Cast in Hellfire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 2) (19 page)

And Seth had said,
Or if Death disappears
.

He shocked out of the strange vision of the Pit of Souls when his body washed against the ground.

Had he reached the opposite shore of Mnemosyne?

Seth barely had enough time to push himself up onto his hands before he realized he’d gone the wrong way. He hadn’t reached the Dead Forest. He hadn’t even left Duat’s hill. He’d only managed to end up a few hundred yards down the river.

He vomited cascades of water out of his stomach, but it was too late to clear the river’s influence from his system. He had already drunk from Mnemosyne—the river of memory, he now recalled—and he was beginning to reach memories he hadn’t realized he had lost.

Death is Death.

Nyx had been truly beautiful before she had withered away.

Seth tried to stand and failed. He needed to run before the Hounds located him again.

You are Death, Seth
.

A projectile slammed into him from behind. Seth was driven face-first into the dry grass.

The Hounds were on him.

He rolled over. Heavy paws weighed against his ribs, his spine. Jaws opened wide to reveal so many teeth.

No matter how hard he swung his fists, no matter how much he kicked his feet, the Hounds didn’t react. They dug in to devour his mortal flesh and strip it from his bones.

Seth was dying, and the gods were satisfied.

N
ori dropped
Marion inside the twin walls of the Bronze Gates.

Neither of them took the transition into the Nether Worlds well. They arrived gasping, lungs burning, flesh boiling.

Marion spent the first several seconds on the ground with her eyes shut, struggling to remember how to breathe. Her chest burned. Inhaling hurt. The lingering remnants of Arawn’s potions continued to race through her veins, but it wasn’t enough. Not anymore.

“Go back,” Marion gasped.

Nori shook her head. Her eyes were watering and a line of blood trickled out of her left nostril. She had angel blood, just as Marion did, and she hadn’t had any of the potion.

She would die within minutes.

“I’m sorry,” Nori said.

She blinked out of Sheol.

Marion forced herself onto her feet, clutching the statuette. It hummed with the power she had borrowed. The magic was reassuring. It was her ticket to return safely to the Winter Court, where she would be able to breathe.

But not until she found Seth.

It took a moment to orient herself and realize that guards were rushing toward Marion’s position. She had materialized not far from the place Konig had taken her. She could see the temple where the Canope had been hidden atop the hill.

She jammed the statuette into her pocket.

A pair of guards reached her. The left one yelled, “Stop!”

“No,” Marion said.

She nocked an arrow quickly, drew the fletchings back to her cheek, and released.

The arrow flew true.

It punched into the left-hand demon’s throat and passed through. He fell, clutching at the new hole underneath his chin. He gurgled as blood dribbled between his fingers.

Before he’d hit the ground, Marion had drawn and fired another arrow.

The second guard dropped.

Still, they kept coming. Marion backed up as she continued to shoot, targeting throats and chests and even foreheads. It was different shooting arrows at living creatures rather than the targets at the Autumn Court. These things were moving and breathing. They wailed when she struck them.

Marion reached for another arrow, but the quiver was empty. She hadn’t brought enough.

Yet more guards were coming.

“Don’t kill her!” said one demon to his companion. “Arawn wants her.”

Marion lifted her hands. “Tell him to get me himself.” Electricity rippled down her arms and lightning arced between her fingertips.

Ethereal magic was dull in the Nether Worlds, where it wasn’t meant to function. But even her dull magic was far brighter than Konig’s. It flowed from her in waves.

She shoved the guards away with lightning and wind. They flew off of their feet. Both of them punched into a building, and the force made it collapse.

Marion whirled on the guards who were coming from another street. There were crowds of demons beyond them, gathered near the temple like maggots on a corpse. She flung lightning at them too. It burned a path up the road, clearing a route to the temple.

It was amazing what magic Marion could perform once she knew she needed to get back to Seth. The desperation was a special kind of motivation. She didn’t require memories when she had driving, powerful
need
.

When another creature ran at her, she prepared more bolts of lightning.

“Marion, wait!”

The demons shouldn’t have known her name.

She dropped her hands, and as the light from her magic dimmed, her eyes adjusted. Something resembling a gangly corpse ran toward her.

“Charity?” Marion asked. “Where’s Seth?”

The revenant unfolded her arms. “I lost him. I’m sorry,” she said as a large ceramic jar was revealed, a plain, clay-colored thing that was shaped like a lidded vase. “Seth gave it to me and told me to run.”

Marion reached for the Canope reflexively, but drew her hands back. The Canope didn’t belong to her. It
was
her. Everything trapped inside those ceramic walls was something that had come out of Marion’s soul. She was entitled to it in the way that she was entitled to her own body.

Yet she feared the way it tugged at her. As soon as her eyes rested on it, Marion knew that the Canope was what had been calling to ever since she’d arrived in Duat.

She wasn’t sure she was ready to become who she used to be.

Charity drew back an inch, keeping Marion from touching the Canope. “Arawn’s Hounds are tied to this thing. They’re chasing Seth because he stole it. I don’t know what they’ll do if you try to take the Canope back.”

“The Hounds are chasing Seth?” Marion’s hesitation evaporated. She yanked the Canope away from Charity. “Where is he?”

She’d barely gotten the words out when the power overwhelmed her.

The magic of the jar was more immense than any other Marion had experienced. Touching it was physically painful.

Marion was inside the jar, outside the jar.

The Canope was everything.

It took a miracle of willpower not to fling the jar away from herself.

Only Dana’s warning—that if the Canope broke, then Marion’s essence would evaporate—kept her gripping it, even when it made her palms feel like they were burning off.

“Seth and I split paths at the temple,” Charity said. “I don’t know where he is now. The Hounds—”

“I’ll find him,” Marion said. She shifted the Canope into one arm so that she could take the statuette out of her pocket. She gave it to Charity. “Use this to go to the Winter Court. Tell Konig and Nori what happened. Tell them…” What? That Marion had left again, chasing the doctor into Sheol? Konig would be thrilled to hear
that
. “I need Konig’s help.”

“How do I use it?” Charity asked, clutching the statuette in both fists.

Marion rested her hands atop Charity’s. She shut her eyes and focused.

Magic jolted between them.

Once Marion opened her eyes again, Charity was gone, and she was alone with the shimmering Canope.

She lifted the jar to study it. The lid was affixed firmly to the top, as though it had been baked into one solid piece. Marion was certain that couldn’t be the case. The Canope was a thing of magic, and there would be a magical way to open it.

There was no time to figure it out at the moment. Marion could battle with magical artifacts and her sudden reluctance to restore her memories later.

Seth needed her.

Marion flung her magic into Duat, searching for his presence. He wasn’t within the Bronze Gates. She kept reaching out with fingers of power. She mentally leaped over the warlock runes between the walls and combed the world beyond.

That was where she felt him. He was on the shore of Mnemosyne.

“I’m coming,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t be able to hear.

Marion raced through the Bronze Gates. She traveled safely between the two doorways, since no one had relaid the incendiary warlock runes since her first arrival, and erupted onto the hillside breathing hard.

Mnemosyne frothed at the edge of the grass. It had been so calm when Marion had last seen it, but now it looked like it was on the brink of flooding.

She couldn’t see Seth anywhere.

Marion was certain she had felt him outside the Bronze Gates.

The sound of dogs yipping echoed from around the corner. Her heart leaped, but the sounds weren’t growing closer—the Hounds weren’t hunting her. They weren’t even on the move.

They’d already caught their prey.

Marion slid down the embankment to see a dozen white Hounds digging into some hapless prey animal, something mutilated and dead. She clutched the Canope tighter to her chest. She took two steps back.

Then one of the dogs shifted, and she saw a sodden foot between its legs. Once she saw it, she instinctively reached out with her magic again, searching for Seth. And she felt him.

A ragged cry ripped from Marion’s chest.

That piece of meat—that raw, bloodied body—was Seth. The doctor. The man who’d saved her a thousand times.

He was dying.

But he wasn’t quite dead. If he had been, Marion wouldn’t have been able to feel him anymore.

“Stop!” Marion cried to the Hounds.

They didn’t hear her, or else they simply didn’t care.

She lifted the Canope above her head. “I told you to
stop
!”

The motion made one of the Hounds look at her briefly before returning its attention to mauling Seth.

Marion didn’t even consider the risks. She didn’t weigh her life against Seth’s, or whether or not her plan would work, or what she would be losing. She didn’t wonder if she’d even be able to survive without her memories.

She hurled the Canope to the ground.

It shattered into a hundred pieces, and kept shattering. A thousand fragments, and then a million, a billion—they sprayed across the grass in diamond shards before dissipating.

The Hounds stopped mauling Seth. They all lifted their heads as one, jaws stained by his blood.

Marion felt the weight of two dozen haunting canine eyes on her.

Charity had warned Marion that the Hounds were tied to the Canope. They had hunted Seth because he’d stolen it. What would they do to the woman who had destroyed the thing?

“Come and get me,” she whispered.

And they did.

S
eth was dying
, and it hurt. Few things had hurt in the last thirteen years.

It hadn’t hurt when he’d gotten a tattoo of a caduceus right above his hipbone. That had been little more than a numb tickling.

It hadn’t hurt when a drunken patient had attacked him, unleashing werewolf power on Seth in the Mercy Hospital emergency department.

It hadn’t even hurt when he’d accidentally rested a hand on an active burner on the stove at home. He hadn’t healed with preternatural speed because there’d been nothing to heal.

Nothing hurt.

That was another of the weird symptoms demonstrating that he’d changed after Genesis, similar to teleportation or the inability to age. Seth didn’t hurt anymore. He didn’t hurt, he didn’t love, he didn’t feel
anything
.

But Arawn’s Hounds ripping him apart hurt. It hurt a lot.

Their teeth shredding into his skin, shattering his bones, gnawing on the meat…

It hurt.

Seth hadn’t been in that much pain in a long time, and he didn’t know how to deal with it anymore. All he could do was scream and scream and scream. He loosed his agony into the universe because it was so much easier than trying to trap it inside.

Teeth scraped against his liver.

Pain
.

Yet there was another level to that pain.

Every pinch of a nerve, every tearing scrap of flesh, felt like it was unlocking something within his skull.

One Hound snapped its head back with a chunk of flesh so large that it included Seth’s bellybutton. He could see into the dog’s brain as though fur and flesh had turned transparent. He knew that the Hound was a living thing, and he knew that it was going to die in exactly seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds.

The Hound’s death loomed like the Genesis void.

Seven minutes and twenty-one seconds.

Tick-tock
.

Another Hound clamped its jaws on one of Seth’s small ribs. With a vicious twist of its head, the bone snapped free of his spine.

That Hound was not due to die for years to come.

It would be killed by an archer. A woman hunting with a bow. The arrow would plunge into its heart, and it would fall among the roots of the Dead Forest, immediately consumed by the hungry fingers of the foliage.

His mind continued to expand as the pain swelled.

Seth was dying, and in his death, he saw every other death in the universe.

The Hounds were nearest, so he saw what would happen to all of them. Every death was ugly. Brutal. Some were within minutes or days, others were within years or even centuries. Regardless of when it would happen, he knew that it
would
happen, as certainly as he knew that the sun would rise on Earth the next morning.

Seth’s mind brushed against a watching soul.

His eyes rolled in his skull. He focused on a human figure standing atop the hill near the Bronze Gates.

She was tall, slender, graceful. She had a heart-shaped face framed by brown curls and eerily bright eyes that might have been mistaken for blue.

It can’t be Marion
.

Seth had told Konig to take her back to the Winter Court, where she would be safe. Where the harsh environment of the Nether Worlds couldn’t damage her purer ethereal system.

Yet he
felt
her. The Hounds stripped his skin away to expose his organs and Seth felt that Marion was real—that she had returned, that she was alive for the moment, although Death was on the horizon of her existence.

She was clutching the Canope against her chest.

“Stop!” she cried, her voice echoing off of grassy planes.

Seth wanted to tell her something similar.

Stop. Leave. Run away
.

The Hounds weren’t interested in her presence, even though Seth was so painfully aware of Marion’s nearness that it overrode the sensation of being eaten. The whole universe could have been coming apart at the seams and he still would have been able to feel Marion there.

The Hounds didn’t care. They had what they wanted.

But what they wanted wasn’t what Seth had expected.

He was dying, yes. But Seth’s death was only the erosion of a mortal form. When he lifted his head an inch to look down at himself, he realized that the dogs were exposing a lot more than anonymous human meat, like the bodies dangling from Arawn’s hooks.

They were exposing Seth’s truth.

His energy.

There was so much more to Seth than a human body. That physical form was no more than a prison of flesh containing his essence, just as the Canope contained Marion.

He wasn’t dying. He was transcending.

That wasn’t what Marion seemed to be seeing. Her beautiful face was twisted with horror.

She lifted the Canope above her head.

Seth opened his mouth to tell her to stop, but he couldn’t speak. One of the Hounds was gnawing on his diaphragm.

Marion hurled the Canope to the ground.

It shattered.

The magic binding the Hounds to the Canope activated again. Not because it had been stolen this time, but because it had been destroyed.

Their protective instinct flared to life. Every single one of those red-eared heads lifted to focus on Marion.

Through his hazy vision, Seth could see Marion’s defiant despair. She was crying. “Come and get me,” she said so softly that her voice barely reached his ears.

No. Don’t. Stop
.

The Hounds leaped for her.

Marion tried to run, to her credit—but she must have known that it wasn’t going to work. She’d seen how quickly the Hounds could move.

She only made it a handful of steps before they descended on her.

For all that being mauled had hurt him, watching them rip Marion apart was even worse.

No…

Seth’s muscles had been pulled apart fiber by fiber, half of his guts swallowed by Arawn’s hounds, with so much blood dribbling into Mnemosyne that his heart shouldn’t have been able to beat. Yet the frailty of his human form didn’t seem to matter. He rolled onto his hands and knees, and the pain receded, growing more distant.

Strength of body had been replaced by strength of soul.

Marion’s screaming shook the trees.

“No,” he said, this time aloud.

He got to his feet. Seth’s organs dangled from the cavity that the Hounds had dug below his breastbone. Shredded large intestine dangled over his right thigh, but it didn’t matter. The waterfalls of blood didn’t matter. The missing spleen didn’t matter.

Marion’s death hovered as her screaming became strangled. A Hound began to drag her body away, teeth digging into her delicate wrist, where once her pulse had beat so strongly.

He stepped forward. One foot after another.

“Get away from her,” he said.

The Hounds reacted to his voice the way they’d reacted to nothing but the Canope, shying away from Marion’s body as he approached. They cowered. Heads tilted, legs bowed, tails tucked. Seth had spent enough time around werewolves to recognize signs of submission.

Seth stretched his hands out the way that he had reached for the Canope to seize it. His fingertips brushed the wiry white fur of the nearest dog.

Its skin peeled open. Jaws split. Eyes burst.

In an instant, it was dead. It hadn’t required a single thought from Seth. Merely the faint desire to save Marion.

The rest of the Hounds fled.

Even the idea of mortality that they represented couldn’t stand up to Death himself.

And then Seth was alone with what remained of Marion.

Even in the confusing, better-than-mortal state that Seth had entered, he was horrified. “Marion,” he said, falling to his knees beside her. The name was uttered in a thousand dimensions, across every world that existed.

Her heart was beating every few seconds now. Her right eye was shut. Her left eye had been torn free.

“No.
No
.” Seth pulled her into his lap, even though his medical training told him that was one of the worst things he could do. One of the Hounds had been gnawing on her spine after she crumpled. It had snapped her neck. Moving her would only cause more damage.

What did that matter now? Seth could see the end all over Marion.

She was on the precipice of oblivion, but regardless of whatever powers Seth was assuming, he couldn’t heal.

Marion was going to die.

He cradled her in his arms—her fragile mortal body, tall and lean, gushing crimson from the wound in her throat—and bowed over her body, pressing his lips to her hair. She smelled like the smoke of distant campfires drifting over the mountains, all tangled up with pine and sun-warmed grapes and lavender.

This was his last chance to smell it.

“Take her soul.”

Seth’s head snapped up. Nyx stood over him, even more translucent than she’d been before. She was little more than the idea of a ghost.

“You’re dead,” Seth said.

“So are you,” Nyx said. “Take her soul to the other side. End her suffering as she once ended the suffering of Elena Eiderman.”

Seth was so wracked with despair that it took him a moment to understand. Mrs. Eiderman had been a patient in Ransom Falls—his last patient. She’d been an old woman dying of lycanthropy. It had been slow and painful until Marion eased the end with her ethereal magic.

The magic had been beautiful, but it had been a distinct ending. Elena Eiderman was gone. And Nyx wanted Seth to end Marion in that same way.

“Help me save her,” he said. “Please.”

“That’s beyond my ken,” Nyx said. “My only power is in death, and even that is a mere shadow of what you do. You have to walk her to the other side.”

Marion’s heart wasn’t beating.

The power lurking within him wanted her to die, but he was more than the infernal forces that had seized him. He was Seth Wilder: the only human man to ever run a werewolf pack; a doctor with an oath to heal, not harm; friend to Marion Garin, a helpless and hopeless innocent.

“I won’t do it,” Seth said.

“Neither of us needs to take action. Once it’s time for her to walk, she’ll walk,” Nyx said gently. “We can only make it easier.”

He intended to ask what Nyx meant by “walk,” since it was clear that Marion wasn’t going anywhere. She was utterly limp in his lap.

But then fog lifted from her chest. It pooled in the air above her nose and mouth.

Her soul was going to walk to the other side.

Nyx touched his shoulder so lightly that he could barely feel the tap of bone upon his injured flesh. Her demon mind connected to his. He saw what it would take to guide someone into death: how simple it was to open pathways between life and oblivion.

“Take her through the Dead Forest,” Nyx said.

Was that all he could do for Marion now? Make it easier to die?

Seth stood with Marion hanging from his arms. At least, some part of him stood—not his shattered body, which remained hugged around Marion’s equally broken form, but his soul tangled with hers. Power reaching for power. Life with life.

He stood and Marion flitted away.

“Wait,” he said.

The ghost of the girl smiled at him with eyes vacant of understanding, and she ran across Mnemosyne without her feet ever contacting water. She disappeared through the trees.

“Take her,” Nyx urged.

When Seth turned to the demon, he was shocked to see that the shrouded, skeletal creature had been replaced by a beautiful woman of human features. She was even more beautiful than he had remembered when they had stood at the edge of the Pit of Souls together. Diamonds studded fleshy cheeks. Plump lips curved into a loving bow. Her black eyes were filled with as much compassion as there was chaos.

Nyx was a black woman with gnarly curls that sprayed in every direction, enhancing a noble jaw, strong shoulders, a tiny waist. Filmy veils flowed from her hips.

She was a Lord of Sheol as much as Arawn, but she was the kind of lord that anyone would have bowed to in relieved submission, knowing that they were in maternal hands. She represented the tragic mirror image of birth. Everyone who was born had to die, and Nyx attended with love.

The demon gestured toward Marion’s retreating form, and said again, “Don’t let her be alone.”

Alarm clawed within Seth. “I won’t let her go at all.”

He tossed aside all that was physical and chased her.

After all, in his glimpses of Marion’s memories whilst he bore the Canope, he had seen the truth.

Elise had wanted Marion to seek out Seth. Why had Seth been hiding from her in the first place? He didn’t know. The particulars were neither relevant nor surprising. Before Genesis, Seth’s relationship with Elise had never been better than fraught.

Marion hadn’t known Seth at the time, but she had defended him from Elise. The Voice of God had tried to protect Seth from the intervention of deities.

Now that Seth was bleeding his life onto the ground of the Dead Forest without actually dying, he thought he could guess as to why. Elise had changed him, and she’d wanted to possess him, like Dr. Frankenstein with her monster.

But Marion had protected Seth—more than once now.

Dammit, she deserved better than death.

Seth raced into the trees.

“Marion!”

There was power behind her name for the first time, and she stopped when she heard him. He’d reached her just in time. The ghost of Marion had somehow found a doorway among the trees, and her hand was already lifted to knock on the frame.

He hadn’t seen the door before, but he recognized it deep within his soul.

“What is it?” Marion asked. Her lips didn’t move, but her eyes never fell from his.

“Don’t go through that door,” Seth said. “That’s the last door you’d ever go through.”

“But this is what I’m meant to do, isn’t it?”

“You’re meant for so much more than this. You aren’t done, goddammit.”

“Why stay?” Her voice cracked. “What remains for me here? I destroyed the Canope, and most of my spirit along with it. My memories are gone. I’ll never know who I was, what I wanted, or the things I’ve done. I’m a ghost of myself in life or death.”

Seth risked a step toward her, and Marion didn’t yet move.