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

by SM Reine

  Jibril had descended into the swarm of demons. A sword appeared in his hands, and it flared with blue angelfire as he attacked.

  “Haven’t seen a bum rush like that since the Breaking,” Suzume remarked. “How many demons, you think? A century of them?”

  Benjamin gaped at her uncomprehendingly. “Fight them!”

  “Me? Oh, no way, I’m not sleeping on the couch over something this stupid,” Suzume said. “Jibril!” She snapped her fingers loudly. “Cover the kid. I’m out.”

  Her wings shimmered behind her.

  She was going to leave.

  “Wait!” Benjamin cried. That one word was lost under the shrieks of the horde that spilled into the city. Their wails echoed off of the mirrors.

  Suzume lifted from the ground. She shot into the air faster than a human should have been capable of doing under their own impulse.

  Worse, Jibril was right behind her. He’d already lost the flaming sword somewhere. He was gushing blood from multiple wounds. A lone angel should have been able to take every single demon, but they’d surprised him.

  Now Jibril was abandoning the fight.

  “Where are you going?” Benjamin would have been embarrassed at how shrieky his tone went, except that there was nobody to hear. Even the Raven Knights were asleep thanks to Marion’s potion.

  Benjamin was alone with the demons.

  They slammed into him. He hit the floor of the college. The pain of being trampled was so overwhelming that it shut off his brain, and he had plenty of inner silence to muse over the experience.

  Shouldn’t he have had some kind of immunity in battle since he was a long-format journalist, or historian, or whatever the title should have been?

  Couldn’t Suzume have flung lightning bolts to save his life, even if she had to do it from a fetus-safe distance?

  Where were all those other angels who were supposed to live in Dilmun?

  Had Marion ditched Benjamin knowing what was going to happen?

  Was that a demon foot in his mouth?

  That last thought shocked the survival urge into Benjamin. He was flat on his back underneath a lot of bug feet. Their legs were as thick as his arms with wiry hairs. Gross, but that probably saved him. All the legs meant reduced weight distribution on any single foot. That was the only good news. Every other bit of bad news was wrapped up in “I am underneath oversized demon beetles.”

  Benjamin started screaming and flailing. His fists cracked into carapaces. His feet smashed holes into softer underbellies. Black fluid spattered him.

  “Get out of there!” A man leaped over a bench to reach Benjamin. He was a stranger with well-kept dreadlocks down his back and a pink leather bustier.

  The newcomer didn’t look like he belonged in Dilmun, but he was kicking the demon beetles away from Benjamin, and that made him look pretty awesome.

  As soon as the area was clear enough for Benjamin to move, he scrambled to his feet. Everything hurt. “Oh gods,” he groaned, gripping his ribs. “I feel like a tenderized steak.”

  “You are.” His savior pinched his cheek. “Now this is an adorable thing. Not an angel?” He thumbed back Benjamin’s eyelid, searching for the blue irises. At that distance, Benjamin realized this man’s eyes weren’t simply dark, but inky black. Every inch of them.

  He was a demon. He’d arrived with the hordes.

  Benjamin shouted and fell back, tripping on the bench. The demon man caught him. “Easy, cutie pie. You can’t go anywhere! We haven’t talked yet. I’m Arawn. You?”

  “Benjamin.” He was supposed to tell captors that he was a Wilder so that they could contact Rylie for ransom. But that would mean demons telling his mom that he was sneaking through ley lines without permission. “Benjamin Flynn.”

  Arawn propped him up on his feet and pretended to dust off his shoulders.

  “Excellent to meet you, Benjamin. You’re in Dilmun when the Voice of God has a scheduled meeting. That means you’re important. And you know what else that means?” The demon grinned broadly, pinching both of Benjamin’s cheeks at the same time, hard enough that it felt like the skin was going to tear. “That means you’re now officially my hostage. Congrats! This is going to be fun.”

  Marion hadn’t been certain that a cocktail of her mother’s potions would be effective in the way she hoped. If she’d acquired anything from Onoskelis’s memory restoration, it was that magic was a finicky thing. Witches had to cast spells with the north oriented to just the right degree to ensure success. Simply mashing four spells together would have been a catastrophic failure.

  She told herself that she hadn’t mashed her mother’s four potions together, but with all she understood of Ariane’s technique, it may as well have been as graceless.

  The mash-up contained one part philter of bone-hollow. That was among the few properly labeled potions Ariane had left behind. It didn’t actually hollow out the drinker’s bones, but it made them significantly lighter.

  It was why she’d chosen to put one part of a cushioning potion in there, too. That one hadn’t been labeled. Marion had been tossing the vial in frustration when she discovered it couldn’t break. It simply struck the walls and bounced off.

  The other two parts of the potion were stone-skin.

  Temporary stone-skin, Marion hoped.

  She soared toward the ground boots-first, arms folded across her chest to hold the bow in place. The wind whipped her mercilessly.

  For once, instead of being an archer, she was the arrow.

  Her target was the demon camp.

  It took a few seconds to fall through the night. Not enough time to devise a back-up plan if the potion didn’t work, but enough time to regret the jump.

  There was surely a better way to get to the demons’ doorway, Marion decided approximately six nanoseconds before hitting the ground.

  She lost time.

  It wasn’t a blackout. There was simply nothing.

  Marion hit the ground, and then she woke in a trench several meters from where she’d struck. She’d taken out multiple shacks in her landing. Nothing remained around her except pulverized brick—and a lot of surprised demons.

  Dozens of surprised demons, at first count.

  They were arrayed in front of an archway in the base of Dilmun’s pillar. It was a rough carving, with the smallest symbols around its perimeter the size of Marion’s head, and the largest quadruple that. The marks were the same as the jagged, bloody smears that she’d seen at a murder scene in Las Vegas.

  Infernal magic.

  That door would allow her to pass into Sheol without the help of a planeswalker, and there were only a couple hundred demons standing between Marion and its mouth.

  The wind blowing from Sheol reeked of sulfur. Marion grew queasy at the faintest whiff of it.

  Good thing she’d brought a third potion from her mother.

  She tried to sit up, but her legs wouldn’t move. They were gray. The stone-skin, she realized. It had kicked in on the way down in time to save her, and she hadn’t shattered, so the cushioning had worked perfectly.

  Unfortunately, the stone-skin hadn’t worn off during her brief bout of unconsciousness. She wasn’t mobile.

  The demons that approached her first looked like oversized scarabs, glistening darkly gold in the twilit desert. Their carapaces clicked with every movement. Marion catalogued their weak spots—the joints, the underbellies—as she pulled her bow off over her head.

  The string fell limply over her hand. She’d gotten stone-skin from the fall, but her long bow’s string hadn’t. She didn’t have time to replace it. “Gods help me,” Marion muttered as she yanked an arrow out of her quiver.

  When the first scarab struck, she did too. The arrow’s point thrust through its head and erupted from the shell above. A lucky hit.

  Marion’s luck ended there.

  She didn’t have the physical strength to shove the demon’s weight off. It pinned her in the crater, heavier and heavier as the other demons pi
led on. Marion didn’t have enough room to stab again.

  Magic. I need magic. The weight made it difficult to breathe.

  Lightning fizzled over her fingers. It was the spell she’d cast most frequently, and she was capable of summoning it at will. But electric shocks didn’t move a dead scarab.

  The broken arrow slipped. It sliced into her hand.

  “Merde!”

  There were voices somewhere beyond the shifting bodies. Other demons were watching, so even if Marion got out from under the scarabs, she’d have to face them.

  If she didn’t remember any other spells, she was screwed.

  My father’s blood anointed all the most powerful mage craft.

  Her hand tightened on the arrow stave. The wood was slick in her hand, even pinned against her collarbone.

  Marion focused her power into the arrow.

  Another spell popped to the forefront of Marion’s mind. It was lurking in the recesses of her thoughts, and had likely been there all along.

  Her blood hissed, and then evaporated.

  Blood became wind.

  Marion shoved.

  The pile of scarabs exploded in a thousand directions. Air rushed into her lungs as she sat up. Her knees bent—everything had gone back to normal color. The stone-skin had faded.

  Another gust blew from the massive Sheol doorway. Marion jammed her hand into the quiver, seeking the third and final potion in its depths.

  Her fingers were sliced by shards of glass. The potion bottle had broken.

  Marion had no protection against Sheol’s climate.

  She was barely on her feet when she realized that demons flanked her.

  Marion remembered the look of Arawn’s gang from Sheol. They made trolls look attractive. Only some of that was due to how lumpy the creatures were; the rest was because they wore leather made from human skin. More distinctively, members of Arawn’s gang were riddled in tattoos, from pointed head to hairy toes. The Lord of Sheol fancied himself an artist.

  All the demons closing in on Marion at that moment were tattooed. They didn’t look happy that she’d fallen on their encampment.

  Marion lifted both hands, fingers slicked with fresh blood. She’d stopped bleeding red. They were the same color as her magic—the same color as any other angel’s blood.

  Silver gushed forth and became wind again. Marion jerked her fists. The front row of Arawn’s gang jerked too. They came off of their feet, hauled into the air so that she could easily drop them onto the row behind.

  A laugh escaped her, coming from a place between shock and amazement. She was throwing demons with her mind.

  Marion flung a wall of wind into the brick wall nearest her crater. It shattered into dust. Debris clobbered the demons.

  Arms grabbed her from behind.

  “No!”

  A demon locked his grip around her chest and biceps, forcing her elbows to her waist. She couldn’t lift her hands. Marion was squeezed tightly. The air burst from her mouth in a squeak.

  “He wants her alive!” a demon shouted.

  That seemed to make her captor squeeze harder. Her vision blurred.

  Let me go!

  She scrabbled for magic. It sputtered from her fingertips.

  And then she was dropped.

  Marion hit the ground again. Even though she was only falling from a span of inches, she hit even harder than she had jumping from Dilmun.

  The demon that had been holding her splattered to the ground to her right.

  Without its head.

  She flipped onto her back, hands raised to defend herself from this new assault.

  It wasn’t focused on her, for once.

  A monster tore through the demons. It must have cleared seven feet tall, though its frail, spindly body made it look as though it should have collapsed under its own weight. If the monster was weak, then the demons must have been tissue; they were shredded by the monster’s claws effortlessly.

  Marion knew that particular monster. She’d only briefly seen the revenant in her true form before, but there was no forgetting all those pointy bits.

  It didn’t take long for Charity Ballard to clear the whole block around them. Then she came thudding toward Marion, toe-claws gouging the soil under her feet.

  “Marion!” Charity swept her up in a hug.

  “How in the world did you escape Arawn?” Marion asked. “Are you okay?” It was impossible to tell how the revenant was doing. She always looked like a corpse.

  “I didn’t escape—he let me go so that I could come find you,” Charity said.

  “I owe you thanks for saving me, and an apology as well,” Marion said. “I should have come looking for you once I learned that you were alive. I’ve known for…” Days? Months? Time was meaningless.

  A wounded look crossed Charity’s face. “It’s okay, I guess.” It was the least convincing acceptance of an apology Marion remembered hearing. “I haven’t been in danger.”

  But Marion hadn’t known that. She hadn’t really cared, if she were being honest with herself. Despite the time she’d been obsessing over ways to connect with Seth, she’d barely spared two thoughts for Charity. “I owe you much more than an apology,” Marion said. “You need to come to the Winter Court so I can make it up to you.”

  “Maybe we can worry about that later? We need to get you into Sheol. It’s about Seth. I found a way to reach him.”

  Marion’s heart stopped beating. “Pray over the palantír?”

  Charity’s eyes widened. “How did you know?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Fate was driving her inexorably toward a single location in space-time—fate, or one of the gods.

  It was better than she’d ever dreamed. Onoskelis wanted her to reach Seth. She needed to get to that palantír. “Where is it?”

  “At least two hours’ walk in the center of Sheol,” she said.

  Marion’s growing hope shattered into a million pieces. She would never make it that far now that the third potion had been destroyed. “I can’t survive in Sheol, Charity. The atmosphere is hostile to me, and I lost my only potion to survive in it.”

  “You mean one of these?” Charity asked.

  And she offered Marion a vial of sludgy red potion identical to those she’d been drinking while Arawn’s prisoner.

  20

  Running through a doorway to Sheol was less abrupt than being teleported by a god’s avatar, but it was nevertheless an unpleasant transition.

  The instant Marion’s foot crossed the threshold, everything changed. The smells. The weight of her body. The surface upon which she stood.

  Every single one of her senses screamed that Marion was no longer on Earth.

  They emerged in the Dead Forest—an endless field of skeletal black trees gripped in wet fog—at the juncture of two rivers. The island narrowed into a point of soil so slim that Marion had to move forward before Charity could join her. It was shockingly bright in that part of Sheol. Balefire burned beyond the fog, making the sky a shade of gray as pale as her eyes and silhouetting the trees in flat blue.

  The army had filled every square foot of the island between rivers with an extension of the encampment. The tents were empty at the moment, but the sheer size of the camp suggested an invading force of thousands.

  She made the mistake of gasping at the sight of so many tents. Marion clutched her throat, as if she could somehow block out the burning taste that meant she was inhaling acid.

  She had one potion. Just one. She needed to save it as long as possible.

  It seemed that five seconds within arrival was the best she could do.

  Marion fumbled with the cork. Her weak fingers made it impossible for her to pinch.

  “Here,” Charity said. The revenant carefully opened the potion with her claws, then tipped Marion’s head back with a gentle hand to pour crimson healing between her lips.

  Marion sucked the potion down hungrily. She felt its protective effects as soon as the awful taste coated her tongu
e. The strength was tenuous, but it was enough to straighten herself.

  Having her vision clear so that she could focus on Charity’s monstrous face wasn’t pleasant. She peeled away from the revenant, scrubbing the heels of her palms into her dry eyes. “Thank you for that.”

  “No problem.” The revenant shifted uncomfortably, scratching her elbow. “Hey, can we talk really quick? I know it’s not great timing, but…you have to know this. I ended up with Arawn because of Konig. I saw him kissing Nori. And he threw me to the wolves to protect the secret.”

  Marion felt those words as a punch to the gut, and they weren’t even a surprise. “I know.”

  “You do? Thank the gods. I did not want to be the one to deliver the bad news.” But Charity didn’t look entirely relieved. She looked a little suspicious.

  If Marion had known what Konig did, why hadn’t she tried to find Charity?

  “Let’s go before the potion wears off,” Marion said, perhaps too quickly.

  “I could help…” Charity opened her arms, offering to carry Marion like a baby. The most undignified of positions. “For Seth.”

  For Seth.

  Marion nodded, and Charity scooped her up.

  A revenant’s long legs proved to be excellent for speed. Sheol rushed past in a blur of formless gray, brown, and black, broken by the occasional bolt of searing white. The balefire that had only flared within the Bronze Gates had spread.

  “What happened here?” Marion asked.

  “I’m not sure. It started doing this after Seth died and Arawn came back,” Charity said. “It just keeps going.” She had to change routes to evade a part of the forest where balefire was consuming trees. “Arawn seems unworried. Like it’s not his problem.”

  Whose problem was it? What would happen when the balefire burned all of Sheol?

  There were distant screeches, and the clattering sound of giant insects scrambling along stone. They never got closer. None of them could catch up with Charity.

  She only slowed when they’d run straight up the wall at the edge of the city. Their heads hung over Sheol. From that angle, Marion could see how far the balefire had spread throughout the city. It burned in at least a half-dozen locations. The fires were smaller than she would have expected, given how bright they made the Nether Worlds.