She looked resigned. “I just want a fair fight.”
“A fair fight?” He laughed. “I’ll make it as fair as I can.”
“We can duel at the next sunset because you’re from the Autumn Court, and—” she began.
“Midnight,” Konig interrupted. “The Winter Court is mine too. We’re going to Niflheimr and we’re fighting at midnight.”
That got another reaction out of her. Just a small one, but it was enough to fuel his hunger for more. He wanted to see her cringing and falling, not just flinching slightly. “Midnight is in seven minutes.”
“Then you better get ready. I’ve already chosen my weapon.” He opened his hand to the sky, and his sword appeared. “Get ready, princess.” Konig’s fingers curled around the hilt. Its weight sank into his palm. When he swung its blade in front of him, it sliced the air with a happy cry, eager for blood.
Marion didn’t waste time.
The handmaidens had already relocated some of her belongings to Titania’s bedroom. It was an optimistic move on their part; they’d assumed she would live long enough after the invasion to need her belongings. It meant that she had clothes, though. She wouldn’t fight naked from having sex with Death.
For once she wasn’t careful and calculating in what she wore. She grabbed the first things that she found—a sports bra, oversized t-shirt, leggings, socks.
“That won’t do much to protect you,” Konig said, stepping closer. He swung the sword again. Just inches from Marion. It swept through the air, carving a wide path where her magic could do nothing. He was painting the room slowly with sidhe power that Marion couldn’t penetrate.
“Stop attacking me,” she said, cramming her feet into ankle-height boots. “It’s not midnight.”
He slammed the blade into a dresser. It was sharp enough to cut right through it, severing the mirror. The glass shattered and showered over the floor.
“I’m not attacking you,” Konig said. “I’m not even touching you.” But he would have touched her with his next swing, had she not leaped away from the bed quickly enough. The lazy strike sank inches deep into the mattress.
A lock of Marion’s hair was pinned to the bed rails by the bastard sword.
She touched her hair, eyes aflame with anger.
“Konig,” she said warningly.
“Threaten me, princess,” he said. “What can you do to me that you haven’t already done? I want to hear it.”
She ducked around the end of the bed. “I could have killed you a thousand times.”
He paused. He couldn’t help it. He should have been strong enough not to be so affected by death threats from his wife, his princess, the woman he’d loved for years. But even Konig was only a man. “You never could have killed me,” he said after a moment.
Marion plunged an arm into the wardrobe and withdrew it with a bow and a quiver of arrows, which she looped around her waist with hurried, clumsy movements. “When you slept. When you orgasmed. When your back was turned. When you were drinking—and you’ve so often been drinking lately.”
>
His head and throat and eyes burned with alcohol now. He could barely even focus on the words that she was spitting at him.
He’d have grabbed her by the throat to silence her again, but it wasn’t quite midnight.
Not yet.
Konig approached her so that she had no choice but to step backwards, into the corner. “I could have killed you at all those moments too. You’ve trusted me as much as I’ve trusted you. The difference is that I wasn’t pretending to care about you.”
Marion twisted her hair atop her head, wrapped a cord around it, and jammed an arrow with a broken shaft through the center to hold everything. Her heel caught on the ornamental base of a potted rosebush. She fell hard on her ass.
He jammed the point of his sword into the ground between her legs.
There was a centimeter between the cutting edge and the filthiest parts of her body, forever soiled by Death.
“How long do I have?” Marion asked, glaring at him from the floor.
“Seconds,” Konig said.
“Why wait? The suspense is killing me.” She threw herself back, tumbling legs over head, and put space between them.
She pointed at his sword.
Lightning rippled from shoulder to elbow to wrist and erupted out of her fingertip. It consumed his blade. He was the connection between sword and ground, and he felt the bite of electricity in every single piece of metal jewelry he wore, from the studs in his ears to the barbells in his nipples.
He wasn’t expecting it so he took the full brunt of that force, and it flung him off the floor, into the opposite wall.
This was something Konig had to process in retrospect, while sprawled on the floor after striking the wall. He was momentarily dazed. Too shocked to feel it when it happened. Afterward, it hurt like hell.
Marion was on her feet, aiming for another blast of lightning.
Konig brought the floor up between them. He simply lifted a good square meter of tiles so that it formed a wall, and the lightning splashed off harmlessly, sizzling to nothingness where it landed.
Yet her first blow was followed by a second, and a third. She shot such a barrage of angelfire at him that he only had time to lift more floor as the first section was blasted to pieces.
