by SM Reine
These canines were sleek and white. Their legs were long the way that the gondolier’s neck had been long. Their perked ears were tipped with red that was the same color as blood. Their feet didn’t contact the ground when they ran, so they were immune to activating the warlock runes, with full mobility that Seth didn’t have.
They were at least triple the size of the dog in Arawn’s tower, and ghostly. Not domestic beasts, but the wild hunt.
The Hounds that Dana had warned him about.
When Seth saw them, all he could think was, These are Death.
They weren’t animals the way that coyotes were or even the way that werewolves were. They were the cold physical embodiment of inevitability.
And they were racing toward him.
The dogs were only a hundred feet away by the time Seth realized he’d frozen.
He fired.
There was no way to tell if his bullets hit. If they did, it didn’t matter to the dogs.
Konig struggled to his feet, flames continuing to lick along his shoulders, his spine, his hair. It didn’t seem to hurt him once he got over the shock of it. Seth had underestimated the sidhe prince’s strength.
“Run, Marion!” Konig commanded. He thrust his hand away from the dogs, toward the gate that would lead into Duat. Sidhe magic foamed over the warlock runes. They ignited as his spells passed, and went dim.
He’d cleared a path for Marion.
Then he leaped in front of Seth. Not to defend him—never to defend Seth. But because he was the Prince of the Autumn Court, and he would be respected. He would kill the dogs. He would protect the princess. Not Seth.
Konig met them with the blade.
They parted around him like a river parting around stone. Their bodies slammed into Seth and knocked the breath out of his lungs.
He hit the ground on the edge of the safe path Konig had created. Inches from an incendiary warlock rune.
Seth kicked both boots into the face of a dog when it tried to bite him. It felt like kicking an iron statue. The pain of it resonated all the way into his spine.
The dog’s head reared back. Its mouth opened, similar to the one in Arawn’s tower, but even wider—so huge that Seth could see all the way down its crimson throat into the boiling acid of its belly. Its jaw had thousands of teeth. Millions. And the teeth had teeth, layers upon layers of jagged razors the color of bone, running in long lines down its gullet.
Forget the warlock runes.
Seth hurled himself away, rolling out of the dog’s path. He felt the demon spells catch underneath him.
He was consumed by fire.
It burned over his jacket, melting his skin. Seth ripped the coat off with a cry.
The dog lunged again.
He whipped the burning cloth in front of him, smacking the flaming sleeve right into the dog’s face. The fire spread over its fur too. It caught as quickly as though it had been drenched in accelerant. The warlock flame wasn’t ordinary fire, and thank the gods for that, because it meant Seth had a weapon.
With a yelp, the dog receded. But another took its place.
Seth tried to strike it with the fire too, but missed. It was ready for him now. And it darted forward, chomping on his boot. Teeth penetrated the steel in the toe. Sharp fangs scraped the tops of his toes.
He wrapped the jacket around the dog’s muzzle, wrenching its head to the ground. He stomped its skull.
The fire on Seth’s jacket crawled up toward his fingers. He had to drop it. The remnants of the cloth vanished into cinder.
“Konig!” Seth shouted. “Help!”
The prince was surrounded, but his head snapped up at the sound of his name. A smile sparked in his eyes. He liked having Seth beg for assistance. “Just a second!”
Konig whirled with incredible speed to swipe the bastard sword through two of the dogs in a single gesture. Even without full access to sidhe magic in the Nether Worlds, he was still a consummate warrior, as anyone trained in the Autumn Court would have been.
The sword helped.
Seth wished he had a sword.
Another of the dogs changed direction, charging him with two others on its tail. Seth thought fast.
He’d fought hundreds of werewolves in his day for fun, and for survival. These were bigger, meaner, and distinctly more infernal. But that didn’t mean some of the same tactics wouldn’t work.
“Come on, you ugly mutts,” he muttered, crouching low, hands extended to either side.
The dog at the front hit him.
Seth was ready.
He wrapped his arms around its neck, his chin ducked to his chest to protect his soft parts. And he let the force of the contact carry them onto the warlock runes.
When they hit the ground, Seth made sure the dog was on the bottom.
Its fur went up in blue flame.
He was surrounded by a yelping, thrashing mass of burning demon dog. The warlock fire was crawling over its thorax.
Seth kicked it into the two other dogs, putting the flaming Hound between him and his attackers. The fire spread and kept on spreading. No matter how they rolled, the fire wouldn’t go out.
“Konig!” he shouted again.
And the unseelie prince was suddenly there. He carved through the dogs, putting them out of their misery with a few swift gestures.
His violet eyes were bright with the satisfaction of violence.
When he was done, he stood on a safe spot on the ground, drenched in ichor and grinning. There were pieces of the Hounds everywhere, but nothing living within sight. Maybe Konig hadn’t been speaking from pure arrogance when he’d said he would carve his way to the Canope.
Konig offered Seth a hand up. He took it.
“Thanks,” Seth said.
“But of course,” Konig said. A thought struck him. He spun on the spot. “Where’s Marion?”
Seth leaped to the truck bed and ripped the canvas aside. The only things inside were crates of lethe.
Marion had run.
At least, he hoped she’d run.
14
Marion wanted to pretend that it was strategy that compelled her toward Duat. Strategy, or maybe even cowardice—two completely normal reactions to being attacked by Hounds in Sheol.
It was neither.
She was propelled away from Seth and Konig’s fight against the Hounds by a force so strong that she didn’t look back. Two men she would have been stricken to lose were struggling for their lives, and she was fixated on the door leading into Duat.
With each step she took toward it, she felt doors opening in her mind.
The clicking of locks disengaging rattled through her skull.
Marion stopped in front of the door, gripping the stave of her bow in one hand and an arrow in the other as she studied the Bronze Gates.
As her mind opened, she could see with more than her eyes. She saw the magic layered over the gates, under them, throughout them—not too dissimilar from the magic that had been woven into the throne room of the Autumn Court.
The door existed on multiple levels.
It wanted her to knock.
No, that wasn’t a want from the door. It came from the same gods who were shoving her toward Duat.
Marion didn’t need information from her old journals to identify the feeling that grew within. It was the gods filling empty holes as though she were nothing more than a vessel for their presence.
She took a few steps to the right and knocked on the wall instead of the gates themselves.
A door appeared.
It swung open, revealing Duat.
The black city towered over her, enormous in its scale and familiar in the shapes of its blocky towers. She’d been there before. It was a city of the gods as much as it was of demons, and Marion knew it the way that she sometimes knew magic.
At the sight of it, all of her trepidation vanished.
Marion was exactly where she was meant to be.
Everything she could remember from the moment she
had woken up in Mercy Hospital had been leading to this arrival.
She also knew that there were guard towers concealed within the inner walls of the Bronze Gates, and that demons would be coming for her.
It felt like she turned around in slow motion to look for the guard towers. As she expected, demons were clambering down from the concealed windows, easily finding traction on the smooth metal. The door that she’d used to pass through the wall had already vanished. Her opportunity for escape had disappeared with it.
She didn’t want to escape. Not anymore.
The demons hit the ground and raced toward her.
Marion lifted her hand. “Stop,” she said, and there was borrowed power in the word.
They stopped so fast that they tumbled into each other. They stared at her in befuddlement, torn between the urge to attack and the urge to obey.
“I want the Bronze Gates opened,” she said.
They didn’t move.
Marion summoned every scrap of arrogance she possessed. These were the same instincts that had made her want to steal Charity Ballard’s glasses and use Seth’s money to buy couture.
The entitlement. The nobility. The self-certainty.
All those things that made everyone from her past loathe her, she donned like the robes of a queen.
And she said it again.
“I want the Bronze Gates opened now.”
The first of the guards to break was some kind of human-like creature with snakes rather than hair—a megaira, Marion thought. She wasn’t sure how she remembered the name. Maybe she didn’t remember it. Maybe it was something that she was borrowing from the gods, much like whatever happened when she knocked on the wall.
The megaira stumbled past her with glassy, confused eyes. Only the serpents that flowed from its scalp watched Marion, exposing their needle fangs with loud hisses. They weren’t susceptible to her commands. They would have bitten if they’d been close enough.
“Where’s the Canope?” she asked the others as the megaira climbed into the guard tower again.
All of them turned slowly, painfully to point up at the tallest tower within Duat: a temple that was protected by statue versions of the Hounds who’d attacked outside.
Marion’s heart almost stopped beating.
Her memories were so close. So close.
Fear grew within her throat until she choked on it.
There were two forces battling within Marion. The first seemed to be from the gods, who were pushing her toward her memories. The second seemed to be herself—the shadow of the woman Marion used to be, which was urging her to run away.
The gods were stronger.
She faced the demons again. “Get out of my sight and tell nobody you found me.”
After a moment, they all obeyed, drifting away throughout the city, propelled by commands that hadn’t come from Marion.
She was the Voice of God, and she was being controlled as surely as the guards were.
* * *
Konig and Seth went from one side of the Bronze Gates to the other to search for Marion, but there was no sign of her. When they got back to the inner wall a second time, Seth tried a hundred times to teleport through the inner wall of the Bronze Gates to reach Duat. He shut his eyes and squeezed his hands into fists and tried to jump with all of his willpower.
It felt like smashing his face into a wall. He moved nowhere.
“Damn!” Seth slammed his fist into the gate. This time, he punched hard enough to make sure it hurt, if briefly.
“Incapable of teleporting?” Konig asked.
“That seems to be the case, yeah.”
“They clearly have wards against it. You shouldn’t waste your energy trying.”
Seth gritted his teeth, trying to ignore Konig’s know-it-all tone. They were on the same team. The sidhe prince had saved him. They needed to get along, damn it.
Marion’s life depended on it.
He could feel her, even now that they were physically distant from one another. Specifically, he could feel the line of her life slicing through Sheol, edging closer toward death the longer she lingered. He was as acutely aware of her existence as though she stood right behind him with a hand on his shoulder.
Whatever she was doing—wherever she had gone—she was dying, moment by moment.
“Back to the truck,” Seth said. “It might have something to get us through the Bronze Gates—something that would let the merchant access Duat.”
“Why bother? I’ll cut through the door,” Konig said, swinging the infernal bastard sword at his side, as though to warm up his shoulder.
Seth had never heard anything so stupid in his life. Well, he probably had—he’d dealt with his brother Abel for a long time, and Abel was the master of stupid ideas—but this particular stupid idea was delivered with more self-assurance than Konig deserved.
He rounded on the prince. “What the hell is with this attitude you’ve got? Can’t you listen to one goddamn idea you didn’t come up with on your own?”
“I am the Prince of the Autumn Court—”
“And you will be respected,” Seth said. “Yeah, I heard you the first million times. That doesn’t change the fact that there’s no way a demon sword is going to cut through that door. Like you said, it’s clearly buried under wards. If I can’t teleport through, then you can’t cut it open.”
Konig was haloed by shivering anger. “You don’t want me to get to Marion.”
That was the new stupidest thing that Seth had ever heard. A world record broken within a span of seconds. “I’m not listening to this.” He headed for the truck.
“I see the way you’ve been looking at her,” Konig called to his back. “I know your game.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Then what is it? I’m all ears. I would love to hear why you keep running off with my woman.”
Seth stopped walking.
My woman. He would have laughed, except it wasn’t remotely funny. Juvenile, yes. Exhausting, definitely. But funny? Not at all.
Seth had sworn off relationships exactly to avoid this kind of bullshit. He’d have rather cut his own throat than deal with that brand of jealousy ever again.
But he needed Konig’s help. He needed Konig to understand.
“I was changed in Genesis, and I don’t know how,” Seth said. “I’m starting to think there’s something seriously wrong about me. I’ve got these…instincts.” He wasn’t going to force himself to share the painful details with a dried-up crouton like Konig. Seth kept the explanation simple. “I keep thinking about killing Marion.”
Konig surprised him by laughing. “You want to kill her?”
“No, I don’t want to. I’m not a killer. But I’m thinking about it, all right? It’s been all I can think about since we arrived in Sheol. I think it’s because she’s got angel blood, and she’s dying, and for whatever reason it makes me like a greyhound after a rabbit.” Or like a werewolf with silver poisoning.
“Then why are you still dragging Marion around, if you don’t want to kill her?” Konig asked.
“Once she’s got her memories, she can talk to the gods on my behalf and figure out what happened to me in Genesis. It’s the only way I can get fixed.”
The prince was still laughing. “Oh, this is great. Marion’s been pining over you for weeks, and you want her dead.”
Seth entertained the thought of punching the sidhe prince in the throat. “I wouldn’t have brought her if she hadn’t insisted. She’s persistent.”
“You could say that a thousand times and it wouldn’t be overstating,” Konig said. His laughter faded. He gripped Seth’s shoulder. “If you hurt Marion, I will kill you. Let’s make that clear.”
“Konig, if I hurt Marion, I’ll kill myself,” Seth said.
That didn’t seem to comfort the prince in the slightest. His lips drew into a thin line. “You’re not in love with her. You promise that?”
“Goddammit, how many times do I have to
say this? I don’t want her within a hundred miles of wherever I am.” Seth shook off Konig’s hand. “As soon as we find her, you have to take her back to the Winter Court. I’ll get the Canope, save Charity, and return as soon as possible.”
“Done,” Konig said. “Whatever you want.”
Seth didn’t tell Konig the truth—that he didn’t truly want Marion to leave. He wanted her right beside him, her heart beating sluggishly and breaths slowing as she labored toward the precipice.
And that was the problem.
* * *
The men walked back the way they came one more time, searching for the pickup. The distance only seemed to stretch the further that they walked together.
Seth would have been happy to walk in silence, but Konig seemed to feel differently. He was happy now that he’d heard Seth’s confession. Practically skipping.
“Tell me more about yourself, Doctor. Clearly you can teleport yourself and friends,” Konig said. “And clearly you want to kill people, particularly those of the beautiful princess persuasion. What else changed about you in Genesis, eh? Any fun party tricks?”
Seth shook his head. “Not that you need to worry about.”
“You’re great at pretending to be human. There must have been something that tipped you off to the way you’d changed when you came back from the void.”
There had been a great many things that tipped Seth off, and he didn’t want to discuss them. “Did something change in you?”
“Sure,” Konig said. “I came back as a five year old who could do this.” He snapped his fingers. Nothing happened. “That was supposed to generate flame. I seem to be running dry after fighting with the Hounds.”
Seth shrugged. “Nether Worlds.” That was all the explanation either of them needed.
“Well, I returned magical. Quite the handful for my parents, but nothing they couldn’t deal with. And you? Did you come back a baby demon? Horns sticking out?” Konig shot him a look, as though double-checking to make sure he hadn’t missed any infernal features.