by SM Reine
“You’re coming with me,” he said, holding her wrist tightly.
Flash.
They reappeared outside the throne room. Heather dropped to her knees and vomited in much the same way that Marion usually did.
“Sorry, but we don’t have time for you to recover,” Seth said.
He hauled Heather off of her feet and wrapped her hand around the handle to the throne room door.
She elbowed him in the gut.
The archer seemed to know just where to aim. The blow went underneath his breastbone and connected with his vulnerable heart. It hurt like nothing else had—not even having Myrkheimr dropped on top of him. It staggered him. He groaned.
The touch of Heather’s hand on the door was enough to make it swing open, though. Both of them saw inside simultaneously.
They saw the body in front of the thrones—Nori’s body—and the massive puddle of blood creeping across the tiles.
“Gods above,” Heather said.
“That’s why I brought you here,” Seth said, scrambling to his feet with his arms folded around his aching chest. “Konig—Marion—”
“Understood.” She pulled a new arrow out and lifted her bow. “Sorry about the elbow thing.”
Marion’s cry echoed through the throne room.
There was an open door behind the dais where the king and queen should have been sitting. Her voice came from that direction.
Seth drew his Beretta and exchanged magazines. Iron instead of lead. He wasn’t going to let anyone hurt Marion again.
“Follow me,” he said. He punched into the next room, guns drawn, with Heather on his left.
In a heartbeat, he saw it all.
The king collapsed against the wall.
The queen with magic thrashing around her fist.
An entire pack of Hounds kenneled under the boarded windows.
Arawn standing over Konig, gaping mouth hanging open to expose the multitude of teeth within his jaw.
And Marion.
She looked a lot like her sister when she was drenched in blood, armed with a bow, and wearing a shredded wedding dress. Seth could easily imagine Marion as a Godslayer. The woman who would bury an arrow deep in his heart and ruin his life.
Violet unleashed a fistful of magic aimed right at Marion.
It didn’t seem like that much of a betrayal at this point. Seth had been waiting for this moment ever since the summit, when he’d told Marion that he believed the royal family was out to get her.
Seth didn’t need another moment of thought to fire his gun.
And he shot to kill.
A bullet hole appeared in Violet’s back. The queen pitched forward. But the deadly magic she had been gathering in her fist had already been released, churning toward Marion in seeming slow motion.
Seth phased.
He wrapped his arms around Marion’s waist and phased again.
They reappeared, and her quiver scattered arrows across the floor of the throne room. She was gasping for breath, clawing at her throat, coughing up blood from the briefest exposure to Sheol. The taste of death wasn’t as sweet on her as it had been in the past. There were many other souls waiting to be claimed in the Autumn Court, and they called to Seth much louder.
Seth sank to his knees while holding her, watching to make sure she started breathing again.
She did.
“You spoke out against Konig,” Marion gasped. It seemed a ridiculous thing to be focused on during a total assault against Myrkheimr.
To be fair, it was also at the forefront of Seth’s mind.
“I’d do it again,” he said.
She got up, hand pressed to her chest. It must have been difficult to breathe in the restrictive wedding dress, but she still found the strength to stand tall and look Seth in the eye. “Thank you.”
The wall behind the thrones exploded.
Arawn erupted through the rubble, clutching Heather’s hair in one fist, and Konig’s hair in the other. The archer was alive but unconscious; the prince was conscious but not fighting. Seth knew that look of shock. It had been on Abel’s face when their mother had been killed.
Violet was dead.
“Took you long enough to get here, Seth,” Arawn said. He tossed both Konig and Heather aside. “I thought I was going to have to skin Marion to get your attention at this rate.”
“You know that I am what you only pretend to be,” Seth said. “So you know how serious I am when I tell you not to touch Marion.”
“Do you really think a human avatar can stand up against a Lord of Sheol at the height of his powers?” Arawn tossed Konig aside with a laugh. “Let’s find out!”
Another explosion shook the room. Cracks raced up the walls. The roof beams sagged, and then snapped. The roof began to fall.
Marion and Seth leaped at the same time. But where Seth tried to grab Marion to phase out of the throne room, Marion went for Nori’s body. “Save her!” she cried.
It was too late. Nori was dead, soul severed from her physical body. Seth could tell because he thirsted to consume her death. Marion didn’t realize, and she bowed over the body while the roof fell around them.
The only thing Seth could do was shield Marion from the worst of the rubble. It struck his back. He barely felt it.
Marion was touching Nori’s throat, feeling for a pulse. The horror of truth dawned in her eyes. “No.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Boo,” Arawn said. He’d appeared on the other side of Nori’s body while they were distracted. He wrapped an arm around Marion’s throat, yanking her off of her feet.
Crimson runes raced in a circle around them, erupting with a flash so bright that Seth’s night vision was instantly wrecked. It formed a towering dome of smokeless flame that sheared the rubble apart where it touched.
Balefire.
They were trapped inside the circle with Arawn.
Seth was standing, aiming his gun at the demon’s leering face, and he hadn’t even felt himself move. He didn’t shoot. The iron bullets would do nothing to Arawn, and he was holding Marion in front of him like a shield anyway.
“Think of this,” Arawn purred in her ear, “if you’d just taken your memories, then I wouldn’t have had to fight for my freedom. Every single soul that’s burned in balefire is your fault.”
“Nobody is responsible for the evil you’ve done except you,” Seth said. “Blame it on the victims if you want, but we all know who’s culpable.”
“How much does culpability matter, in the end? The result is the same.” Arawn scraped one of his fingers down the side of Marion’s throat. He was wearing a metal claw over his nail, and it left a crimson line on her delicate flesh. “Let your mortal form die so you can ascend. I won’t kill Marion if you give me immunity to sunlight as soon as you cross over.”
“I’ve got another deal for you,” Marion hissed at him over her shoulder. “Let me go and I won’t emasculate you.”
“Petty threats,” Arawn began to say.
Marion punched her fist backward.
She was holding one of her arrows. She buried the point in between Arawn’s legs, driving it into the place where humans kept their manhood.
Apparently Lords of Sheol were assembled in a similar fashion.
He released her with a shriek. Ichor spurted over his leather pants.
Seth ripped Marion away from Arawn, into the relative safety of his arms—but that was as far as they could go. Balefire wouldn’t let them pass through it without burning. According to Dana, they couldn’t phase through, either.
There was only one way that they were going to get out of this.
Seth gripped Marion by the back of her neck. Pressed their foreheads together. “Read my mind. Please.”
This time, he felt Marion inside his skull.
He focused his thoughts on his memories of godhood—how detached he’d been while omnipotent, how little he’d cared when he had seen Rylie’s death, how it hur
t him to be distant like that.
It was an apology he couldn’t bring himself to speak aloud, not when he wouldn’t be able to explain it well enough.
Marion looked horrified. “Don’t go. Please don’t go.”
He’d have given her anything else she asked for.
It was sheer impulse—base animal instinct, the craving for touch—that made him brush his lips over her cheek, like when he’d kissed her forehead after the summit. A gesture he could convince himself was fraternal, friendly, platonic.
She turned her head at the last moment and lips brushed against lips, just a little bit, the barest touch. Her breath tasted of smoked wood. It whispered over his mouth and then she inhaled, tasting him.
Her lips were so soft. A man could have lost himself in that touch.
Seth pushed Marion behind him.
He threw himself at Arawn.
Both Seth and Arawn plunged through the wall of balefire.
The instantaneous incineration of Seth’s body didn’t even hurt. It happened too quickly.
His avatar was gone.
Seth remained oriented to mortal time in the moments that followed, even as his consciousness slipped sideways into a more god-like state.
In those moments, he remembered he had killed himself to end the fight with Arawn. So he ended it.
Even he couldn’t destroy balefire easily, so he relocated the flames to Duat, allowing it to meld with the rest of its ilk.
The throne room was safe.
Nori’s soul hovered over her body, floating unseen beside Marion. The half-angel mage was increasingly disinteresting to Seth. She had years of life ahead of her. She wasn’t his business like Nori was.
No. Not disinteresting. Not Marion. Focus—don’t forget.
He had to do his job.
Seth reached out by instinct, seizing the ephemeral glow of Nori’s spirit. He saw her as an apparition of herself: a petite, semi-transparent woman with no hair or clothes. The ghost of the half-angel who had been. “There’s a door,” Nori’s spirit said. There was nothing audible about her voice. Marion wouldn’t be able to hear it.
Seth’s heart twisted. “I know. Go toward the door, Nori.” His response was equally silent.
Hundreds more souls were scattered throughout the Autumn Court, their souls yearning away from the bodies that contained them.
Seth couldn’t do anything for the ones Arawn had already burned, but he could still save the others.
He reached out with the entirety of his being and scooped all those other souls into his arms. The throne room warped around them as Seth followed Nori into the Nether.
Arawn was right behind Seth. He’d died in the balefire too, but death seemed to be a different thing for the Lords of Sheol. Nyx had lingered after being murdered, and so did Arawn. “You’re killing them all,” Arawn taunted. “It’s all your fault.”
“No,” Seth said. “It’s yours.”
Taking responsibility for people killed by Arawn would have been like Marion taking responsibility for Konig’s actions.
It was wrong.
The Pit of Souls was burning with Arawn’s balefire when Seth arrived with the victims from Myrkheimr. He pulled the balefire away with a thought as brief as the one that had stripped it from the throne room. Now Duat’s flaming shield was miles thick. It touched the edge of the Dead Forest. So much balefire for one little Nether World.
Hundreds of souls hung over his shoulders, heavier than a cloak of lead. He still clasped hands with Nori’s blank-eyed apparition.
They were ready to go through the door.
“Come with us,” Seth said, reaching out for Arawn.
The demon’s spirit hovered a few feet away, his braids lashing behind him in the wind generated by balefire. “Think it through. You don’t want me to die.”
Seth heard him, but he didn’t really care about the question. Arawn was dead. He needed to send him where he belonged in the Pit of Souls so that he could be disassembled, remixed, and spit out as new life.
But wasn’t there something he still needed from Arawn?
“Charity,” Seth said. “Where’s Charity?”
“I can tell you she’s not in Duat anymore, and she won’t survive if you kill me,” Arawn said. “Let me go. I’ll find a new body. I’ll take care of Charity.”
Seth didn’t know if that was the right thing to do. He couldn’t tell anymore.
He only knew that it was time to go.
Slowly, over the span of eternity, he turned toward the Pit of Souls with the charges who needed him. Nothing remained in the chasm after that except vast, empty nothing, where souls could sink and sink, waiting for the instant of rebirth. He released them all at once.
Everyone but Arawn.
And then Seth followed them down.
Marion’s last cry was still trailing him.
Please don’t go.
He still cared for one moment.
What was a moment in the span of a god’s experience, though? Was it a heartbeat, or the entirety of eternity that stretched between one Genesis and the next?
The caring drained out of him as he continued to sink.
Seth remembered the things he’d forgotten when substantiating. Every single detail of his eons ruling Sheol with Nyx. The instant that the Genesis void had consumed all of the planet.
Even an eternity coexisting with Elise and James.
Becoming the third god to a couple like them—a pair who were madly in love, with an emphasis on the “mad”—was worse than being a third wheel. He had been a roommate for two people who hadn’t cared about anyone else. But their room had been an entire universe, and Seth had been incapable of getting away.
Worse, they hadn’t wanted him to get away. They’d wanted him to suffer. They’d wanted him to be Death.
“I made you and you’ll do what I tell you,” Elise had said at one point. “If I want you to perform surgery on yourself, you’ll do it. If I want you to hop on one foot while barking like a dog for a thousand years, you’ll do it. And if I want you to kill my sister—”
“Just because you made me doesn’t mean you own me,” Seth had said.
And Elise had said, “You’ll regret saying that.”
She’d been right.
Seth’s only option to escape Elise and James had been to flee to a place gods didn’t care about: mortality.
Gods didn’t care about mortals.
Seth didn’t care about mortals.
The souls were taken by the Pit, and he felt a distant, momentary satisfaction over a job well done.
Then he felt nothing.
23
It was quiet after Seth and Arawn left. All Marion could hear was a soft weeping. She needed a few minutes to realize that the weeping was coming from her.
She got up, swiping the tears off of her cheeks. She didn’t have time to mourn for Nori’s empty body in a puddle of blood. She didn’t even have time to mourn losing Seth.
Marion stumbled over the rubble to get to Konig. He was waking up. She helped him to his feet. “He shot my mom,” Konig said, his voice raw. “Seth killed my mother.”
“He was trying to protect me,” Marion said.
“You don’t understand. Seth killed the Queen of the Autumn Court and control is matrilineal. You’ve seen what happened to Niflheimr when its queen died.” Its protective magic had unraveled and the court had become a wasteland.
“But Rage—”
“Matrilineal,” he snapped. “He’s not king without a queen.” Konig pressed both hands to his temples, eyes squeezing shut. “The wards are already breaking down.”
Footsteps thudded among the rubble. Rocks slipped and shifted.
Hounds emerged from the chamber behind the thrones, loosed from the kennels that had contained them. Violet wasn’t the only ruler who had died. Seth had taken out Arawn, and there was nobody to hold the Hounds anymore.
One of them lunged for Heather Cobweb’s unconscious body.
&
nbsp; Konig swept her off of the ground before it could bite, leaping backwards. Its mouth snapped on the heel of his boot. Sidhe blood spattered the floor.
Marion lifted her bow, heart pounding. Her arrows would do nothing against the Hounds.
A loud crash.
The collapsed rubble exploded. Jibril punched his way through it, landing between Marion and Konig with his wings flared. Even in the midst of so much destruction, the angel was clean and composed. “What in the names of the gods happened here?”
“My mother’s dead,” Konig said.
Jibril understood without the explanation Marion had needed. “Then there’s only one thing to do.”
He grabbed both Konig and Marion and burst into flight.
They lifted from the throne room, leaving the Hounds among the wreckage. Only when they were in the air did Marion realize exactly how far they were from the rest of Myrkheimr. The enchanted throne room was on a cliff in the depths of the forest, overlooking the rest of the kingdom.
From there, Marion could see the white shapes of the Hounds pouring through the trees, racing for the burning castle.
A dozen Hounds would do a lot of damage to the wedding attendees.
Jibril landed on one of the few towers that were still standing. There was an altar at its top, much like the kind that Marion had in the Winter Court. It must have been one of the points where the soul-linked wards could be connected with blood.
“You know what needs to happen,” Jibril said. “You both know.”
Marion’s heart sank into her stomach.
And it kept sinking.
It sank and sank and sank like balefire eating its way through the Earth’s mantle, heading straight for the burning liquid core.
“We have to get married,” she said.
Because the queen was dead, the wards had failed, and the Hounds were about to kill everyone—not just the innocents of the Autumn Court, but the members of the council who had been attending Marion’s wedding. The leaders of every preternatural organization in the world.
If the Hounds killed them, then all of the world would be thrown into chaos.
“We have to get married as quickly as possible,” Marion reiterated, and it was a struggle to get the words out when her whole body was shaking. “Then Konig can fix everything. He can save the Autumn Court.”