Cast in Faefire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 3) (20 page)

Dust blasted from around the corner.

The path she’d been about to take had collapsed.

Infernal runes raced from the destruction, lancing toward her toes. They leaped with the same muted balefire that had guarded Duat in Sheol.

If that stuff touched Marion, she would never stop burning.

She took a page out of Heather’s book and leaped through the nearest window.

For a weightless moment, she thought she’d escaped the balefire.

Then she struck the lawn outside, which bordered the western cliffs, and she gagged on smoke. Marion twisted to see that blasted train of her dress on fire. It swarmed through the grass like fireflies that gushed sticky black smoke.

“
Merde
!”

She hacked at her dress with the sharp point of an arrow from her quiver, severing the gauzy train from the rest of the dress. The cloth puddled to the grass, enveloped in fire moments later.

Marion shielded her eyes from the sun and smoke as she gazed up at Myrkheimr.

An explosion thudded through the ground beneath her feet. One of the towers vanished into smoke, collapsing instantly.

She raced for the throne room, taking other paths between the cliffs and waterfalls, running fast enough that the infernal runes couldn’t catch up with her. The fight was elsewhere in Myrkheimr—in all the public areas where the wedding had been due to occur. The screaming grew distant as she plunged into the depths of the castle.

She slammed into the throne room.

Konig wasn’t there.

Nori was.

Poor, beautiful Nori looked like she’d drowned in her own blood. Angels bled in silver colors, but Nori’s human side ran strong. She was drenched in sticky, cherry fluids.

And then Nori gasped.

“Gods!” Marion threw herself beside Nori. For all that she couldn’t touch dirty things, she didn’t hesitate to press her hands against Nori’s wounds, fighting to stem the flow of blood. But it wasn’t like there were a few severed vessels. Her whole body was severed. Pinching the skin together didn’t help.

She was dying.

Why couldn’t Marion summon healing magic to mind?

Nori’s unfocused eyes stared in Marion’s direction. “Ymir. Konig’s magic.”

“Shh, don’t talk.” Marion’s fingers trembled while they smoothed over Nori’s forehead, smearing blood into her hair. Nori was dying. She deserved to be touched.

It gave no comfort to Nori. Tears slid down her bloodied cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Marion.” Her chest jerked. A drop of blood slithered from the corner of her mouth to the corner of her ear. “I never should have—so sorry…”

If she couldn’t do magic to save Nori, then Marion should have ended the suffering. It would have been mercy to knock her out, finish the job, whatever it took to save her from drowning in her own blood.

For all her flaws, though, Marion was too similar to Seth in this respect. She couldn’t make herself responsible for the moment that Nori’s heart stopped beating.

“Hello, Marion.”

Her head snapped up.

Arawn stood above her, elbow propped on the back of one throne. A bastard sword dangled casually from his other hand. It was identical to the sword Konig had selected for his duel against Arawn in the Nether Worlds, but this was the weapon that had killed Nori.

“Do you want your fiancé?” Arawn asked. “Or should I just kill the lying dickweed for you right now?”

T
he Raven Knights
had attempted to arrest Seth. At least, that was what he assumed they’d been trying to do. He hadn’t stuck around to see what the royal guard wanted from him.

He’d tried to chase Konig into the throne room and failed. The wards were too strong.

Seth had been trained to hunt werewolves by the best. They were different beasts than faeries, but hunting such powerful creatures was the same in philosophy.

If he couldn’t get in the monster’s den, he could set a trap.

He went to the courtyard, where the wedding was meant to be held, and he waited.

Seth positioned himself on the balcony overlooking the altar. What he planned to do when Konig showed up—he honestly hadn’t thought that far, but he suspected it would be the kind of thing a man didn’t walk away from whole, or without regrets.

Konig didn’t show up.

Neither did the rest of the wedding party.

“What are you doing?” Rylie approached, trailed by a young teenager who strongly resembled Abel. Not so much around the eyes—those were Rylie’s eyes—but in the stubborn set of his jaw, and the sullen way he wore his tuxedo. He looked as though he’d have much preferred a t-shirt and jeans.

“I don’t know,” Seth said, glaring at the altar. “I’ll figure it out by the time Konig shows up.”

“Bad blood there, huh?” Rylie asked.

“You have no idea.”

The angel who had agreed to perform the ceremony, Jibril, was waiting for the wedding party too. He stood alone on the altar in front of the enormous group of spectators, outwardly serene even though he must have been getting worried.

Everything was ready for the royal wedding except the couple due to get married.

“Do you want to talk about what happened with the vote?” Rylie asked.

Seth forced himself to focus on the Alpha. She was beautiful in that moment, as she was in all moments. She wore a sleek dress befitting her station. Even in her mature clothes, with her lined face, Seth could see the girl he’d fallen in love with.

“Konig’s not a good man,” Seth said.

“You told me that about Abel once or twice.”

“This is different.” Konig was a thousand times worse than Abel. A million times worse. Some number that mortal minds couldn’t even comprehend.

Rylie hesitated, and then said, “I have something you might want.” She led Seth a few feet away from her teenage son and pulled something out of her purse. It was a magazine for a Beretta 9mm. “I assume you’re carrying the same gun you always have.”

“You assume right.” Seth thumbed one of the bullets out. It was iron—a metal that could kill the sidhe. He turned shocked eyes on Rylie.

“I don’t get searched,” she said. “You seemed worried about events with Marion, and I just thought…” Rylie trailed off, as though unsure how to justify carrying a deadly weapon in her purse.

“Thank you,” Seth said. He pocketed the magazine. “Seriously. Thanks.”

“Did I introduce you to my son, Benjamin?” Rylie asked lightly. “Benjamin, this is Seth Wilder.”

The teenage boy’s eyes widened. “Wilder?”

“Seth is your uncle,” she said. “You might have heard your older siblings talk about him before.”

“Wow,” Benjamin said.

Seth shook hands with Benjamin Gresham—or perhaps Benjamin Wilder. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t want to ask. Like Marion had pointed out, Rylie and Abel had never married.

“You look young to be my uncle,” Benjamin said. The fact that he was remarking on age rather than the exposed organs was telling. This was a boy who had grown up with Alphas, and very little surprised him.

Seth didn’t want to explain that he was a god who had once been engaged to his mother. He settled for saying, “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

Benjamin probably planned to keep talking, but that was when people started screaming.

A rumble spread through Myrkheimr, followed by crashing.

Seth had a moment to register the dust that spilled from a crack in the mezzanine’s roof before it collapsed.

He dived.

If he were asked later, he’d have said that he was going for Rylie. But it wasn’t Rylie who he wrapped his arms around. It was Benjamin, teenage son of Abel Wilder.

Seth’s momentum carried both of them well out of the range of rubble. They struck the ground within the courtyard.

Benjamin came up gasping, his hair whitened by rubble. “Mom.”

Seth’s mortal ears were ringing. His core ached from his spine to the place his abdominals should have been, and the world swam around him.

Part of Myrkheimr had collapsed. Kindred energy sang to him from the resulting shadows, and infernal magic flowed through the crowd.

Possessed
.

Seth could feel that in his core as surely as he felt his heart beating.

Dozens—hundreds—of the human attendees to Marion and Konig’s wedding had been seized by demon energy in that same heartbeat that an entire wing of Myrkheimr collapsed.

He was surrounded by chunks of rubble large enough that they easily could have crushed people into glue. Had Seth been anyone else, he doubted he’d have ever walked again. But many injured victims were standing. They were walking. Some were even running.

That was the demon force seizing them.

Chaos spread through the crowd.

What had been an orderly crowd barely minutes earlier had turned into a churning mass of bodies. There were no fire codes in the Middle Worlds and no laws about safe crowd capacities; likewise, there were no emergency exits that would ensure people could escape such situations safely.

Bodies smashed into Seth. He was squeezed tight, carried against a pillar as people struggled to escape. Feet smashed his feet. Elbows pummeled his ribs. The crowd grew so tight that he could barely turn his head.

When he looked down, he saw a face pressed to his knees. An adult man. Someone who had fallen and was wailing as he struggled to escape. The crowd had gone wild so quickly that there was simply nowhere to go.

Damn
. Those who were possessed by demons didn’t need to rip people apart like they had in Rock Bottom. Everyone was getting trampled underfoot, pressed against columns, buried under rubble.

Seth had never heard screaming so horrible before.

And he didn’t see Rylie anywhere.

“Hold your breath!” he shouted, shoving his hand between two strangers to grab Benjamin’s shoulder.

Seth snapped his fingers.

With a whirlwind of brimstone, he vanished from the crush of the crowd in the courtyard.

There was an instant—less than the span of time it took him to inhale—that he stepped through Sheol with Rylie’s son, his nephew, cradled in his arms like a very tall infant.

Then he reappeared atop a part of Myrkheimr that had yet to fall apart. It was more horrifying to see everything from that perspective. It gave Seth a high-level view of the devastation, which meant he didn’t see many of the wounds, the splatters of blood, the faces slack in death. But he saw bodies falling. He saw people writhing under rubble. He saw the swarm of demons within the shadow.

No Rylie.

No
Marion
.

Seth set Benjamin down. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He brushed himself off. “Where’s my mom?”

It was a great question, but Rylie would never forgive Seth if he took one of her sons into danger. He phased Benjamin outside of the castle and deposited him on flat ground.

“Stay here,” Seth said firmly.

Benjamin was disoriented by multiple jumps through the Autumn Court. His eyes could barely focus. “What?”

Seth phased again.

He returned to what had been the mezzanine moments earlier. There was no sign of Rylie among all the broken stone fragments.

Seth phased again, and again, and again, trying to find her.

When he reappeared on a flat patch of ground underneath columns that had fallen together, like the poles of a tent, he found humans with glowing eyes and infernal runes swirling over their foreheads. People possessed by demons.

But still no Rylie.

The demons reacted to Seth’s appearance by lurching toward him. Seth could taste the Nether Worlds on the air that they exhaled. Shredded souls clung to them—the aftermath of all the murders they’d committed. These were Arawn’s creatures, no doubt about it. The Lord of Sheol was getting the revenge he wanted.

“Stop,” Seth said.

Energy filled that one word. Seth hadn’t even known he had that kind of energy within him. Something so powerful, so
fatal
, that the demon-possessed wedding attendees in their dresses and tuxedos couldn’t help but obey.

They froze where they stood, staring at him.

Seth reached his senses along the cables of infernal power to feel for its origin. It was no surprise that Arawn was holding the puppet strings. What surprised him was the nearness of the demon.

Arawn was in the Autumn Court.

“Wait there,” Seth said, pointing at the possessed ones so they would understand.

He leaped into the courtyard again.

The survivors who had been capable of escaping had cleared out at that point, leaving behind dozens of crushed, motionless dead. There was enough space to breathe, and enough space to see possessed ones swarming in the shadows. He also saw Rylie on the ground near the altar, lying in the one beam of sunlight that could shine through the shattered castle. Someone must have dragged her there for safety’s sake, but her guards were nowhere in sight.

That shapeshifter from the American Gaean Commission, Deirdre Tombs, was standing over her. Just like Seth remembered from her moments of death.

Seth drew his guns.

Neither Deirdre nor Rylie noticed his approach. There was no world outside of the two of them, their golden eyes connected in that sunbeam, safe from Arawn’s followers.

Some part of Seth was horrified by how easily he aimed both barrels at Deirdre Tombs’s s skull.

His fingers tensed.

But then he realized Deirdre’s motions weren’t aggressive. She was reaching toward Rylie, gripping the Alpha’s hand, and helping her stand. Even as Rylie got up on wobbling legs, Seth could see that the wounds inflicted by Myrkheimr’s collapse were healing. Rylie’s cuts and bruises faded to nothing, leaving no sign of what had happened aside from smears of blood.

Deirdre was going to kill Rylie someday.

Not
that
day.

Seth jammed a gun back into his belt, freeing an arm to grab the Alpha. Rylie fell against him.

“Benjamin,” she said.

“Safe,” Seth replied.

The relief in Rylie’s expression was familiar. It had been decades since she’d looked at him like that, but it felt like no time had passed at all. The timelessness of godhood took on new meaning.

But then she said, “Marion.”

He shocked back to the present.

Marion
.

Where was she?

Seth’s eyes swept the area. He didn’t see a hint of her—not so much as a flash of Winter Court white.

While he’d been distracted with Rylie, he had forgotten his intent to protect the bride-to-be. And he hadn’t seen her anywhere.

Rylie pushed away from him, grabbing Deirdre Tombs for support as though they trusted one another as much as Seth and Rylie. “Do what you have to do,” Deirdre said, fixing Seth with her fierce hawk eyes. “I’ve got Rylie.”

He couldn’t trust her. Dammit, he knew for a
fact
that Deirdre was going to shoot Rylie right between the eyebrows.

Rylie knew that too, but she still had an arm looped over Deirdre’s shoulders as she healed.

“Take care of her,” Rylie said.

That was the last encouragement he needed.

He phased.

* * *

A
rawn had been
unsettling to encounter in the depths of the Nether Worlds. Amid the rustic beauty of the Autumn Court, he was downright terrifying.

He wore leather in shades of pink that suggested it had been tanned from no animal. The vest swooped low in the front to expose a skeletal chest not unlike Seth’s, and chains connected his studded collar to his wrists. A domino mask made of scorched iron and barbed wire concealed half of his face. Horrible yet formal.

It seemed that he had dressed up for her wedding.

Marion stood, dress heavy with Nori’s blood. “What have you done?”

“Come and see,” Arawn said, sweeping a hand toward the door behind the throne room.

Marion went to see.

She only took one step into the chamber behind the throne room before she lost the strength to keep moving.

Arawn had brought Hell into the Autumn Court.

What had once been a room for entertaining political guests had been cast in total shadow, its windows bricked, the witchlights replaced with lanterns fueled by bowls of fat. Kennels were positioned around the walls. The white-furred Hounds from Marion’s nightmares snarled inside, barely contained by flimsy bars.

In the middle of it all was the King of the Autumn Court, Rage. He had been chained to the wall and flayed.

He’d clearly been there for a long time. Weeks, maybe. Effluence caked his leather pants. There were plates discarded around him. A bucket that smelled like urine, even at that distance.