by Reine, SM
He put a hand on the top of her head when she tried to stand. “Prove that you want this.”
And she did, with enthusiasm that would have convinced anyone else. She opened his trousers and put his dick in her mouth and did what a wife was supposed to do.
He liked to see her on her knees. He liked to see the Voice of God submit.
Until speaking to Maddisyn—until Jaycee had made him realize how little he needed Marion—that domination had been enough to get his rocks off. But now, looking down at her while she worked to extract the sensual magic of the unseelie from his body, he was mostly annoyed.
Soon, Konig wouldn’t need her anymore.
He finished in her mouth. She sank back on her knees and gave him a sultry smile.
What a piece of half-human wreckage.
Konig was in a better mood post-orgasm, if nothing else. Even unseelie kings were susceptible to hormones like dopamine. He hooked his hand under Marion’s arm and hauled her to her feet.
“This is as good as it gets for you, princess,” he said, stroking the curls out of her face. The fact she could smile at him was as much a lie as anything else she said. “It will never get better for you. You should be grateful for every damn second of it.”
Because her seconds were numbered.
“Oh, I’m grateful,” Marion said, tucking her head underneath his chin. She was warm against his chest. Soft, malleable, and unafraid. “I love every last second with you, Konig.” She kissed the underside of his jaw. “Until death do we part.”
5
“Blood color or liver color?” Arawn asked.
Charity flipped through the catalog she was reading. “Hmm?”
“The bedspread. Blood or liver?”
She put a sticky note to mark her page, then looked up. Arawn was holding two cloth samples. In the darkness, the colors of blood and liver didn’t look different enough to matter. “I like the saturation of the blood-like tint better.”
“Blood-like?” Arawn asked innocently, handing the samples back to his designer. “What do you mean like?”
“Ha ha, very funny.” Charity tossed the catalog to the coffee table. Like the rest of their furniture, it was made of iron and tiny bones that Arawn assured her were not human in origin (“Though they do look like they come out of babies!” he’d said with the least reassuring laugh possible).
Just like her table was (probably) not made out of baby parts, her future bedspread was not going to be dyed with actual blood.
She hoped.
That was part of her terms in helping to settle the Barcelona undercity. Charity would work with Arawn and live in an apartment near him, but all materials biological in origin needed to be ethically sourced. And anything that was not food couldn’t be made from human parts.
At least, not in her apartment. Charity had very little control over the rest of the undercity. She was an advisor and nothing more.
The only thing that even gave her that much power was the gris-gris dangling from her bony right wrist.
Arawn dismissed his interior decorator and then dropped onto the couch next to Charity. He braced one hand on the back of it, and the other hand on the arm, pinning her against the corner.
It would have been intimidating if not for two details: firstly, Charity was physically much larger than Arawn, and secondly, he’d never tried to do anything weirder than hover with creepy bulging eyes. For being a demon Lord of Sheol—now Lord of the Undercity—he was a very considerate host. He just had a terrible sense of boundaries.
“Will you tell me now?” he asked.
He’d been begging Charity for details about her vacation with Seth ever since she’d come back. And she kept refusing. Not because she didn’t trust Arawn (although she didn’t), but because she still wasn’t certain how to process the nauseating feeling that coiled in her belly.
Charity hadn’t left her meeting with James feeling good about it.
It didn’t help that she’d been gone from the mortal worlds for months. Months! She’d lost most of the year to visiting the conservatory. How was she supposed to deal with that? How could she tell Arawn about how she’d been missing for almost half a year when it had only felt like a day to her?
“I already told you,” she said lightly. “I want the blood-like color.” Deliberate obtuseness could take a woman far, she had learned. It had been one of her most useful lessons from nursing school. Even better than the ABCs of handling trauma patients.
His thin lips slanted with mirth. He was not fooled by Charity’s diversion. “All I want to know is that you’re safe.”
“Safe? From Seth?” She glanced around the room. “Do you see him anywhere?”
“He is Death.” Arawn was near enough now that she could smell the oil in his dreadlocks. “He can do things to you from a distance.”
Charity rolled her eyes. “I’m a vampire. I’m fine. Promise.” And if it were time for her to go with Death, Arawn wouldn’t have been able to stop it. Nobody could.
“Good.” But he didn’t sit back. He kept staring at her. “What do you think of all this now? Everything I did while you were gone?” His voice was low and gravelly, coming through a throat torn ragged by a lifetime of cigar smoke.
Her gaze tracked to the open French doors leading out to her balcony. She had an excellent view of the undercity, which they’d been calling Shadowhold. Because it had been dug into the bedrock by shifters who lived in Spain, it looked essentially like a Spanish city that just so happened to be underground.
That meant a lot of lovely little details. Asymmetrical architecture, hip roofs, some hints of stucco and adobe, ornate tile. She especially liked the wrought iron. Given a few years, all of that would be soiled by blood and sulfur and ichor. For now, it was beautiful. When she could see it. Which wasn’t often, because demons sure loved their darkness.
The undercity was called Shadowhold, not Sunnyhold.
“It needs better lighting.” Charity couldn’t help but smile. “Otherwise, I like it.”
Arawn hadn’t moved. His face was still about two inches away. He’d recently tattooed the inside of his lips, for some reason which made absolutely zero sense to Charity, and she caught a glimpse of the marks when his tongue darted out to wet his lips with a raspy sandpaper sound.
When he said, “Good,” he leaned forward just a little bit more.
Charity wasn’t exactly leaning back, even if his breath smelled like dog.
Footsteps thundered down the hallway.
The heavy doors flew open. Nothing was heavy enough to slow down the Alpha stag shifter known as Adàn Pedregon, especially when he was as angry as he looked now.
Arawn didn’t immediately sit back, though he did roll his eyes. “What in the seven Hells do you want now? Aren’t we done with each other?”
Adàn surged through the room to grab Arawn by the collar and lift him off of Charity. The shifter wasn’t particularly tall, but his strength more than made up for it. “You traitorous, serpentine bastard!”
“Please,” Arawn said, calm as ever. “I’m more like a jackal.”
And then metal flashed, and there was blood.
The demon fell to his feet. Adàn fell to his knees. He clutched his gut in both hands, trying to stuff his intestines back into himself. Such was the sharpness of Arawn’s blade, and his willingness to use it.
Charity was still scrambling to reach Adàn when Arawn licked his razor blade clean. “Arawn!” she said, horrified.
Adàn jerked away from her touch. He spit out a slew of Spanish-language curses that she barely understood, shoving her hands off. He didn’t want her help? Fine. If the shifter was convinced his healing was adequate to recover from sudden vivisection, then fine. It wasn’t as though he was susceptible to infection.
He pressed a hand to the wound. Blood flowed through his fingers, but his intestines were contained.
Adàn staggered away from Charity. The shifter’s hair was parting as antlers budded from his scal
p. Only a truly angry Alpha could partially shift like that. “We gave you Barcelona!” Adàn spat. His foot slipped in his own blood.
Arawn smirked his amusement, licking the blade again even though it was now clean. He seemed pleased when it cut a line down the center of his own tongue. Black fluid oozed from the slice. “It’s not giving when we barter. You get Sheol. I get Barcelona.”
“Do I? Do you?”
“Doe, a deer, a temperamental deer,” Arawn sang off-key, swinging around to sweep Charity off the floor. She planted her hands in his chest and pushed. “Let me ask again. What do you want?”
“My home,” Adàn said. “My people arrived to find the Sheol door inaccessible. Dilmun is occupied. The wards on the ethereal city are blocking us from getting through. We haven’t gotten our end of the deal!”
Now he had Arawn’s interest. “Wait, Dilmun is occupied?”
“You never told us that the city has ethereal wards demons could easily penetrate but shifters could not. This is your fault.”
“But the city is occupied.”
“Yes! The city is occupied!”
Charity and Arawn exchanged looks. One of the many asshole things that Arawn had done without Charity’s approval—though not without her knowledge—was invading Dilmun. Between the demons and balefire, there shouldn’t have been anything there.
“In all fairness, I did the best I could with Dilmun. I emptied out the angels. Whatever happened afterward? I’ve got nothing to do with that.” Arawn picked between his teeth with the razor.
“But you have that thing,” Adàn said, thrusting a finger at Charity.
Specifically, at the gris-gris on her brittle wrist.
Charity’s hand moved to cover it, feeling its rough edges and the way that it tingled against her fingertips.
If Adàn wanted her to speak to God, then there was only one angel that could possibly be triggering the wards within Dilmun.
“Fix this, or I will take my undercity back,” Adàn said.
“How do you propose you’ll do that?” For an instant, Arawn was not a slouchy, dreadlocked, tattooed-and-leather-clad demon with a bad attitude. He was a white canine with red-tipped ears who was bigger than the room with countless sharp teeth.
Adàn’s hands peeled away from his gut to expose the place Arawn had cut him. It had already healed. “Your undercity is rigged with explosives. I will collapse it.”
Arawn’s eyebrows arched. “Explosives, you say?”
“And we will kill anyone who tries to escape,” Adàn said.
“Suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” the demon muttered to Charity. He flicked his wrist, reopening the blade. “You can’t detonate bombs if you’re dead.”
He only took a step before Charity grabbed him. “I’ll talk to him. I’ll fix this.” She dreaded the words even as she spoke them. Seth had said that Marion was an off-limits subject. It wasn’t that he would punish her for bringing Marion up anyway—but it would hurt Seth. He’d hurt so much.
Arawn’s eyes radiated with affection. “I’m really happy to kill Adàn.”
“But I’m not,” Charity said.
Adàn watched them impatiently, tree trunk arms folded over his chest. His shirt hung open in front where he’d been cut. For a middle-aged man who turned into a prey animal, he was impressively muscled.
“All right,” Arawn said. “Go see Seth. Talk him into fixing shit for us. I’ll give you a couple hours.”
But Adàn said, “I’ll only give you one.”
* * *
Sheol was a dark place made no less dark by the amount of balefire that consumed it. Balefire could be redirected by someone powerful enough, but never destroyed; being relegated to the edges of Sheol didn’t mean it wasn’t running wild.
Charity was brought into the world high above the balefire, above Duat, above the hive where the insect-like demons used to dwell. She stood at the edge of a pit.
The Pit.
Charity was not alone.
A force had materialized in front of her, most likely at the same time that she’d been brought into Sheol by the gris-gris. Seth faced her without any real face. Even now that he had the heart of ash, it took a few seconds of concerted effort to form energy into eyes, full lips, a strong jaw.
“How can I help you?” The kindness of Seth’s voice was as shocking as the shadowy trees against the balefire. A nice person like Seth Wilder didn’t belong here. But this was his world, so much more than that foggy Infinite. This was the place the dead were drawn. They were compelled into his gravity well by fate.
“How’s progress?” she asked, nodding toward his chest.
He looked down at the wooden bone. And he shrugged. “I’m still waiting. I haven’t done much, so nothing’s changed.”
“What are you waiting for? Have you just been hanging out in Sheol?”
She hadn’t expected that to be a loaded question, but the formless black mass of Seth collapsed a bit.
“I haven’t been in Sheol much,” Seth said. “Part of me is here, but my attention… I’ve been searching. I’m looking for answers. I can’t see into Shamayim, and I still can’t see into this event that’s coming. I don’t know why.”
“It’s good if you’ve only been observing.” She kicked a rock and sent it skittering across the ground. “That means you still have lots of time.”
“As long as I’m careful.” His eyes brightened as they became more corporeal, and there was calculating intelligence in them. “Do you need me to do something that isn’t careful?”
“We’ve got to talk about that thing you said you never wanted to talk about,” Charity said. “I’m sorry. You know I wouldn’t bring her up if I didn’t have to.”
Seth nodded. “Okay.”
Even with his acceptance, it hurt Charity to say it. “Marion isn’t letting Adàn’s people into Sheol, and he’s pissed. He’s gone back to cry foul with Arawn. They’re two seconds from war.” There. Summarized nice and neat.
“Another war?” Seth asked.
“Another war seems likely, yes. I don’t want to put Arawn in that position. He’ll fight a war happily. But he’ll also happily do nothing if we make the space for him to exist in peace. This doesn’t have to go badly.”
“What’s Marion doing in Dilmun?”
“Not sure. The wards are active, though. Demons could probably punch through, but…” It wasn’t demons who needed to reach Sheol. “We promised everyone that we’d make this happen.”
“I can’t make Marion help.”
“Well, I mean, you can…”
“She wouldn’t like it if I did,” Seth said.
Charity reached out for him. She put her hand reassuringly upon the place where a shoulder might have been. “And what’s that got to do with the price of lethe in Sheol?”
“Everything.” He patted her hand. She felt skin, just as she’d felt James’s skin while in the Infinite. “This is going to sound crazy, but Marion… For all that she’s in control of everything, she has no control over anything. She doesn’t have respect from anyone but me. The only way I can show that now is by staying away, like she wants.”
“But Marion will want to hear from you,” she said.
“I don’t think she will. You saw what happened at the Veil.”
“I mean this in the nicest way possible, but are you stupid? Did you miss out on the whole months-long development of your relationship? I was only witness to parts of it and I still know for a fact Marion’s got to be pining as much as you are.”
“I’m not pining,” Seth said.
“You’re pining and you’re lonely.”
“A lonely god’s a dangerous thing to even think about,” he said. “Anyway, I can’t be a lonely god. I have you.”
“It’s not the same.” But Charity was a little tickled. If he’d said anything like that to her while they were working at the hospital together, she’d have turned inside out and exploded with embarrassed glee. Arawn’s open flattery
had numbed her somewhat in the interim. “Look, I’d wager my whole paycheck on the fact that Marion does, in fact, want to hear from you.”
“You don’t get a paycheck anymore.”
“Can I have my metaphor, please? We’re wagering with the lives of Arawn’s people if you don’t talk to Marion. Even on the tiny sliver of a chance she doesn’t want to see you, you want to see her. I know you do.” She took two of his hands in hers. Seth didn’t shy away from her claws at all anymore. “You deserve this. You need closure or something.”
When he didn’t speak, Charity added, “A lonely god isn’t safe, and I bet that an obsessive, confused one isn’t either. You’ve got to clear the air while you’re still breathing mortal air.”
And that was what made him waver.
“I’ve just got to open a path for Adàn into Sheol,” Seth said.
“That’s it.”
He raked a hand over his hair—because he did have hair again. The more he thought about Marion, the more he was forming back into the man he used to be. It wasn’t just the power of the gris-gris or the Tree of Knowledge. He was humanized by the very thought of her.
“All right,” Seth finally said. “I’ll sort this out. I’ll talk to Marion.”
6
Dilmun was a shining city—a grave teetering upon a pillar. Not so much an oasis at the heart of a desert as the sand baked into glass by unrelenting sunlight. A place where no shadow could dwell. Seth had heard it described as a monument to the dying race of angels, but the reality was grimmer than that. Until Arawn’s attack, it had been a hospice that nestled the last of angel-kind while they waited for death.
The grimmest part was that Seth had helped design Dilmun.
Seth’s involvement had been less about designing the specific buildings so much as making sure that angels were given space for natural deaths. As a result, the streets were familiar to him, as the entire universe was familiar to him.
Angels had died on that cobblestone before. Violent arguments had spiraled into death on multiple occasions. Demons had died there recently, and balefire still burned on the roads. Seth had been here for a thousand lives. It wept with the tragedy of dying.