Cast in Hellfire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 2) (22 page)

Nori was there, and she stiffened at the sight of Marion. Her eyes darted between Marion and Konig.

“Thank the gods you’re okay,” Nori said hesitantly.

Marion grimaced. “Please don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Thank the gods.”

Nori obviously didn’t understand, but she nodded. “Anything.”

Marion had to lean heavily on Konig as they walked toward the mezzanine’s railing together. It was so quiet in the courtyard. She could hear only the wind.

Her foot caught on a furrow in the icy floor. She nearly tripped. “What happened there?” Marion asked.

“This,” Konig said, resting her against the railing.

The camp below was decimated. Every single bed and tent was shredded, and the wreckage was so severe that it took Marion a moment to realize that not all of it was inorganic.

Those splashes of blue weren’t potions, but the strange, gem-colored blood of unseelie sidhe.

The cloth wasn’t entirely canvas, but clothing.

The refugees were dead.

“No,” Marion whispered.

She staggered down the spiral stairs, bundling the furs around herself so that she wouldn’t trip on them.

“Wait,” Konig said. He hurried to catch up, and he reached Marion just in time, because her knees buckled on the bottommost stairs.

“What happened?” she asked, clinging to his arm. “Where is everyone?”

“There was only one survivor,” he said.

Ymir was sitting on the very bottom step of the stairs, tousled white hair stuck to his forehead with blood. His cheeks and throat had been scratched. He gazed at Marion with haunted, hollow eyes and then dropped his head to his arms again.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He wouldn’t speak. He hugged his legs to his chest, bowed his face to his knees, and rocked in place without saying a word.

Her relief at seeing the little frost giant was quickly overwhelmed by grief and horror.

There was no motion in the camp. Just a lot of dismembered bodies that were getting rapidly covered by snow.

“Cyprian?” Marion whispered, turning her eyes toward Nori at the top of the stairs.

The other half-angel only shook her head.

Marion tried to move out into the camp to search for survivors. She only made it two steps away from the stairs before her legs buckled again. This time, Konig let her fall. The icy cold that seeped through her shredded jeans was only fractionally worse than the cold spreading within her heart.

“Charity tried to save everyone, but she just ended up being taken,” Konig said. His hand rested on her shoulder.

“Who did this?” Marion asked. It shocked her how calm she sounded. The frigidity had entered her soul.

“It was Leliel,” Konig said. “She was infuriated that you missed another meeting, and she decided to retaliate.”

Tears burned in Marion’s eyes. “By killing helpless refugees?”

“I tried to save them, but…there’s only so much I could do against the might of an angel.” Konig swallowed audibly. His eyes shimmered, though it looked like he was blinking back tears of anger, not sadness. “We could have stopped this, Marion.”

He was right. If she hadn’t run into Sheol to chase her memories, she’d have been able to negotiate with the angels.

Marion picked up the remnants of a fur cloak. It was stained with the sparkling blood of sidhe.

“I should never have left,” she whispered. Not the first time, or the second time, or…any time at all.

The Winter Court had needed her. The steward.

She had failed them all.

“Don’t blame yourself for that,” Konig said. “You did what you needed to do to restore your memories. You had to go. But…” He looked away without finishing the sentence, and Marion appreciated his momentary discretion.

He didn’t need to say anything else. Even if Marion hadn’t been there for the meetings, they could have brokered peace another way.

She could have agreed to marry Konig when he’d proposed to her.

“What will happen next?” she asked, letting the cloak fall from her hands.

“We should fix our relationship with the EL,” Konig said. “We need to make it clear that we’re on the same side. If this is what one angel did to Niflheimr, think of what a concerted attack could do to the Autumn Court.”

Marion could imagine it far too clearly.

All those dead bodies. All that blood spilled.

And many more orphaned children, just like Ymir.

Marion was too late to save the refugees, but she could protect Konig’s family, his court, and his kingdom. “Ask me again,” she said, barely able to speak through the tears. She stood up and locked her knees. She wouldn’t fall again. She wouldn’t be weak anymore.

He touched her hand. “Ask you what, princess?”

“Ask me to marry you.”

Konig’s eyes widened. “You were right when you said it shouldn’t be like that. When we marry, we should do it for love.”

Seth’s expression in the Dead Forest swam to the forefront of Marion’s mind.

Chemistry
, he had said.

There was chemistry between them.

But this? This was so much more than whatever she felt for Seth.

“This
is
about love,” Marion said. “Love for the people we can save by going over Leliel’s head and making a real, proper alliance with the angels.”

“Princess…” Konig’s Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed hard. “I wish I had a ring, or—it will just have to be like this, won’t it? Marion Garin, my princess…will you marry me?”

She clutched Konig’s hand, standing among the dead with their blood on her fingers.

She looked at poor little Ymir, alone again in her shattered palace.

And Marion said what she should have said long before.

“Yes.”

S
eth appeared on Earth
.

When he’d fled from Marion’s bedroom in the Winter Court, he hadn’t been aiming for anywhere in particular. His only thought had been to get
away
.

He’d gotten away. So far away that he found himself in desert that was unmistakably Nevadan, most likely outside of Las Vegas, and distant enough that the city’s lights barely lightened the horizon. He was kneeling on packed desert soil and surrounded by sagebrush.

Seth was also bleeding.

“Oh shit,” he groaned, clutching at his stomach.

The bite wounds that the Hounds had inflicted upon him had hurt again. It turned out that he wasn’t immune to pain after all—as long as the pain was the sort that came from one’s intestines flopping out of the abdominal cavity.

He clumsily tried to stuff everything back where it belonged, but it was like trying to pile spaghetti noodles into fishnet. It all kept flopping out again.

I should be dead
.

People didn’t survive these kinds of wounds. Newborns could live through something similar. It was called gastroschisis, when they were born with their internal organs bulging through the navel, and was best resolved by covering the intestines until they naturally reduced into the stomach cavity. But adults, no. Never adults. Not when everything was perforated and dribbling onto the desert.

Seth wasn’t exactly an ordinary adult, though.

The night weighed heavily on him as he wrapped his arms around his body. Large intestine slithered through his fingers like giant earthworms. The warm desert air stung inside of him, biting at places that never should have been exposed, even as the moon bore upon his flesh.

He could still taste Mnemosyne on his tongue, lingering underneath the flavor of Marion’s blood.

That was the worst of it. The fact that he had bowed his head to Marion’s throat and drank from her when she was most vulnerable.

She would never forgive him.

Hell, Seth would never forgive himself.

The more that he struggled against himself, the more wounded he seemed to become. Despite his lucidity, he was still distinctly dying. The skin was peeling away. Blood was gushing out of him.

He pressed a hand to his chest.

His heart wasn’t beating.

“I can’t,” he whispered. He wasn’t sure how that sentence was supposed to end, but those two words summed up all of his feelings about the situation.

I can’t be alive right now.

I can’t be what Marion thinks I am.

I can’t be a god
.

Headlights fell on him, so bright that they blinded. He flung a bloody arm in front of his eyes to shield them.

For a wild instant, he thought that it was the Office of Preternatural Affairs seeking retribution for his attack on their detention center. Las Vegas wasn’t all that far from their facility in the Mojave. There were surely security cameras that had caught sight of his face.

Then the off-road vehicle’s lights angled away, allowing Seth to see that it was covered in leopard print. That wasn’t the OPA’s style.

A door on the side of the ATV opened and shut again. Sagebrush rustled.

Seth fumbled to draw a gun, but his underarm holster had been destroyed by the Hounds, and the Beretta was gone. He was still patting his body in search of a weapon when a woman stepped into the beams of light.

It was a stocky, square-faced woman with spiky hair and stone gauntlets. She was checking the time on her phone.

“
Finally
,” Dana McIntyre said, shoving her cell into her back pocket. “What took you so long?”

Seth gaped at her. “I was—I mean—you know I had been in Sheol. How did you find me?”

“I was told where you'd show up."

"By who?" he asked.

Dana didn't answer the question.

She didn't need to. Seth already knew.

"I have two things to say to you. First thing: you better have brought my map back like you promised. Second thing: Elise says that she hopes you’re done being a little bitch because it’s time for you to go back to the garden. She misses your punk ass. And it’s time for you to be God again.”

M
arion has agreed
to marriage in order further her political goals. But her sacrifice isn't enough to make the new alliance go smoothly. Between Konig's betrayal and a gaean revolt, Marion will be lucky to escape with her life intact, much less save the ethereal species from extermination.

E
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