Cast in Hellfire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 2) (8 page)

“Why isn’t it?”

“Let me count the ways. She’s got a boyfriend. And she’s nineteen. And I don’t date anymore, period.”

“I didn’t think you were dating,” Charity said. “Whatever is going on with you, it’s a little bit more, um,
intense
than that.”

“Yeah, like I keep thinking about killing her,” Seth said.

Charity blinked. “Oh. Well, you should probably talk about that, then. Before Marion gets the wrong idea.”

“No.
No
. I’m not going to tell a woman that I’m thinking about killing her. That’s creepy as hell. I’m going to figure out how to deal with this on my own—and with your help. That’s all the honesty I need.”

Her eyes went unfocused, as though she were listening to very quiet music. “Here’s your opportunity to be honest right now.”

Someone knocked at their hotel room door an instant later.

Seth didn’t have to check to know who it was.

He’d seen Marion’s face when he’d said that he planned to go to Sheol without her.

Maybe that was the subconscious reason why he’d chosen to take a long shower—not to calm himself, but to wait for her arrival.

He opened the door. Marion stood on the other side with her fist uplifted, as though preparing to knock again. She was dressed for travel into Sheol: long-sleeved blouse, jeans, boots, a headscarf. She even had her unseelie bow slung over her shoulders and a quiver at her waist. Marion looked far too conspicuous to wander around the Empress Hotel, so Nori must have dropped her off in that hallway.

All that effort he’d put into controlling himself—clearing his mind of thoughts and hunger and
need
—vanished in a heartbeat. The sight of her pulse pushing blood underneath the veil of her skin tossed him back to the detention center, licking the blood off of his fingers.

The deaths of angels, immortal as they were, would be sweeter than the deaths of human OPA agents.

Seth was horrified by the thoughts, as foreign to him as though he had some parasitic brain-slug narrating the violent fantasies.

Hell, maybe it
was
a parasitic brain-slug. Weirder things had happened during Genesis.

“Hi,” she said, giving him a dimpled smile. “What are you guys doing?”

Charity gave Seth an expectant look, encouraging him to respond. He cleared his throat. Stuffed his feet into his shoes. “Guess you could say we’re enjoying our luxury amenities for a few last minutes. Nowhere in Sheol has high tea.”

Charity made a scoffing sound.

Marion wasn’t oblivious to the mood. Amusement darkened to suspicion, and hurt. “Is that it, then?” Damn, she must have thought they’d been talking about her. It would have been so much worse if she’d known what Seth was really thinking.

“That’s it,” Seth said.

The mage girl looked between Charity in her bathrobe and Seth, who wasn’t wearing his holster and was putting on his shoes, in the hotel room that they were sharing.

He finally made the connection Marion did.

She wasn’t feeling self-conscious. She thought Seth and Charity were getting dressed together. Never mind that Seth had sworn to spend the rest of his life alone—or that Charity was, despite her frightening vampiric charms, the emotional equivalent of a little sister to Seth.

He squared his shoulders. “Charity’s coming with me to Sheol.”

“The more the merrier,” Marion said brightly. “I’ll be happy for the assistance.”

“You’re not coming,” Seth said. “Did you forget about what happened when I pulled you down to Las Vegas?”

“I’m fine. I’ll be better prepared for it this time.” She smiled at him toothily, and it was more of a challenge for him to defy her than her normal charming grin. “I don’t have anything better to do.”

“Really?” Marion had made no secret about the work to be done in the Winter Court.

She lifted her chin in defiance and crossed her arms over her chest. “Really. Nothing is more important than getting my memories back. Perhaps you don’t need me, but I won’t let you go without my company, so here we are.”

“That’s very
honest
of you,” Charity said, shooting a pointed look at Seth. She dropped the bathrobe. She was fully dressed underneath, wearing a tank top and shorts that would be suitable for Sheol’s warmth. “I think it’ll be good to have Marion help us.”

Because that meant Charity could keep bullying Seth into telling Marion the truth.

Two against one. It wasn’t fair.

“Then let’s go,” he said, holding his hands out.

Charity took the right hand. Marion the left. Even through the gloves that he wore, Seth could feel her pulse, strong and sure. He could hear her heart. See the flush of blood on her throat.

She was watching him so closely, he wondered if she was catching glimpses of his murderous thoughts.

Seth yanked all of them into Sheol before Marion could hear the worst of it.

S
eth leaped into Sheol
. It was always unsettling to teleport somewhere that he hadn’t visited by normal means first. He hated stepping out of the world without being certain where he’d step back in.

Stepping off of the Earth to a place where he knew there would be nothing waiting for him but demons—that was something he dreaded even more.

He appeared in a cramped tunnel. Thankfully, he was still clutching both Marion and Charity.

“Is everyone all right?” Seth asked.

“I think so,” Charity said, patting herself down. Marion nodded silently. She was very pale.

He stepped up to the edge of the tunnel, lifting Dana’s map to compare it to what little he could see of the hive.

Seth’s first impression of Sheol was that it was claustrophobic. The tunnel that they’d appeared in was too short for Marion to walk through without stooping over. She’d have to duck under the doorways.

The fact that there were open windows along the side of the tunnel wasn’t much improvement; all they could see was a honeycomb of other cramped tunnels, along with heavy iron doors, pipework vanishing into the walls, and ooze.

He spotted a row of shops at the end of the tunnel because he could see the end of a sign marking a butcher’s shop. Seth located it on the map. They had appeared exactly where he’d intended, and, just as Dana had promised, a tiny red dot appeared to mark their position.

“Let’s find Arawn,” Seth said.

Marion only took two steps down the tunnel before her knees buckled. She struck the ground on all fours.

She coughed. Seth smelled her blood before he saw it, and the coppery scent was stronger than the metallic tang suspended in Sheol’s air.

The hunger roared through him.

The
need
.

His human instincts were, for the moment, stronger than the inhuman ones. Coughing blood might not have been worrying if the amounts were small. But when he kneeled to help Marion, he saw splatters the size of a fist. It looked like she’d regurgitated coffee grounds.

Internal bleeding.

She turned pained eyes on him. “Seth?” And then those eyes unfocused, rolling into the back of her head.

Marion stiffened. Fell over. The bow bent strangely under her, but she didn’t respond to being jabbed in the side by the stave.

She began to shake.

Seth moved on instinct—making sure the space around her was clear as she seized, ensuring her airway was clear—but there was another instinct that was far too interested in the wavering jitter of her heart. An instinct that told him she was dying. He didn’t even need to hear the raspy, labored intake of her breath to know that.

It was Agent Hanes all over again. He was frozen, knowing that he needed to resuscitate her, but without a clue as to how that should happen.

“I’m going to look for a doctor,” Charity said, grabbing the map. He hadn’t realized he’d dropped it.

She ran off before Seth could tell her to stop. They weren’t going to find a doctor in Sheol other than Seth.

He clutched Marion’s shoulders and focused on teleporting back to Earth, where they had come from. Back to Marion’s home. Back to mage-friendly atmosphere and medical care.

Nothing happened.

He’d never been stuck before. It was like the ability simply wasn’t there anymore.

Charity raced back toward him. “There’s an apothecary down by the butcher. I don’t see anything like a hospital.”

An apothecary. Leave it to demons to have some archaic Dark Ages shit in their new version of Hell when Marion was going toxic. She needed real medical care. Not an
apothecary
.

Seth gathered her into his arms. She was his height in bare feet and continuing to tremble, so it was awkward hefting her. He held her tight. Refused to let go.

Her heart was speeding, but erratic.

I never should have let her come
.

Charity raced down the tunnel, glancing over her shoulder to make sure that Seth was keeping up. “It’s around the corner,” she said.

Marion went limp. The sticky black blood was caking her chin, her chest. Her skin was colorless.

They rounded the corner to see a milling trio of insect-like demons. One clung to the wall. They all looked at Seth with bulging stares that were too human to match their segmented carapaces, as though someone had yanked eyeballs out of a human body and hot-glued them to giant beetles.

The two on the floor skittered forward. They must have smelled the death on Marion, just as Seth did.

“Get out of my way!” he roared.

They clicked to each other. The sounds that came from their mouthparts didn’t resemble human language, but Seth understood it.

It’s them.

Go get the guard.

He was so shocked to understand that he missed a step. “
What
?” He stumbled, clutching Marion tighter to keep from dropping her body.

The demons dispersed, vanishing into burrows in the lava rock. If they’d been hoping to get to the Canope without being spotted, they were out of luck.

A bell tolled over the apothecary’s door when Charity shoved it open. The sound was heavy with power.

The shop was clean but cramped. Shelves had been built out of scrap metal, displaying books, glass jars, a few body parts that might have come from creatures similar to the ones outside.

“We need help!” Charity cried, running toward the back of the shop. It seemed to have been fit into one of those burrows, so it curved toward the back, preventing Seth from seeing through to the end.

He shoved a few boxes off of the counter next to the register, laying Marion’s body where the space had been cleared.

There was no longer a pulse of energy under the semi-translucent skin of her throat. There was blood flowing underneath, but it was too slow to resemble life.

Charity returned moments later. “I found the shopkeeper.”

A woman drifted toward them from behind Charity. At least, Seth thought that it was a woman. Her face was a skinless skull with exposed teeth, hollows where her eyes should have been, and wisps that resembled hair. Her waist was tiny, her legs misty. She dragged a cloak of shadows behind her.

The instant that she spotted Marion, she stopped.

“Mage.” The word slithered through yellowed teeth. The hollows of her eyes turned on Seth. “And…
you
.”

She swept through the shop, shadows billowing around her, and reached for them. She stopped an inch in front of him, shoving her face into Seth’s. Her eye sockets weren’t empty after all. Smoke stirred within their depths, tickling along the upper rims of bone.

“So this is when it began,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Seth’s shoulders were so tense that the muscles could have ripped his spine apart. “Me?”

The door slammed open again. There was no chime of a bell this time.

A demon appeared in the archway. He was tall and tusked, much like Dana’s girlfriend Penny, and he had a long-legged dog on a chain. It snarled, lunging and snapping at Seth’s legs.

“They’re here!” the demon shouted.

And then there were more of them—five, six, a dozen—and they were all jamming into the shop. They looked like a biker gang on Halloween. The leather they wore wasn’t all in shades of black. Some of it was pink, olive, brown. Nothing that looked like it could have come from animals.

They were carrying chains and blades.

Seth jerked his Beretta out of the holster, but he didn’t even know where to begin shooting with that many demons coming toward him.

They encircled him. They reached for Marion.

“Get back!”

He fired one shot directly into the face of the nearest demon. Its head snapped back. It stumbled, smashing into the demon behind it. They fell like dominoes into a shelf. Glass sprayed across the floor.

Seth looked to see if the apothecary would attack him for it—but she had vanished.

In his instant of distraction, two demons grabbed his arms.

“Arawn’s going to be excited to see you,” one of them wheezed down his neck, its breath hot.

Arawn?

Charity grabbed her glasses as though she were about to remove them.

“Wait!” Seth said. “We’ll go peacefully!”

She stared at him. “We will?”

“Yes,” he said, “we will.”

The demons laughed as they dragged them out of the apothecary. They didn’t seem to think that Seth had any choice but to be taken peacefully—not surrounded by so many enemies.

He could have figured out how to take them. It wasn’t like they could kill him. Given infinite time, Seth could have handled infinite demons.

But he wasn’t alone.

One of the demons had scooped Marion off of the table. She hung over its shoulder limply, smelling of blood and death.

Seth would go anywhere they took her. Literally anywhere.

Luckily, the demons were taking them exactly where he wanted to go.

He was carried on a tide of the gang’s bodies, shoved down the halls of the hive, helpless to fight back. That long-legged white dog nipped at Seth’s boots, snarling and drooling. “Give me the word,” Charity said, bumping against his side. “Just tell me when.” The guards weren’t watching her as closely as they should have. They had no clue she was anything strange.

“Do you still have the map?” he asked.

“Yeah, why?”

Because they would need to find somewhere to hide soon. The demons were taking a revenant straight to their leader, Arawn—the guy who had bought Marion’s memories.

Seth didn’t doubt he could steal the Canope. But he didn’t know how to get back to Earth if he couldn’t teleport.

The demons carried their party through so many twisting corners of the hive that Seth lost track of direction. They passed pools of bubbling magma, open fire pits surrounded by shadowy forms, rooms that were webbed over with sticky gray fiber.

Then they arrived at a tunnel that turned vertical at a ninety-degree angle. Seth gaped up at it. Insect demons scrambled up the rock surface as far as he could see—at least a few hundred feet before foggy darkness concealed the upper levels.

“Welcome to Arawn’s tower,” said Seth’s captor.

That was when he noticed there was a door by the tunnel’s juncture. It was surrounded by demons lounging on crates wrapped with barbed wire, forming makeshift barriers.

They kicked the door open and shoved him through.

He found himself in a tattoo parlor.

There was a demon lying in a chair that looked like it belonged in an old-fashioned dentist’s office. The chair was upholstered with red leather and lifted on gears of shiny gold to make the demon’s arm accessible to the man who sat beside it.

That man was holding a tattoo gun, its spiraling cables vanishing into the darkness behind the table. He was etching occult symbols onto the demon’s fragile, papery flesh. The lines tore cuts into its arm and ichor dribbled onto the table.

The demon had the ugly, stretched features of a nightmare. All nightmares looked like they had been sculpted from putty by someone who’d only ever heard humans described in loose terms. It must have been powerful to have substantial human-like form, even if the tattoo gun did shred its skin.

But the nightmare wasn’t the guy in charge.

There was no power resonating from the tattoo artist. None at all. He looked like an ordinary mortal man wearing a tight-fitting laced leather jacket and boots that would make him too tall for the hive. His skin was human brown. His hair was twisted into black dreads.

The fact that Seth felt no power from him at all meant everything.

He was the leader because he was strong enough to hide it.

“Arawn, sir,” said the demon gripping Seth’s shoulder painfully tight. “We’ve got prisoners for you.”

Unsurprisingly, it was the tattoo artist who responded. “I don’t want them.” He wiped ichor off of the nightmare’s arm, exposing an illustration of looping, interlocking circles that radiated dashed lines.

“Then what should we do?”

“Kill them,” he said without looking up.

Marion was limp in the arms of the demon beside Seth. She didn’t react to the threat.

“Okay,” Seth said.

That was the only word Charity needed.

She ripped the glasses off of her face, disabling the glamour spell that made her look human.

The revenant emerged.

For all the horrors of Sheol, there were none quite like Charity. She seized the nearest demon by the throat and smashed his face into the wall. Her serpentine tongue wrapped around another demon’s head, and the texture was so coarse that it stripped the flesh right off of its skull. Her claws gutted a third before the second had time to scream.

The guards exploded into chaos.

“Seth!” Even though he knew Charity well, the sound of his name coming out of a revenant’s maw made his heart skip a beat. She thudded toward him, smashing through the guards effortlessly.

Arawn finally lifted his gaze from the tattoo. He flipped his magnifying lenses onto his forehead to expose eyes that were nothing but pupil—endless, inky black.

First he focused on Charity. Admiration curled his lips into a big smile, and his short-trimmed mustache bent along with his lips. Arawn had jackal features, stretched and mean.

Then he looked at Seth and Marion, and the smile turned into surprise.

“Wait!” he yelled to his guards. “Don’t kill them! And you—get off of my table.”

The nightmare sat up, twisting his arm to look at it. “You’re not done.”

“Get off of my table!” Arawn surged to his feet so quickly that his stool fell over. His jacket flared behind him. The tattoo gun clattered to the floor.

Charity had cleared a path to Seth, breaking at least a half-dozen necks on the way. She plucked Marion away from a demon and shoved the mage into Seth’s arms. “Get out! I’m right behind you!”

Seth gripped Marion to his chest and bolted.

He didn’t even make it to the door. More of Arawn’s gang swarmed in.

Charity cried out. Not a battle shriek, but a shriek of pain.

Arawn had seized her. In her exposed revenant form, he only came up to her chest, but he’d caught the bony spurs of her elbows in both hands. He locked her in place. Grinned up at her with that cruel jackal face.