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

by SM Reine

  Marion and Konig affirmed that they wanted their relationship to continue.

  The army marched at the witching hour.

  28

  Nobody was answering the phone number Seth had given Charity. The phone kept ringing and ringing for minutes on end. Thirty minutes after Charity first tried calling—and barely an hour before the army was due to march—she came to terms with the fact that something must have gone wrong with Seth.

  One of Arawn’s planeswalking demons took Charity and Lucifer back to the house by the ocean. A phone was ringing when they arrived, and she followed it through an empty living room filled with the sound of thundering rain.

  The home office was as unoccupied as well.

  “Seth?” Charity called, edging toward the phone on the desk. “Marion? Is anyone here?” She sniffed the air for any hint of blood and found nothing.

  The phone stopped ringing before she could answer it.

  “Any luck?” Lucifer asked. He hadn’t joined her in the search. He was sitting by the fireplace looking bored.

  “They have to be here somewhere,” Charity said.

  She left to search the rest of the house from top to bottom. She even looked into the bathrooms and the bedrooms, but never found a single living soul. Luckily, there were also no dead bodies aside from Lucifer. Until Charity found signs of foul play, Marion had entered the realm of Schrodinger’s Cat.

  In the kitchen, Charity found two glasses with half-melted ice in the bottom, and a bottle of whiskey.

  There was also a bracelet on the floor.

  Magic stung her claws when she tenderly lifted it. “Ouch,” Charity whispered, wiggling her fingers to return feeling to them.

  Marion had been wearing that bracelet earlier. Now she was not.

  She showed it to Lucifer. “Any idea what this is?”

  “A gris-gris,” he said.

  “Yeah, but what’s it do?”

  “I’m a fucking vampire,” Lucifer said. “Why am I supposed to know?”

  Charity shrugged her bony shoulders. “I just thought that, well…you get around more than the rest of us. I thought you might have seen something like it before.”

  “The rest of us.” He snorted. “There’s no us. Vampires aren’t a community.”

  “You work alone?”

  “I didn’t say that. We hang out. But we’re not like the demons or the shifters or the sidhe who can’t go five minutes without hugging it out, and we never will be. We don’t need that.” Lucifer studied her with interest, resting his chin on his knuckles. “You look like you need that, but you won’t get it from us.”

  Charity was surprised when she smiled. “I know.”

  Barcelona was sounding better and better.

  The phone began ringing in the office again.

  Charity carried the bracelet back to answer it. The caller was identified as “UNKNOWN,” but she instantly recognized Adàn Pedregon’s raspy breathing when she answered. “My people are positioned to cross over to the Veil,” he said.

  She swallowed down her feeling of dread. “Arawn is prepared as well. He’s only waiting for the signal that the wards have dropped.”

  “Good.” That seemed to be the only information Adàn cared to hear. He hung up.

  Charity stared at the receiver as thunder rolled outside. They were ready to march on the entrance to Shamayim, and Lucifer had gotten the information that they needed from the darknet.

  So where was Seth?

  Magic jolted through the bracelet again. Charity grimaced. “Please don’t kill me,” she muttered to nobody in particular as she slid it over her bony hand.

  The oxygen vanished from the room.

  There was no light, no wooden flooring, no ceiling beams.

  Charity could only perceive Seth.

  He was near enough that he collapsed into a human form quickly. It must not have been Marion who solidified him, but the magic of the bracelet.

  Seth looked confused. “Charity?”

  “Well, look at that.” She twisted her arm, letting the bracelet dangle from her knobby wrist. “Now that I’ve got Marion’s magical thingy, you can just slap me silly and call me the Voice of God.”

  Confusion flashed to panic. “Where is she?”

  “I’m kidding—I’ll give it back. I’m sure she’s around. Marion wouldn’t wander far from you.”

  “She took the bracelet off deliberately.”

  “I know why she might have done that,” Lucifer said, floating into the room. “I found what you wanted to know about the weapon in Shamayim. I found something else interesting on the darknet too. Did you know who ordered the original bounty on Marion’s life, back in the fall?”

  “Leliel,” Charity said.

  “Try again,” Lucifer said. “You’ll never guess. Give up?”

  Seth looked like he was about to lose control completely. “Who was it?”

  “Marion,” the vampire said. “Marion put a bounty out against herself before she lost her memory.”

  Charity’s mouth dropped open. “She what?”

  Seth’s presence flashed. He disappeared from the room for barely the span of a heartbeat. When he returned, the panic had grown so enormous that Charity couldn’t even breathe. “We’re out of time. The wards in the Autumn Court have failed.”

  The Summer Court was invading.

  Nikki and Hooch departed with the army while Marion was still cleaning herself after the affirmation. “They’re at the Veil,” Konig announced as he swept into the bathroom. His copper skin shone brighter than a polished statue. Violet fog trailed from his tear ducts as though there was so much power his body could no longer contain it all.

  Marion extended one of her legs. Aoife ran a soapy sponge along her calf. “They moved quickly,” she said.

  “There was little resistance from the Wilds on our side of things.” Konig spread his hands wide. He cast his view of the kingdom on the wall as Saoirse wiped his sweat from Marion’s chest and thighs.

  Nikki had been funneling the army’s power to neutralize what little spirit remained of the Wilds. A region that was ordinarily too dangerous to enter had been neutered, leaving the redwoods tall but immobile, and the flowers dimmed of magic.

  The bodies that drained gemlike sidhe blood into the soil were not all gentry. The denizens of the Wild were lost in the battle too.

  Collateral damage, Konig would say.

  Marion rose from the bath. Water streamed from her hair. With a snap of her fingers, she was tidied, in much the way that Jibril had been tidied before his death. The handmaidens immediately moved in to dress her.

  “The Wilds look strange,” Marion said. It was the nicest way she could think to say that they looked dead. An extreme environment was a healthy one in the Middle Worlds. Just as her lagoon on Vancouver Island was at its best when overgrown with algae, the Wilds were meant to be a tangle of magic.

  “It’s one thing when I have as much power as kings of the past, who could shape their kingdoms to their whims,” Konig said. “It’s another thing when I can decimate what past kings made and rebuild from scratch. With Nikki—and with you—I can do anything.”

  “That’s what this is?” Marion strolled among Konig’s illusion of the Wilds, which made it appear as though the trees were growing from the bathroom floor. “Your world built from scratch?”

  It looked a lot like a wasteland.

  She walked to the point that his illusion lost integrity and extended a bare hand to touch where the Veil should have been. There were bodies all around her feet.

  “We need to go to the Veil,” Marion said.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Konig said. “The conflict’s even. Look at them.” He waved his hands, and the image shifted around her. Hooch was confronting seelie sidhe dressed in Summer Court colors. Even though they’d known that Titania’s people were in Leliel’s pocket, it was still discomfiting to see sidhe against sidhe so close to home.

  Marion couldn’t tell who had
the advantage from the mess of Konig’s vision. Magic splashed with colors both warm and cool, blossoming like silent fireworks that painted the handmaidens’ horrified faces.

  She clenched her fists hard enough that her arms trembled. “Show me more,” Marion said.

  Konig’s hands shifted again, and so did the vision.

  They swept through the Wilds. It was as though they were riding one of the many crows in the Autumn Court, circling the battlefield from above. From such an altitude, it was easy to see that the Summer Court was penetrating the Veil—and that they had thousands more soldiers to come.

  The wards had been brought down in a narrow slice by the river. It only allowed the Summer Court to enter barely dozens at a time, but they still vastly outnumbered the Autumn Court’s civilian army, and Nikki could only do so much against her own kind.

  “I don’t see Leliel anywhere,” Marion said. That was most disturbing of all. She’d have preferred to know where Leliel was than the entire seelie army.

  “She probably fled in fear,” Konig said.

  Marion doubted it. Leliel did nothing from fear. Arrogance? Pride? Absolutely, on both counts. But if she wasn’t among the army she’d thrown at the Veil, it was for good reason. “She’s gone into Shamayim to kill Benjamin.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She swallowed hard. “I got the last labor from Onoskelis.” Marion faltered, letting her hesitation show in her eyes so that Konig could drink deep of it. “It’s why I came back. I was with Seth, but…I came back.”

  Konig strolled toward Marion. When he grabbed her chin, it was with a motion faster than lightning, lifting her face so that she had to look at him. “For Benjamin.”

  “I’ve made my choice and chosen you. Do you care why?”

  He dropped her chin. “In that case, I have a present for you.” He waved to the Raven Knights, and Wintersong brought feminine armor into the bathroom. It was hideously non-functional from a physical standpoint. There were plates to cover the breasts, and a low-slung belt that would expose her hips, belly, and even part of her pubis. It was the overly sexualized dream armor of a teenage boy.

  But even though the metal was sparse, the unseelie magic filled in its holes. It would make sure Marion couldn’t get shot with another urisk arrow. It would also make her externally indistinguishable from her people. It wasn’t enough that she’d given up her body to Konig; she had to surrender her identity to him too.

  Konig put it on her body himself. His hands curved around her breasts, stroking her nipples, mounding them into the molded cups. He arranged a thin chain around her narrow waist so that a jewel dangled over her navel, and he slid his fingers up her inner thigh as he placed the quiver on her hip.

  Marion watched his face as he touched her, but she didn’t see him. She didn’t let herself think or feel about her surroundings.

  The diadem was glowing.

  When she was dressed, she took her bow from Tove and held it loosely in one hand. “Shall we save the Alpha’s son?” Konig asked, grazing her lips with a kiss.

  “Let’s,” she said.

  They slipped through ley lines to the battlefront.

  29

  Marion choked on the taste of death that hung heavily over the Wilds. Perforated intestine allowed a unique stink to escape the bloated bodies. Blood soaked into the soil.

  She knew without counting that one hundred fifty-eight sidhe were already dead within her range. Only a third were gentry. The rest were collateral damage. They were bestial, closer to animal than human—though many of them had been human before Genesis—and would have been living out an ordinary day in the wilderness before their unceremonious and untimely deaths.

  “Spread out,” Konig said to the Raven Knights.

  They did, leaving the royal family guarded only by the handmaidens and Heather. They were deadly enough, fanning around Marion as she lifted her bow.

  The Summer Court rushed them.

  She fired.

  Marion’s arrows met the hearts of two separate seelie sidhe, and both died.

  Konig touched her wrist when she nocked a third arrow, aiming between the shoulders of her handmaidens. “Not too many casualties, princess. We want to win without decimating them.” They were, after all, family.

  He punctuated his statement by descending into the morass with all the half-corporeal glory of a king. Konig created such a fog in the forest that it took Marion a moment to realize that the Summer Court was no longer sending new soldiers through the barrier. Nobody was crossing the icy river anymore.

  On the opposite bank, she glimpsed demons. Arawn’s demons. Seth’s army was there—which meant that the god himself couldn’t be very far behind.

  Movement attracted Marion’s attention to the tree at the center of the Veil. A dozen seelie were rushing her handmaidens. Aoife was furthest forward; she was most vulnerable. Marion fired an arrow into the throat of the nearest attacker. She slung an arm around Aoife and dragged her out of range from a bolt of seelie fire.

  “Be careful!” Marion said, shoving Aoife behind her.

  Marion fired again. Her arrow missed, sinking into the shoulder of an oversized troll with sandy hair.

  Marion snapped her fingers. Lightning exploded through the arrow, electrifying the troll, and it collapsed in a seizing lump.

  Aoife looked shocked. “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” Marion said. She wished she could have said more. She wanted Aoife to know that her honesty was appreciated, even when it was delivered curtly. Instead, she touched Aoife’s temple, and her unconscious handmaiden dropped to the ground.

  Marion’s path to the tree at the center of the Veil was clear. It was her last opportunity to turn back, defy Onoskelis, and fly back to Seth’s arms. But then Benjamin would be left in Shamayim alone, and Leliel would kill him. Her kingdom would crumble. Ymir would never eat another box of candy bars.

  Her armor rattled as she ran toward that tree, making her every motion sing. The light under the roots brightened until she could see nothing else.

  Marion.

  The smell of death intensified. Energy thrummed through the Wilds.

  Seth was approaching the arena.

  Marion jumped into Shamayim.

  Marion’s memories returned the instant she vanished from the Middle Worlds. She had committed to Onoskelis’s third labor. Her duty was complete. And she was made whole in return.

  If her mind was a book with the first few hundred thousand pages erased clean, then the return of her memories was Onoskelis’s quill copying the lines of another edition back into it.

  Marion was a little girl again, so young that she’d spoken only French, and not well. She was hanging on to the back of an adult woman who smelled like cut grass, sweat, and blood.

  “Hold on,” the woman had said. Her voice had rumbled through her back against Marion’s cheek, and Marion had wrapped her arms tighter around her sister’s shoulders.

  My sister.

  This was Elise Kavanagh from the days when she’d been the Godslayer. Her hair had been demon-black, swept into a glossy ponytail to keep it out of Marion’s face. She’d been wearing leather and combat boots but she’d still run like the wind, hauling her sister along on her back as though she’d weighed nothing.

  Marion had loved it. She’d never felt safer than she had clinging to Elise’s back like a monkey. In her small, childish mind, she’d believed that she was helping Elise train.

  She had remained clinging to Elise’s back like that as she performed complicated physical maneuvers, some of which had resulted in them turning upside down, or leaping through trees, or sliding down cliffs.

  Endless perfection. Marion couldn’t get enough of being close to her sister.

  That was the first winter Marion remembered sharing with Elise. Her sister had been around often enough that she was a presence as reliable as Maman’s, so even though Marion didn’t recall anything they did before that, she knew Elise deep within her
heart. They were pieces of each other. Big sister, little sister.

  Big sister wore leather. Big sister carried swords. Big sister kicked things in the face.

  Little sister wore lace, ruffles, and pink. Little sister set fire to the house with her mind more than once.

  Halves of a whole.

  Sometimes Elise had taught Marion magic.

  “Fire,” the Godslayer had said, opening her hands to reveal jagged demon-runes. Elise’s magic had been red-orange.

  “Fire,” Marion had said, precisely repeating the American accent that Elise had. She’d opened her hands to swirls of blue-white as bright as her eyes.

  It was fire.

  “Good,” Elise had said.

  She’d been Marion’s god long before she’d become God. The emotionless praise had fueled Marion in a way that Maman’s hugs never had.

  And then she’d been gone.

  Elise had more demands on her time than that of a preschool-aged child, most of which Ariane had been unwilling to discuss. Marion wasn’t oblivious though. She sometimes watched the news with her mother, and she knew that Hell was spilling onto Earth.

  “It’s the apocalypse,” Ariane had said one day. “Now eat your bread and butter.”

  Marion had been sitting in a meadow when the promised apocalypse reached them. Heaven had begun to fall from a crack in the sky. She hadn’t been old enough to understand what was happening, but she’d known it would be trouble. Nobody could imagine exactly how much trouble at that time. Heaven falling had been one of the first signs of Genesis coming to Marion’s part of the world.

  So there she had been sitting among the dandelions gone to seed, with flecks of Heaven blowing out of a gash in the sky and tossing her hair, and he had arrived.

  Benjamin.

  He’d looked like himself. Brown skin, black hair, big friendly eyes. She’d been expecting him even though they hadn’t met yet, in that timeline. She’d been dreaming of him for many months.

  “Hello, Marion,” he’d said.

  It was funny how he’d looked so grown up to her at the time, so remote. Watching those memories getting rewritten, Marion realized Benjamin couldn’t have been older than he was now, in present day.