Cast in Hellfire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 2)

by SM Reine

  She took him to her sitting room the long way around, and this time, he examined things with more interest. Not unlike the way that Marion had examined his humble apartment.

  Marion wondered what he saw in her decorative choices.

  To be honest, she wasn’t even certain she’d decorated everything herself. She had a cleaning staff. She’d probably hired an interior decorator, too.

  Perhaps her surroundings said nothing about her at all.

  The sitting room had large windows overlooking her front yard. The sight wasn’t as impressive as the gardens of Myrkheimr, but it was well enough for a teenage girl living alone on some wet island. Nice trees, nice lawn. Her curtains were operated by remote control so she didn’t even have to get up to open them.

  Marion took a seat first, picking a fainting chair on one side of the coffee table. Seth chose a stool on the opposite side—as far from Marion as he could be without being rude. His elbows rested on his thighs, wine glass cradled in one hand as he studied the room, and Marion studied his face.

  Nothing had changed about him. He still had that scar on his bottom lip and the graceful hands of a surgeon. Even at that distance, he smelled faintly of leather.

  He didn’t belong in Marion’s pristine palace.

  She wasn’t sure she did, either.

  Marion realized she was still carrying the apple from her back garden. She set it on the coffee table between them, where it glistened, ruby-black, in the cloud-filtered sunlight.

  She refilled her glass. “What does my sister matter? To you, I mean?”

  “We worked together for a little while. Partnered up on a couple of cases involving the werewolves. Once I got tangled up with Elise and James, I ended up dead—that was a year before Genesis.”

  That was news to Marion. “I thought that the only people who came back after Genesis were the ones directly killed by the void.”

  “And me,” Seth said. “They chose to bring me back.”

  “Why? Did they feel guilty?”

  “I doubt that’s the reason. Lots of people died because of Elise and James, but they did special backflips to bring me back, while everyone else stayed dead. The only other person I know that they did that for is Rylie.”

  The mention of the werewolf Alpha stung Marion. She didn’t like the way his expression changed when he mentioned her. “So Rylie is friends with them too.”

  “From what I heard, Elise and Rylie were tight in the end,” Seth said. “They fought together, side by side. Not always friends, but a team. You don’t come out of something like that without being changed.”

  But Elise and James were the only ones who had changed into gods.

  Marion sat back, drinking her wine and trying to think of what the world must have been like before Genesis. Seth and Rylie fighting against an ancient God, with the help of a half-sister whom Marion’s father had created.

  Even if Marion’s memories had been intact, she doubted she would have remembered the days when Seth had fought alongside this Elise person. During the time of Genesis, Marion had been barely more than a toddler. It was unlikely she’d been directly involved in the battles.

  Marion did almost remember a garden, though. And a boy in the garden who looked much like Seth.

  No matter how Seth denied it, there was something to those memories.

  “I’m not the same as I was before Genesis.” Seth took a sip of the wine and grimaced. “They changed me when they brought me to life again. I need to know how more than why. The symptoms…” He trailed off, staring hard at his hands. “I’m getting worse. I need you to ask Elise and James what they did to me.”

  So that was what Seth valued more than his anonymity, more than getting away from the mage who’d been dropped into his emergency room.

  He wanted his identity.

  She couldn’t blame him. Marion was aching pretty hard for the same thing.

  “I doubt I’ll need my memory for that,” Marion said. “If I’ve been able to contact Elise and James in the past, then I should be able to do it now, too.” She twirled the glass between her forefinger and thumb. “You said you’re different since Genesis. Different how?”

  Seth finished his wine and set the glass on the coffee table beside the apple. The remaining drops of wine pooled in the bottom of the bulb. “Different.”

  “Is this another of those secrets you claim has nothing to do with me, even though it clearly does?”

  “I don’t know all the ways I’ve changed. But look at me, Marion. Just look.” He pointed at his face. “Do I look like I’ll be hitting forty years old soon?”

  He didn’t. If anything, he looked younger than when Marion had met him a week earlier.

  “And that’s the only difference you’ve discovered since Genesis,” she said.

  “It’s one of the big ones.”

  “Very well.” She set her wine glass beside his. “I’ll see if I have any way to contact my half-sister. Are you in a rush to leave?”

  “Not at the moment,” Seth said. “Charity was planning to hit up tea time at the Empress Hotel. She’ll be entertained for a little while.”

  She scooped the apple off the table. “I’ll pick through my journals, then. Make yourself at home.” Marion dropped the apple into his hand. They both held it for a moment, touching through the apple without making any kind of contact skin-to-skin.

  “Thanks,” he said. The state of his agelessness wasn’t the only thing that had changed since Marion had last seen him. His irises had gone from very dark brown to black.

  She turned to leave. “You’re welcome.”

  “Marion?”

  “What?” she asked.

  Seth twisted the stem off of the apple. “I am sorry. I didn’t want to lie to you.”

  A smile twitched at the edges of her lips. “I was wrong.” She swirled to leave, striding up the stairs.

  “About what?” he called after her.

  Marion shot a grin at him over her shoulder. “Your apology did make me feel better.”

  5

  The library in Marion’s home was larger than her private pool, the kitchen, and the master bathroom put together. That was where she’d found all of her personal journals last Wednesday, which she’d systematically yanked off of the shelves and arrayed on tables for easy reading.

  “I’ve been studying myself in my free moments, of which there are few.” Marion moved stacks of journals off of one table so that she could reach the oldest ones at the bottom. “If I can’t get my memories back, then I assumed that I’d be able to fake it in the meantime. I’ve been doing well, if I do say so myself. Few at the summit seemed to realize anything was awry.”

  Seth wandered into the room behind her. He was gazing around her shelves with some awe—the first time he seemed to have been impressed by her home. He’d had quite a few books in his old house too. A man after her own heart. “You still haven’t told me how things at the summit unfolded.”

  “Terribly. The majority voted to keep the angels out of the Winter Court.” She waited, but Seth was walking through her room, inspecting the spines of her books. “Aren’t you going to ask me how I voted?”

  “Nope. Whatever you voted, it was right. And wrong. There was no good answer to this. Either you piss off Elise by defying her will, or you piss off the angels by refusing to give them what they want.”

  “It’s hideously unfair that I’d have been put in such a position. The gods must not think much of me, if they have me bearing such news to the summit.”

  “Or they think you can handle it,” Seth said. “You have a chance to read the Bible?”

  “You can see my entire reading list for the last week right here.” Marion patted one of the journal stacks.

  “The Bible’s an old book that some religions follow. More so before Genesis. It’s full of sayings, lessons for life, stuff about God. The old God. In Corinthians, there was one passage that said something like, ‘God won’t give you more trouble than you can
bear.’”

  “And then my half-sister killed that God and dumped all her crap on me to share with humanity,” Marion said.

  Seth laughed. She loved his laugh. The way it came to him so easily, the hint of embarrassment in his eyes. “You might not have your memories, but you’ve got a good grasp of what your sister’s like.”

  “War, Seth,” she said. “There’s going to be war, and being placed in charge of the Winter Court means I’m at the crux of it, with no memories, virtually no army, and no clue how to protect myself.”

  “You’re not getting in on all the defenses the Autumn Court’s been setting up?”

  “They’re setting up defenses?” Another thought struck her. “How do you know about that?”

  “Nori mentioned it,” Seth said.

  No, Marion hadn’t been included. Her conversations with Konig had mostly been centered around what he would do if they took charge of Niflheimr, with occasional interjections about his mother’s preferences about their decisions.

  As for communications from the king and queen of the Autumn Court, there had been only dead silence.

  It was feeling a lot like she was stuck at the far end of the table again, hanging out among the speakers for the least important factions when she should have been in charge.

  “Mind if I look at your journals?” Seth asked.

  Marion waved dismissively at the stacks. She was sick of looking at them. “Much of it is truncated netspeak, and some of that in French. You’re welcome to read anything you can understand.”

  He flipped through one of the journals. “This is all printed off of the computer. I’d been expecting something handwritten.”

  “Yes, the printing thing is explained in a later journal. I used to do all of my journaling on the internet, but an enemy hacked my accounts and exploited the private information for several assassination attempts.” Marion imagined that it should have been embarrassing to confess that, but she had no attachment to any of it. None of the journals had stirred a single memory.

  She didn’t feel attached to her own thoughts. Her home. Anything.

  “How old were you when that happened?” Seth asked.

  “This was five years ago.”

  “Your mom let you have unsupervised access to the internet when you were fourteen?”

  “I was also behind the election for the office of Alpha at that age,” Marion said. “I don’t think anyone was concerned about what I was doing online, though clearly they should have been.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Seth said.

  She shrugged. “Even then, I was the Voice of God.”

  “Yeah, and a kid. You needed boundaries.”

  “You’re all about boundaries, aren’t you, Luke?” she shot back.

  He set her journal down. “Okay,” he said slowly. “But you haven’t found anything about how you contact the gods in your writing.”

  “I never elaborated on it. Why would I? If I’d been chatting with the gods since Genesis, it would be like elaborating on something as mundane my hair care rituals.” Marion wished she’d gotten a bit more specific about her hair, actually. Humidity did unpleasant things to the curls.

  “Maybe the answers aren’t in your journals, then,” Seth said.

  “It’s the only thing I have,” Marion said.

  “Not the only thing.” He flipped the cover on her journal shut. “You woke up thinking that Seth Wilder could bring your memories back. So…” He offered a bare hand to her.

  Marion edged away. “You didn’t want me reading your mind.”

  “You already know what I was trying to keep to myself,” Seth said. “No point in trying to protect my identity now. If the two of us are going to get what we want, this seems like the fastest way.”

  Fastest, but perhaps not the easiest.

  Seth may not have had more secrets to protect, but Marion wasn’t sure that she wanted him in her head now. She had been thinking about him over the last week a lot more than a girl with another boyfriend should. Sometimes those thoughts had been riddled with frustration. But they mostly had not. Really, really not.

  He held his hand patiently outstretched, unwavering. The skin on his knuckles was a more ashen shade of brown than the rest of him, like he’d been punching things. His palms were callused.

  Marion could get her memories back.

  “I’m not sure it’s safe,” she said. “My magic flares up whenever we, um…” She pointed at his hand.

  “You can’t hurt me,” Seth said.

  “Another of your post-Genesis changes?” she asked. He nodded. And he kept waiting.

  Well, there was no point in putting it off. It meant she wouldn’t have to read another of her embarrassingly frank preteen journals, and hopefully her thoughts would remain firmly within her head.

  Marion rested her fingertips in Seth’s.

  The physical contact was light, and the mental collision was equally peaceful.

  For once, instead of feeling as though her skull were blasted open by lightning, her mind seemed to blossom. The library whited out with swirls of magic. Seth’s face and hand and everything else vanished from view.

  The ground shifted beneath her feet.

  Marion.

  She was standing in the garden again—a place of towering trees, a dense canopy, and mossy floor.

  There was a door between two of those trees.

  Marion drifted toward it, and she had no clue if she was moving physically or simply imagining it.

  She didn’t bother reaching for the handle. She simply rapped her knuckles against the frame, and the knocking resonated throughout the entire garden, making the trees sigh and the leaves rustle gently.

  The door swung open.

  For once, there wasn’t another world on the other side—only a pedestal that held a jar.

  The Canope. A voice supplied its name as she approached. Find it. Take it. That’s yours, and once you have it, you’ll be whole.

  Marion reached out to grab the Canope. Her hands contacted smooth clay.

  And the vision terminated.

  The garden vanished, and Marion was back in her library. No time had passed. Nothing had changed. The only difference was that she must have started to fall, because Seth was holding her upright.

  Though they were similar in height, he felt so much stronger than she was, sturdy and safe. He pushed her hair out of her face. Cupped her cheeks in his hands.

  Seth looked at her closely, as though trying to see if she was still herself.

  “Marion?”

  Her knees wobbled. She rested her forehead on his shoulder and wrapped her arms around him.

  Marion’s mind from the time two weeks prior was still a giant blank.

  “I don’t remember anything new,” she said.

  He sighed, and she wasn’t sure if it was relief or regret. “Damn. You didn’t get anything out of that?”

  Well, Marion was currently getting a hug from sexy doctor Seth Wilder, so that wasn’t exactly nothing.

  Konig certainly wouldn’t have thought it was nothing.

  “I saw something,” she said, peeling away from him guiltily. “The Canope.”

  “The what?”

  “I’m not sure.” Marion found a blank piece of paper and pen on her desk. She sat down to sketch what she had seen. Her motions were confident—she was good at illustrating.

  It only took a few minutes to sketch out a large jar. It was plain, made of clay, without handles. It had two stripes of strange runes, which Marion had to be vague about, as she couldn’t remember those in detail.

  “I’d say it’s approximately fifty centimeters high, perhaps twenty in radius. Quite heavy.” She sat back to study her own picture, nibbling on the tip of her pen. “I heard a voice tell me that it would make me ‘whole.’ What do you think it is?”

  “Let’s find out.” Seth snapped a picture of her drawing with his phone. “I’m sending it to Brianna. If anyone’s heard of this Canope thing, it�
��ll be her.”

  Marion sighed, dropping her pen. “I can’t believe that’s all I got out of you. This feels like some kind of cruel joke.”

  Seth stroked his fingers along the back of her hand. Bare skin against bare skin.

  Nothing at all happened now.

  “Seems like that’s the only information you were supposed to get,” he said.

  “Merde.” She shoved the chair back and stood. Disappointment choked her, and she needed to move, needed to distract herself—needed another glass of wine, perhaps.

  Seth’s phone rang. He answered it. “You do?” he asked after a moment. “Wait, I’m with Marion right now. I’m going to put you on speaker.” He pushed a button.

  “Hey Marion,” said Brianna Dimaria, her voice crackling from the cell phone. “Where’d you see the Canope?”

  “I remembered it,” Marion said. “It’s the only thing I remember. Do you know what it is?”

  “Yeah, that’s what’s weird. Dana McIntyre had it about a month ago. She was hired as courier to transport it into Sheol, since she’s the only badass bitch who doesn’t mind taking stuff into the Nether Worlds.”

  Marion’s eyes widened. The Nether Worlds were similar to the Middle Worlds, in that they were a separate plane of existence than the one that Earth resided in. However, instead of housing the sidhe, the Nether Worlds were home to demons.

  “Sheol?” Seth asked sharply. “Who was she taking it to in Sheol?”

  “You’ll have to ask her. She’s in Las Vegas right now, working a case with the vampires. She told me she’d be meeting at the Trump Tower this evening.”

  “You’re friends with this Dana McIntyre?” Marion asked.

  Brianna paused for a long time. When she spoke again, her words were slow. “Yeah, I am. I bet she’ll be at the Trump for the next hour, at least. You need to know anything about the Canope, you should hit her up.”

  “Thanks, Brianna. We will.” Seth hung up.

  “Wait,” Marion said. “What does it matter where Dana McIntyre is right now? Isn’t Las Vegas further than an hour from here?”