Cast in Balefire: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Mage Craft Series Book 4)

by SM Reine

  She had been more concerned about his transparent skin and the blood oozing from his hairline. His braids were caked in more ichor than oil. “You still don’t look right.”

  “Is that your professional medical advice?” Arawn asked with that cloying, teasing tone. “It’s gotta be professional, because I wouldn’t think you’d be worried about little old me.”

  “You’re the only thing holding the wards on this tower together. If you die, I’m stranded in Sheol, and I’m much too cute to get eaten.” It was meant to be a self-deprecating reference to her hideous visage, but Arawn’s admiring gaze said that he agreed she was, indeed, too cute.

  “But then there’d be no big mean demon to keep you from escaping Duat.” Arawn stood with less swiftness. He swayed as he buttoned the shirt a servant had delivered. Inches at a time, he concealed his throbbing internal organs. “Don’t you want to escape?”

  Charity did want to get back and kick Konig’s ass. She wanted to tell Marion that Konig was cheating on her. And then Charity wanted to rejoin Seth.

  Now Seth had died, so that last, most-important item on her to-do list was impossible.

  Arawn had gleefully filled Charity in on Seth’s nature before the injury. He’d seemed to delight in having a rapt audience absorbing his complaints about the God of Death. “That guy’s been all over my territory for eons. Literally eons. He blinked out for twenty-something years to get mortal again, and those twenty-something years were the best of my eternity. No whining! But also I had to process souls, and that is so boring.”

  Charity hadn’t been surprised to learn Seth was a god. She couldn’t explain why it wasn’t a surprise. Her coworker being a deity should have been weird.

  And yet. It was Seth.

  He’d died a day earlier, and that meant he was back to godliness. He hadn’t reached out to Charity during that day. Balefire was spreading throughout Sheol and nobody was touching that, either.

  All signs that Seth was too busy being a god to pay attention to the rest of the world.

  There was nobody waiting to greet her back on Earth, so that eliminated the major drive for escaping Arawn. And Arawn wasn’t exactly a terrible captor. He’d really gussied up her apartment, and Charity had even gotten a few trips to the market.

  Such a shame he was also a ruthless mass murderer.

  “You should be grateful I didn’t run off while you were snoring on my couch. An opportunistic demon might have sneaked in and offed you.”

  Charity tossed a pair of clean slacks at his chest. They dangled from his hands as Arawn dripped contemptuous glares at her. “What exactly is this?”

  “It’s cotton. No snug leather while you’re healing.” She’d specifically requested loose clothing from his servants without mentioning whom they were for. The harder she focused on proper care for Arawn’s injury, the easier it was to block the grief from searing her neurons.

  Dr. Flynn’s dead.

  “You’re being awful sweet toward your worst nightmare.” Arawn jerked the cotton slacks over his hips.

  She laughed hollowly. “Right. Worst nightmare.”

  He got serious all of the sudden. He stepped toward her, and even though there were only a few inches between them, it seemed to take minutes for him to reach her. He surged in size with every step on the approach until he was as tall as Charity and could look her in the eye.

  “I’d have been burned up in balefire if Seth hadn’t spared me. Seth spared me so that you’d be safe.” He snorted. “Stupid. Like I’d ever leave you in danger.”

  Charity’s guts squirmed like the worms she’d seen within Arawn. “Why don’t you?”

  His eyes crinkled at the corners. The skin was more opaque where it folded, so it made his face glow pasty-white when he grinned. “Seems like I owe Seth a favor for saving me. So here’s the favor. I’m gonna give you my palantír—that weird seeing stone in my office—and take you to the Pit of Souls. Pray over the palantír. Pray hard.”

  “What in the world will all that do?”

  “It will be like calling Seth’s direct phone number,” Arawn said. “You can get God’s attention.”

  Arawn escorted her to the Pit of Souls, accompanied by a handful of his gang. They took a tunnel underneath the walls to escape the balefire and emerged on the other side in a forest that smoldered from proximity to such heat.

  Charity appreciated Arawn’s company outside of Duat. Sheol had always been dangerous, but it had been getting worse. The late Nyx had been a second Lord of Hell, so it had been like having two mountain lions hunting among the same community of deer. She’d often picked off demons who failed to meet her exacting standards of behavior.

  Arawn was as predatory in his way, but his standards of behavior were lower, too. He let people get away with a lot.

  One less predator, a lot more deer. The population of Sheol looked to have tripled in that month alone, and it wasn’t a nice population.

  The same laissez faire attitude toward demon behavior that made Sheol dangerous made Arawn untouchable. He didn’t care about justice. If anyone looked at him sideways, his Hounds would eat them.

  Demons treading lightly around Arawn meant treading lightly around Charity by extension. Even the gang looked wary of her, and they knew she was a prisoner. She couldn’t piss Arawn off by ripping the heads off of his gang.

  Well, she could have, but Charity had restraint.

  None of Sheol’s booming population bothered them on the road to the Pit of Souls. The scrabbling insect demons remained in the plains beyond the Dead Forest, seething like a black ocean of legs under the mist. Arawn guided Charity around several spots where the rock was smoldering in a core of balefire, but he walked right through the crowds of demons untouched.

  There was no wind to touch them or the fire as they climbed the slope. The air grew thinner until Charity struggled to breathe. She hugged the palantír to her chest like a teddy bear.

  Gravity shifted the higher they walked. Although they were sloping up on the cavernous interior walls of Sheol, they remained pinned perpendicularly to the surface. Charity had been walking for hours when she looked up to see that the smoking wreckage of the Dead Forest was above her head.

  “We’re inside a dome,” Arawn explained. “Duat’s at the bottom, and the Pit of Souls is at the top.”

  “This isn’t how gravity works,” Charity said.

  “Nope, doesn’t work at all like this.” He barked a laugh and jogged ahead. Gravity continued to shift so that he stood upright easily relative to the ground, putting him at an angle to Charity.

  She kept her eyes on her feet until they stopped at the edge of a great big nothingness. She didn’t let herself look up—or down—at Duat hanging over her head, nor did she look at the columns of searing white balefire that failed to brighten Sheol’s eternal night.

  Then they arrived at the Pit.

  “What’s happening in there?” Charity asked. It was hard to focus on anything beyond the line where rock ended. The absolute darkness reminded her chillingly of the Genesis void—the last thing she had seen before waking up a revenant.

  Arawn remained several feet back, looking annoyed. “Souls are going in the Pit, obviously.”

  But it wasn’t a pit. That word implied depth. Someone had taken scissors to Sheol’s roof and cut out a part the size of a lake, leaving nothing behind.

  Charity kneeled at the edge. With her arms occupied by the heavy seeing stone, she unbalanced.

  Arawn grabbed her shoulder. “Don’t get too close. It sucks to fall in.”

  She shook off his icy grip. The palantír shimmered when she peeled back the layers of leather she’d been using to shelter it. It was cold against her palms, to the degree that it felt like burning.

  Charity tried to clear her mind as she gazed into it. The palantír was so glossy that it should have been a mirror, but it reflected nothing.

  The idea of talking to Seth like this made her stomach writhe. It wouldn’t work. Seth
wasn’t a god, no matter how much demons had been whispering about him—he was just dead. Charity was going to start praying and get no reaction except Arawn cackling at her for being so stupid as to believe him.

  She needed to attempt it. She’d never forgive herself if she didn’t.

  Shutting her eyes, Charity prayed.

  Are you there, Seth? It’s me, Charity.

  She couldn’t suppress a snort-giggle.

  Her laugh cut off when she heard a response.

  It wasn’t quite a sound, although Charity felt the pressure of it between her ears. She was immersed in experiences, sensations. The memory of something she’d never done or seen.

  She saw a door.

  It was a normal-looking door for Earth, though its plain white features were out of place in Sheol. Stranger still was the way that it stood independently beside the Pit of Souls.

  That was the sort of door that should have led into an innocuous pantry, a guest bedroom, an attached garage.

  As Charity watched, the door changed in her vision. It became a thing of sleek black lines framed by utilitarian gears—machinery that was not pretty but elegant in its functionality. The palantír was nestled at the center of it. When Charity put her hand on the seeing stone, cogs whirled, ropes twisted, and the door swung open.

  Seth was on the other side. He was facing the Pit of Souls, head lowered, shoulders sagging.

  He slowly turned as if about to look at Charity. She wished he wouldn’t. If he turned, then she would see the truth—that Seth was no longer a man, but something great and terrible, and so distant from Lucas Flynn that he’d be a stranger.

  The vision ended before she could see his eyes.

  She leaped back from the palantír. Her palms were slicked with crimson-tinged sweat.

  “What’d you see?” Arawn asked.

  “A door.” No, that was the wrong word for it. “An altar. I need to build an altar for Seth right here.” She jabbed her finger toward the palantír. “It’s the only way he’ll be able to come back.”

  Arawn shrugged. “Okay.” He clapped his hands to his gang. “Get the blood-sucker anything she wants. Anything at all.”

  She met him a few steps down the slope of the road, hurrying to speak before he could leave. “I could tell them to get me keys to the tower with instructions like that. I could walk out of Sheol and leave.”

  “Oh yeah?” Arawn swiveled to shoot a grin at Charity. “Go ahead. I won’t stop you.”

  He kept walking. She didn’t.

  Charity watched the Lord of Hell ambling toward Duat’s flaming dome, walking with less energy than she’d ever seen before. He looked exhausted by his rebirth.

  Seth had spooked him. Arawn was going to let her go if she wanted rather than deal with Seth again.

  Why didn’t Charity want to leave?

  5

  February 2032 — The Middle Worlds

  The life of sidhe royalty was one of rigorous scheduling cloaked in hedonism. Marion was debriefed for meetings while her handmaidens made love to handsome faeries in the same room. At the actual meeting for which she’d been prepped, she was hand-fed grapes and slivers of expensive cheese. Her wine glass never emptied while Aoife delivered grim news about demons in the Ethereal Levant.

  Demons had always had a settlement at the base of Dilmun. A god with a sick sense of humor had made the only tangible doorway between Earth and Sheol rest under the angels’ city—whether to taunt them or to make sure angels could protect humanity from demons, nobody knew.

  The inhabitants of the demon encampment had been frothing like ants whose nest had been kicked. There was definite activity in Sheol.

  Aoife suspected that Arawn was rallying forces for a concentrated attack on the Autumn Court. He would approach, Aoife posited, from a ley line a few hundred kilometers from Dilmun.

  Marion drank an entire bottle of wine dry by the time Aoife had finished speaking, only to have a second bottle appear.

  “Keep monitoring their activity,” Marion said. One of the handmaidens was brushing her hair. Another was sleeping off a hangover at Marion’s feet.

  All business was conducted as such. And there was much business to be done. The throne had come with legions of advisors who knew more than their half-angel queen, but couldn’t be permitted to realize it.

  What a deadly tightrope walk her meetings were. Marion would be swarmed by so many sidhe that their magic gave her headaches through the wards. Someone would be massaging her feet, and someone else would be feeding her chocolate-drenched berries, while someone else would be asking for Marion to decide the fate of civilians. It was overstimulating, and more than a little distracting, but snap decisions needed to be delivered with confidence.

  Who should be punished? Who would be pardoned? How should the few cooperative members of the army be positioned to prevent further attack?

  If she faltered, they would know. The magic would shrivel. Konig and Marion would lose control.

  She rode it out as best she could, waiting for Onoskelis to return with the first of the labors. Days passed in monotonous swirls of color, wine, and music played to the beat of roast pigs crackling in the fire.

  Before long, the advisors and handmaidens were joined by lobbyists from the Autumn Court. The rumors said that there was friction between Marion and Konig, and they wanted to beg the queen for things that the king refused.

  No matter her opinions, Marion had to parrot Konig’s response in solidarity.

  A total waste of her time.

  Marion never let herself pause before speaking to these people. She showed no sign of taking time to think. They were looking at her with simmering hatred, all those sidhe. Their culture prohibited them from saying anything to her face, just as the protesters had been silent, but the chilly politeness was equally punishing.

  Cheater. Keeping Konig’s dick on a leash. Fucking a god.

  Even that silent deference would vanish if Marion didn’t look like she knew what she was doing.

  She leaned into the culture. She laughed with the handmaidens. She rolled her eyes when concerned lobbyists begged for favors, dismissing them coldly while she sipped wine. She feasted on pig and grapes.

  Marion acted like she was truly the unseelie queen and she waited for the unseelie to love her for it.

  The new residents of the Winter Court were cordial enough in response, but they remained distant. They never touched her.

  She also attended court with Konig in the Autumn Court once a week. It was a vacation from making choices because she never had to speak, much less think about the questions she was asked. But it was a vacation that meant sitting beside Konig in the throne room where his mother had died.

  Each time Marion entered the Autumn Court, she noticed changes. It was reshaping to match Konig’s personality with increasing speed. Many of the Onyx Queen’s organic flourishes were turning into jagged thorns. Orange upholstery darkened to the viscous black of menstrual blood. Gemstone mosaics turned to fields of shattered mirrors.

  Her cheek had healed from Konig’s last strike by the time the swords appeared along the road between Niflheimr and Myrkheimr.

  Despite how charming Konig was as king—patient, good-humored, and effusive—the court reflected the truth of him. The broken parts. The ones he only wielded toward Marion.

  She was every inch the queen during the day, but she avoided being alone with her husband. The thought of trying to talk to him privately filled her head with fog and sucked the moisture from her mouth.

  That didn’t stop him from speaking to her publicly.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it?” Konig asked one day at the end of court. They’d heard pleas from farmers suffering attack on the edge of the Wilds. He stood beside Marion, a few inches taller and dressed in silk the color of dying roses. His mouth tipped toward her ear so only she’d hear the words. “Having to be responsible every day is difficult.”

  As if Konig were so much more experienced than Marion. He had
n’t willingly sat in on court since he’d been twelve.

  “It’s my pleasure to be queen,” Marion said.

  “Despite the protesters?”

  She cast a sideways glance at him. “What do you know of that?”

  “I know that half the Autumn Court wants us to separate.”

  Half was an optimistic estimate. It was surely more than three-quarters. “Until we find a way to quiet dissidents, it will be easier for us to cease joint days in court. It’s impractical to travel through those crowds.”

  “Princess…please.”

  Marion’s gaze lifted to his. They connected with such force that something should have exploded.

  The pet name from Konig filled her with painful shock, and their first direct eye contact since the funeral hurt even more. It was hard to look into the violet shards of his eyes and remember what he’d done to her. Particularly because he still gazed at Marion like he loved her.

  “We’ll keep having court together here,” Konig said. “You should too. If we spend nights together, it’ll help convince people.”

  “The people aren’t the ones who need to be convinced,” Marion said.

  Every time he’d said he loved her, he’d been lying. Nothing had changed.

  She continued to commute between ley lines weekly.

  Even when there was distance between them, nothing she did ever escaped Konig’s touch—or his eyes. The handmaidens were always there, whether she was holding court in Myrkheimr or being hand-fed pork medallions in Niflheimr.

  She had no way of doing the things she enjoyed in privacy, so she stopped worrying about privacy.

  Marion studied her magic and journals while the handmaidens sprawled around her jungle-like bedroom. The women made appreciative sounds when Marion did something impressive with magic. In between, they read through her journals too, and they shrieked with delight at private details about Konig.