Cast in Hellfire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 2) (18 page)

Arawn lifted his black eyes slowly to Charity and Seth, wiping the blood off of his bottom lip with the back of his hand. “So,” Arawn said, “what were we talking about before Nyx interrupted us?”

T
he Canope was
a ceramic jar so nondescript that Seth wouldn’t have looked at it twice were it not the most mundane-looking thing in the Temple of Duat. Statues of long-legged dogs were posed on either side of it, staring at the jar with blank-eyed wonder. The air around the Canope buzzed enough to make the wall beyond seem blurry.

The pedestal was the crowning feature of the hypostyle hall, filled by stylized columns fashioned like trees, mountains, and clouds as imagined by a tormented artist. The reliefs on the walls depicted wailing demons. Everything was jagged and black—except for that jar.

Death is Death
, Nyx had said.

Seth could easily imagine some kind of death god ruling from that temple.

The Canope was an obvious mismatch, not only in visual styling, but also in its energy. Seth could smell a faint hint of burning oak and lavender. It was Marion’s distinctive scent.

What the jar held was clearly ethereal in origin, not infernal.

“Is this what you wanted?” Arawn asked, wandering along the edge of the room with visible amusement.

He’d readily led them to the innermost sanctum of the temple. Nyx’s body had barely begun to cool when Arawn had happily shown Seth and Charity the path.

“This is such a trap,” Charity muttered from behind Seth.

Seth didn’t need to be told so many times. It was true.

That didn’t change one damn thing about the situation.

“I’m going to take it,” Seth said.

Arawn yawned. “Oh no, please don’t.”

Seth mounted the stairs leading toward the altar. The air became thicker as he drew closer, as though the Canope were pushing back at him, begging him in the voice of Nyx not to touch it.

It was a trap. He
knew
it was a trap, and he still pushed through, reaching his hands toward the jar.

“Don’t,” Charity whimpered from behind him.

The jar was a hundred miles away yet only inches from his fingertips.

The temple faded and Marion’s memories swirled around Seth. Everything she had forgotten flashed like fireworks as wispy knowledge flitted through his mind. He understood magic on a level that he had never understood before—on a level no witch but Marion could.

For a few seconds, Seth thought he might even understand French.

He pushed through the torrent of memory and kept pushing until his fingertips brushed hardened clay. It was heavy—so very heavy, heavier than anything else he’d tried to move before, as though it were affixed to that exact point in the universe and couldn’t be broken free.

But Seth hadn’t come that far to be stopped.

He wrapped his hands around the body of the jar and pulled.

The universe shifted like it had every time he’d touched Marion’s skin.

Destiny smashed through Duat. He felt it in every atom of his bones and every hair on his body.

Time was changing. Every single world was changing.

Seth hugged the jar to his chest as he fell, tumbling through eons of existence. He saw the garden that Marion had talked about—the one with the big trees and the blue light. He saw a brown-skinned boy with curly hair and a friendly smile. He saw Marion knocking on doors, and he saw those doors opening to reveal worlds Seth hadn’t been able to imagine until that moment.

He fell. He kept falling.

There was no bottom.

He saw the time that Marion had gotten shot in the ribs with an arrow by one of Konig’s guards. He felt her excitement at the wound. Her exhilaration.

He saw Marion soaring through the clouds, riding an ultra-light airplane that glittered with magic, and her laugh of joy swelled within Seth’s chest.

All of the faces that Marion had seen in her life sparked on the edges of Seth’s vision, too. Family members, like Dana and Nori. Politicians who had been subjected to Marion’s teenage whims. Friends from the werewolf sanctuary.

And the Alpha, Rylie Gresham.

Even in Marion’s memories, Rylie was a shy, radiant woman. But there was mistrust in her eyes, which Rylie had never once directed toward Seth.

Rylie didn’t like Marion. And Marion had known that.

It was no secret to Marion that she was widely loathed.

Seth kept falling down the stairs, but he never let go of the Canope, even when it heated to a thousand degrees within his arms and shook so hard that he thought his bones would break.

If the jar shattered, Marion would be lost—all of her memories and the answers that went along with them.

But holding on to it was a struggle. Her magic was endless. She was so much more powerful than he ever could’ve dreamed.

It was easy to see why everyone hated her. That much power had made her a god on Earth, without any of the wisdom one would hope a god to possess. As a mage, Marion had the ability to reach out and change anything that she wanted.

And she had.

She had influenced elections, ordered world leaders to do her bidding, made a sidhe prince fall in love with her.

It was all in the Canope. Every last instant of it.

After a hundred years, Seth slammed into the floor at Arawn’s feet.

Joy filled the demon’s face. Even his black eyes didn’t seem to be quite as flat as they’d been until that moment. “Here comes the sun,” he said softly.

Seth frowned up at him, confused. “What?”

Dogs howled.

Their cries drifted through the temple, echoing off of the walls and rattling throughout Seth’s mind.

“The Hounds are coming,” Arawn said, backing away. “They’re tied to the Canope. You stole it, and they’ll want you dead.” He was almost giddy, his words closer to song than speech. “You’re almost dead, and then…they’ll take me. They’ll let me go to Earth.”

“What have you done?” Charity asked.

Arawn extended his hand toward her. “I’ve cleared my path to sunlight. Join me.”

She shook her head slowly as the yipping of the Hounds grew.

They were coming for Seth. He needed to run.

Seth staggered to his feet, and Arawn stood back to let him get up. The Lord of Sheol didn’t need to attack. A white dog had appeared at the entrance to the hallway, and its eyes were fixed on the Canope within Seth’s arm.

Seth grabbed Charity. “Run!”

They bolted out the back door of the temple. Seth didn’t drop his grip on the revenant’s elbow. He clung to her and focused on Earth, on sunlight and rain and actual, living grass that was touched by the brush of time, and he tried to teleport.

But nothing happened.

He still couldn’t leave Sheol.

“What are you doing?” Charity cried desperately. “We need to leave!”

“I’m trying!”

Seth refocused. If they couldn’t get all the way back to Earth with the Canope, then he could at least teleport to the hive, where the Hounds wouldn’t be able to reach them.

Reality twisted around them.

They disappeared from the temple’s hallway and reappeared a few feet down.

He couldn’t leave Duat.

By the time Seth realized what had happened, the Hounds had appeared at the doorway, only a dozen feet behind them. There were six of them now that he could see.

Charity all but yanked Seth off of his feet. “Don’t stop!”

They raced through the darkness of the temple and broke out above Duat.

The city was no longer empty.

Shadowy demons packed the streets, as though they’d sensed Nyx’s defeat. They came in a thousand forms: some huge, some small, some little more than smoke, some multi-legged and frightening. They crashed toward the temple in a black tide.

They were going to block Seth’s exit from the temple.

“How do we get out?” he asked.

Charity looked around. “That way!”

She wrenched him down another hall, toward the back of the temple where demons had yet to reach.

The Canope jostled in his arms. Some of Marion’s essence hummed out of the jar.

For an instant, Seth was trapped in the mage’s memory, looking through her eyes. In the memory, Marion had been confronting her half-sister, Elise. The woman who had once been known as Godslayer, but had now become God. “I won’t do it,” Marion had said.

Elise had glared at her half-sister. “You want to rethink your answer?”

“No. If a man doesn’t want to be found, it’s for good reason. You disrespect him by refusing to acknowledge his wishes.” Marion had been at peak form, drenched in her own arrogance.

“You can’t side with him,” Elise said. “You don’t even know him. I’m family and you do what I tell you.”

“Just as you always did what Isaac told you?”

Elise had slapped Marion. Hard. Right across the face.

The contact had been physical, though Elise’s form had not. She’d been an imaginary figure standing in a garden that drifted among the stars—god stuff that Seth’s mortal mind couldn’t begin to interpret. But the pain of the slap had been very, very real.

It had only been the beginning.

“You little shit,” Elise had said.

Pain jolted through Seth’s physical body, dragging him out of Marion’s memory. His toe had caught on an uneven tile at the edge of a staircase in Duat. He tripped, stumbled, and rolled down the stairs.

He stopped at the bottom, surrounded by shadowy demons. They receded from him and the Canope he clutched.

No, not from Seth—but from the Hounds that chased him.

Charity descended upon him. “Doctor!”

Seth shoved the Canope into Charity’s arms. “Get it out of Duat. I’ll divert the Hounds.”

She clung to the Canope, despair twisting her features. “But Seth—”

“Run! For the love of God,
run
!”

Charity didn’t need to be told again. She left.

And when Seth ran in the other direction, taking a path perpendicular to the temple’s entrance, the Hounds followed him.

He was the thief. The one that the trap had been set for.

They wanted
him
.

As Nyx had said, that was the whole point.

Seth couldn’t run fast enough like this, not when he could barely teleport more than a few feet at a time. He felt sluggish and weak.

Worse, even he could feel Marion’s memories rattling around inside of him.

“Hit me all you want,” Marion had said with blood trickling down her lip, glaring in defiance at the god known as Elise. “If this Seth Wilder guy doesn’t want you to find him, then I won’t help you look! You’re deities. That doesn’t mean you have to be assholes.”

Elise had said, “If you won’t choose to do it, I can make you.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Marion had said.

And Elise had.

Damn it all, Elise had
forced
Marion to find Seth Wilder.

She’d stripped away Marion’s memories, leaving nothing behind but Seth’s name. And then Elise had given all that she took away to Dana McIntyre along with the instructions to deliver that essence unto Sheol.

The Canope was a trap so much worse than Seth could have imagined, because it had been set by the gods.

For some reason, Elise wanted Seth dead.

He was beyond screwed.

Seth leaped behind an old apartment building, hoping that the path would be narrow enough to keep the Hounds from following. It didn’t work. The Hounds were behind him. They were white ghosts in the darkness, flashes of light.

He couldn’t run as fast as them. They were ideas, and he was only a man.

Somehow, he managed to reach the walls of Duat before they did. The Bronze Gates were still open. Mnemosyne waited on the other side.

He raced between the two layers of walls protecting Duat. The warlock runes hadn’t been reset, so there was nothing to set fire to the Hounds who chased him.

When he reached the grass, he hurled himself down the hill.

Seth struck Mnemosyne with a splash.

The waters of the river were impossibly cold compared to the muggy warmth of the rest of Sheol. They swallowed him whole, flooding his nose and ears, weighing down his clothes. He clamped his jaw shut to make sure he swallowed nothing.

Through the fluctuating surface of the river, he could see the white forms of the Hounds stopping on the bank.

They wouldn’t follow him into the water.

Seth sank and kept on sinking.

Swim, dammit. Swim
.

His feet connected with something firm. He pushed off, pumping his arms in long strokes. He kicked off his shoes as he went. They only weighed him down.

He surfaced long enough to gasp air, and then submerged again.

It had only taken a few moments for Nyx to cross the river in her gondola. Seth felt like he was swimming for days. His muscles burned with exhaustion—which was strange, because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been tired in such a way. The changes that Genesis had forced upon him seemed to have left him preternaturally energized.

Mnemosyne was preternatural too. It was deep and wide and immense in dimensions Seth couldn’t fathom.

His foot struck something solid again, and again. He was too high in the river for it to be the bottom.

Seth looked down.

There was no riverbed. Only bodies layered upon bodies, all of them preserved in the icy water, gaping up at him with eyes rolled back to show the whites.

Their arms drifted above them, as though reaching for Seth.

He’d accidentally kicked one in the head.

Seth’s mouth opened in a silent cry of shock. A bubble escaped him, and water rushed in.

The instant he tasted it, he was struck by memories.

These didn’t originate from Marion’s essence in the Canope—wherever the hell that had ended up. They originated from some murky, forgotten place within Seth, shadowier than the Dead Forest and more remote than Duat.

He remembered standing on the edge of the Pit of Souls. It was a chasm so broad that he couldn’t see the other side and so deep there was no sign of the bottom. If Seth had fallen into it, he’d have had miles to tumble.

Nyx stood beside him in this memory. He knew it was Nyx even though skin covered her skull. She looked like an older woman with stringy gray hair, which had been arranged into an artful bun between her gem-decorated horns.

Death is Death
, Nyx had said.
Arawn can only inherit the Pit of Souls if Death steps down.