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

by SM Reine

It hurt enormously.

  “Thank you,” Marion whispered.

  “Marion! No!”

  Her vision was blurring when she focused beyond Leliel’s shoulder.

  Benjamin had come out of hiding.

  Even when Marion was gushing blood, she was cognizant enough to recognize that Benjamin looked very, very strange. The mundane human son of werewolf Alphas looked distinctly preternatural. He was haunted by the ghost of the man in his head, the one who looked like he could have been Marion’s brother.

  Whatever powers Nathaniel had bestowed upon Benjamin were not enough to face Leliel. He should have known that.

  “Careful,” Marion said.

  He couldn’t hear her. She was too faint, and growing fainter as she sank to her knees.

  Leliel rounded on Benjamin. “Don’t worry,” she said to Marion over her shoulder. “I remember our agreement.” She pointed two fingers at Benjamin—and electric angelfire consumed him instantly. A spell that Marion had taught Leliel months earlier. It must have pleased Leliel to finally be able to use mage craft instead of hiding it.

  Benjamin tumbled into the pool.

  So did Marion.

  Her dripping blood dotted the surface of the water and spread toward the eggs.

  One by one, they began to glow.

  30

  Konig was braced for anything to come out of the Summer Court. It wasn’t as though he expected Titania to release her goblins—a vicious brute force that were normally kept in the mines—but he knew it was a possibility, and he’d packed enough magic in his broadsword to confront the lot of them.

  He wasn’t prepared for an army of demons and shifters to pop through the wards as soon as night fell.

  He was even less prepared for the invading forces to be on his side.

  Konig had bisected two demons with the blade of his bastard sword before realizing that they weren’t fighting back. The pieces of them fell to his feet, and the surviving oversized scarabs still only rushed past him without talking.

  Numbed by shock, he turned to watch the swarm devour the Summer Court.

  “What the hell?” he asked aloud.

  “You’re welcome.” Arawn stepped through the Veil, wrinkling his nose at the gap that Titania had shredded in the wards. “That’s going to be a bitch to clean up! But don’t worry—like the little Danish boy, I’ve stuck my fingers up in your dyke. No more seelie coming this way unless they can get past my guys.” He cupped his hands on either side of his mouth and said in a stage whisper, “They can’t.”

  Konig swung without thinking, bringing his sword sweeping toward Arawn’s head.

  The demon lord twirled out of the way. His hair swung behind him in a broad arc.

  “Watch it,” Arawn said. “I’m here to help.”

  “You? Why?”

  “It’s a favor, of course. Because I am such the nice guy.”

  Konig was tempted to gut him and see how nice Arawn was after that. “Who called in a favor from you?”

  “Let’s see,” Arawn taunted, baring his teeth in a thin-lipped grin. His dreadlocks had gone the colorless white of a bloated body found at the bottom of a lake, though they were tipped with firecracker-red. “Who was it that arranged this? It’s that guy your wife is in love with. Something-something sexy death god… Right!” He snapped his fingers. “Seth Wilder did this. You know, most guys just send ladies flowers.”

  Konig wasn’t sure if the adrenaline that rushed through him was anger or jealousy or what. “You say that like it should bother me. Didn’t you hear? We’ve had the affirmation and our kingdom’s united.” He waved toward the battle.

  “So you don’t care that Seth’s coming for a visit right now?” Arawn asked. “Great. Because he’s coming for a visit right now. He’ll spirit your girl right off her feet and leave you with nothing.”

  No kingdom, no wife, no power.

  Konig turned to look for Marion. She should have been easy to spot. She’d be a splash of angel magic wearing chainmail.

  The forest was too dense to see more than the scarabs now. They grappled with the seelie sidhe—ugly smears of glossy black that presented no real threat to the Summer Court’s finest. Not singlehandedly. But Arawn’s demons vastly outnumbered the seelie. They could kill hundreds of scarabs and be killed by the next hundred.

  It was utter chaos, and Konig couldn’t see Marion or her handmaidens.

  Konig turned to fog.

  He searched the Wilds. As king, he was capable of looking underneath every leaf and within every snail shell. There was no sign of Marion anywhere.

  Except that Aoife was unconscious near the twisted tree at the center of the Middle Worlds.

  He formed himself around her. His hands were gentle as he lifted her into his lap. “Wake up, Aoife.” He brushed a palm over her forehead, and her eyes flew open with a jolt.

  “Marion!” she cried.

  Her eyes zeroed in on the entrance to Shamayim.

  Konig clutched Aoife’s shoulders. “Don’t tell me she went in there alone.”

  Aoife didn’t tell him anything at all. She knew better than that. Konig held her life in his hands, physically and literally; he was king, and she was a vassal working to feed her family. If he didn’t want her to say that Marion had gone into Shamayim alone, then she wouldn’t.

  Her silence didn’t change reality.

  Konig knew where Marion had gone.

  Even now, he struggled to trust that Marion was doing what was right. He wanted his hands on her throat so that he could teach her the price of acting independently from him.

  A pair of scrawny legs appeared beside him. Konig’s eyes tracked from her clawed toes to her bony ankles, jutting hips, and a face like a funeral mask.

  Charity Ballard had escaped Arawn. Konig supposed he should have expected her, since the Lord of Sheol was there too.

  “It’s done,” Charity said as he straightened. “We’ve blocked off the Veil and the door to Shamayim is secure.”

  Konig wasn’t used to having to look up in order to meet someone’s gaze. He especially didn’t like having to do it with Charity. She didn’t have the common decency to wear her glamour, and she looked disgusting. “You survived.”

  “No thanks to you,” Charity said.

  Seth descended behind her.

  He appeared so swiftly that there was no time for Konig to summon support. When Seth appeared on the other side of the revenant, Konig was surrounded by darkness that severed him from all support. There was no world outside the three of them—old friends who had journeyed through Sheol together and come through the other side changed. The four-trunked tree was within their circle of light. It cast Seth in a pallid glow.

  “You came for my wife, didn’t you?” Konig asked. “You think you’re going to save her from me? Is that what this is?”

  Seth was so silent that he may as well have not been there at all. He was smoke among shadow. His infinite faces and hands had been reduced to barely more than a dozen, so Konig could almost make the man out from the monster.

  Fear thrilled through Konig’s gut, fueling his indignant anger.

  “Do you love her?” Konig asked.

  A muscle in Seth’s jaw flexed when he clenched his teeth.

  “Do you know she’s been manipulating you?” Konig went on. “She made you fall in love with her so that she could control you. It’s the M.O. of women with her blood.”

  “What’s that say about you?” Charity asked.

  Konig was different. Unlike the other men that the Garin women used, he was using her in return. That had been their relationship from the beginning. That was the only way either of them knew how to love. They were suited perfectly for one another—and the affirmation had proven it.

  Even gods couldn’t get between that kind of thing.

  “You’re wrong,” Seth finally said.

  The light between the roots surged. The Veil rippled. Konig felt the changing barrier between worlds within his gut, resonati
ng along his every nerve as though a scarab crawled down his spine.

  His stomach lurched, and the roots widened to allow someone out of Shamayim.

  Marion spilled from between the roots, landing in a heap of limbs and revealing chainmail. Her hair was over her face. Once she came to a stop, she didn’t move again.

  Charity reacted first. Konig almost laughed at the sight of a revenant being so careful with a human woman’s delicate body, shifting Marion onto her back to ensure her airway was clear.

  He didn’t laugh because he saw the blood.

  His enchanted armor should have ensured that no blade could hurt Marion. Yet there was a knife wound in her belly, and her blood was silver. Angel blood.

  Konig shoved Charity aside. “I’ll fix this,” he said, passing a hand over Marion’s wound. It felt identical to the wound that Leliel had delivered at the United Nations. Ethereal assault pinged against his senses.

  She wasn’t waking up.

  Seth hung back.

  “Not going to do anything?” Konig asked. “You’re a god, dammit!”

  “Of Death.” He looked repulsed. Not by Marion, most likely, but by how appealing he found her condition. He stayed back for her safety.

  The veneer of disgust failed to conceal Seth’s thoughts now that he’d transcended to a form outside of time. Konig was brushed by omnipotence within his kingdom—a place where Konig was this side of a deity—and Seth radiated even stronger than the sidhe magic.

  Konig had never felt such love and compassion in his entire life.

  He’d just been thinking that a god couldn’t come between what he and Marion shared. Their shared ambition bonded them more closely than blood. But it paled in comparison to Seth’s energy flooding the universe, and Konig felt more than mere doubt. He felt mortal.

  When Marion’s eyes flashed open, the first person she saw was Konig. Her eyes were even brighter white than usual. “Princess?” Konig asked.

  She lifted her hands to look at them. Her knuckles were still marked.

  Marion turned her palms outward and shoved. Magic forced Konig backward. He and Charity stumbled out of arm’s reach.

  She rose from the earth, lifted by invisible tendrils of magic, and the white light shining from behind her didn’t come from Shamayim. It was Marion’s magic. The power of a half-angel.

  Her injury was still bleeding. She pointed at it. Wound and blood vanished completely.

  “Marion?” Seth asked.

  She lifted an eyebrow at him. “Yes?”

  Had that cold tone been directed at Konig, he’d have considered moving from Myrkheimr without a change of address so that Marion couldn’t find him. That kind of coldness sounded like murder—particularly when Marion had never been anything but warmly swooning toward her favorite doctor.

  Seth approached slowly. It took years to cross from one side of the clearing to the other. When he slid his hands down Marion’s shoulders to cup her elbows, toxic jealousy raged within Konig. “Let’s leave, Marion,” Seth said. “We’ll get out of here and talk. Please.”

  Marion stepped back from him. “You’ve done what you promised you’d do. Take your army and leave or I’ll consider it an act of war.” She turned from Seth…and walked right into Konig’s arms.

  Confusion wasn’t a strong enough word for what Konig felt.

  But it was incredibly satisfying.

  Konig gazed at the half-naked mage in his arms with wonder. “What in the world happened in Shamayim?”

  “I remembered everything,” Marion whispered, the tip of her nose brushing Konig’s. “Everything.” Her tongue slid into his mouth. Marion’s body molded against Konig’s.

  When Konig lifted his head from the kiss, Seth, Charity, Arawn, and their army had vanished from the Middle Worlds.

  The sun rose upon Myrkheimr with a dungeon filled by sidhe. Konig had received an official declaration of war from Oberon of the Summer Court, and it wasn’t even breakfast. They responded by holding a muted dinner in Niflheimr, where families of fallen soldiers had their grief numbed by wine. And where Heather Cobweb conscripted more sidhe.

  A productive day indeed.

  That night, Marion came to Konig in a gown of gauze and diamonds. Her body was even more exposed than when she’d worn his armor. He could see the sinuous curve of bones from her ribs to her hips as clearly as he could see her many bruises.

  He’d left a few of those bruises himself. He was pleased to see the shapes of his fingertips imprinted on her waist.

  The rest of the bruises were all that remained of her part in the fight at the Veil. Even the stab wound had healed to no more than a dark smudge on her olive skin. Soon, she would heal to her usual perfection, with the older scar on her ribcage as her only flaw.

  “Were any survivors found?” Marion asked.

  He was drinking in the sight of her swaying breasts with such hunger that her words didn’t register. “Survivors?”

  “From within Shamayim.”

  “No, nobody was found. There was only an empty garden,” Konig said. “Did you expect us to find someone?”

  “Leliel or Benjamin, I’d hoped. She must have kidnapped him.” She slid into bed with him. The familiar weight of her thighs was more than comfortable—it was as arousing as though he hadn’t sated himself that very night.

  Konig was too virile to have gone so long without such satisfaction. He’d never wait that long again.

  He rolled her underneath him. “Leliel’s gone for now, but we’ll find her. Thanks to you, we’ve got one of hell of an army. There’s nowhere she can run.”

  “Thanks to me.” Her smile was smugly self-satisfied, and Konig found it wildly attractive. Marion was a rocket ship headed to the wild unknown. All he needed to do was hang on, and she’d launch both of them straight into destiny.

  He kissed her slowly. She tasted faintly of bitter herbs, though it didn’t detract from her natural, womanly flavor. Marion always tasted like oak and lavender.

  Everything about Marion tasted and felt better now after being deprived for so long.

  His magic surged as their arms and legs entwined. Konig could feel even the tiniest facets of crystalline ice on the furthest edges of his kingdom. The harder he kissed her, the more sensitive he became.

  Konig almost pitied the enemies who had to fight against him.

  “Do you feel that?” he asked without lifting his lips from her throat. “Do you feel my power?”

  Her hand crept to places on his body that she hadn’t touched in ages. “Always.” She giggled throatily. “Would you like wine?”

  “Always,” he said.

  She slipped out from underneath him to fetch a decanter. He lingered near the bed, watching her mostly naked body move through the room.

  “It’s really you,” Konig said, half-amazed and half-disbelieving. He had almost thought he’d hallucinated the way she used to be.

  “It’s been me the entire time.” Marion poured two goblets of wine. He watched her form swaying in the mirror over her vanity, his body aching to embrace hers.

  His attention dropped to the surface of the vanity. Magic shimmered around a half-finished bracelet made from vines.

  “What is this?” Konig asked, twirling it between his fingers. There were touches of gaean magic in the spellwork but it felt mostly ethereal. He thought he’d seen her wearing a similar bracelet earlier, though that one had been finished.

  She took it and placed a goblet in his empty hand. “That’s an exercise I was working on as part of my magical studies. It will be much easier to finish now that my memories have returned—but I’m not interested in that tonight.” She flicked the bracelet of twisted vine to her vanity, then kissed him deeply, without hesitation. Her fingernails dug into his scalp painfully.

  Marion had just poured wine for them, so he imagined they should have been toasting their success—and their future successes.

  But he could wait no longer.

  They made love again and aga
in that night, under the fragile shards of the chandelier. Their joined energy made it regrow. Instead of returning as frosty stalactites, it was a new form—more like the horns of a ram. A demon. Perhaps even Death himself. The shadow of it hung heavily over them.

  When they finally lay still among the pillows, their bodies scratched by Marion’s diamond-studded gown, the chandelier had already begun to melt. Chilly droplets created a pool at the small of Marion’s back. Steam drifted from her shoulders.

  “Tomorrow begins the campaign,” Konig said. “We tear the Middle Worlds into pieces, and only one faction survives at the top.” He already knew who it would be. Ariane had said he would be king of all the sidhe, and now he tasted its beginnings.

  The question was not whether he would build a united kingdom under himself, but how many bodies would be buried in it.

  “The beginning of the end,” Marion said softly. She kissed him with surprising pressure. “This is the final stretch, Konig.”

  “And then we can finally rule everything as we were meant to.”

  “Yes.” It was dark in the room, but her eyes glowed with inner angelfire. “It will all be as things are meant to be.”

  They laid together for silent hours, drifting off to the sound of machinery churning in Niflheimr’s depths. Konig’s breath slowed. His hands relaxed on Marion’s body, pinned against his side.

  He was almost asleep when she moved.

  Marion slipped from bed, picked up the vine bracelet on her vanity, and…she stood there. Just stood there, holding her magical creation with her eyes closed, looking like she was in pain.

  Then she locked it in her jewelry box, kissed her fingertips, and pressed them to the lock. Magic jolted through the mechanism.

  Konig pretended he’d been asleep when Marion returned to bed. He threw his arm over her and buried his face in his pillow.

  But behind his closed eyelids, he saw the look of pain on Marion’s face when she touched that bracelet, and tendrils of toxic jealousy crept into his blood again.

  It was then he knew that the peace between them was not long to last, and Konig swore in silence that he would never be deceived by the Voice of God again.