Cast in Faefire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 3) (8 page)

“Are you comfortable using this as a teaching opportunity?” Rylie asked. She was sitting in the center of the altar with Seth.

“Working on a ‘golem’ is a hell of a lesson, don’t you think?”

Rylie smiled faintly. “It wouldn’t be the strangest lesson we’ve had at the Academy.” She sounded proud, as well she should have. A school of witches, werewolves, and angels—that was likely to be her legacy, even after her legislative impact had faded into the past.

“You can include anyone you like,” Seth said. “I trust you.”

“And Marion too,” Rylie said.

The half-angel was talking to Sinead in the back corner of the room. It obviously wasn’t a comfortable conversation. They stood a good eight feet apart with such guarded body language that they might as well have both been wearing armor. But they
were
talking.

“I trust her, yeah. She’s a good person,” Seth said.

“She’s not good or bad. She’s a person.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve had Marion in my home every summer since she was five years old. I know her too well to say she’s good or trustworthy.”

“Harsh.”

“I’m a parent,” Rylie said. “I’ve learned that sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a child is to be harsh on them.”

There was nothing childish in the way that Marion spoke to Sinead with impassioned fervor. She was gesturing with her hands now, illustrating concepts by etching symbols in the air with her fingertips, which occasionally sparked with glimmering magic.

She looked graver than she had when Seth had met her in his hospital, with all her wide-eyed confusion. Things had happened to her. She’d walked
this
close to death. And soon, she’d be married to an unseelie prince. Marion was young, but far from a kid.

“Then let’s try it that way,” Sinead said loudly enough that everyone in the room could hear it. “Let’s get in the circle.”

The witches gathered. Rylie and Seth got to their feet. “I should get out of the way,” Rylie said. “You’re in good hands.” She brushed his shoulder when she stepped down from the altar.

The sensations he’d been trying to ignore roared to the forefront of his mind—the cable of life that wound through Rylie and connected her to the surrounding world.

There was death in Rylie’s past.

Before Genesis, Rylie had fought beside Elise on the edge of the world. They had conflicted with angels—Leliel among their number—and one of them had stabbed Rylie. She’d been saved by the gods, similar to the way that Seth had been saved. Rylie had kept her mortality, though. Unlike a vampire, she was alive, not undead. That meant death loomed in her future as well as her past. Her tenure as Alpha was bookended by oblivion.

If he wanted, he could know how Rylie was going to die. Again. Permanently, this time.

Seth shoved the sensations away, trying to focus on the here and now. On Marion’s heart-shaped face looming over the heads of the other witches. She looked worried, but when she realized he was watching, she offered a dimpled smile.

“We’ll use a spell similar to the ones that we use to contain a shapeshifter in her human body,” Sinead explained to the adepts ringing Seth. “We’ll need more energy than we use to prevent shifters from shifting, as well as a thread of healing from Flora.”

“Excuse me,” Marion said. “You can prevent shapeshifters from changing forms completely? Without direct control from the Alpha?”

“That’s right,” Sinead said.

There was no smile on Marion’s lips when she looked at Seth now. They were likely thinking the same thing. If preventing shapeshifting was magically possible, then they could save shapeshifter patients from death—patients like Elena Eiderman.

“Why haven’t those spells been adapted for medical application?” Seth asked.

“It’s too difficult for most witches. People would kill themselves trying to attempt it.” Rylie had taken position where the iron-and-stone flooring faded into long grass, which grew all the way to her knees.

“We’d also have to share proprietary sanctuary magic with the public,” Sinead added.

“That’s not fair,” Marion said.

“You’re the one who told me we should keep it a secret,” Rylie said.

Marion’s face fell. “I was?” She must have been wondering if that meant she was responsible for Elena Eiderman’s death.

“Let’s focus,” Sinead said. “Seth, please remove your shirt so we can see what we’re working with.”

He took a bracing breath, seized the hem of his shirt, and lifted it over his head.

Silence strangled the room.

Seth’s decay had gotten worse. It was less grotesque as it advanced because his thorax now looked too inhuman to be properly disturbing, but there was still a hint of the ribcage encasing shadowy memories of the organs he had contained.

Mostly there was light—the glimmer of godly power, which promised to tear away his mortal flesh completely.

When the wound was exposed, he had a harder time shutting off his awareness of the death in the room, too.

One of the witches he didn’t know would suffer a brain aneurysm in five years. She would drop dead where she stood with no warning sign.

Two of the witches were going to die in a car accident driving back from Northgate, the town nearest to the sanctuary. Both of them would be drunk. One would remain in intensive care for eight days before succumbing, whereas the other would be crushed to death when the car flipped. They’d take out the driver of the other car in the collision with them.

Nine of the witches would die of old age, over a span of sixty to ninety years—a good life span for preternaturals of their ilk. That indicated they were strong enough to maintain health with magic, but not so strong that the magic would kill them.

Hundreds of students were near enough in the school that he could simultaneously see their lives, too.

He couldn’t bring himself to look at Marion. He didn’t want to know.

“Do it fast,” Seth said hoarsely, eyes fixed on his chest and the smoky power dribbling over his hips.

Sinead began chanting. When she did, the witches raised their hands, linked their fingers, and began to circle him. The spell shoved against his flesh, forcing him into the mold of a human shape so tight that it hurt.

The pain must have showed on his face.

“Careful,” Rylie called from outside the circle.

“As careful as we ever are,” Sinead said.

The salt ringing the circle of power lifted in a cyclone that whipped at his legs.

Magic squeezed him tighter.

Thread by thread, the fog spilling from Seth’s chest retracted. Flakes of skin and bone that had been drifting from the injury reversed.

Getting knitted back together hurt almost as much as when the Hounds had chewed on him. The witches circled and chanted and his skin was growing back together and it
hurt
.

His knees buckled. He sank to the altar with a groan.

The sense of death only grew along with the magic. Threads of life and death pinwheeled through eternity, pulling Seth along with them.

Another of the witches would die while pregnant because her boyfriend shot her in the face.

Yet another would die in childbirth.

A student in the nearest wing was going to die in a dominance fight between werewolves when he was in his fifties.

Another would die of cancer—cancer! Something that nobody had realized that shapeshifters could even get. It would strike her when she was in her eighties and take twenty years to murder her.

And then there was Rylie.

“No,” Seth groaned aloud as the magic pushed. “
No
.”

He didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want to know.

But there was no avoiding it.

He saw the horrible instant that Rylie would permanently shuffle off of the mortal coil.

The magic ended.

Seth came back to reality and collapsed on the altar.

Sinead was kneeling over him, arms folded, a frown on her bow-shaped lips. “We’ve stopped the degradation.”

He looked down. She was right. His skin was no longer flaking away.

“Is he healed?” Rylie asked from outside the circle.

Sinead was silent, so Seth was the one who had to tell them, “No.”

* * *

S
eth was
silent for a long time after the coven left with Rylie, sitting alone on the altar. Marion waited to approach. She’d give him all the solitude he needed.

They were at an Academy for educating young preternaturals, and he looked like the most magical thing there. He hadn’t pulled his shirt back on, so the wound was still exposed to the air. She caught the occasional glimpse of a heart beating within his ribcage.

Seth must have felt her watching. He patted the altar beside him, silently suggesting that she should sit.

She stood on the ground by his legs, leaned her elbows on the elevated platform, and gazed up at him from below. Marion was tempted to poke her fingers in the gaping wound to find out what that internal fog would feel like. She resisted. It was doubtful Seth would appreciate the intrusion.

“They stopped the degradation,” Seth said. “I can tell I’m not dying anymore. But I’m not fixed.”

“The problem isn’t you. It’s with the nature of healing magic.” Marion had been able to see the threads of magic as they’d been cast. She had seen its power, and its limitations. “To heal, witches restore a body to its current optimal state. Bones can be mended, but old age can’t be fended off. It’s only returning people to a template. You have no template.”

He glared at the lake behind the ritual space. “Guess that’s the bitch about being an avatar instead of a real person.”

Marion had seen the term “avatar” in her journals. She’d tried to talk Elise and James into taking on avatars so that they could rejoin the world. She’d even offered to let them crash on her couch once they inhabited mortal bodies—to no avail.

There were many very good reasons that Elise and James only interacted with the world through Marion. One of the reasons—a big one—was that they simply couldn’t keep track of anyone else in the mortal worlds.

Gods existed outside of traditional time and space. If they took on avatars, they’d be just as likely to appear five hundred years from now as they would the present. They also might not return in a form that anyone recognized.

It was miraculous that Seth had appeared immediately after Genesis in a body that resembled his old one.

“How do you feel otherwise?” Marion asked. “Do you feel all…murderous?”

“You mean, do I want to kill people? Yeah. I still feel all of that.” His head hung between his shoulders. “I know how Rylie dies.”

Marion had never heard that much emotion in his voice before. Not even when he’d been dying.

She studied him in the afternoon light that rimmed his bare biceps, his forehead, the rounded bridge of his nose. Despite the wounds, he still looked very young.

And heartbroken.

This wasn’t just a mortal avatar of a god. This was a man who’d lived a life before other gods interceded—a man who’d lived and lost and loved.

He still loved, in fact. He was clearly in love with Rylie even though she had cheated on him, had a million children with another man, and now looked like an old lady by comparison.

“How does Rylie die?” Marion asked.

Seth ran his hands over his face. “A phoenix shapeshifter kills her. A woman named Deirdre Tombs.”

C
old shock spread over Marion
. “
Deirdre
kills Rylie? Why? When?”

“I don’t know exactly when or why. All I know is that this Deirdre Tombs will be the one who pulls the trigger.”

“Are you sure? I think the two of them are somewhat friends.” Although they may have been the kind of friends where Deirdre was blackmailing Rylie. Perhaps assassination wasn’t so far-fetched.

Seth wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I’m sure.”

After the threats that Deirdre issued in the Winter Court, Marion hadn’t needed another confirmation that she was dangerous, but it was sobering to hear anyway. If Deirdre could beat Rylie, then it seemed unlikely that Marion would defeat her in the vote for Konig’s title as Prince of the Autumn Court.

Perhaps Konig and Jibril hadn’t been wrong to threaten Deirdre with assassination.

“We have to do something to protect Rylie,” Marion said.

“Yeah, we should warn her,” Seth said.

Marion’s thoughts had been so much more murderous that she would have laughed if anything about the situation had been humorous. Even when Seth was becoming a death god, he still wanted to resolve their problems more peacefully than anyone else.

“I heard you’re getting married,” Seth said.

Marion drew her shoulders in until they nearly touched her ears. “At the end of the week. The marriage only makes sense.” She needed him to know. She needed him to
understand
. “Once Konig and I are married, it’ll pull the entire Winter Court under Leliel’s peace treaty with the Autumn Court.”

He was silent.

“It’s my responsibility to protect everyone,” Marion said. “Did you know that Leliel attacked the Winter Court while we were in Sheol? She killed so many of my refugees. Half of the people I’d tried to relocate to Niflheimr…gone.” And those who weren’t gone, like Morrighan and Rhiannon and Ymir, were forced to live in a cemetery among the ghosts of those they’d lost.

“So you’re marrying Konig because she won’t be able to hurt the remaining half.”

“And because the wards on the Winter Court are failing without a sidhe in charge of them. The marriage will allow Konig to bolster the protections on the entire plane.”

“What about the part where you’re marrying because you love Konig?” Seth asked.

“I do love him,” she said. Seth was quiet for so long that Marion’s defensiveness choked her. “You don’t have a problem with Konig, do you?”

“He’s a great fighter,” Seth said. “I can see him being a great king, too.”

“You’ve been avoiding me because of my wedding, though,” Marion said. It wasn’t a question, but another accusation.

He rolled his eyes toward the domed skylight, staring fixedly at the shadowy pattern of branches cast upon the glass. “I’ve stayed away because I don’t want to hurt you, and when we were in Sheol, it was hard to think about anything else.”

“You don’t feel like that now, though. So it’s no longer a factor.”

“No, but I told you things about my feelings, about my thoughts—”

“The fact that we have chemistry.” Her memories of the Dead Forest were hazy, but she did remember the part where Seth admitted that some kind of feelings existed between them.

“You’re getting married.”

“I wasn’t then.”

“You already had a boyfriend. I shouldn’t have been saying things like that.”

“You’d have said anything to get me away from that door,” Marion said. “What’s a little bit of a lie between friends?”

Seth raked a hand over his hair, giving a shaky laugh. “Are we friends? Is that what you’d call us?”

“You and I will need to get along for the years to come, so a friendship would be in our best interests.” Marion thrust her hand toward him. “Friends?”

“Friends,” he agreed. But he still hesitated before shaking.

“In any case, we both understand that our chemistry is due to the fact that you’re a god and I’m the Voice of God. The air is clear.” Clear enough that she could go ahead and marry her sidhe prince boyfriend for reasons that seemed much less important now that she was with Seth again.

“Sure.” He sounded totally unconvincing.

She didn’t feel much more convinced than he was.

“Now that the air is clear, I have to be the one to bear bad news,” Marion said. “I didn’t just lose refugees when Leliel attacked the Winter Court. Charity died too.”

Seth’s eyes widened. “Charity isn’t dead.”

“I’m sorry. I know that you and Charity were very good friends, but—”

“No,” he said again, more firmly than before. “She’s not dead. I told you, I can see everyone’s deaths. Charity’s still out there somewhere. I can feel the threads of her life.”

“Konig told me that Leliel killed her,” Marion said. “He was there. He saw everything.”

“But she’s alive.” Seth sounded as sure of that as Konig had been.

“Then why would Konig have told me that Charity’s dead?”

Seth stood, snagging his t-shirt off of the altar. He tugged it over his head to conceal the gaping magical hole in his chest. “Good question.”

“He was fairly clear about the series of events,” Marion said. “Nori corroborated.”

Either Konig was confused about what had happened in the Winter Court, or Seth was very, very wrong.

The options seemed to disturb Seth, too. “That means Charity has been missing for a month. I thought she’d have stayed with you. I never would have thought… Jesus.”

“I could have told you what I knew—what I thought I knew—if you hadn’t avoided me for a month,” Marion said.

He looked properly ashamed for the first time. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

The door to the ritual space opened. Rylie returned, a golden pendant dangling from one hand. “I have your glamour. Sinead’s confident it will conceal your wound.”

That was the whole reason that Seth had been waiting. Since they hadn’t been able to heal his physical wounds to the point that his body—his avatar—would be indistinguishable than that of any other mortal, he’d planned to hide it.

A man followed Rylie into the ritual space. He was a black man with sympathetic features offsetting the squareness of his jaw and scars plastering one side of his face. He looked like Seth’s father rather than brother.

But that was who he was: Abel Wilder, elder brother by a couple of years. A man whose scarring was the result of a pre-Genesis werewolf attack. He was hideous, a monster even in his human form.

He followed Rylie at a distance and didn’t approach his brother.

Decades of history hung over them so heavily that it was palpable, even to Marion—the only one in the room who hadn’t witnessed what had gone down between them.

From what little Marion knew of Abel, she expected the Alpha werewolf to start throwing punches at the sight of his brother. But Abel only inclined his head in a nod. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Seth echoed as dispassionately.

Their distant civility made Rylie sigh. “Try the charm on, please.”

Seth dropped down from the altar. He took the chain of the glamour from her and donned it.

The change wasn’t as severe as when Charity Ballard wore her glamour. Seth only needed to have a single wound healed and it knitted as Marion watched.

“Cool, huh?” asked Abel.

Marion hadn’t realized that she’d ended up standing next to the Alpha mate until he spoke. She’d have avoided him if she had. “I suppose.”

“The witches here know what they’re doing,” he said. “They’re the best.”

Only then did she realize he was trying to make her jealous.

She studied Seth’s brother. Abel was much taller—nearly six and a half feet, if Marion was any good at such estimations. At least seven inches her superior. Even with his face directed away from her, she made out a sliver of scarring along the bridge of his nose and his chin. If her journals were to be trusted, that scarring would extend all the way to his ear and then down half his chest, as she’d observed during communal swimming time at the lake.

Abel wore the scarring with confidence. He didn’t seem bothered by the idea that Marion would see it.

When she returned her attention to Seth, he showed no sign of injury—certainly no scarring near the scale of his brother’s. The hole in his chest had been replaced by smooth flesh and rippling abdominal muscle, exposed only because Seth lifted the hem of his shirt to look underneath it.

Every bite that the Hounds had left behind was invisible.

“Amazing,” she breathed.

Marion could only assume that Seth had observations as equally non-verbal. Whatever he murmured to Rylie wasn’t audible at that distance.

Seth and Rylie embraced tightly. They held on to one another for a long time.

Much too long.

Marion stole another look at Abel. His arms were folded over his chest, but he didn’t intervene.

“Your wife seems very close to your brother,” she said.

“Mate, not wife. We’re not married,” Abel said. “And yeah, they used to be close.”

“I’m impressed by how copacetic you are about this.” Impressed, frustrated—whatever.

“Seth and Rylie have always belonged to each other,” Abel said. “I’ve just borrowed her for twenty years.”

“Cuckold,” she snarled under her breath.

“What’d you say?”

“Nothing,” Marion said louder—loudly enough that she finally caught Seth’s attention.

He released Rylie and stepped back. Seth let go of Rylie’s hand last, fingers remaining linked until he came to Marion’s side.

It appeared all things were forgiven between them.

Marion was almost disappointed when she and Seth left the altar room without so much as a single punch getting thrown.

As soon as they were alone, Seth said, “Time to get to work.”

“Work? On what?”

“We have to find Charity,” he said, “and your goat-woman. Wanna come?”

Marion checked the time on her phone. An hour. She had an hour before her dress fitting. “Yes, please.”

* * *

T
eleportation remained
the fastest method to reach Las Vegas from the shifter sanctuary, but it took Marion ten minutes to talk Seth into using it rather than borrowing Rylie’s private jet. She couldn’t waste hours on an airplane. He didn’t want to phase Marion and make her sick.

Marion won the argument.

They appeared on the roof of the Allure Tower after that.

When Marion regained awareness of her body, she was already done vomiting. Her skin burned as though she’d been struck by lightning and cooked from the inside out.

Seth was watching from a safe distance. “I told you we should have taken the jet.”

Marion swallowed wetly, wobbling on hands and knees as she tried to stand. Gods, it had even come out of her nose that time. She was so pretty. Amazing that men ever resisted her charms, with all of the projectile nose-vomiting. “I’ll be fine.”

“You weren’t this bad the first time I phased us to Vegas.”

“I think my sensitivity to passing through Sheol is increasing with exposure. But it’s fine. I’m fine.” She plucked a handkerchief out of her jacket’s inner pocket and dabbed at her face. “Thank you for bringing me here. I’ll let you search for Charity now.” She meant it to be dismissive—a goodbye.

Seth followed her to the rooftop door. “I’m not letting you face Dana McIntyre alone. She’s aligned with Elise and James.”

“That’s a problem?”

“They took your memories and ditched you in the forest,” he said. “Who knows what else they might do?”

“The last person to see me before I lost my memory was a goat.” That was why she was taking the OPA database information to Dana for analysis. If anyone could determine who the goat-woman was, it would be the well-connected mercenary triadist. “You and your glamour should go back to Rylie. You can frolic in some lovely, sunny fields together while your numerous nephews and nieces chew on your ankles.”

She stepped through the door and let it swing closed behind her so quickly that Seth had to reopen it to follow. “Are you mad at me?”

She wondered if he used that innocent tone while murmuring into his ex-fiancée’s ear. “I have no reason to be mad at you.”

Dana’s penthouse was at the top of the tower, so Marion reached it quickly from the roof. Seth caught her before she could knock on Dana’s door, turning her gently to face him. “If you want me to go away, just tell me and I’m gone. I promise I don’t have the urge to kill you though. Not right now.”

That was why he thought she was angry? Because she feared he’d drink her blood again?

“There’s nobody I trust with my safety more than you, and I have access to literal knights for protection these days.” Damn it, Marion had a hard time being angry when he looked so regretful. Her thoughts burst from her mouth before she could control herself. “Why have you forgiven Rylie, after everything she did to you?”

“In a few years, after you’ve been married to Konig for a while, you’ll get it.”

“You aren’t married to Rylie. In fact, Abel isn’t married to her either. The two of them
never married
. Doesn’t that seem strange?”

“They’re mated,” Seth said. “Getting married would be redundant.”

“Abel says that Rylie belongs to you.”