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

by SM Reine

  She felt Konig’s arrival before he entered the door. Icy spikes scrabbled up the sheer walls, constricting around the vine-strewn rafters of her bedroom. “Go,” Marion said, pushing the rest of the box of Three Musketeers into Ymir’s arms.

  He slipped into her closet and vanished. He was getting too big to fit in some of Niflheimr’s passages, but the one in her room was wide enough that he’d be able to use it for at least a few more days.

  Konig entered a heartbeat after Ymir’s icy moptop disappeared into shadow. He glanced around the room. “Alone?”

  “Ariane has been on Earth for”—she flipped the pages on her desk calendar—”over a week.” Gods, Marion hadn’t had a confidante in over a week.

  He opened her closet with a flick of his wrist. There was no sign of Ymir or the passage, and Konig almost looked disappointed. “Why did Ariane leave?”

  “A new boyfriend demands her attention.”

  “I’m not surprised. It’s not like she loves you.”

  “She’s my mother.” But the statement was true enough that it hurt. Ariane had made her priorities clear.

  “If even your mother doesn’t love you, then that’s a terrible sign, isn’t it?” Konig sauntered around her room, shifting aside vines and curtains to look in the shadowy spots behind them.

  When he passed by, the breeze smelled of wine.

  Marion’s heart sank. “Have you been drinking?”

  What had she done to infuriate him this time? He hadn’t seen her short kiss with Benjamin. Nobody had. That was a nauseating worm of self-hate that, luckily, could not be fed by external perceptions.

  “You know my ugly truths, princess. For all that I’ve been a little shit, my mother died with my toddler-era finger paintings hanging on her wall. My baby teeth are immortalized in a jar. She wanted me to talk her every night before I went to sleep. You’ve seen how my temper can get, and still, I’m more loved than you.”

  He turned so quickly that she couldn’t help but take a quick step back. Konig’s hand slammed into the trunk of a tree at her back. Leaves showered around them, catching in his hair.

  “What should I say at your funeral?” Konig asked. “Should I speak kindness? Or should I share all your ugly truths in the eulogy?”

  His breath definitely smelled of wine, but his eyes were sharp. He was sober.

  “Don’t plan my funeral yet. I’m not dying,” Marion said.

  “Accidents happen. The Winter Court’s been unstable since I took charge, and all it would take is one little slip.” He punched the tree again.

  Marion instinctively reached for magic, and she was rewarded by fists that sparked with lightning when she lifted them. Electricity shivered from her nails to her elbows. “Threaten me again, Konig. Try it.”

  “Do you want to be pitted against me? Here?” That last word didn’t come from a mouth, but from everywhere—the trees, the furniture, the floor underneath. “You don’t have your boyfriend here to back you up anymore. Or do you?”

  Marion’s cheeks burned. “How many times do I have to—”

  “You met with Benjamin Flynn,” Konig said.

  It was fear, rather than Konig’s magic, that made the bedroom swirl around her.

  Konig saw us. He must have.

  “You’ve been hiding things from me,” he said, “and I want to know what.”

  She balled lightning in her fists. “I don’t owe you any explanations.”

  “None at all?” Konig slapped an envelope into her chest.

  Marion had to kill the magic seething over her hands in order to take it. The letter was identical to the last one she’d gotten from Onoskelis. “Where did you get this?”

  “What is it?” he countered.

  “I told you I’m getting my memories back. This is—”

  “A labor from a Librarian,” Konig said. “Complete the labors and you get the rest of your memories. Somehow Benjamin’s involved. You know why and how, and you’re not telling me.”

  The only way that he could have learned that was from Onoskelis herself…or from Ariane, who had been in an enormous hurry to reach Adàn on Earth.

  Even Marion’s mother was reporting to Konig.

  “Open it,” Konig said.

  She broke the wax seal.

  The instructions for her second labor were even shorter than the first.

  Pray to the palantír.

  Konig plucked it out of her hand to read it. “Pray?”

  “To a palantír,” Marion said. “What’s a palantír?”

  “A seeing-stone. They’re infernal rip-offs of our looking glasses,” Konig said. “There are at least two in Sheol. Arawn had one.”

  Chills skittered over her shoulders like ice shattering against stone. “I see.” Marion’s path to Shamayim cut through Sheol, where the very air was deadly to her.

  “You’re not going to Sheol again. We can’t risk it,” Konig said.

  “Then you’d prefer I don’t get the rest of my memories back?”

  “I want that more than anything in the universe, princess. More than this throne. More than the thrones of all sidhe courts. I want the woman who used to love me back!” He punched the tree again. Even though the blow landed inches away from her head, she couldn’t help but flinch. “Why didn’t you tell me about everything with this Librarian?”

  “I can’t believe you’re surprised that we have trust issues in our relationship,” Marion said.

  “And I thought you were serious in wanting to make efforts to heal!”

  She swallowed hard. “I am.” There was no other option.

  “This is your last chance,” Konig said. “Tell me the truth now. Tell me everything.”

  “Or else you’ll do what?” Marion asked. “Will you strike me again? Will you beat me until I’m too battered to face the angels?”

  “You’re cold, Marion,” he said. “You’re so gods-damned cold. You belong in the Winter Court. What do I have to do to convince you I’m sorry?”

  “I need time. You need to stop pushing me.”

  “You make me push when you keep lying,” Konig said.

  Preemptive pain throbbed along her jaw. What was the point in trying to keep things from her husband? He had eyes and ears everywhere who reported Marion’s activities to him.

  He knew about Onoskelis now, and there were no secrets left.

  She needed to seize control of the narrative.

  “All right. Here it is: My mother approached me, along with a Librarian named Onoskelis.” Marion sketched out the basics for Konig: the labors, the search for Shamayim, the ambiguous note about Benjamin and Lucifer.

  “Lucifer will be at Dilmun tomorrow,” Konig said. “Won’t he?” It hadn’t taken the king long to connect the dots, and figure out when Marion would be capable of slipping away for a meeting unobserved.

  Marion didn’t see any point in lying about that. “Protection of our kingdom remains my priority. I won’t let a brief meeting in pursuit of restoring my memories detract from a deal with the angels.”

  “You won’t because you’re not going to go astray,” he said. “You don’t need a meeting with Lucifer to get a palantír. I’ll have it fetched for you. All right? You don’t do anything that puts us in danger.”

  “Even if it means I could restore myself?” she asked.

  Konig gave a tiny chuckle as he backed away from her. She still didn’t relax. There was a looseness in his movements that made Marion think too much of her husband when he was at his drunkest.

  “It’s funny to hear that coming from you,” he said, “because I happen to know you don’t want to be yourself again.”

  “I’m queen now. I need to be at my best.”

  “So that’s why you want your memories back.” Even with his slouchy posture and his slurring tone, his gaze was sharp enough to cut.

  Marion poured every molecule of earnestness into her regally straight-backed, chin-lifted glare. She was imperious. She was cruel. And she was serious. �
�I will be my best again, Konig. I don’t accept less than best.”

  It disgusted her that being an arrogant jackass convinced Konig. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders. His body was as hard as icicles. “I’m meeting with Nikki and Hooch about our naiad problem, so I can’t go to Dilmun with you. I’m going to triple your guard. They’ll watch your every move. Everything you do will get back to me. That won’t be a problem, will it?”

  “I welcome the support,” Marion said.

  Apparently giving all the right answers was the wrong thing to do. Konig’s arm tightened, and suspicion darkened his chiseled features.

  Ymir had appeared on the other side of the cracked closet door. He’d come back for more chocolate, but he was silent and wide-eyed, and Marion couldn’t ask him to leave without tipping Konig off.

  Konig noticed she was looking. “What are you…?”

  She grabbed his face and kissed him. It was even less pleasant as kissing Benjamin, but it was an effective distraction.

  Those lips had been upon Nori’s body.

  She would never be able to kiss him and think of anything else.

  But it distracted Konig thoroughly, so he stopped trying to look at the closet. “No matter what you do, I’ll love you, princess,” Konig said, pulling back just far enough to glare at her. “I’m the only person who’d love someone like you. Don’t screw it up for yourself.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” Marion said.

  Ymir vanished into his secret passage silently and unobserved.

  17

  Sinead McGrath opened a ley line to whisk Benjamin all the way around the world, but he still needed a helicopter to reach Dilmun. The angels had somehow redirected ley lines so that none overlapped the city, so it was a heck of a commute.

  Benjamin had risked poking one of Rylie’s connections for transportation. Nobody else had been willing to risk entering angel territory in a flying machine. One flare of ethereal magic would knock them out of the sky like a fly under a swatter. “But I’ve got wards,” the pilot said cheerfully. Isidora looked roughly ninety years old, though she was nimble climbing into the seat and buckling in. “Better than the best wards on the market!”

  “That’s really impressive.” Benjamin couldn’t tell they were there. Some mundanes could still see magic, but he wasn’t even one of those types. He was mundane as mundane could be.

  Isidora was happy to narrate everything that they saw on the way to Dilmun. “That used to be a human city. That one too.” She was pointing at lumpier piles of rock far below the bubble of the chopper’s windshield. “It’s amazing how fast nature reclaims the places humanity leaves behind.”

  Benjamin leaned forward far enough to see between his toes. The indicated cities sprawled throughout two sections of a canyon, above and below. He wouldn’t have noticed their existence if Isidora hadn’t pointed them out. They were buried under collapsed rock and dust. “Why’d they abandon them?”

  “Because of the angels,” Isidora said. “Because the gods wanted them quarantined, but not too quarantined.”

  “Are you a triadist?” They were a movement that believed in three gods with a heavy hand in designing the world that they lived in.

  Isidora winked. “I’m a realist.” She wheeled them around a few degrees, and Dilmun swung into view.

  “Oh my gods,” Benjamin said.

  The gleaming city was perched atop a teetering plateau a kilometer above the rest of the Earth. An inverted triangle of rock balanced on its point, while its base lifted glass towers toward the sun. Dilmun was almost transparent. It looked more like a heat mirage than a proper city.

  Isidora laughed. “Now you see why I risk flying out here every time I get an excuse!”

  The chopper responded by shuddering. An instant of freefall made Benjamin taste acid.

  Then they were moving up again, tilting drastically to reach the elevation of Dilmun. Isidora hummed to herself as she piloted a serpentine path toward the city. “I’m dodging ethereal energy, by the way. There are barf bags under the seat if it’s getting you mixed up in the guts!”

  Benjamin clenched his fists atop his knees, squeezing his eyes shut. “I’m fine.”

  He didn’t open his eyes again until the helicopter touched down.

  The door slid open.

  Isidora hadn’t landed them in the actual city. She’d somehow landed on a narrow platform carved into Dilmun’s pillar. “This is as close as I can get you! And I’m not getting out, so have a nice walk, all right? Hang onto the rope.” Isidora pointed at the rock face nearest Benjamin’s side of the chopper. Someone had hammered O-rings into the stone and looped a rope through them in lieu of building actual stairs.

  Benjamin tasted bile again when he stepped out of the helicopter and tracked the rope’s path up the cliff with his eyes. It went up near-vertically after a few flat feet. The ledge was also about six inches across.

  He’d climbed the waterfall at the sanctuary hundreds of times, so he was used to dangling from cliffs without even a single rope.

  There’d been a lake at the bottom of the cliff at home. And it hadn’t been this tall.

  “At least there’s a rope,” Benjamin said. He couldn’t hear himself over the wind.

  Isidora could hear him fine. “That’s the spirit!” She slammed the door shut. He clutched the rope in both hands when the rotors spun up, and she slipped off the side, dropping out of view.

  Benjamin waited until he saw her bee-lining for the horizon before turning to the not-stairs.

  “At least there’s a rope,” he said again, more firmly than before, and he began to scale the side of Dilmun’s pillar.

  Walking the path along the outside of Dilmun was like walking the thread on a screw. He dared to look down once while he was edging along one of its slimmest segments, and his stomach plummeted at the sight of the yellow earth below.

  His fear was forgotten when he realized that there was a city on the surface underneath Dilmun. Rather than being one of the dusty, ruined scars humanity had left elsewhere in the Ethereal Levant, it was a living city. The buildings were nestled under the slim point on which Dilmun balanced.

  A slim point that was a very long fall away.

  Benjamin gripped the rope tighter and kept shuffling ever higher.

  Some hazy corner of Benjamin’s memory recalled walking a similar slope, though in a different time, on a different world. As hot as it was in the Ethereal Levant, this other place had been even hotter.

  “It was called Malebolge.” The mysterious Nathaniel had appeared again. He stood lower on the slope, but he didn’t hold the rope. The wind made the collar of his shirt flap against his chin. “It was a cave built into a giant demon’s cadaver. It’s not around anymore. Malebolge vanished with the rest of Hell.”

  “Why do I remember climbing around in a giant cave in Hell that doesn’t exist anymore?” Benjamin asked, yanking himself up a few more steps.

  “Because that’s where I went right before I became everything,” Nathaniel said.

  The sound of the wind had faded. Benjamin could only hear a high-pitched whining, like a single note played endlessly on an out-of-tune cello. “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s okay. I will once I get to Shamayim.” Nathaniel had disappeared from below and reappeared on the path above Benjamin.

  “Shamayim is where the red-haired woman is waiting, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of. It’s how I’ll get to her.”

  Benjamin clung to the scraps of his cognizance that always seemed to slide away whenever Nathaniel appeared. He’d quickly become such a constant presence, that man with the weird blue eyes, and it bothered Benjamin how normal the weirdness felt. “Who is she?”

  Nathaniel scratched his chin thoughtfully. He was growing patchy stubble. “Mom. She’s Mom. Kinda.”

  The first woman who came to Benjamin’s mind wasn’t Rylie, a leader at ease among the werewolves, but another blonde woman. A woman on a
beach. A woman who looked old and sad and tired.

  And then he thought of a red-haired woman. The one who was waiting.

  “Stepmom, is more like,” Nathaniel said. “She’s married to Dad.”

  Benjamin didn’t hate his father, Abel, in the least bit. In fact, he loved his father very much, though the nature of their relationship prevented him from saying it often. But Nathaniel’s mention of a dad didn’t make Benjamin think of Abel. It made him think of someone as ephemeral as the Malebolge he vaguely recalled.

  “Fuck that guy,” Benjamin said reflexively.

  Nathaniel laughed. “I don’t need to say that twice.” He crouched on the edge of the walkway, peering down with not even a hint of fear in his face. “That’s a terrible place for a city.”

  “Yeah. What is it?”

  “It’s a portal to Hell,” Nathaniel said, “or whatever passes for Hell these days. It’s the only one I know about on Earth nowadays. Demons have been coming out and chipping away at Dilmun ever since Genesis, just because they can’t resist antagonizing the angels.”

  “That sounds like a serious security vulnerability,” Benjamin said. “Why don’t the angels do anything about it?”

  “They tried to. They wanted to create a nest so they could move away from here—their designated corner of the world. But that would piss off Mom and Dad royally. They want them here, strapped to this rock, with their liver eaten by a vulture every day.”

  “Mom and Dad.” The words echoed within Benjamin. They made him feel heavy.

  “I’ll remember them soon,” Nathaniel said. “And then it won’t be long before I meet them face-to-face again. They’ll account for what they did to me.”

  Benjamin had reached the top of the stairs. He used the rope to haul himself onto Dilmun’s surface. He turned to offer a hand to Nathaniel, but the other young man was gone.

  “With whom were you speaking?” Marion had beaten Benjamin to Dilmun, and she was waiting further up the road, surrounded by Raven Knights.

  The severe awkwardness was so overpowering that Benjamin forgot Nathaniel instantly.

  Marion looked no less beautiful than she had on their last couple of encounters, though she was dressed to make a different kind of impression. Gone were the elaborate gowns, replaced by a short leather skirt that showed every inch of her thighs, down to the tops of her above-the-knee leather boots.