by SM Reine
“You really don’t remember,” Konig said when he noticed how Marion stared. Gods, but he was a beautiful man. Since entering the Autumn Court, his skin had taken on a metallic sheen more like copper than mortal flesh. His jacket hung open around his linen shirt, which was thin enough that the hard lines of his muscles glimmered through the material.
And his eyes.
The surreal violet color was the least shocking part about his gaze. If it hadn’t been obvious before, it was now incredibly obvious that Konig knew Marion well.
He loved her.
“Have I spent much time here?” she asked tentatively, walking along the ring of chairs at the center of the foyer. She touched the backs of the chairs, hoping for some kind of tactile sensation that would stir memory.
“Many days.” Konig’s gemlike eyes smoldered. “Many more nights.”
The dizzying realization that she was surrounded by a court that knew her—a court that she should have known—made Marion want to reach out to Luke for comfort.
The doctor didn’t seem awed by the surroundings. The fact that he kept his hands off of his sidearm must have meant he was trying to look as non-threatening as possible, but Luke moved like he was ready to fight. He didn’t turn his back toward any of the unseelie sidhe who flitted around the periphery of the foyer, and he stuck close to Marion.
“Then I’ll show you to the throne room, I suppose,” Konig said. His fingers laced with hers, shooting exhilarating warmth through her veins.
The grand staircase was draped in cobwebs and more shriveled golden vines, leading to a hallway as open as the foyer itself. Some of the window frames were filled with stained glass that fragmented the light like prisms; others were open to the crisp air, giving it all an open feel that appealed to Marion. It was as though she’d be able to jump out and fly away.
Marion could tell that they were drawing near to the queen. As Konig led her closer to the end of the hallway, the air grew thick, but chilly. It made the marrow within her bones vibrate unpleasantly.
That was sidhe magic. She’d felt it frequently enough when the assassins were coming for her that she could identify it now.
The end of the hall was capped by a pair of towering double doors. Detailed scenes were carved into the four panels, each one showing a different woman who wore a crown or diadem.
On the first, there was a woman seated on a throne with a scaled tail like those of the sirens who had attacked Marion and Luke.
The panel to the right of that one was decorated with a pregnant woman with butterfly wings.
On the third panel, the one below the first quadrant, was a woman with twin pigtails decorated with pearls.
The fourth was a woman with claw-like fingernails and sharp eyes.
All those carvings were so detailed that Marion imagined that they must have been modeled after real people. “The queens of each sidhe court,” Konig said helpfully.
“So one of these is your mother?”
“This one.” He tapped the woman with the pigtails and pearls. Once he pointed it out, Marion couldn’t help but notice the similarity to their features. She had the same lean bone structure in her face and intelligent eyes. “She’s the Onyx Queen. You call her Violet.”
Marion called the queen of the Autumn Court by her first name. How close was she to Konig, in order to address his mother so informally?
Only one way to find out.
“Go ahead,” Konig said, gesturing toward the door.
Marion reached for the handle as she stepped forward. She hesitated with her fingers hovering an inch above the metal. “Interesting.”
“What?” asked the prince.
She tipped her head to the side as she studied the door. The carvings weren’t its only unique feature. Once Marion opened her mind, she could tell that the door didn’t exist in merely one plane of existence. There was the physical thing that she was a hairsbreadth from touching, but there were layers under layers.
It was a magical door that tunneled straight through reality.
The spells didn’t speak to her in a language she knew. It was like trying to understand the clicking of bats that flitted through the night. Clearly the work of another species. But power recognized power. The magic of the sidhe resonated with her on some level.
Instead of opening the door to the throne room, she lifted her fist and knocked. Her knuckles connected with more than wood.
The throne room on the other side became exposed. Marion saw the thrones clearly—not with her blurry, nearsighted eyes, but with a sense that superseded the physical.
She saw everything.
The spells under her feet, which would have appeared like a mosaic of tile to a mundane like Luke.
The illusions woven into the windows, making it appear as though the throne room overlooked the beach even though there was nothing beyond the walls.
She even saw the fibers of life that wrapped through the thrones themselves. The thrones looked like they’d been carved, but Marion understood that they had been grown from the same matter as the hair and fingernails of the royalty who sat upon it.
The king and queen waited at the epicenter of the magical hurricane.
“Marion,” the king said, getting to his feet.
She blinked rapidly, struggling to retract her vision from the depths of the magic so that she could perceive a man. The king had the same muscular build as Konig. The same lofty stature. The same lazy way of standing, as though they were too cool to bother standing upright.
The queen lounged in her seat beside him. Her hair was wrapped into two thick braids that hung over her shoulders and puddled on the floor. There was no way to tell where hair ended and the tangle of vines began. She wore the same oversized pearls that she did on the door, along with blossoms dotting her hair that were almost the same creamy shade as her flesh.
A tiara was set into the mass of her hair. A delicate chain held a crescent suspended between her eyebrows, which matched the pendulums in her ears and the chains draped around her throat to nestle in her cleavage.
“I can’t begin to say how relieved we are to see you, dear girl,” the queen said warmly. She had no pupils, no irises. Her eyes were blank, eerie white.
Marion remembered that she was in the presence of royalty, and she was probably supposed to show some kind of respect. She fell into a clumsy curtsy. It must have looked moronic since she was wearing scrubs. “Your Majesties.”
The king chuckled. “I never thought I’d see the day that you bowed before me. Heather was right. You’ve forgotten everything.”
She wasn’t supposed to bow to him? She straightened awkwardly. “I’m sorry, Your Highness.”
“Please,” he said, “call me Rage.”
“Rage?” What kind of name was Rage?
She half-expected to be punished for echoing his name with such disbelief, but the king only laughed. “That’s more like it.” He looked over her shoulder. “Who is this?”
“Dr. Lucas Flynn,” Luke said, stepping forward. “I’m a doctor from Ransom Falls, California. I was there when Marion was found, and I was escorting her home to Vancouver Island.”
“Home?” Rage’s brow furrowed. “Why would you have gone there first, of all places?”
“Because she doesn’t know,” the queen said softly.
Marion glanced between them, unable to keep herself from frowning. She didn’t understand. “What don’t I know?”
“Anything, it seems,” Violet said. Her blank eyes could have been focused on anything, but Marion felt like the queen was staring at her.
“What’s at my house?” Marion pressed.
“Nothing, right now,” Rage said. “You’re due at the summit. Your live-in assistant will be waiting for you there.”
“And my parents?”
“No. Here, let’s make this easier.” Rage stepped down from the dais, and his throne seemed to sigh, as though it were saddened by his distance. “You don’t seem to remember much, so
we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Why don’t we start by figuring out what you do know?”
Marion opened her mouth to respond. She wanted to tell them about the garden and the curly-haired boy, but instinct stopped her.
That wasn’t something that she should tell anyone.
“I know that my name is Marion. I’m a mage. A half-angel, half-witch girl. And…” She shrugged. “I like things to be clean, I like designer clothes, and everyone seems to want me dead.”
Luke made an odd noise behind her. She knew him well enough now to tell when he was trying to smother a laugh.
Violet stood from her throne, smoothing her dress around her thighs. She wore multi-layered ruffles, much like the carving. “This is surely the work of people trying to keep you from the UN summit. It should be easier to bring your memories back than to try to fill you in on everything that you’ve ‘missed.’ Why don’t we see if we can take care of that for you?”
Marion’s heart stopped beating. “Yes,” she said. “Yes please.”
Violet led them out of the throne room and down a hallway to another wing of the castle. The king didn’t come, though Marion could feel the weight of his eyes following her all the way out the door.
Marion had a great view of the surrounding forest as they weaved through Myrkheimr. They were only bordered by trees on one side. A steep precipice carved through the earth on the other side of the hall, and waterfalls foamed off the side, spilling into a lake the color of the cold sky. There was a village at the bottom.
“That’s where most of our guards live.” Konig seemed reluctant to let her go. He had his arm wrapped around her shoulder, and his grip only tightened as they moved down the hall. “The rest of the Autumn Court lives on the fringes of our world. We like our space.”
“It doesn’t look real,” Marion said.
“The courts were designed by the Summer Queen, Titania,” Violet said. “She’s a dramatic soul.” They spiraled down a staircase and into a hall set along the side of the cliff.
“What can you tell me about…me?” Marion asked, looking thoughtfully at her boyfriend’s mother. “Do we know each other well?”
“I know you about as much as you’d expect any woman to know her son's girlfriend. I can tell you that your name is Marion Garin. Sometimes you go by Marion Kavanagh.”
The name struck against Marion’s skull as though it were crashing into her, a meteor entering the atmosphere to crater exactly where she stood.
Kavanagh.
She clutched her skull, heels of her palms digging into her temples.
“Kavanagh,” she said aloud. “Kavanagh. Kavanagh.”
“Marion?” A hand touched her elbow. It was Luke. She wanted to let herself fall into him, praying that he would be waiting at the bottom of the deep hole that name had corkscrewed into her brain.
“Kavanagh,” Marion whispered one more time.
“Two different last names,” Luke said, hovering nearby, as though prepared to catch her. “Why?”
“I’m not sure, to be honest.” Violet ran her fingers through the strands of pearls in her hair, which chimed unnaturally. “Marion’s never been forthcoming about her past, even though we’ve brought her into our court as readily as though she were family.”
Mysteries layered underneath mysteries.
Marion stood between Luke and Konig. The way that both of them stared at her was too much.
“I’m fine,” she murmured, though she wasn’t certain who she was reassuring.
“Here we are. The library.” Violet stopped in front of another door, this one unremarkable aside from the fact that it should have opened into the cliff.
“Doctor, you can’t come in here.” Konig waved down the hall, vaguely indicating the direction of his servants. They had followed the sidhe royalty into the rear of the castle so silently that Marion hadn’t noticed them. “Our people will take you to a room where you can rest after your difficult journey from Ransom Falls.”
“Luke can’t come into the library? Why?” Marion asked. Her urge to grab Luke was stronger than ever.
“The information held within is exclusive to the sidhe,” Violet said.
Konig added, “And you, princess.”
“Luke can hear anything I can,” she said.
“Your loyalty’s nice, but you don’t understand what you were like…before,” Konig said. “You don’t know what you went through to earn the right to access what’s beyond those doors.”
What did Marion want more: to keep Luke by her side, or to find her memories?
“I’ll go,” Luke said, sparing her from the decision.
Marion gave him a weak smile. “Don’t go far.”
He didn’t smile back.
Marion watched one of Konig’s servants guide Luke away, frustration uncoiling within the pits of her gut. If she’d had her way, she would have been tethered to Luke, keeping him permanently within arm’s reach. Like a toddler who needed her teddy bear. Now he was leaving and she wanted to throw a tantrum much like a toddler’s, too.
She swallowed down her hurts and clutched Konig’s hand harder.
Even so, when Luke walked away, she couldn’t help but watch his retreating back and feel like she’d never see him again.
* * *
The room that the servant took Luke to was nice enough, aesthetically speaking. It was exactly the kind of thing he’d have expected to find in one of the faerie courts, with all its froufrou furniture, ridiculous rugs, and stained glass windows. Magic shimmered on every surface, so obvious that even he could see it.
The woman who had escorted him there hung by the door. “You’ll let me know if you need anything?” She was a petite waif of a woman, and Luke believed her to be one of the gentry—the highest caste of sidhe. The gentry could pass for human, as Konig did. There was nothing inhuman about her willowy form, goldenrod hair, or peachy skin.
“I’m fine, thanks,” Luke said, giving the servant a long, thoughtful look. There was something strangely flat about the purple of her irises. They didn’t have the depth to them that Konig’s did. She might have been gentry, but either she was weak gentry, or wearing a glamour.
Why? What physical attribute would she be trying to hide?
She stared back at Luke as though she expected him to say something.
“I’d like privacy,” he said after an awkward moment.
“Of course you would.” She bowed and backed out of the room, shutting the door behind her.
Luke was left alone in a room with proportions so overblown that they felt ready for a giant. The bed was like four kings put together. He could have climbed into the wardrobe with a half-dozen others for a party, too. It was possible that the sidhe did expect to entertain large guests. There were demons of those grand proportions.
None of that was interesting to him, though. He couldn’t stop thinking about the magic that he had seen on the door to Myrkheimr’s throne room—and the door to the library he hadn’t been allowed to enter.
Luke hadn’t put much thought into the magic circle he’d seen at Ollie Machado’s house. At the time, he’d thought the spellwork had the faint hallmarks of unseelie magic, but he didn’t know enough to be certain. There was a lot of overlap between human and sidhe magic.
Now he felt much more certain. The designs on Myrkheimr’s doors were too similar to the teleportation spell to be coincidental.
He just didn’t know what it meant. But he knew how to figure it out.
Luke pulled a cell phone out of one pocket and a battery out of the other. It was no secret that the Office of Preternatural Affairs tracked cell phone networks in conjunction with the National Security Agency, which was why Luke owned a phone, but never turned it on.
This particular cell phone was ancient technology. A pre-Genesis artifact. The battery and antenna were slathered in magic. No spell could prevent the NSA from surveilling the cell networks, but it could let Luke contact people without touching a cell network in the f
irst place.
He popped the battery into place and pressed the power button.
The phone only got to ring twice before someone picked up on the other end. “Hey,” said a woman. Her voice crackled with interdimensional interference, but Luke still heard the utter shock in her tone.
“Hi, Brianna,” Luke said. “Long time.”
Brianna Dimaria was the one person that Luke trusted with his identity—the one phone number he had kept of all those he’d known before becoming a doctor at Mercy Hospital.
Once upon a time, Brianna had been the high priestess of a prestigious coven, trained by the best of the best. Now she lived in Las Vegas and worked as a private investigator. She was so often contracted by the government that she might as well have been an employee.
Government contacts or not, Brianna was deeply loyal to Luke. She had enchanted the phone as a gift to be sure he could get help whenever he needed. Until that day, Luke had been convinced he’d never need that help.
Never say never, he thought.
“You answered the phone awfully fast,” Luke said.
She gave a shaky laugh. “Well, yeah.” Those two words were filled with a thousand unasked questions.
“I’d like you to contact a friend of mine,” Luke said. “Her name is Nurse Charity Ballard and she works at Mercy Hospital in Ransom Falls, California.” It was the first time that he’d told Brianna anything so personal about his new life. He pushed on before he could think about the sensitive information he was exposing. “Ask Charity to go to Oliver Machado’s house. I need Ollie’s laptop, his spellbook if she can find it, and anything else remotely occultish that she can find.”
“Okay. And where will you meet her to get those things?” Brianna could barely make that question sound innocent. She must have been dying to hunt Charity down, and Luke by association.
He wasn’t going to make it easy for Brianna to seek him out. “I’ll find Charity myself.”
“Anything else?”
Luke gazed up at the stained-glass windows and the leafy shadows fluttering past. What could he do with the help of a witch like Brianna Dimaria? Probably a lot of things. Nothing that would be worth it. “Just don’t tell anyone you heard from me. I’m not coming back.”