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

She could still see enough to know that Deirdre shifted in a burst of flame. The AGC chair became a firebird—something halfway between heron and hawk, assuming she’d been rolled in kerosene then shot through a bonfire via cannon.

Deirdre seized the bag with the contract in massive talons and vanished into the night, untouched.

“So much for cupcakes,” Marion said faintly.

N
ew York City
, New York—January 2031

A bar called Rock Bottom should have been an ironic hangout for rich kids pretending to be poor, but there was nothing ironic about the lightless dive squeezed into the basement of a bodega. Its dirt-caked windows were tired eyes gazing across cracked sidewalks, while its shadowy interior was its rotten brain filled with the sick thoughts that were its patrons.

Not ironic, but honest. Refreshing in a way. But mostly depressing because Seth Wilder fit the name perfectly.

Sunlight burned a square onto the dusty floor when he opened the door to step inside. Mutters of protest broke through the crowd, like it was strange to open that front door during daytime. The dozens of patrons must have never left.

He walked past the bar and all the pixie liquor, which held no allure for him at the moment. He ignored the naked woman with a tattooed venus mound offering cubes of lethe with blood-caked fingers. He also ignored the gang of vampires blowing clouds of hookah into one another’s faces, but ignoring the vampires was the hardest.

All the lives in the bar demanded his attention. What they were now, with pallid faces and desperate fingers, was only a small part of it. Their entire lives cried out to Seth: from the moment each individual had been birthed from the waters of the womb forward into inevitably grave futures. The grave times were brightest for Seth, where his heart wanted to be.

Everyone should have had their graves in the future.

Vampires didn’t.

They hadn’t been birthed from flesh, but from dirt. Their bloodless bodies craved fuel to power them a few more days into defiant undeath.

The strongest of the undead was waiting for him at a table in the back.

Lucifer was watching the news on an old pre-Genesis CRT television. It teetered on a wobbly table by his side, its power cables running under his feet.

“You’re late.” Lucifer turned down the volume. He was a whip-lean vampire with slicked hair and a cadaverous pallor. He didn’t glisten anything like the powerful sidhe, or even the colorless beauty of a half-incubus Gray.

He was dead, and he’d been dead for years.

Lucifer had acted as speaker for the vampires during the recent preternatural summit held at the United Nations. How he had ended up speaker was hard to pinpoint. Vampires were very loosely affiliated. More of them aligned with Deirdre Tombs’s American Gaean Commission than Lucifer’s people. Yet he’d had enough authority to show up at the summit.

Somehow, Lucifer was more than the usual petty drug lord feeding off the worst of preternatural society. And Seth needed him.

Lucifer gestured to the chair opposite his. “Hold tight. I’ll be with you in a second.” He was watching the news while January Lazar, celebrity newscaster who’d made her fame profiling important preternaturals, reported on increasing demonic possessions nationwide.

“You know anything about what’s happening with that?” Seth asked.

“I wouldn’t tell you for free if I did.” Lucifer’s crimson eyes finally weighed on him. “Don’t tell me what you want. Let me guess. I’m sure you’re not here for my drugs.”

“That’s right. I’m not.”

“Shut up, I told you not to tell me.” Lucifer drummed his fingers on his thigh. “You’re a nice guy, so you don’t want me to knock someone off. You don’t want power because you’ve clearly got enough of that. I’ve only got two guesses: either you want me to hide you, or you’re looking for someone.”

“Can I tell you now?” Seth asked. Lucifer nodded. “I need black-market magic. Something that will keep me alive.”

“Shoot, I thought I was good at guessing.” The vampire reclined in his chair, arms folded behind his head. “You’re coming to a dead man for eternal life even though you already have eternal youth. What are you?”

Seth’s eyes flicked around the bar. There were no familiar faces—no Dana McIntyre—but that didn’t mean there were no triadists who might recognize him for what he was. Lives and deaths whirled around him in dizzying variety.

“I’m human,” Seth said.

“Not exactly.”

“No,” he admitted reluctantly. “Not exactly. I’m human enough that I can die and I don’t want that to happen.”

“What walks on two legs, is ‘human enough’ to die, but eternally young?”

“How do you know about the…” Seth lowered his voice. “The eternal youth.”

“I’m a vampire,” Lucifer said. “I know what it looks like on a man. So tell me, old guy—what have you got hiding under that shirt of yours?”

Seth glanced down at his shirt. There was nothing to see except cotton. What had given away his injury? Did vampires have acute smell like werewolves did? “All I’m packing is chest stubble. I missed my last appointment with the Bic.”

“Show me.”

“Screw you.”

“Show me or you’re leaving here with nothing.”

“I doubt you have anything.”

“I do,” Lucifer said. “I’ve got the secret to life. You won’t find out unless you flash me.”

Seth clenched his jaw, grabbed the hem of his shirt, and lifted.

He didn’t look down at himself again. He’d spent enough time staring through a motel’s cracked bathroom mirror to have memorized the mire of glistening organs exposed by his chest wound. He’d been torn apart by Arawn’s Hounds in Sheol and wasn’t healing. It wasn’t like the time he’d been stabbed by a sidhe assassin protecting Marion. He’d walked it off after a touch of TLC and a bottle of whiskey.

This wound was permanent. Worse, it had been degrading over the last few weeks.

The cage of Seth’s tooth-scraped ribs held light captive, tangled up with his intestines. The pulse of his heart forced unnatural energy like a lightning-ripped storm through his body. Every beat made his skin flake a little more.

Seth wasn’t dying from the wound. He was dying from whatever was trapped inside of his mortal body. If what followed his death was what Dana McIntyre claimed, he wasn’t ready to face it.

“Happy?” Seth asked, dropping the shirt.

“That’s not a word in my vocabulary,” Lucifer said. “Let’s talk immortality.”

“Vampires weren’t around before Genesis. Staying twenty-five years old for fifteen years doesn’t make you an expert in immortality.”

“There were immortals before Genesis. Eons-old angels and demons.” Lucifer’s dark eyes gleamed. “There were gods, too.”

“Are you a triadist?”

“I know a few of them.”

“Are any of them named Dana McIntyre or Oliver Machado?” Either would have meant Seth needed to beat a quick exit.

The pause before Lucifer responded meant that he had no clue who those people were. “I don’t divulge the names of contacts.”

“People divulge your name,” Seth said. “You get talked about a lot in bad circles. You’re supposed to work the worst kind of miracles. If anyone can make someone—something—like me stay alive, you’ll know about it.”

Lucifer lifted a finger to quiet him. “Wait.” The news had come back from commercial break. January Lazar was talking again.

“I don’t have all day.”

“We just established that you have eternity,” Lucifer said. “
Wait
.” The vampire stared intently at the news anchor. There were no subtitles, and the audio was quiet enough that Seth couldn’t hear it, but Lucifer must have been getting something out of it.

Or else he just liked annoying Seth.

Without shifting his eyes from the television, Lucifer said, “You’re a demon. I feel it all over you.”

“I’m not,” Seth said.

“Infernal. You’re drenched in infernal energy. Preternaturals, we’re all a family, even between factions—some of us more closely related than others. Shifters are closer to sidhe. Sidhe are closer to angels. And vampires are closer to demons. ”

The door to the bar opened, allowing harsh daylight to spill through Rock Bottom. Protesting voices lifted in shouts again.

Someone had come inside. It was impossible to see who it was at that distance. Seth doubted it was Dana McIntyre, but the mere possibility of it had him on edge. “Get to the point.”

“Vampires are just this side of infernal,” Lucifer reiterated. “You’ll need to feed the way we do if you want to heal your body. I can hook you up with blood.”

The revulsion was immediate and overwhelming. “No.”

He’d spent years fighting to ignore his visceral reaction to spilled blood. Working as a doctor, the battle had been relentless—what a revenant friend of his called living in the eye of the storm. Always an inch from getting ripped apart by hurricane winds.

Seth had strayed an inch too far from the eye of the storm in Sheol. He’d fed on Marion and still remembered the sweetness of death in her blood.

He would never do that again.

“Blood or meat, pick your poison,” Lucifer said. “Demons tend to go for meat over blood because it’s more substantial, but blood should do the trick. Bonus: it’s less likely to be fatal to your victims.”

“
No
,” Seth said again. “I can’t do either.”

“You can if you want to fix…that.” He flicked his fingers at Seth’s shirt.

The cloth was loose enough that it didn’t suck into the cavity of Seth’s body. But it fell over his exposed ribs when he wasn’t careful. And he wasn’t being careful now. When Seth finally dared to look down, he could see the outline of bones. “There has to be another option.”

“Blood can be extracted without murder. If that doesn’t work—if you need meat—then I can help you with that, too. Vampires aren’t bad people. I can tell you what we do to target the dregs of society nobody will miss.”

The dregs of society that Seth had healed in his hospital.

There was no such thing as a person nobody would miss. Everyone mattered. Everyone was important.

“Thanks for your time,” Seth said, standing up.

Lucifer watched him stand with obvious irritation. “You wanted a deal with the devil.”

“I’ve made such deals before,” he said. “I always regretted it.”

“The devil’s your last choice.”

“Second to last.” If he couldn’t bring himself to deal with vampires, he could still turn to an angel for help. A specific half-angel who he would have preferred not to risk seeing again, even though he desperately missed her.

“There’s one other thing we could do for each other. If you’re ‘human enough,’ I can take the ‘enough’ part away.” Lucifer tongued his incisors, which weren’t much sharper than an ordinary man’s. “I’ll make you a vampire.”

The idea was only two degrees less revolting than being a demon. But vampires could survive on synthetic blood, and Seth couldn’t at the moment—he’d already tried that.

He sat back down. “All right. We can talk.”

“You need to do something for me before I’ll change you,” Lucifer said.

“I told you, no deals with the devil. If you’re attaching strings then I’ll just ask another vampire to do it.” Someone like Charity Ballard, a revenant who would happily help Seth. He’d been avoiding her for as long as he’d avoided Marion, but it would be easy enough to track the thread of her life once he was ready.

“I’m the only devil you’ll find who can do this. Few vampires have the strength to make others.” Lucifer smirked, as if he knew what Seth was thinking. “And not all breeds can change others.”

Most likely revenants among them.

Seth’s eyebrows lowered. “All right. What would you want?”

“Root access to the darknet servers. They’re in the Winter Court and I saw you at the summit with the steward. You two are clearly intimate. Have her give you access.”

Marion probably didn’t know how to get in, either, but it would be an excuse to visit with her, and he wanted to visit. Badly. It was a drive both alluring and dangerous. “So you want root access. That means a login that lets you administrate the servers. Why?”

“I’m a businessman and all the good business happens on the darknet. I want to be in charge of that.”

“I’ll think about it.” Seth would have to think a lot longer and harder about whether he wanted to be a vampire than the darknet issue, though.

Before he could leave, a familiar face on Lucifer’s television caught his attention.

The news stories had switched over. Now January Lazar was talking about a young woman with heart-shaped features and hair the same shade as soil after rainfall. She was dusky in coloring, her flesh a shade too dark to be Mediterranean olive, her eyebrows strong and straight and almost angry-looking. That was what made the contrast of her white-blue eyes so shocking.

Marion Garin stood beside a second familiar face, which Seth found less appealing. Prince ErlKonig of the Autumn Court had an especially irritating smile in the footage that January Lazar was talking over. The two of them were in Hollywood, walking from a limousine to a theater.

Marion had a way of moving that made it look like she had wings, even though no such thing was visible at her back.

“What’s happening there?” Seth asked.

“The Voice of God has confirmed that she’s getting married to the unseelie Prince of the Autumn Court in a week,” Lucifer said. “They sent out invitations a few days ago and someone leaked it to the news.”

Married
.

For a dizzying moment, Seth wasn’t surrounded by vampires in Rock Bottom anymore.

He was a younger man waiting at the altar for a beautiful blond werewolf Alpha. She had been pregnant at the time. Seth had believed that the babies, the twins, belonged to him.

It had been a snowy day when he’d been due to marry Rylie Gresham. And it hadn’t happened. Enemies had attacked their wedding before vows could be exchanged, blood had been spilled across the snow, and the nuptials had been interrupted.

Then he had learned that the babies weren’t even his.

Everything had fallen apart after that.

Twenty years later, he was alone. Rylie was still running the largest werewolf pack in the world alongside Seth’s brother, Abel—the father of her children. Her werewolf Alpha mate.

It still hurt.

Seth had promised himself never to deal with that hurt again.

He had sworn to be forever alone with that pain, letting old wounds heal, forgotten, while he dealt with a life beyond love.

That pain had nothing to do with Marion’s wedding to Konig.