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

by SM Reine

  They raced through the darkness of the temple and broke out above Duat.

  The city was no longer empty.

  Shadowy demons packed the streets, as though they’d sensed Nyx’s defeat. They came in a thousand forms: some huge, some small, some little more than smoke, some multi-legged and frightening. They crashed toward the temple in a black tide.

  They were going to block Seth’s exit from the temple.

  “How do we get out?” he asked.

  Charity looked around. “That way!”

  She wrenched him down another hall, toward the back of the temple where demons had yet to reach.

  The Canope jostled in his arms. Some of Marion’s essence hummed out of the jar.

  For an instant, Seth was trapped in the mage’s memory, looking through her eyes. In the memory, Marion had been confronting her half-sister, Elise. The woman who had once been known as Godslayer, but had now become God. “I won’t do it,” Marion had said.

  Elise had glared at her half-sister. “You want to rethink your answer?”

  “No. If a man doesn’t want to be found, it’s for good reason. You disrespect him by refusing to acknowledge his wishes.” Marion had been at peak form, drenched in her own arrogance.

  “You can’t side with him,” Elise said. “You don’t even know him. I’m family and you do what I tell you.”

  “Just as you always did what Isaac told you?”

  Elise had slapped Marion. Hard. Right across the face.

  The contact had been physical, though Elise’s form had not. She’d been an imaginary figure standing in a garden that drifted among the stars—god stuff that Seth’s mortal mind couldn’t begin to interpret. But the pain of the slap had been very, very real.

  It had only been the beginning.

  “You little shit,” Elise had said.

  Pain jolted through Seth’s physical body, dragging him out of Marion’s memory. His toe had caught on an uneven tile at the edge of a staircase in Duat. He tripped, stumbled, and rolled down the stairs.

  He stopped at the bottom, surrounded by shadowy demons. They receded from him and the Canope he clutched.

  No, not from Seth—but from the Hounds that chased him.

  Charity descended upon him. “Doctor!”

  Seth shoved the Canope into Charity’s arms. “Get it out of Duat. I’ll divert the Hounds.”

  She clung to the Canope, despair twisting her features. “But Seth—”

  “Run! For the love of God, run!”

  Charity didn’t need to be told again. She left.

  And when Seth ran in the other direction, taking a path perpendicular to the temple’s entrance, the Hounds followed him.

  He was the thief. The one that the trap had been set for.

  They wanted him.

  As Nyx had said, that was the whole point.

  Seth couldn’t run fast enough like this, not when he could barely teleport more than a few feet at a time. He felt sluggish and weak.

  Worse, even he could feel Marion’s memories rattling around inside of him.

  “Hit me all you want,” Marion had said with blood trickling down her lip, glaring in defiance at the god known as Elise. “If this Seth Wilder guy doesn’t want you to find him, then I won’t help you look! You’re deities. That doesn’t mean you have to be assholes.”

  Elise had said, “If you won’t choose to do it, I can make you.”

  “I’d like to see you try,” Marion had said.

  And Elise had.

  Damn it all, Elise had forced Marion to find Seth Wilder.

  She’d stripped away Marion’s memories, leaving nothing behind but Seth’s name. And then Elise had given all that she took away to Dana McIntyre along with the instructions to deliver that essence unto Sheol.

  The Canope was a trap so much worse than Seth could have imagined, because it had been set by the gods.

  For some reason, Elise wanted Seth dead.

  He was beyond screwed.

  Seth leaped behind an old apartment building, hoping that the path would be narrow enough to keep the Hounds from following. It didn’t work. The Hounds were behind him. They were white ghosts in the darkness, flashes of light.

  He couldn’t run as fast as them. They were ideas, and he was only a man.

  Somehow, he managed to reach the walls of Duat before they did. The Bronze Gates were still open. Mnemosyne waited on the other side.

  He raced between the two layers of walls protecting Duat. The warlock runes hadn’t been reset, so there was nothing to set fire to the Hounds who chased him.

  When he reached the grass, he hurled himself down the hill.

  Seth struck Mnemosyne with a splash.

  The waters of the river were impossibly cold compared to the muggy warmth of the rest of Sheol. They swallowed him whole, flooding his nose and ears, weighing down his clothes. He clamped his jaw shut to make sure he swallowed nothing.

  Through the fluctuating surface of the river, he could see the white forms of the Hounds stopping on the bank.

  They wouldn’t follow him into the water.

  Seth sank and kept on sinking.

  Swim, dammit. Swim.

  His feet connected with something firm. He pushed off, pumping his arms in long strokes. He kicked off his shoes as he went. They only weighed him down.

  He surfaced long enough to gasp air, and then submerged again.

  It had only taken a few moments for Nyx to cross the river in her gondola. Seth felt like he was swimming for days. His muscles burned with exhaustion—which was strange, because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been tired in such a way. The changes that Genesis had forced upon him seemed to have left him preternaturally energized.

  Mnemosyne was preternatural too. It was deep and wide and immense in dimensions Seth couldn’t fathom.

  His foot struck something solid again, and again. He was too high in the river for it to be the bottom.

  Seth looked down.

  There was no riverbed. Only bodies layered upon bodies, all of them preserved in the icy water, gaping up at him with eyes rolled back to show the whites.

  Their arms drifted above them, as though reaching for Seth.

  He’d accidentally kicked one in the head.

  Seth’s mouth opened in a silent cry of shock. A bubble escaped him, and water rushed in.

  The instant he tasted it, he was struck by memories.

  These didn’t originate from Marion’s essence in the Canope—wherever the hell that had ended up. They originated from some murky, forgotten place within Seth, shadowier than the Dead Forest and more remote than Duat.

  He remembered standing on the edge of the Pit of Souls. It was a chasm so broad that he couldn’t see the other side and so deep there was no sign of the bottom. If Seth had fallen into it, he’d have had miles to tumble.

  Nyx stood beside him in this memory. He knew it was Nyx even though skin covered her skull. She looked like an older woman with stringy gray hair, which had been arranged into an artful bun between her gem-decorated horns.

  Death is Death, Nyx had said. Arawn can only inherit the Pit of Souls if Death steps down.

  And Seth had said, Or if Death disappears.

  He shocked out of the strange vision of the Pit of Souls when his body washed against the ground.

  Had he reached the opposite shore of Mnemosyne?

  Seth barely had enough time to push himself up onto his hands before he realized he’d gone the wrong way. He hadn’t reached the Dead Forest. He hadn’t even left Duat’s hill. He’d only managed to end up a few hundred yards down the river.

  He vomited cascades of water out of his stomach, but it was too late to clear the river’s influence from his system. He had already drunk from Mnemosyne—the river of memory, he now recalled—and he was beginning to reach memories he hadn’t realized he had lost.

  Death is Death.

  Nyx had been truly beautiful before she had withered away.

  Seth
tried to stand and failed. He needed to run before the Hounds located him again.

  You are Death, Seth.

  A projectile slammed into him from behind. Seth was driven face-first into the dry grass.

  The Hounds were on him.

  He rolled over. Heavy paws weighed against his ribs, his spine. Jaws opened wide to reveal so many teeth.

  No matter how hard he swung his fists, no matter how much he kicked his feet, the Hounds didn’t react. They dug in to devour his mortal flesh and strip it from his bones.

  Seth was dying, and the gods were satisfied.

  * * *

  Nori dropped Marion inside the twin walls of the Bronze Gates.

  Neither of them took the transition into the Nether Worlds well. They arrived gasping, lungs burning, flesh boiling.

  Marion spent the first several seconds on the ground with her eyes shut, struggling to remember how to breathe. Her chest burned. Inhaling hurt. The lingering remnants of Arawn’s potions continued to race through her veins, but it wasn’t enough. Not anymore.

  “Go back,” Marion gasped.

  Nori shook her head. Her eyes were watering and a line of blood trickled out of her left nostril. She had angel blood, just as Marion did, and she hadn’t had any of the potion.

  She would die within minutes.

  “I’m sorry,” Nori said.

  She blinked out of Sheol.

  Marion forced herself onto her feet, clutching the statuette. It hummed with the power she had borrowed. The magic was reassuring. It was her ticket to return safely to the Winter Court, where she would be able to breathe.

  But not until she found Seth.

  It took a moment to orient herself and realize that guards were rushing toward Marion’s position. She had materialized not far from the place Konig had taken her. She could see the temple where the Canope had been hidden atop the hill.

  She jammed the statuette into her pocket.

  A pair of guards reached her. The left one yelled, “Stop!”

  “No,” Marion said.

  She nocked an arrow quickly, drew the fletchings back to her cheek, and released.

  The arrow flew true.

  It punched into the left-hand demon’s throat and passed through. He fell, clutching at the new hole underneath his chin. He gurgled as blood dribbled between his fingers.

  Before he’d hit the ground, Marion had drawn and fired another arrow.

  The second guard dropped.

  Still, they kept coming. Marion backed up as she continued to shoot, targeting throats and chests and even foreheads. It was different shooting arrows at living creatures rather than the targets at the Autumn Court. These things were moving and breathing. They wailed when she struck them.

  Marion reached for another arrow, but the quiver was empty. She hadn’t brought enough.

  Yet more guards were coming.

  “Don’t kill her!” said one demon to his companion. “Arawn wants her.”

  Marion lifted her hands. “Tell him to get me himself.” Electricity rippled down her arms and lightning arced between her fingertips.

  Ethereal magic was dull in the Nether Worlds, where it wasn’t meant to function. But even her dull magic was far brighter than Konig’s. It flowed from her in waves.

  She shoved the guards away with lightning and wind. They flew off of their feet. Both of them punched into a building, and the force made it collapse.

  Marion whirled on the guards who were coming from another street. There were crowds of demons beyond them, gathered near the temple like maggots on a corpse. She flung lightning at them too. It burned a path up the road, clearing a route to the temple.

  It was amazing what magic Marion could perform once she knew she needed to get back to Seth. The desperation was a special kind of motivation. She didn’t require memories when she had driving, powerful need.

  When another creature ran at her, she prepared more bolts of lightning.

  “Marion, wait!”

  The demons shouldn’t have known her name.

  She dropped her hands, and as the light from her magic dimmed, her eyes adjusted. Something resembling a gangly corpse ran toward her.

  “Charity?” Marion asked. “Where’s Seth?”

  The revenant unfolded her arms. “I lost him. I’m sorry,” she said as a large ceramic jar was revealed, a plain, clay-colored thing that was shaped like a lidded vase. “Seth gave it to me and told me to run.”

  Marion reached for the Canope reflexively, but drew her hands back. The Canope didn’t belong to her. It was her. Everything trapped inside those ceramic walls was something that had come out of Marion’s soul. She was entitled to it in the way that she was entitled to her own body.

  Yet she feared the way it tugged at her. As soon as her eyes rested on it, Marion knew that the Canope was what had been calling to ever since she’d arrived in Duat.

  She wasn’t sure she was ready to become who she used to be.

  Charity drew back an inch, keeping Marion from touching the Canope. “Arawn’s Hounds are tied to this thing. They’re chasing Seth because he stole it. I don’t know what they’ll do if you try to take the Canope back.”

  “The Hounds are chasing Seth?” Marion’s hesitation evaporated. She yanked the Canope away from Charity. “Where is he?”

  She’d barely gotten the words out when the power overwhelmed her.

  The magic of the jar was more immense than any other Marion had experienced. Touching it was physically painful.

  Marion was inside the jar, outside the jar.

  The Canope was everything.

  It took a miracle of willpower not to fling the jar away from herself.

  Only Dana’s warning—that if the Canope broke, then Marion’s essence would evaporate—kept her gripping it, even when it made her palms feel like they were burning off.

  “Seth and I split paths at the temple,” Charity said. “I don’t know where he is now. The Hounds—”

  “I’ll find him,” Marion said. She shifted the Canope into one arm so that she could take the statuette out of her pocket. She gave it to Charity. “Use this to go to the Winter Court. Tell Konig and Nori what happened. Tell them…” What? That Marion had left again, chasing the doctor into Sheol? Konig would be thrilled to hear that. “I need Konig’s help.”

  “How do I use it?” Charity asked, clutching the statuette in both fists.

  Marion rested her hands atop Charity’s. She shut her eyes and focused.

  Magic jolted between them.

  Once Marion opened her eyes again, Charity was gone, and she was alone with the shimmering Canope.

  She lifted the jar to study it. The lid was affixed firmly to the top, as though it had been baked into one solid piece. Marion was certain that couldn’t be the case. The Canope was a thing of magic, and there would be a magical way to open it.

  There was no time to figure it out at the moment. Marion could battle with magical artifacts and her sudden reluctance to restore her memories later.

  Seth needed her.

  Marion flung her magic into Duat, searching for his presence. He wasn’t within the Bronze Gates. She kept reaching out with fingers of power. She mentally leaped over the warlock runes between the walls and combed the world beyond.

  That was where she felt him. He was on the shore of Mnemosyne.

  “I’m coming,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t be able to hear.

  Marion raced through the Bronze Gates. She traveled safely between the two doorways, since no one had relaid the incendiary warlock runes since her first arrival, and erupted onto the hillside breathing hard.

  Mnemosyne frothed at the edge of the grass. It had been so calm when Marion had last seen it, but now it looked like it was on the brink of flooding.

  She couldn’t see Seth anywhere.

  Marion was certain she had felt him outside the Bronze Gates.

  The sound of dogs yipping echoed from around the corner. Her heart leaped, but the sounds weren�
�t growing closer—the Hounds weren’t hunting her. They weren’t even on the move.

  They’d already caught their prey.

  Marion slid down the embankment to see a dozen white Hounds digging into some hapless prey animal, something mutilated and dead. She clutched the Canope tighter to her chest. She took two steps back.

  Then one of the dogs shifted, and she saw a sodden foot between its legs. Once she saw it, she instinctively reached out with her magic again, searching for Seth. And she felt him.

  A ragged cry ripped from Marion’s chest.

  That piece of meat—that raw, bloodied body—was Seth. The doctor. The man who’d saved her a thousand times.

  He was dying.

  But he wasn’t quite dead. If he had been, Marion wouldn’t have been able to feel him anymore.

  “Stop!” Marion cried to the Hounds.

  They didn’t hear her, or else they simply didn’t care.

  She lifted the Canope above her head. “I told you to stop!”

  The motion made one of the Hounds look at her briefly before returning its attention to mauling Seth.

  Marion didn’t even consider the risks. She didn’t weigh her life against Seth’s, or whether or not her plan would work, or what she would be losing. She didn’t wonder if she’d even be able to survive without her memories.

  She hurled the Canope to the ground.

  It shattered into a hundred pieces, and kept shattering. A thousand fragments, and then a million, a billion—they sprayed across the grass in diamond shards before dissipating.

  The Hounds stopped mauling Seth. They all lifted their heads as one, jaws stained by his blood.

  Marion felt the weight of two dozen haunting canine eyes on her.

  Charity had warned Marion that the Hounds were tied to the Canope. They had hunted Seth because he’d stolen it. What would they do to the woman who had destroyed the thing?

  “Come and get me,” she whispered.

  And they did.

  18

  Seth was dying, and it hurt. Few things had hurt in the last thirteen years.

  It hadn’t hurt when he’d gotten a tattoo of a caduceus right above his hipbone. That had been little more than a numb tickling.

  It hadn’t hurt when a drunken patient had attacked him, unleashing werewolf power on Seth in the Mercy Hospital emergency department.