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

by SM Reine

  “Where am I?” Charity asked again,

  “I’ve brought you to Duat,” Arawn said. “What are the chances they’ll come for you here?”

  If it had been Konig and Marion alone, Charity doubted that they’d put the effort into saving her. But Seth was with them. The man once known as Dr. Lucas Flynn.

  Even if he hadn’t needed Charity’s help to control his growing inner monster, and even if they hadn’t been coworkers for years, he would have saved her. He was just that kind of guy.

  “Let me go,” Charity said.

  Arawn physically released her, but he remained close. “I asked you a question.”

  “They’ll come,” she said with no small amount of despair. “I know they’ll come.” Seth would never leave her trapped with Arawn. He was going to hunt her down to fight this hideous demon with the ripped muscles and exposed bones.

  “Perfect.” He clapped his hands. “I’m here!” A pair of beetle-like demons scuttled around the corner, carapaces clicking. “Tell Nyx I’m within the walls. I want to see her.” They left, but not before Charity had to swallow down a bellyful of burning bile.

  Giant beetles. Sheol was so screwed up.

  Arawn offered his arm to her. “In the meantime, would you like a tour of Duat, beautiful one?”

  * * *

  Getting out of the tower to rescue Charity was only second priority. Seth’s first priority was to locate the potions in Arawn’s storeroom.

  He had to walk through more bodies hanging from meat hooks, ankle-deep sludge, and crates cluttered with bones to find the potions. Arawn kept them on a shelf in the back. There were a dozen different types in a dozen shades of crimson. All were nearly indistinguishable to Seth.

  “Can you tell which one’s meant to heal you?” Seth asked, handing one to Marion.

  She was sitting in the dentist’s chair where Arawn had been tattooing a nightmare earlier. Konig had carried her downstairs before leaving to search for their missing weapons.

  Marion held one of the vials to the light to study the consistency. “This is the one, I think.” She drank it down, and then a second identical to the first.

  While her head was tipped back, Seth could see the lacy pattern of veins under her semi-translucent skin. They brightened and faded with each heartbeat.

  For several long seconds after drinking the second potion, her heart didn’t beat at all. The cloying veil of death clung to her.

  Then her weak heart thumped.

  Seth didn’t breathe until it resumed a regular beat. He forced himself to look at her face instead of her neck, her chest, the vessels visible on the insides of her wrists. “Are you okay?”

  Marion nodded, eyes screwed shut and nose wrinkled. “I should be grateful I was unconscious last time I drank these. They taste dreadful.” She tossed back a third vial before finally standing.

  Seth hovered nearby, watching to see if she was going to fall.

  For the first time since entering Sheol, Marion looked fine.

  She wasn’t fine, though. She’d pushed death back by a few hours and no more.

  “Perfect.” She picked through the remaining potions that he’d brought, discarding a handful of them and stashing the rest in a plastic bag. “These should last long enough for us to reach Duat.” She sounded much more optimistic than Seth felt.

  She could take more potions when the first three began to wear off. Arawn had stored enough that Marion might be able to last a few days by taking those every time she started to feel ill again.

  It didn’t change the fact that being in Sheol was killing her, slowly but surely, and Seth had a hard time thinking about anything else.

  “I hope we didn’t make Arawn so angry that he shatters the Canope,” Marion said. “Dana said that breaking the vessel would allow my memories to escape, and…” Her shoulders sagged at the idea. “It would be quite the act of revenge, wouldn’t it?”

  Seth was a lot more worried about poor Charity in the hands of a creepy Lord of Sheol. “I don’t think there’s a chance that Arawn will screw with the Canope. I spoke to him about it at dinner. I don’t think he bought it for fun—I think he was hired to hold on to it for some reason. Maybe even bribed.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Marion said.

  “It does if someone wants to lure us to Duat.”

  As she considered this information, she pulled her curls back from her face, tying them into a loose ponytail. She missed a few strands near her face. They dangled in her eyes. “What’s in Duat? Aside from the Canope, that is.”

  “We’re going to find out,” Seth said grimly. “It’s not like leaving your memories there is an option.”

  “Not for me,” Marion said. “You have alternatives.”

  “No, I don’t. I really don’t. I’m not leaving you, Marion.” Even if leaving her might have been the best thing for her safety. Her movements had gotten Seth transfixed by her throat again, and the lingering aroma of death that wafted toward him every time she shifted.

  “Oh, Seth,” Marion sighed. “You’re kinder than I deserve.”

  He folded his arms tight enough that his shoulder blades ached. “Trust me, I’m not.”

  Konig reentered the tattoo parlor. “I found your bow, princess.” He’d washed himself of Arawn’s blood since Seth had last seen him. He had also stolen a black t-shirt from the Lord of Sheol and wore the infernal bastard sword across his back. Konig did a great impression of a demon. “And your guns, Doctor.”

  “Thanks,” Seth said. He returned his Beretta to its position in the holster under his arm. He stashed the other handgun at the small of his back.

  “You’re welcome.” Konig said it so graciously, like he was doing a huge favor for them. Like Seth wouldn’t have been fully capable of locating his own damn weapons without help from a temperamental unseelie prince.

  Marion threaded her belt through the quiver and slung the bow over her shoulders. “Okay. What’s our plan from here? How do we get to Duat?”

  “According to Dana McIntyre’s map, the only route is directly through the Bronze Gates,” Seth said.

  “Let me see,” Konig said. Seth handed the map over. The prince studied it, rubbing a hand over his upper lip. It was strange to see five o’clock shadow appearing on a sidhe’s jaw. Seth hadn’t thought they could even grow facial hair. “Unfortunately, no ley lines cross through Duat, but I can jump us across the Dead Forest. There’s a ley line here.” Konig pointed to a spot between the Bronze Gates and the river Mnemosyne.

  “Seth could teleport us into Duat,” Marion said.

  Konig’s brow lowered over his eyes. “You can teleport? You’re a planeswalker?”

  “Yes, but no,” Seth said. “I tried to teleport out of Sheol earlier, and I can’t for some reason. I also won’t teleport Marion anywhere now. It makes her sick.”

  “Then how will we get through the gates?” Marion asked, folding her arms. It looked like she was gearing up to argue with Seth.

  Konig spared him from the fight. “I’ll have to do reconnaissance,” he said. “I can figure out a way in, rest assured. Even if it requires killing every demon on the wall.”

  It was a stupid plan. No, worse than that—it was no plan at all. But Seth didn’t have any better suggestions, and he wouldn’t be able to come up with anything until he could study the gates in person.

  Seth wasn’t confident he’d be able to come up with anything once they got there, either. Marion was a few feet away, her heart steadily fluttering along.

  She was watching him. Distracting him.

  Konig’s stupid non-plan was still a thousand times more useful than Seth at the moment.

  “Where do we go to catch the nearest ley line?” Seth asked.

  “A juncture crosses through the tower. We don’t have to go anywhere. That’s how I reached Marion without being disturbed.” Konig wrapped his arm around her shoulders, pulling her tight to his side.

  “That’s poor planning for security pu
rposes,” Marion said. “That means the sidhe could have invaded Arawn’s tower at any time.”

  “His stupidity is lucky for us.” Konig extended a hand toward Seth. “Are you ready?”

  Not even remotely.

  Seth grabbed the prince.

  * * *

  Being pulled through the ley lines felt nothing like teleporting. It was one thing to willfully propel himself across the planes, and quite another to be dragged by an outside entity.

  Passing through the ley lines made Seth feel like toothpaste forcibly extruded from a tube.

  All of Sheol stretched underneath him. The Nether World was completely contained within a cave with walls pocked like a stony sponge. The hive was burrowed into those holes. The Dead Forest, on the other hand, grew from the loamy quagmire collected along the bottommost curve of the cave, dampened by a network of rivers that flowed in spirals around Duat at the center.

  Only one ley line crossed the entirety of Sheol, slicing a path from the hive to the Dead Forest. Seth extended from one position to the next, out of body, out of mind, beyond sensation.

  His heart plummeted into his stomach and he reappeared on the banks of Mnemosyne. He stumbled as though he’d been dropped twenty feet, trying not to collapse onto his knees. The river’s crystalline waters sloshed inches from his toes.

  “What just happened?” he asked, looking up for his companions.

  Marion and Konig weren’t beside him.

  He turned to orient himself. Seth had fallen out of the ley lines on the wrong side of the river. Instead of being on the banks nearest the Bronze Gates, he was at the edge of the Dead Forest. The skeletal shapes of the trees were eerie silhouettes in a thick, hot fog that smelled of animal waste and rotting flesh.

  Konig must have ditched him a few hundred feet too early. They were probably safely on the other side, where Seth couldn’t see them.

  “Goddammit,” Seth muttered.

  In all fairness, it was his mistake for thinking he could trust the prince.

  He took Dana’s map out and found his dot on the edge of the Dead Forest. There was no bridge crossing Mnemosyne nearby. He traced its looping path around Duat and realized that there were no bridges marked anywhere at all.

  Dana had warned him that the Dead Forest was patrolled by Hounds. If they were anything like Arawn’s white dog, Seth didn’t want to encounter them.

  He shut his eyes and focused on teleporting across to the other side.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said a soft voice.

  Seth looked around. The dark form of a small boat had appeared on the calm waters, and it now drifted toward him.

  A cloaked creature stood on the aft of the gondola, pushing it toward him with a long pole. It wasn’t until the gondola struck the shore nearby that he realized that it was the apothecary again. That feminine spirit with the exposed skull for a face and pits for eyes. “Hello again.” Her voice slithered through his ears, penetrating the fog effortlessly. “Looking for a way across?”

  Seth took a step back, resting a hand on his gun. “I can get around on my own.”

  “You might, if you can teleport without touching the wards,” she said. “Do you know where the warlocks have placed their spells?”

  He didn’t. And he couldn’t sense them without help of a witch like Marion, which meant that they may or may not have been there at all. The source of the information didn’t exactly seem trustworthy.

  Her gondola was matte black. It didn’t seem to become damp where the water touched it. He wasn’t entirely sure that the water could touch it.

  Seth surveyed the demon without releasing his gun. “You’re not an apothecary, are you?”

  “Not usually.” Her semi-transparent cloak billowed around her in a wind he couldn’t feel. “I pulled you from your friends so we could talk.”

  So it wasn’t Konig’s fault they’d been separated. “All right. Talk.”

  A skeletal hand swept toward the prow of her gondola. “The Dead Forest isn’t safe for you in this form. We’ll talk in privacy as I take you across. It will be a short passage, I promise.”

  It couldn’t be that short. He couldn’t see the other side.

  Short or not, it wasn’t like Seth had a lot of options. He could hear howling in the Dead Forest.

  He clenched his jaw and climbed in. The demon towered over him, a gangly specter with arms longer than her legs and a spindly neck of exposed bone. She pushed them away from the shore.

  “Do you remember the Pit of Souls?” the demon asked.

  He checked Dana’s map. Yes, there was a Pit of Souls inside of Duat, apparently located underneath the temple. “I’ve never been there.”

  “Arawn is heir to the Pit of Souls and the title of Death.” She remained poised above Seth as they glided serenely across Mnemosyne.

  “Yeah, he told me that.”

  “Did he tell you that he’ll only inherit if Death concedes his throne?”

  “I think that’s kind of implied with the whole ‘heir’ thing,” Seth said. “Who’s Death right now?”

  “Death is Death,” she said simply.

  “All right.” That was about as unhelpful as Seth could imagine.

  “Arawn doesn’t want to inherit,” the demon said. “He hungers for the Middle Worlds. He’s been pushing against his boundaries for weeks, sending spirits to Earth to possess humans and quietly forming an army.”

  “Why? To conquer?”

  Her tone became thoughtful. “Isn’t that what you would expect of a demon? Driven by need to conquer?” She pushed the pole again, and they glided a few more feet. “Arawn longs for the sunlight of the Middle Worlds. Don’t give it to him. Don’t go after the Canope.”

  Seth stared up at her emotionless face. “How did you—”

  “The Canope is the only reason that you’d have come here again,” she said. “It’s also the only reason that Arawn would have assigned his Hounds to guard it. The instant you touch the Canope, they will come for you. They will devour you. You’ll be trapped.”

  “I can handle them,” Seth said. If Konig could kill one of those dogs, then Seth could surely take them, too.

  “The domesticated Hound in Arawn’s tower was a crossbreed, an impure bastard. Even you can’t survive a mauling from the true Hounds. That’s the whole point.”

  “The point of what? Did Arawn take the Canope so he could kill me?” It didn’t make any sense. Seth hadn’t known Arawn existed until he’d spoken to Dana, and Seth wasn’t important enough to have Lords of Sheol going after him.

  “I don’t blame Arawn for doing whatever it takes to escape,” Nyx said. “You became tired of Sheol’s darkness within a span of centuries, too.”

  The gondola stopped abruptly. The river that had seemed endlessly wide when he stood on the opposite shore had taken barely moments to cross.

  She didn’t have to tell Seth to get out. He’d never wanted to set foot on land more urgently.

  “I’m not staying in Sheol for centuries,” Seth said the instant his feet touched colorless grass.

  By the time he turned back to look at her, gondola and gondolier had vanished. There wasn’t even a ripple to show that a boat had disturbed the water.

  The only thing that remained was a sense of unease weighing heavily within Seth.

  “Seth!” Footsteps whispered through the grass. Marion appeared, eyes glowing white-blue in the darkness. She stopped a few feet away, even though it looked like she wanted to tackle him. It wouldn’t have been the first time. “I thought we’d lost you. Damn it, Konig—”

  “It wasn’t him.” Seth’s gaze was fixed to the inside of Marion’s wrist. She clutched her bow in one hand and arrow in the other, and he could see the blood flowing under the surface of her skin with every thump of her straining heart.

  She swept her eyes over the river as if looking for something to shoot. “Then how’d we lose you?”

  His conversation with the apothecary—or gondolier, wha
tever—had left him itchy all over. Don’t go after the Canope.

  “I fell out,” Seth said.

  Marion crossed her arms. “You…fell?” Her jaw tightened, and the tension rippled through her entire body. Her heart was beating sluggishly again. The three potions she had drunk in Arawn’s tower were already wearing off. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  You became tired of Sheol’s darkness within a span of centuries, too.

  He wasn’t telling her a lot of things.

  Honestly, he wasn’t sure what he’d tell her at that point even if he tried.

  Seth trudged up the hill toward her without answering. “Where’s Konig?”

  “He’s trying to find a way into the Bronze Gates,” she said. “He’s performing what you might call reconnaissance.”

  He could imagine how terribly that must have been going. Konig wasn’t a subtle man. “All right. We better get up there and help.”

  Marion hesitated. “I’m afraid.” She didn’t give Seth an opportunity to ask why before plowing on. “I’m afraid of going into Duat. The Bronze Gates are making me uncomfortable.”

  Seth rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Uncomfortable how?”

  “It feels like something is calling to me from the other side.”

  “It’s probably your memories,” Seth said.

  “It feels bigger than that. Less like I’m being pulled and more like I’m being…pushed. I know it doesn’t make sense. It must sound insane. Here we are, so close to my memories, and I fear crossing over.”

  “You don’t sound crazy.” He sighed. “Look, I know you’re having second thoughts. After the way everyone’s been treating you, especially Dana McIntyre… I can see how you might be reluctant to go back to your old self.” Seth had thought more than once that he didn’t want Marion to change. The fact that he liked that horribly selfish idea so much made his words come out harsh. “You have to get your memories back, though. It’s the right thing to do.”

  Marion blinked rapidly, as if slapped. His hostility shocked her. “I don’t think that’s the reason I’m afraid.”