by SM Reine
The woman drifted toward Benjamin with faint revulsion in her eyes. She carried a bloody, oversized key in one hand. It had already been used to unlock the door to Shamayim. That was why the four-part tree was glowing. “You’re unraveling. Look at you, god-child. You’re a wreck.”
Her cold blue eyes traveled down his form, and Benjamin looked down at himself too. He was shocked to see that he glowed with the ghost of Nathaniel, who seemed overlaid upon his body. They stood in the exact same place at different times.
“I know why you’re here.” Leliel’s peach-colored dress dragged behind her on the mossy rocks as she circled him at a safe distance. “I know you’re obliged to ensure events happen according to plan.” She stopped to stare at him hard. “Gods, I didn’t believe it would really be you.”
He meant to ask, Who are you? But the words came out, “Who am I?” When he lifted his hands, Nathaniel’s hands lifted too, stretching toward the woman in a gesture of pleading.
“Soon you will be Benjamin Flynn, a teenage precognitive in the employ of the Union,” she said.
“What’s the Union?”
Pity mingled with her disgust. “They didn’t even prepare you. I almost pity you for this.” Leliel reached for him, radiating ethereal power. It was almost strong enough to cancel out the energy of the Middle Worlds—almost.
Another angel landed between them, his feet slamming to the forest floor hard enough to kick up both blossoms and golden leaves. “Leliel!” It was Jibril, the angel who’d abandoned Benjamin in Dilmun. His wings were stretched to full impact above his head. He blocked Leliel entirely.
“Ah, Jibril,” Leliel said. “You should have sent Suzume. I’d feel less remorse killing that abomination.”
He quivered with anger. “You lower yourself to meet my expectations, as always. She is as much angel as we are!”
“She’s not a daughter of Eve, and she will never be one of us. Come, Jibril—it’s not too late for you to help me.”
“I’ll give you nothing but punishment. Your dogmatic march ends here, woman. Whatever weapon you plan to find in Shamayim… You can’t have it. I won’t let you.”
Two angels meant so much ethereal power vibrating over Benjamin’s flesh that he thought he’d fly to pieces.
The world was swirling again. Benjamin was tumbling down a drain.
Get into Shamayim, quick, Nathaniel said. This is our chance.
Through the swirling color, Benjamin could still make out the glow underneath the roots of the four-part tree. It wasn’t an unusually tall growth, and the holes underneath weren’t very large, but a man would be able to slip through on his belly.
Shamayim was waiting.
Elise needs us.
“Okay,” Benjamin said, “stop nagging me.”
Startled by his voice, Jibril turned to look at him. That was a mistake—Leliel took the opportunity to dive at him with a knife.
Benjamin didn’t see what happened. He leaped between the roots of the tree, chased by Jibril’s strangled cry of pain.
He tumbled into blazing light. Both he and Nathaniel burned.
26
There was no time to be idle while waiting for Jibril’s return from the Veil. Marion was escorted to the king’s bedroom for a private meeting, where they were meant to discuss their plans for the army that wanted nothing to do with them. It was a meeting that needed to happen in private. If the unseelie realized how few options Konig and Marion had, there would be mass panic.
A hand brushed hers on the walk to the bedroom, but didn’t look to the side. She could tell who it was by the electric jolt of his skin against hers. Seth was signaling his nearness to comfort her. He was still there. He wasn’t a dream.
He’d kissed her at the doorway to Dilmun.
Then she had confessed that she was in love with him—that she’d always been in love with him, if she were to be honest with herself—and his reaction had been… Gods, she didn’t even understand that reaction.
It wasn’t like she could ask what he meant.
Marion brushed her fingers against Seth’s one more time and entered the bedroom. Like the rest of Niflheimr, it had changed in recent weeks. Lacy-delicate trees had sprouted in a path through the antechamber leading to the bed. Their branches bore juicy red berries amid white leaves.
The shape of the trees shifted in a blink. A thousand knives were aimed at Marion as soon as she entered.
Only when Marion passed through the first row of trees did she realize that she was alone with Konig. He stood by the master bed on his own.
No Raven Knights, no other gentry, no Seth.
“Where are the others?” Marion asked with all the calmness she could muster. Her eyes flicked up to the chandelier that used to be there. Aside from a few shattered nubs of ice, it was gone.
“Heather, Wintersong, and Aoife will join us soon to assist with planning. There are no others. We tried to summon Hooch, but he still won’t return to the Autumn Court. Nikki won’t even report back.”
“But they came to Dilmun for us,” she said.
“They came to Dilmun because I told them that you were in love with me as much as I’m in love with you. They don’t believe it now because they saw that kiss.” Konig stepped right into her face, and his exhalations were so cold that they made no fog. “You have ripped our kingdom in half with your disloyalty—except for…”
The diadem. She hadn’t been able to control herself when she’d seen Seth in the throne room, and now the memory of his pinky finger brushing hers in the hallway was enough to make the diadem flicker again.
If anything, that seemed to make Konig angrier. It must have been so confusing to see Marion recoil when her diadem was flickering with light. He so badly wanted that light to be for him.
“You can make that damn thing glow at an unimportant private meeting with Jibril, but not at the fucking coronation?” Konig asked. The snow was growing thicker in the meeting room, so dense that Marion couldn’t see anything more distant than her king.
Her mouth had gone drier than cremains. “I have no words to convince you of my dedication to the kingdom. If you can’t believe me, then believe the diadem.”
She wasn’t certain if his expression was annoyance or pleasure. “Although Hooch wouldn’t come back to the Middle Worlds yet, he promised to bring Nikki to the palace tonight. The army will also be back shortly before dawn, assuming that everything goes right. As long as you’re being honest with me right now—as long as you’re truly dedicated to me and our kingdom—we’ll have no trouble.”
“Trouble with what?” Marion asked.
“I’ve scheduled our affirmation ceremony for tonight. Hooch and Nikki will witness it, and the army will march as soon as you make that diadem glow.” His eyes sparked with violet fire. “You’ll make it glow for me.”
The door burst open, and Heather rushed in. “We found Jibril!”
She gestured, and servants hurried in with a rolling bed between them. They were flanked by Raven Knights on high alert, though they didn’t have their weapons drawn for once—they were wielding healing spells that did nothing for the dying angel on their bed. Not even the Autumn Court’s black silk sheets could hide the amount of blood he’d lost.
Only Seth hung back from the rest, betraying his presence with his hesitation. He stared at Jibril as though seeing through him. Yasir’s eyes had turned black.
The angel was sprawled on his extended wings. They were limp over either side of the bed, and shedding half of their feathers. Marion had to wade into the down to approach. “No doctor? And keeping him to the Middle Worlds—you’re asking for him to die!” Angels possessed rapid healing, but it only worked when they were near home. Before Genesis, that would have meant resting within an ethereal dimension. Now, that meant going to the Ethereal Levant.
“We were instructed to bring him here,” said Aoife, glaring at Marion. “By Jibril, for the record. He told us that he didn’t need to go back to Earth.”
Marion clutched Jibril’s hand as he struggled to breathe through shredded lungs. He was sodden with blood. It was the greatest disrespect that she could imagine, drenching an angel in his own filth like this. “Can you speak?”
Jibril shook his head. Air rattled in his chest.
“Here,” she said, spreading her fingers wide a few inches above his chest. She imagined opening her crown so that magic could gush forth.
The blood-fouled sheets dissolved and his clothes tidied. It was a spell she’d devised in case of coffee spilled on white jeans, but it worked well for this too. There was no less pain in Jibril’s eyes when she finished cleaning him, but there was a degree of peace.
“Someone put him out of his misery.” Konig had been conferring with Heather quietly until that statement. He sounded annoyed—as if Jibril had inconvenienced them by dying when Konig was trying to plan a war.
The Raven Knights stirred when one of their own stepped forward. Marion had already come to associate Seth with Yasir’s severe, gloomy features, and her heart skipped several beats. Konig noticed one of the Raven Knights breaking apart from the others, and worse, he knew that Seth didn’t fit in. “Wait,” Konig said.
The air darkened around Seth as he approached. He flickered. “Don’t,” Marion said softly.
Seth stood at her back, hands settling onto her shoulders. “He’s dying. It’s going to take a long time, and it’s going to hurt.” His hands glided down to Marion’s elbows. “Remember Elena Eiderman?”
The old woman had been Seth’s last patient as Dr. Lucas Flynn. She’d been dying from complications with lycanthropy, and that, too, had been a slow death.
Evoking Elena Eiderman’s memory carried Marion out of her body. Her mind receded from the chilly throne room, pushing Konig, Heather, Aoife, and everybody else into the distance. Only Jibril remained.
Touching Seth had given Marion the magic she needed to help Elena Eiderman die. She remembered the magic again, with his hands on her shoulders and her fingers laced with his, clinging to each other as though they’d be lost in the tide of time without an anchor. “Come with us, Jibril,” she said.
She wove together runes for grace and calm. She wove runes that helped Jibril’s chest muscles relax and permitted his lungs to fill with blood. Marion wove other runes so that none of that would hurt. She filled him with memories of warmth in his mother’s arms.
A shadow slipped over Jibril.
Marion blinked away tears as she looked up, her mind opened to a place beyond reality. She looked into eternity.
Seth was there in his truest form. It was the core of the man he should have been—a stolen spirit changed into a god when he was just twenty-one years old. The original Seth was less attractive than his Lucas Flynn avatar, and less frightening than the form Marion’s gris-gris created.
He was real. He was just some guy.
All of the compassion, patience, and love that Marion had seen in God-Seth were present in Guy-Seth. None of that had come from being turned into a deity.
When he reached a hand out for Jibril’s soul, it was the normal guy who said, “Come on, man. Let’s get out of here.”
Jibril reached back for him.
It was a combination of magic and omnipotent will that lifted the angel from his broken body. Marion opened the door for him. Seth did all the walking.
They faded together into the Dead Forest, beyond which rested the Pit of Souls. The Pit no longer looked like rivers of bone. It was a white-sand beach on the edge of a vast ocean, and Jibril sipped a fruity drink as he looked out at the surf. The angel wore loose white linen without shoes. His toes were being licked by the water.
Seth walked up to stand beside him, fashionable with a black tank and board shorts. “This is better, right?”
“Much,” Jibril agreed. He could speak now that he’d left his body. “Thank you.” Only when Jibril smiled directly at Marion did she realize she was on the beach too. Her long sundress trailed into the sky, blown by adoring fingers of wind. She was tethered to life, unable to enter the water with the dead and their god.
“Did you see Benjamin at the Veil?” Marion asked.
“Yes. Leliel was confronting him, so he has been found.”
In that beautiful place, she couldn’t feel fear. “Is he safe?”
“No,” Jibril said. “I flew over the Wilds on the way to him. The Summer Court is on the way too. Benjamin isn’t safe, nor are the rest of you.” He hesitated, as though weighing his possible final words. “Be wary of Nathaniel Faulkner and Benjamin Flynn. You can’t trust him.”
Marion felt lighter than the sand tossed by the waves, lighter than rays of sunlight. She even managed to laugh. “Oh, stop. Stop! None of this is your problem anymore.”
Her laughter infected him. A slow smile crawled over Jibril’s face, which Marion now saw was not emotionless alabaster, but the relaxed face of a man suddenly unburdened. “It’s not my problem anymore.”
He tossed back the rest of his margarita. The glass vanished once it was empty.
“Come on,” Seth said, taking Jibril’s hand.
They walked together into the ocean, where Marion could not follow.
The waves climbed higher and higher with every step. It became so much deeper so quickly. It lapped at their ankles, and then devoured their hips, and then danced underneath Jibril’s chin.
Then he was no longer visible.
It had not been quick, but nor had it been painful.
Marion came back to herself in Niflheimr. Compared to the feather of a soul she’d been in the Pit, she felt as though she weighed a thousand pounds, sodden and filthy and burdened by her very existence.
She was still holding on to Jibril’s hand, but his fingers returned no tension. There was no fresh blood, as his heart had stopped beating.
Konig was upon Marion in moments. “I’m going to kill you.” His hands were so tight on her arms. Jibril’s wings were still shedding the last of their feathers, and Konig was shaking her. “You lied to me, and I almost believed you! But there’s no lying now. The truth is imprinted on your skin.”
His hands bracketed her wrists. He jerked her hands up to her face, forcing her to look.
Patterns of black lace grew across her knuckles. It wasn’t made of cloth or thread. It ran deeper than a tattoo, and it blossomed as though growing from within her instead of being marked by a needle.
That’s what she was, though: marked. There was power in the intricate symbols that formed across the ridges of bone.
It was the mark of a god upon a mortal.
Heat swarmed Marion as invisible hands engulfed her with far more gentleness than Konig’s.
I told you not to touch her. Seth’s voice boomed through Marion’s bones, and she knew Konig felt the same because he jerked back.
Marion slipped into shadow. Niflheimr was vanishing. She spread her arms wide and fell backward onto a beach where there was no time, no life, and no light. A place nothing like Heaven, but exactly like paradise, where nothing could hurt her ever again.
It was raining on Earth. Marion guessed that Seth had taken her to somewhere in the Pacific Northwest because of the velvety grayness of it all, layered over dense green forest and rocky beaches. It was a great view by which she could vomit out her intestines. Seth must have accidentally pulled Marion through Sheol when teleporting again.
He was waiting with a damp hand towel when she finally lifted her head from the trashcan.
Marion kept her head ducked as she cleaned up, unable to meet his eyes. Gods, but he stared at her as if waiting to see if she’d catch fire. She felt like she very well might. “How did you get this towel for me?” She dabbed at her mouth. “I’m impressed you got as far as a bathroom.”
“I’m focusing hard.” Had Seth’s voice always be
en that deep?
His voice wasn’t the only one within the house. Doors were opening and closing downstairs as footsteps moved from one room to another.
Marion didn’t care if he’d taken her to the White House. Anywhere but Niflheimr. Not all of her trembling was an after-effect from the sickness.
“If I stop focusing,” Seth went on, “I’m going to do something to Konig that I’ll spend eternity regretting.” He didn’t give Marion a chance to contemplate the options. “We’re having a meeting with some people at this house.”
One of those people had a feminine, gravelly voice. “Is this meeting with Charity?”
Seth nodded. “We’ve also gathered Lucifer, Adàn Pedregon…and Arawn.”
Her spine stiffened. “You broke him out of my dungeon?”
“I have a plan,” he said. “I need you to trust me.”
Marion trusted him more than anyone else in the universe. She didn’t trust any of those men. Even Adàn was someone who could most generously be described as having sympathetic goals.
Still, this was Seth. He was omnipotent now. If he were gathering people together, then his choices would have good reasoning behind them.
“I trust you,” Marion said softly.
It came out in a tone painfully similar to the way she’d said she loved him.
He stepped back so that she could stand on her own. They were in a loft. There was a big bed behind them and an authentic bearskin rug, which looked filthy, if suitable for the décor. Dead animals aside, the whole house was airy, minimally decorated, and unfamiliar.
“Is this house one of yours?” Marion asked, even though it didn’t look like the humble style of apartment that Seth preferred.
“It’s yours,” he said. “No. Wait. It’s going to be yours later. This is a short-term vacation rental right now. It’s considered unsellable because of unethical witchcraft performed on the premises, but you won’t care.”
Marion perked up. “Mine? This is mine?”
It didn’t look like her home on Vancouver Island. There were similarities, she supposed. Marion seemed to like properties on hills high above bodies of water. There was much more exposed wood involved at this house, though. Sort of like a chic hunting cabin.