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

by SM Reine

  “How do all of the sidhe affirm everything?” Konig asked.

  Sex. It was all about sex.

  Just like how sidhe considered their nightly “family” dinners to be prelude to orgies, Marion would be expected to have sex with Konig to affirm their relationship on the three-month anniversary of their wedding.

  She felt lightheaded, so it took her a few moments to do the mental math. How long had it been since Marion had bonded herself to Konig in order to save the unseelie courts? Three weeks? Four?

  They must have been close to six weeks, which was dangerously close to three months. Too close for her tastes.

  “Nobody ever told me,” Marion said.

  “Everyone knows how long we’ve been involved,” Konig said. “Nobody would think sex is an issue…aside from the semi-public ritual aspect.”

  She tensed. “Public?”

  “We need witnesses to affirm our mutual consent to our mating. Affirmations are often done in front of an entire court, but it can be done with a couple of volunteers instead.”

  On the inside, Marion wasn’t consenting to anything. Forget about sex. Merely continuing to function within the Middle Worlds was something she didn’t want. She was internally kicking, struggling, screaming her reluctance to breathe the same air as her husband.

  She didn’t want this.

  Nor did she want to walk away, leaving the Middle Worlds to collapse and thousands to die, Ymir among them.

  “We need to have sex in front of the court,” Marion said, trying to get herself adjusted to the idea.

  “If we don’t, then it’s considered a retraction of consent, and our marriage will unravel,” Konig said. “Both of us must be enthusiastic participants for it to work.”

  And if she wasn’t convincing enough—if her diadem didn’t glow again—then it would be worse than failing to appease the protesting army. The Autumn Court and Winter Court would be consumed by entropy. Even if the seelie moved in to seize the courts, there would be years of tumult.

  Marion felt like she’d vomited her tea into the back of her mouth.

  Enthusiastic participant.

  She could have sex with anyone, in theory.

  Enthusiastically? That was a problem.

  She stood from her chair, abandoning the steaming cup of tea. Her fingers fumbled on the tie around her waist. “I’m ready to be dressed for our meeting.”

  Konig was still kneeling by the chair. “All right,” he said without moving, watching her journey toward the bedroom door.

  There it was again, that hope.

  He’d just told Marion she’d have to screw him in public and he hoped that it would be fine.

  Marion managed to wait until the door closed behind her to collapse in bed, clutching her forehead as though the diadem’s weight was between her eyebrows.

  It hadn’t glowed for Konig. She couldn’t glow for Konig.

  They were scheduled to meet with the ethereal delegation in an orchard beyond the archery range one hour later. The location was near enough that Marion could hear the whizz of arrows and the solid strike of enchanted flint into hay targets.

  Marion and Konig arrived early, giving themselves time to determine how they wanted to be arranged for maximum impact. Konig sat on a bench beside the stream, which ran from the northernmost waterfalls. She stood in the center of the clearing, ringed by red-tipped tulips, to ensure they would see her first.

  The angels came through the ley lines.

  Jibril alighted first, just a few feet in front of Marion. Suzume was a few feet behind him. It wasn’t an impressive delegation at first sight, but the foreign energy was an assault on the forest. The trees were shivering in the force of their presence.

  “It must be an emergency,” Jibril said by way of greeting, “because it seems like you’re asking us another favor when you haven’t even kept your promise yet.”

  Marion didn’t dare frown. “I’ve called you here to clarify something.”

  “Can we not fuck around with this today?” Suzume was dressed in the blandest professional clothes possible, as usual: slacks, loafers, and a button-down with slits in the back to give her wings room. “Marion, you said you were going to work on magic with us at the college.”

  She had promised that, hadn’t she? But that promise had been made before she’d ended up Queen of the Unseelie, severed from Seth’s steadying influence, and stranded with her cheating husband.

  None of those extenuating circumstances would matter to the angels. They lacked the sentimentality of the sidhe. A promise was a promise.

  “You understand that Marion can’t leave the unseelie courts,” Konig said, “and she wouldn’t be much use to you, given her mental condition.”

  “I understand that she can talk for herself, and I’m not talking to you. Fuck off to your little corner, kiddo,” Suzume said. “Marion, you owe us. Whatever you want, we’re not talking about it until you make good.”

  Marion didn’t even have to look at her husband to know he was going quietly apoplectic. She couldn’t help but love a person who told Konig to fuck off. “You don’t want to ‘fuck around,’ so let’s not. There’s an angel in the Summer Court. Who is it?”

  Suzume practically fell over with shock. “What?”

  Jibril’s reaction was much more limited. He stood rigid. Only his trembling wings betrayed his mood. “All of our angels are accounted for.”

  “Except?” Marion prompted.

  None of them needed to say Leliel’s name.

  “We said you’d want to hear about our news,” Konig said tauntingly. “Didn’t we?”

  Suzume gave an exaggerated eye-roll. “Can we please talk about this somewhere else, Marion? Like…the college at Dilmun?”

  “She can’t go,” Konig said.

  Marion forced her hands to relax from fists. She would follow Jibril’s example: calm in the face of overwhelming emotion. “It’s true that my time is limited. Assuming the unseelie throne is an enormous transition.”

  “How lucky you’ve got a husband to take care of shit around here,” Suzume said.

  Konig was standing now. His presence filled the clearing, much like when he released his form into a fog.

  The angels remained focused intently on Marion with eyes the same shades of empty-blue.

  “When did you find out about this issue?” Jibril asked.

  “Last night, after one of our dinners. We were speaking with Titania and Oberon from the Summer Court, and I detected Leliel’s presence.”

  Jibril frowned. “The dinner was here? In Myrkheimr?”

  “Did you sweep for bugs when they left? Magical ones?” Suzume asked. “Because it would have been easy for the seelie to leave something to spy on you guys. They might be listening in on us right now.”

  “The Raven Knights would never miss such a thing,” Konig said. “We have tight security.”

  “But can security be trusted?” Jibril asked. “The courts are all family. It would be no more a betrayal to report to Titania than to you.”

  Marion was glad that he’d said it so she hadn’t needed to. After all, Wintersong hadn’t had qualms about reporting on Marion to Konig.

  “I should fulfill my promise to them, and talk in private in Dilmun,” Marion said. She reached out to take Konig’s hand. She made herself hold it tightly, and when she spoke, it was with as much earnestness as she could muster. “Please.”

  Konig walked out of the clearing without another word.

  The meeting in Dilmun was arranged by the end of the day.

  13

  It was difficult to track the passage of time in Sheol. There was no sun or moon—nothing except for the circular void miles above Duat, and the Pit of Souls changed in such subtle, unpredictable ways that it didn’t help.

  The Pit of Souls did change, though. Charity started spending so much time at its edge that she began noticing subtle patterns unconnected to the flow of balefire. Pitch-black shifted to charcoal-black, and then to i
nk-black. The shades were so similar that only someone who spent hours of her life at its rim would be able to distinguish them.

  “It’s because of the souls,” Arawn said. He didn’t spend much time with Charity because a Lord of Sheol was too busy for side projects, but he liked to bring her dinner once a day. He slurped down another strip of raw meat before continuing. “You’re seeing things that aren’t tangible, corporeal, or even in this dimension. They’re souls.”

  Charity shredded one strip into two smaller ones. “You mean when the Pit changes…?”

  “People are dying.” Arawn flicked a strip of meat to a Hound, which had its chain held by one of his gang members. Charity glimpsed millions of teeth when it snapped its jaws shut on the scraps. “It’s good to see it working the way it’s supposed to again.”

  “What did it used to be like?”

  “Dead,” Arawn said.

  It looked dead to Charity at the moment. “The Pit is processing souls so that people can be reborn, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, and that’s because Death’s back. You should be happy you can’t see what I do—he’s got one hell of a backlog to get through.” Arawn pointed at Duat and traced an invisible line in the air from its surrounding rivers to the Pit. “There’s these channels of dead people spiraling into it, and they’re all desiccated and whiny. Lots of demons too.”

  That last part must have been due to the balefire that burned unchecked through Sheol. It had cleared out half of the hive. The Dead Forests teemed with insect-like demons turned out of their natural homes, and the Hounds had been hunting them nonstop for weeks.

  That much battling meant casualties, and a lot of them. It would only get worse as the balefire spread. Seth was going to have a lot of work to do.

  Charity’s appetite vanished at the idea of it. “What’s it like?” she asked. “Being in charge of mortal souls after people die?”

  “Boring,” Arawn said. “All the lives you process, you’ve got no choice but to witness them. Cradle to grave. You get their stories, you see what made ‘em kick the bucket, you shove them in a hole so they can get burned up and reused. Boring.”

  Boring for a sociopath like Arawn, but for Seth, it would be torment. He was too much an empath to handle so many lost souls without being crushed under the weight.

  That was why Charity needed to finish the altar, and fast.

  She was getting close. Arawn had given her access to part of his army—a centuria, he called them, which was apparently an old Roman term for a unit of soldiers—and they were skilled craftsmen. Charity commanded a dozen masons. The rest were piecing things together to her specifications.

  Now there was a door alongside the Pit of Souls. Her construction was bigger than Charity had initially envisioned, but she was confident that it was assembled properly. She’d tweaked its design even as her borrowed centuria worked on the construction. It had meant rearranging literal tons of quarried stone at times, and there had been no shortage of complaining from her workers.

  But they were close.

  The altar was a tall door with a handle of elaborate metal spirals. Operating that handle would also operate gears underneath the palantír. Charity had also arranged to have some symbols engraved on the threshold of the door, and that was the hardest part. She wasn’t sure she was getting those right. After all, she wasn’t a witch.

  Arawn seemed to like the work she was doing. He was sprawled on the ground beside her, leaning on one elbow, gazing at it as he finished off his raw meat. “Any new visions?”

  “Not for days.” Charity prayed over the palantír at every opportunity, hoping to see Seth again, but she only ever got a sense of the door. “How about you? What’s happening on your end of things?”

  “I’m almost ready to conquer the world,” Arawn said airily.

  That wasn’t a joke. A side effect of spending her waking hours hanging upside-down over Duat was that she had a great aerial view of troop movements. Arawn had been funneling all his demons through the one tunnel that allowed passage through the balefire dome. Charity estimated his numbers in the high hundreds.

  They were doing something. None of it involved stopping the spread of balefire or saving lives. The National Guard, they were not.

  “How will you conquer the world?” Charity asked. “You don’t have an easy way through the ley lines.”

  “Not through the ley lines,” he agreed.

  He must have had some other route.

  If he had an access point to Earth, that meant Charity could escape through that point too.

  He stood and dusted imaginary dirt off of his pants. When Arawn visited Charity, he tended to dress casually, but not today. He wore full leather under metal plates. His thick dreadlocks swung free.

  “It’s always a pleasure having dinner with you,” Arawn said, bending low to grin at her. His teeth were very sharp. “Same time tomorrow?”

  “I’m your prisoner. It’s your choice.”

  He cackled. “It is, isn’t it?”

  Arawn took the chain of the Hound from the demon. The scrawny white dog snapped at his ankles, but he shut it up with a swift kick, then sauntered away with half of the centuria at his back. That suited Charity just fine.

  She took her time finishing dinner. She sucked on meat until it grayed with bloodlessness and licked her fingertips clean. She’d spent the last decade pretending not to be the revenant she really was, so it surprised her how comfortable she was eating like this, the way that revenants were meant to. It helped that she never asked Arawn where the meat came from.

  By the time she was done eating, her captor had rejoined his army on the floor of Sheol far above her head. She could tell by the way the leather-clad tide parted to give him easy passage.

  For the moment, Arawn was distracted.

  “I’m almost done with the gate,” Charity said, backing away so that one of Arawn’s gang could clean up the bloody picnic. “I just need some gemstones now. Could you get me three diamonds about this big, and a couple chunks of black stone like this?” She pinched her forefinger and thumb to indicate tiny diamonds, then spread her hands to indicate big rocks.

  “Diamonds?” Gunner asked. She was one of the only demons Charity thought might be female, and only because her bare chest had twin rows of sagging breasts pierced with gold rings. Unless Gunner had a wicked case of gynecomastia, Charity was fair certain that she was a she. “You want diamonds?”

  “I need diamonds,” Charity corrected. She doubted that they had any in Sheol, but that was the point. It was the kind of irritating chore that would keep Charity’s babysitters occupied for hours.

  Gunner signaled to a few of her companions and they left. Only one of the gang remained to assist Charity—or, as she believed, keep an eye on her to make sure she didn’t run off.

  The doorway was done. It didn’t need diamonds or black stone. All Charity needed to do was pray again, just as she’d prayed over the bare palantír the first time.

  Her heart jackhammered in her chest as she approached it, rubbing her palms dry on her thighs by habit. She didn’t sweat much when she was outside the restrictive jacket of her glamour.

  “Did you hear that?” Charity asked her remaining guard, called Legs.

  Legs glanced around. His bulging eyes reminded her of one of those ugly dogs with the flat faces. “Hear what?”

  “I think someone’s coming,” she said.

  He shuffled away from Charity, looking for what she claimed to have heard.

  Charity’s hands rested upon the smooth surface of the sphere. She shut her eyes.

  She prayed.

  I built it, Seth. I made what you need. What do we do now?

  It felt like double doors had been carved into her forehead, and now they swung open to expose her vulnerable brain to the outside world.

  Something slammed into Charity.

  It was an independent entity—a form from the Pit of Souls jack-knifing into her gray matter. The jolt crackled over
her nerves and seared her fingertips.

  In her mind’s eye, she saw Seth facing away from her. He was looking into the Pit of Souls.

  Simultaneously, his nose was inches from hers, eyes wide, mouth opened in a scream.

  He screamed and screamed.

  Seth was in pain. He was suffering.

  Charity tried to wrench her hands away from the palantír but it had become colder than a flagpole in winter. Her skin adhered. She was trapped, helpless to do anything except complete the circuit.

  “Let me go!” she cried.

  On the inside of her sealed eyelids, she saw another woman by Charity’s altar—a tall brunette so skinny that she’d slip between floorboards if she stepped wrong. That woman slashed her palm open with a knife and smeared blood on the palantír.

  Then the door opened.

  Only then could Seth get through.

  That was why he was screaming. He was trapped, alone, and he could only communicate his pain with a single name.

  Marion!

  When Charity found Arawn again, he was sharing a joint with a group of visiting men. Their feet were kicked up on the table and even in the poor lighting of the smoky Nether-bar, Charity could see blood trickling from a fresh tattoo on one man’s ankle. Arawn had been inking his buddies.

  She only recognized one of those buddies. He was a vampire named Lucifer with eyes the color of pooled blood, and he’d been involved in the United Nations summit.

  The other man was an older Spaniard who smelled like he’d been drinking for weeks before the visit.

  When the latter saw Charity, he leaped back and shouted, “Mother of God! What is that?” Even though Charity was only familiar with Mexican Spanish, she had no trouble interpreting his disgust.

  Lucifer unlatched his intake bracelet, letting it clatter to the table. “That’s Arawn’s pet, I think. Doesn’t that look like the ugliest overgrown dog you’ve ever seen?”

  Excitement sparked in Arawn’s eyes. “Charity! How nice of you to visit! Sit down, sit down.” He kicked a fourth chair toward the table.

  “Can we talk?” she muttered, trying not to look directly at the other men.