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

by SM Reine

  The balefire only burned around Duat. On the opposite end of Sheol, amid the naked rock that Charity ran through, was an enormous blackness where the ground terminated.

  “Gods,” Marion gasped, clinging tightly to Charity’s shoulders. It felt like she was going to fall. “What is this place?”

  Charity gently lowered her to her feet. “The Pit of Souls.”

  “This is where Seth reigns as god of the dead?” It was as miserable as Marion would have imagined, from the vast black nothing that made up the Pit, to the barren landscape shadowed by cruelly bright flame.

  Marion circled the sprawling altar, wobbling on her feet. The healing potion numbed the unpleasant impact of being a half-angel in Sheol, but she still felt weaker than a newborn fawn. “Where did this altar come from?” The stonework was incredible. It had some of the rough-hewn complexity of infernal handiwork, but the elegance of something ethereal.

  “Arawn’s guys built it by my orders,” Charity said. “And that’s his palantír.”

  “How did you know how to build such a thing?”

  “I got visions when I prayed over it,” she said.

  There seemed to be a lot of that going around.

  How would a god in need of rescue communicate to mortals? Would he be capable of appearing to speak to them, or would he send them visions pleading for help?

  Benjamin to Shamayim.

  Charity to the Pit of Souls.

  And Marion.

  She hadn’t gotten any direct visions, but it was no coincidence that a demon had assigned it to her when other people were being actively compelled.

  Marion didn’t need to ask Charity what to do at that point.

  Pray to the palantír.

  It was only feet away, but it felt like it took a lifetime to approach. Marion stretched every longing fiber of her being toward the palantír on the altar in front of the doorway. Her fingertips yearned toward it.

  I’m coming.

  Arawn stepped in front of the palantír to block her path, arms folded across his chest.

  Marion skidded to a stop. She stumbled on her heels, nearly twisting an ankle. A graceless maneuver—and one that brought her to Arawn’s feet.

  “Look what we’ve got here. The Queen of the Unseelie is out of her home turf!” Arawn yanked Marion to her feet by the elbow. “You and I never finished our last talk.”

  She slammed the heel of her palm into his breastbone. “Let me go!” Lightning leaped from her fingers.

  Marion had been hoping for wind, but electricity was good enough. Arawn closed the circuit. Energy crackled over his skin, and he went semi-transparent, flashing bones through the tissue of his flesh.

  There was a living thing within his belly, and the shadow of it thrashed along with him. The shriek that came from his throat was more Hound than demon. He kept his grip on Marion’s arm—just barely.

  “Arawn!” Charity soared toward them in a single leap, and she shoved between Marion and the demon lord. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to decide how I want to maim this thorn in my side. Why? What are you up to?” Arawn asked brightly, as though discussing their weekend plans.

  “You were the one who said I could do whatever I wanted. You said I could bring Marion to Seth.”

  “And you also killed a bunch of my friends,” Arawn said. “Couldn’t you have just asked them to leave her alone?”

  “It didn’t occur to me to speak with them.” Charity looked sheepish. She waved behind her back at Marion, gesturing toward the palantír where Arawn couldn’t see.

  The doorway was so close.

  Marion edged around them, keeping on her toes so that her heels made no noise against the stone.

  “You said we’re not enemies,” Arawn said, “and then you ripped my guys apart in a way that makes it look a heckuva lot like we are enemies.” A pause, and his tone turned admiring. “You did a great job with that, by the way. It was lovely. I’ll be dreaming of that blood spray for months.”

  “You’re so gross.” Charity’s voice wasn’t without affection, either.

  Marion was so close to the palantír now that her entire body trembled with anticipation. “I’m here,” she whispered, reaching up to curve her hands around the seeing-stone.

  The instant her hands connected, there was light.

  Marion’s mind peeled open.

  And so did the door.

  She blinked. Sheol vanished, and she found herself standing in an old-growth forest. The trees were so tall that she couldn’t see the tops of them, but the canopy must have been woven together so densely that there was no hint of sunlight.

  Even so, the forest wasn’t dark in the way that the Dead Forest was. Sapphire light drenched the moss underneath Marion’s feet and the pale-gray bark of the trees.

  She knew this place. She’d seen it in her scant memories of the past—and deep within Benjamin’s mind, where that olive-skinned man was waiting.

  “I’ve been here before,” Marion said, and she was surprised at the loudness of her voice. It was so quiet in the forest that she’d almost thought she’d gone deaf.

  Marion turned where she stood, searching the surrounding trees for any signs of life. She must have been sent there for a reason. It wouldn’t have made any sense for that doorway to lead…nowhere. “Hello?” she called.

  When she turned again, there was a door behind her that she hadn’t seen before.

  It was a plain door like the kind Marion had in her home on Vancouver Island. The only difference was that there were multiple heavy locks. It had a chunky handle with an ornate swirl, and a chain, and a deadbolt. All of them engraved deeply with magical marks.

  Marion wasn’t sure what kind of marks they were, or what spells they held in their looping symbols. It was hard to focus on them.

  Someone on the other side of the door was crying out to her.

  Unlock it. Let me out.

  And then, Marion!

  A deep voice screamed her name.

  “I’m coming!” Marion was on the door in three strides. She unlocked the deadbolt at the top, and with the click came a piercing pain in her palm.

  She jerked back.

  “What…?”

  Let me out.

  She turned her hand forward and backward, looking for sign of the pinch she’d felt. There was no injury. Even the wounds she’d sustained while fighting the scarab-demons had healed.

  Marion unlocked the chain.

  Another jolt of pain.

  She ignored it the second time. The wailing on the other side of the door was getting louder, and it sounded like he was in pain.

  Something terrible was happening to Seth.

  The last lock was so big that it took both of her hands to operate. Metal ground against metal as she struggled to turn it.

  “What are you doing?” An angel loomed beside the door—a man with tumbles of brown hair framing his angular jaw, a pronounced nose, and the exact same blue eyes as Marion.

  It was the man from the statue. Her father, Metaraon. If Marion was seeing a dead man, then none of this was real. It was an illusion. Or, perhaps, someone else’s memory. There was only one mind where Marion had encountered her father before.

  “You’ll regret opening that,” Metaraon said.

  It was too late for her to stop. The lock had already clicked, and the handle was swinging.

  Her father was gone.

  Marion fell back from the door, and the door fell open, and…

  Seth wasn’t on the other side.

  She glimpsed a distorted world of trees tied into knots, bridging the day and the night. Worlds twisted into a black hole at its center.

  Someone stepped between Marion and the door.

  Marion mistook that statuesque figure for Metaraon only briefly. The angel stalking toward her, backlit by the universe beyond, had pronounced curves too feminine to belong to the former Voice of God.

  Within a step, Leliel’s face filled Marion’s vision.
Everything else vanished around her. The trees, the door, the faint blue light.

  There was nothing but Leliel.

  Marion had never gone through a door at all. She hadn’t departed Sheol. She’d activated a spell that had laid her mind bare, allowing Leliel to invade.

  As soon as she realized she was being manipulated, she ejected Leliel and returned to her senses.

  Marion was still in Sheol, kneeling just on the other side of the door’s threshold. She held an ethereal artifact in both hands, just as she had been holding the last lock in her vision of the garden. The artifact glowed. It sang with magic.

  Her blood was smeared all over it.

  She’d activated it without realizing what she was doing, lost within the illusion that Leliel had cast over Marion’s vulnerable mind.

  Leliel plucked the artifact from Marion’s hands as she slunk past. “Thank you.”

  The angel was there. She was really there. Opening the door must have summoned her to Sheol.

  Which meant that Charity’s vision urging her to build an altar hadn’t come from Seth. It had been ethereal manipulation—easy enough to use against gaeans, even revenants.

  Marion’s despair was more intense than the pain in her bleeding hands.

  She hadn’t found Seth.

  The other angel couldn’t linger in Sheol any longer than Marion could. Pure blood made her angel strengths stronger, but her weaknesses intensified too. Leliel was already colorless, paling in the infernal environment.

  Marion knew why she’d seen her father in the vision. Metaraon’s energy was all over the artifact. As Jibril had pointed out, Metaraon’s blood ran through almost all of the ethereal artifacts from before Genesis.

  It was a magical key forged by her father. And his blood, flowing through Marion’s veins, had activated it.

  She shot to her feet and thrust her arms toward Leliel. She filled her mind with thoughts of lightning.

  Nothing came out.

  Sheol was wearing her down, shredding her skin and the organs and leaving nothing but exposed vulnerable nerves. She couldn’t cast magic like this. Everything she’d gone through to reach Seth, everything she’d done to try to save him and herself…it was all horribly in vain.

  Leliel caught Marion’s wrist. “You’ve served your purpose,” she said, gripping Marion tightly enough that her bones groaned and she sank to her knees. Leliel’s mind assailed hers. Even a weakened angel was stronger than a half-human mage.

  Hideous emotion writhed within Marion.

  The sense of failure.

  Betrayal to self.

  Humiliation at being controlled.

  Leliel lifted the key like a bludgeon. Marion envisioned how it would crater her skull upon contact.

  But a hand caught Leliel’s wrist, clutching it tightly enough that Marion heard something crunch. “I don’t think so,” Arawn said coolly. Marion had forgotten that there was anyone else beside the Pit of Souls. Charity was being dragged away by some of Arawn’s gang.

  He severed Leliel’s grip upon Marion’s arm and tossed the angels apart.

  Leliel couldn’t pursue the fight. She hugged the key to her chest. “You’ll be dead the instant that potion wears off,” she said to Marion, as though Arawn weren’t there. “And if you don’t die, then do a favor to the universe—kill yourself.”

  The angel stepped backward into a portal and vanished.

  Marion couldn’t stand. The healing potion was already losing effect. However long she had been trapped in Leliel’s vision had been too long. “Charity,” she said, reeling. “Where is she going?”

  “She’ll be taken care of,” Arawn said. His disagreement with Charity had clearly concluded with the demon deciding he was, in fact, her captor.

  “Help me,” Marion said. “Get me to her.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about Char. She’ll be fine,” Arawn said. “But you? I don’t like you. You’re a certifiable pain in my ass.”

  Marion struggled to get up. She slumped back to her knees. “Then why save me from Leliel? What do you want?”

  “I wanted to reunite you with your god personally,” he said.

  And with a single, forceful kick, he launched Marion over the edge of the Pit of Souls.

  21

  The spells linking Konig to the Raven Knights severed. Something had gone wrong in Dilmun.

  He was having a meeting with Hooch and Nikki when it happened. It would have taken more strength than he possessed to conceal the intensity of the shock. The metaphysical blow staggered him.

  Hooch took a step toward him. “Your Majesty!”

  One of the Raven Knights, Dwynwen, reached Konig first. She kneeled beside him to offer support. He lifted a hand to discourage her. “I’m fine. It’s a side-effect of being king.” He’d have felt it as acutely if anyone attacked Myrkheimr directly, too.

  Nikki’s impassive eyes were eerily calculating. “Another attack on the queen?”

  “I’ll have to check in,” Konig said, masking his rising worry with a smile. “If you’ll give me a moment…”

  He strode out of the throne room.

  Heather was already rushing toward him. They ran into each other in the hallway outside.

  “There’s been an attack,” she said. Rather than wearing a uniform, she was in some kind of dress. An actual dress with frilly things around the neck that showed off her cleavage.

  “Did a date get interrupted?” Konig asked.

  “Attack. Focus.” She yanked him down an adjacent hall. It was unbecoming of a common archer to haul the king around, even among the informal sidhe, but Konig knew better than to call her out on it.

  “I’m very focused,” he said, staring down the neck of her dress. Gods, it had been too long since he’d been intimate with that part of a woman’s body.

  She snapped her fingers in his face. It was enough to startle him out of his breast-induced stupor. “We lost contact with the Raven Knights during Marion’s meeting,” she said.

  “I felt that.”

  “And you’re not worried?”

  “They’re probably dead. I can’t magically make them undead.” Although it was an intriguing idea worth exploring at another time. A project best saved for an idle weekend. “You, however, do not wear dresses, and I find myself interested in the reason.”

  “I’m a sidhe,” Heather said. “I date. I screw. I was doing one of those things in pursuit of the second when security matters arose. Satisfied? We still haven’t reconnected with the Raven Knights—or the queen, for that matter. I can’t detect her using the tracking spells.”

  Now that was worrying. Konig had employed the kingdom’s best sorcerers to keep tabs on his wife. Even dying shouldn’t have blocked her.

  He’d put up with too much bullshit from Marion to believe it was an accident.

  “It gets better,” Heather said.

  “This isn’t the time for sarcasm.”

  “I’m not being sarcastic.” She pointed at the window beyond him, which opened the hallway to the mountainside. A brilliant point of white was hurtling through the Autumn Court’s orange sky.

  Konig stretched his mind through Myrkheimr’s defenses. Wards embedded within the mortar stretched back toward him, offering answers for what he saw.

  Intruder.

  An angel.

  Pain.

  As he watched through Myrkheimr, the angel smashed into the archery range.

  Konig leaped across towers with no more than a thought.

  He appeared so quickly that feathers were still drifting around the body crumpled against the wall. Konig’s entourage followed almost as quickly; he could only take two steps toward the angel before Heather materialized.

  The angel tried to sit up. Silvery blood coated half his face. “King ErlKonig?”

  “I’ve arrived.” Konig brightened the archery range with a wave of his hand. He knew the face underneath all that blood. “What happened, Jibril?”

  The normally distinguished a
ngel hacked blood onto the ground. He wiped his mouth clean as he stood, bent wing dangling from his right shoulder. “Lucifer didn’t appear for his meeting. Demons swarmed the city—they must have been planning this for months. The Raven Knights were disabled before they arrived. Marion jumped over the side of Dilmun and—”

  “She what?” Konig interrupted.

  Of all the stupid things Marion could have done, that was, hands down, the stupidest of them.

  “To Dilmun!” Heather roared to the Raven Knights. “Except you, Dwynwen—stay with Konig.”

  Ley lines vibrated as sidhe after sidhe shot onto Earth. Everyone leaped into motion without needing a moment to consider the command. The Raven Knights had been trained to eat, sleep, and breathe protection of the royal family, and, like it or not, that now included Marion.

  The only person who didn’t budge was Hooch, who had silently witnessed the conversation.

  “What are you waiting for?” Konig asked. “Get Nikki and the army to Dilmun!”

  Hooch hovered alongside Jibril until the angel sat on a bench, close enough to catch him if he fell. “There’s no army, Your Highness. Everyone’s going home.”

  Gods, but Konig could have lit the entire Autumn Court on fire with his fury. The swords growing in the rose bushes extended several deadly sharp inches. “They’re going home, but not yet gone?”

  “That’s right, but—”

  “Get them together.”

  “It’s not that easy. Nobody’s been wanting to tell you, because it’s not a kind thing to say,” Hooch said, “but it’s obvious to all of us that the queen’s just using you. She’s stringing you along, Your Majesty.”

  It wouldn’t have bothered him so much if he hadn’t thought that same thing a thousand times.

  That bothered feeling turned into angry heat as Hooch continued to speak.

  “We’ve watched you grow from a little boy to who you are now, and it’s been a privilege,” Hooch said. “We’re not going to risk ourselves to rescue someone who doesn’t love you.”

  “She loves me,” Konig said.

  She used to, once upon a time. He hadn’t hallucinated all those times she’d confessed her love in the past. He hadn’t imagined how she’d clung to him in his bed, gasping out noises that had made his body burn with more than magic.