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

by SM Reine

  “Depends on how you travel.”

  “I don’t think there’s any mode of travel that would put the southwest within an hour of Vancouver Island.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” Seth said, “I can show you.”

  Marion folded her arms. “Okay. Tell me where we’re going.”

  He spread his hands wide, as though inviting her for another hug.

  She laughed hesitantly. “What are you doing?”

  “I said that I changed in a few different ways during Genesis. This is one of them,” he said.

  She finally stepped into the circle of his arms.

  Seth embraced her gently. She was enfolded in his warm, leathery scent, and every hesitation vanished. She let her cheek rest against his shoulder.

  “You might want to hold your breath,” he said.

  Marion had momentarily forgotten that they weren’t simply hugging again. “Why?”

  “Just trust me.”

  She held her breath.

  And Seth snapped his fingers.

  * * *

  The shift between Vancouver Island and Las Vegas was nearly instantaneous, but somewhere between her last heartbeat at home and her first in Nevada, Marion felt as though her entire body had been plunged into fire.

  She materialized and instantly vomited on the pavement.

  “Holy crap,” Seth said, stepping back.

  Marion collapsed onto all fours. She barely managed to keep her right hand out of the bile puddle, which was tinted red from the wine she’d been drinking. “Gods,” she rasped, clutching her throat.

  Seth dropped beside her. “Are you okay?”

  “I should have held my breath longer.” It felt like she’d inhaled lava. She wanted to touch her tongue to see if it was blistered, but the idea of touching her mouth when it hurt so much was appalling.

  “You shouldn’t have gotten hurt. I’ve never gotten hurt doing that.”

  She swiped at her mouth with the back of her hand and gazed blearily around the street. Marion had managed to shift one of her contact lenses out of alignment when they’d teleported, too. She had to blink a few times to get it to slide back into place.

  Yes, they were in Las Vegas. They were outside the shopping mall across from a hotel that she assumed to be the Trump Tower, given the large, gaudy letter T emblazoned on the sidewalk.

  “You’re a planeswalker like Nori,” she said, gulping back another surge of nausea. “I don’t get sick when I go with Nori.”

  “I don’t think it’s the same thing. I’m not confined by the ley lines.” Seth lifted Marion from the ground. She swayed into his grip, unable to stand alone. Her legs felt like they might melt underneath her.

  “Stop it,” she said, pushing at him.

  He peered closely at her face. “Stop what?”

  “Stop being so close to me. I threw up. I must smell awful.”

  “I was a doctor for over ten years,” he said. “I dealt with a lot worse than vomit from my patients.”

  Marion locked her knees, trying to stand upright. “I’m not your patient anymore.”

  He didn’t let go of her. One of his hands was curved around her neck, his palm rough against the soft skin, thumb resting against the underside of her jaw. He was staring very intently at her neck.

  “Checking for a pulse?” she asked faintly, trying to smile.

  Seth’s hands dropped to his sides. “Sorry.”

  “Next time you decide to teleport me, I’d appreciate warning,” Marion said. It was a little easier to breathe now. She wiped her hands off on her jeans. “At least we got here quickly. Now let’s see about finding this Dana McIntyre person, shall we?”

  “I think we already have,” he said, gaze fixed across the street.

  Even Marion recognized the sound of flesh slapping against flesh and the crunch of bone.

  A window shattered outward. A body flew out of the Trump’s lobby, smashing into the divider and crumpling on the pavement.

  A second body followed, landing atop the first.

  Seth pushed Marion behind him. “Stay back.”

  Magic fizzled over the street, swelling so hard and so sudden that Marion nearly gagged on it. It was gaean magic, a human creation, but it fed on such rage that it nauseated her.

  The remaining glass shivered, then pulverized. It rained to the sidewalk outside of the Trump’s lobby in a wave of shimmering glitter. Then the person who had cleared it out of the frame stepped over the remnants of the frame.

  She could only be described as fat, and she wore it with authority. Leather and black cotton stretched across her rock-solid body. The woman was busty, with virtually no waist because her core muscles were built as solidly as the pillars of the Coliseum. Stone gauntlets gripped her fists, her forearms. The spells originated from the gemstones set into those gauntlets. Electric magic lanced up her armored shoulders and crawled over the skin of her round cheeks.

  Her hair was cut short, very short, and the spikes were dyed bright blue. Her eyes were hard. Her nose was button-like, almost cute, although Marion suspected that describing her in such words would have been a great way to get one of those gauntlets shoved down her throat.

  She stalked toward the people she’d thrown across the street, crushing glass under the heels of her studded combat boots. Leather straps swung from her belt like a Roman gladiator’s skirt, punched with metal spikes that sparked with more magic.

  “Oh my gods,” Marion said, eyes widening. “Is that—”

  “That would be Dana McIntyre, yes,” Seth said.

  One of the vampires was scrambling to his feet, trying to escape before Dana reached him.

  She punched his head into the ground.

  The other vampire rose, and she mule-kicked one of those chunky heels into his jaw, sending his skull spinning almost a full ninety degrees.

  A half-dozen vampires flooded from the lobby she’d evacuated.

  “Ooh,” Marion said. Eight against one. The odds weren’t good. “Shouldn’t we help?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Seth said.

  He was right. Dana thrust a gauntleted fist toward the newcomers. Pure white fire flooded from her palm, chewing over their desiccated flesh, melting it away.

  Only one of the vampires was left.

  Dana marched over to him and kneeled on his chest. He thrashed, but she must have been a good two hundred and fifty pounds, most of it muscle; an animated cadaver didn’t stand a chance of escaping her. “Do we have an understanding now?” she asked.

  He struggled to suck air through his dried throat. “But—I don’t—you killed them!”

  “They might recover with blood. They won’t if I decapitate all of you.” The threat in her tone seemed sort of redundant, considering she was digging her studded combat boots into his sternum.

  “Okay, okay! We have an understanding! You’ll have your tithes!”

  Dana released him and stood. “Good.”

  She finally noticed that she had an audience. Her eyes narrowed at the sight of Seth—and then she spotted Marion behind him.

  The glow vanished from her enchanted gemstones instantly.

  “Shit,” Dana said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  6

  Dana McIntyre lived in a condo in the Allure Tower, up near the top floor. Its windows offered an excellent view of the rest of the Strip: circling tourist helicopters and signs advertising residencies by the likes of Serafina the Siren, succubus strip clubs, and witch burlesque shows.

  One entire wall of the condo was used to display weapons and armor. Some were guns. She had a few axes, too. But mostly she had more enchanted stone pieces, like a helmet, and some knee guards, and even a breastplate.

  Dana stripped the gauntlets off as she strode into her condo, tossing them onto a leather couch. “Yeah, I took the Canope to Sheol. What’s it to you?”

  Marion gaped at the enchanted armor. The magic was complex and unlike anything that Marion had seen before. T
he gaean spellwork she’d sensed when Dana had been tossing people out of the Trump Tower was only a fragment of it, woven into threads of magic that seemed ethereal and—Marion had to guess—infernal too.

  Dana didn’t emanate even the faintest hint of witchy power herself, so Marion had to assume her collection had been gifted or purchased. She clearly knew how to use them, though.

  “The hell are you staring at?” Dana asked. Marion’s jaw snapped shut.

  Seth slipped into the room. “Who gave you the Canope courier job?”

  “I don’t know. It came to me through the darknet. Picked it up from an anonymous drop point and did my job, like I always do.”

  “Where was the drop point?”

  “Outside Vegas,” Dana said.

  Seth and Marion exchanged looks. As far as they knew, Marion hadn’t been anywhere near Vegas recently. “We need to know where you took the Canope so we can get it back,” Seth said.

  “I don’t share my clients’ secrets,” Dana said.

  Seth surveyed Dana with surprisingly fond eyes. “You don’t remember me, do you? I was acquainted with your dad, Lucas McIntyre.”

  Marion felt a jolt of shock. Lucas? When she’d met Seth, he had been going by Lucas as a pseudonym—now an obvious homage to the father of this woman.

  “Dad had a lot of acquaintances,” Dana said.

  The bedroom door creaked open. A woman peered through. “Dana?”

  “Stay in there,” Dana said. “I’m doing business.”

  The other woman’s eyes flicked between the people in the living room. Her skin was green, her eyes flat brown, her underbite accented by tusks. She was something gaean that Marion hadn’t seen before.

  When the green woman realized that Marion was looking at her, she popped back into the bedroom and shut the door.

  “I don’t do favors for anyone, even Dad’s acquaintances.” Dana plopped onto the couch, unlaced her boots, and kicked them off. She was wearing striped ankle socks with holes in the left big toe and bumblebees on the heels. “If I did, I’d owe something to thousands of people. He was too popular. And a hell of a lot more personable than I am.”

  “That’s Brianna’s work.” Seth pointed at the breastplate.

  Dana dropped her boots with a thud. “You know Brianna?”

  “They dated for a week,” Marion said before she could stop herself.

  “I had no idea Brianna was a cougar,” Dana said. “Nice.”

  “Brianna sent us to you,” Seth said. “She said you’d be able to help us track down the Canope. I’m Seth Wilder, by the way. This is Marion Garin. We have reason to believe that the Canope is holding memories stolen from Marion.”

  “You’re Seth Wilder?” Dana gave Seth another once-over and grunted. “Huh. Sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I should have been expecting you, I guess.” Her jaw clenched. “Both of you.”

  “I’m sorry, do we know each other?” Marion asked. “You look very…angry.”

  “Do you remember me?” Dana asked.

  The specific phrasing of the question made Marion inclined to think the answer was yes. They did know each other. The relationship didn’t seem to be friendly, though. “I might remember you if we could get the Canope from Sheol.”

  Dana rolled her eyes. “I guess that’s the point, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not following you,” Seth said. “The point of what?”

  She grumbled as she pulled herself off of the couch. Without the gauntlets and with her bumblebee socks exposed, Dana looked less like a warrior from the days of yore and more like a disgruntled cashier from Hot Topic. “Hey! Penny!”

  The bedroom door opened again. The green woman emerged hesitantly. She was taller than Marion had first realized, tall enough that her coarse brown curls brushed the top of the doorway. She was also broad-shouldered and as muscular as Dana, though she had less body fat, and also seemed to prefer flannel and pajama pants to leather.

  “What’s up?” Penny asked. She spoke surprisingly clearly around those tusks.

  “Go find my maps of the Nether Worlds,” Dana said.

  Penny shot a shy smile at Marion, slipping into a second bedroom.

  Dana waved Seth and Marion over to her kitchen island. “The buyer’s a guy named Arawn. He’s one of the Lords of Sheol. The other big one is Nyx, who rules from a palace called Duat. Are you following?”

  “I’m following.” Seth sat on one of the bar stools.

  Penny returned with a thick piece of folded paper. She weighed its corners down with a barbecue spatula on one side and an empty snifter on the other. “There you go, sweetums.” She kissed Dana before shuffling back into the bedroom.

  “Here’s Sheol,” Dana said. “This here’s the hive.” She pointed to a mess of streets on the left side of the map. “Arawn’s got a place there, but he also shares space in Duat, over on the other side of the Dead Forest. It’s easier to get into the hive. You can start out looking there. Stay out of the forest. The Hounds roam there, and you don’t wanna deal with the Hounds.”

  “What makes the hive a hive?” Seth asked.

  “Buggy-type demons chewed tunnels into the rock, and it’s big enough that it’s basically become a city of its own. Believe it or not, the hive’s the safest place to start off. Most of those demons only eat smaller demons of the same persuasion.”

  The idea of going anywhere near so-called “buggy-type demons” made Marion feel queasy. “And you think that Arawn will have the Canope in his home in the hive?”

  “Hopefully,” Dana said. “He’d be keeping the Canope somewhere safe. He has to be careful with it. Really, really careful. It’s designed to hold souls. If it breaks, the soul’s gone.”

  “It holds souls?” Marion asked, eyes widening. “Or memories?”

  “The essence of a person. Whatever you want to call it. If it breaks, whoever’s being kept in there will be pretty much dead.”

  Marion’s essence—her memories—had been sold to a demon in Hell.

  No wonder she didn’t remember anything at all once she touched Seth. She’d already remembered everything that remained within her mind. Everything else was locked away in the Canope.

  Seth took her hand and squeezed it. “We’ll get it back. Don’t worry.”

  Was her fear so transparent?

  “Yes, thanks,” she murmured.

  She edged away from the island while Seth and Dana continued to discuss the map.

  Dana wasn’t as much a fan of books as Marion, or even Seth, but she had a few shelves. Most of her collection was trashy science fiction. Old stuff that had been read so much that the spines were illegible from being creased so much.

  There was a piece of paper sticking out from between two books. Marion glanced at Dana, who was still distracted, before tugging it free.

  It was a photograph of three women at a sunny beach: an adult and two teenagers.

  The moon-faced teen on the left with the spiky pink hair was clearly Dana, though she wasn’t quite as fat as she’d grown to become. Less like a tank, more like an armored car. She wore a halter bikini top with board shorts that showed off her powerful thighs and the pleasant rolls of her belly.

  The adult woman was someone that Marion had seen in photos of her own: Ariane Kavanagh, who looked like an older, whiter-skinned version of Marion. Ariane was dainty and mischievous around the eyes, as though she were hiding secrets.

  The third woman was Marion herself.

  She was younger, skinnier, cute rather than beautiful. Her hair was concealed by a headscarf, emphasizing her luminous blue eyes. And the teenage Dana was easily hefting Marion’s lanky figure above her head, like Marion was a barbell, while Ariane watched the two of them. Ariane looked like she was either laughing or horrified.

  Marion wore a string bikini, which showed off her abdomen. She had no silvery scar on her ribcage. The photo must have been taken before she started dating Konig.

  Together, the three women
looked happy.

  Like family.

  Marion stared at Dana in the flesh, where she stood under the pool of light shining on her kitchen island. The huntress didn’t look like she’d been happy in a long time. Like she might have never once smiled since becoming an adult.

  Were they sisters? Marion and this stocky, armored, angry lesbian?

  “Gods,” Marion breathed.

  “Take the map,” Dana was saying, oblivious to Marion’s exploration. She folded the parchment and handed it to Seth. “Once you get in Sheol, there’ll be a dot that shows your location. Bring it back to me once you’re finished down there.”

  Seth picked up the paper, studying it closely. “Loaning your enchanted map to me? That’s showing a lot of trust for one of your dad’s worthless acquaintances.”

  “Not that much. It’ll spring back to me if you die.”

  “Interesting magic. Very strong, very privileged, unseelie magic.” He directed that toward Marion.

  She came up behind him to look over his shoulder. Seth was right. The map was riddled with complex unseelie magic similar to the kind that had connected Oliver Machado to the unseelie. “You’re a triadist,” Marion said. “Aren’t you, Dana?”

  “Triadist?” Seth asked.

  “They’re a church that thinks the gods aren’t dead and have dedicated their lives to worshipping them.” At Seth’s confused look, Marion explained, “Konig told me about them. He said that the triadists are connected to the previous rulers of the Winter Court.”

  Dana folded her arms. “What about it? Who cares if I am?”

  “I believe that triadists recently tried to kill me,” Marion said.

  “Konig thinks your assassins were triadists? Huh.” Seth took folded pages out of the inside of his jacket. Showed them to Dana. They were drawings of men: Oliver Machado and two that Marion didn’t recognize. “Do you know any of these people?”

  She studied the pages from a distance without taking them. “No.”

  “Not even this one?” Seth lifted the picture of Oliver Machado.

  Dana shook her head. “I doubt all triadists want anyone dead. That’d be like saying bald people want you dead. Triadists aren’t a unified community—just a bunch of people who agree on a few philosophies. Like the fact that there are three gods kicking around.”