Cast in Faefire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 3) (16 page)

“Trouble? Other than being openly defied by Deirdre Tombs, finding your stupid sister trying to blow up my ballroom, and learning that you’re screwing a god? What kind of trouble would there be?”

She couldn’t talk to him when he was being like that. There was no point. She braced herself and said, “I think you’ve had enough wine now. Why don’t you crawl into bed?”

“Alone?” He barked a laugh. “Why bother? Do you get off on seeing me suffer?”

He hurled the goblet to the floor with a loud clang. Marion leaped back.

“My mother is overbearing, but she loves me,” he said. “You’re not overbearing. And I think you don’t love me.”

“You know that isn’t true,” she said.

“Then why the fuck did Heather see Seth on top of you? That’s why it’s so easy for you to hold out on me. You’re getting plenty of dick on the side.”

The blood drained from her face. “I’m not. I would never.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Konig said. “Heather saw you.”

“She didn’t see what you think,” she said.

The last word was barely out of her mouth before he swung.

The next thing she knew, Marion was on the floor, dazed, fingertips brushing a hot bruise on her cheekbone.

He had backhanded her.

The man she was about to marry…he had struck her.

Confusion and denial were too strong to leave room for anything else. Certainly there was no room for thoughts about self-defense, because the idea she’d have to defend herself against Konig at all was insane.

Her friend, her ally, her lover—someone she was utterly safe with.

He’d hurt her.

Konig seemed to realize he’d crossed a line. All the fury that had drenched him in earlier moments was replaced by shock.

“Marion,” he said, dropping beside her.

She flinched away. “Don’t.”

His cold fingers brushed along her wounded cheek. “You see what you do to me? You see how much I need you, and how it hurts me when you do this?”

“Hurts
you
?” She was the one who’d gotten slapped.

“If you hadn’t been so gods-damned intimate with Seth—and if you weren’t holding out on me…” His hands tightened on her shoulders. “I love you too much, princess. You can’t treat me like this after everything I’ve done for you. I’m risking my life for you. My title.
Everything
.”

For all that she should have feared him, the heartache in his words only made her want to cling to him. Hurt and comfort, all encapsulated in one man.

Marion wrapped her arms around his ribcage, tucking her head under his chin. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? You’re
sorry
? You should be a hell of a lot more than sorry, princess. It’s your selfishness that left Niflheimr open to Leliel’s attack in the first place. Now your selfishness is going to make us lose the vote. Don’t be
sorry
. Be better!” Konig shoved her off of him. In his absence, she was colder on the inside than the Winter Court.

“I’m trying to do better. I am.”

“I’m afraid your best just might not be good enough.”

She stood on wavering legs. She’d fallen more from shock than because he’d hit her too hard, but she still felt the ripples of the impact through her entire body. “What more could I do, Konig? You keep talking about what you’ve given up, but what about me?”

He laughed. “Dana was right. It’s always about you.”

“I’m giving up my life for this! I wouldn’t have even agreed to marry you after all you’ve done if I weren’t!”

Konig stopped moving.

He turned slowly, and his look was as hard as another slap.

“Amazing,” he said. “Your best will never be good enough for the world, and it seems like my love will never be good enough for you, either.”

“Konig—”

“Are you in love with Seth?” he interrupted.

“No,” she said reflexively, without thinking about it. If there was anything she knew at this point, it was that confessing complicated feelings for anyone but Konig would do nothing but get her into trouble.

“So you’ve been sneaking around with him because you’re a slut.”

Her eyes widened. “No! Gods, Konig, I didn’t even think words like that were part of a sidhe’s vocabulary. You have orgies rather than shaking hands with people to say hello. Slut? I mean,
really
.”

“But you’re no sidhe. Sometimes I doubt you’re an angel.” His hand came out of his pocket. He was holding a golden cuff—the truth bracelet that Marion had made for the summit. “Are you in love with Seth? Are you lying to me?”

She stepped backwards. “I told you already.”

“How am I supposed to trust you?”

Konig flashed forward, using the power of the sidhe to leap within their worlds to slam into her. Her back struck the wall.

She slipped. Fell to the floor.

He pinned her down with his weight, fingers shackling her arm. He shoved the bracelet over Marion’s hand. The magic sank into her immediately.

“Are you in love with him, or are you just some whore?” It was horrifying to hear those words coming from Konig’s face—his perfect, princely sidhe face, which Marion had so often gazed at adoringly. But while he spoke venom, he looked broken. Vulnerable. Afraid.

She wouldn’t have responded if she’d had any choice.

“I love him,” Marion said, unable to help it. “He’s my friend, Konig. More than my friend. He’s my God.”

The silence weighed heavily on them.

He pushed back to sit on his knees, leaving her pinned underneath him even though he no longer held her arms. Marion ripped off the bracelet and tossed it across the room. It vanished underneath her couch.

Konig got up.

Marion did, too.

They stared at each other from opposite sides of the couch.

“You’re lucky I’m still willing to even try to marry you after this,” Konig finally said softly. “I’ve always known you were selfish, but I never realized how cruel you could be.”

He turned to leave.

She watched him going with sickness gnawing at her gut—a desperate need to fix things, to make him forgive her.

“Please wait,” she said.

“Don’t speak to me!” Konig roared with shocking, overwhelming fury, spinning on her again. He flung a hand out as his magic exploded.

They were too distant for him to strike her physically again. But unseelie energy knew no limits in the Autumn Court. It connected with her flesh even as it electrified her innards, hurling her off of her feet so that she smashed into the bookshelf beside her balcony door.

Marion fell in a rain of books and trinkets and burning tears.

She knew nothing but pain.

When the pain subsided enough for her to lift her head, Konig was gone.

B
y the time
Seth left Rylie’s bedroom, the other wedding attendees had relocated to the Autumn Court. Only a few Raven Knights remained to guard the palace, and in Marion’s absence, the wards were weak enough that Seth could go anywhere he wanted.

The Onyx Queen’s wedding decorations were also wearing down quickly. The Winter Court wanted to revert to its barren nature, untainted by the magic of the Autumn Court, and everything green had already been encased in ice. It wouldn’t be long before it was gone entirely, absorbed by the glassy walls or torn down by harsh wind.

Seth didn’t come across a single living soul on his way into the depths of Niflheimr, though he knew there should have been some around. A few refugees Marion had managed to save; a handful of Raven Knights.

And Dana McIntyre, far below ground.

It was trivial to phase himself beyond the sidhe guarding her. Nobody saw him going into the cell where Dana McIntyre was being kept.

She was napping on the floor, but her eyes popped open the instant he appeared at her side.

“The hell do you want?” she asked.

“I want the same thing you do,” Seth said. “I want the darknet. I know what I need to get from it. Question is, what do you want out of it? Are you after the weapon?”

“I’m after all kinds of information. The darknet servers have private information on people you don’t even know exist, who are running a lot of shit in the background of our world. I want to get up in that.”

Seth wondered how she’d react if she knew that she wanted the servers for the same reason that Lucifer did. Dana hunted vampires—getting compared to one couldn’t have been a compliment. “So you’re not trying to find the ethereal plane that balefire comes from.”

A smile spread across her round face. “Don’t tell me
you
want balefire.”

“I want to know how to get past it,” Seth said. “How to control it, how to destroy it. Would that be on the darknet?”

She stood up slowly. “Maybe.”

“Where did you expect to find the servers?”

“Free me and I’ll show you,” Dana said.

Seth grabbed her elbow and phased both of them out.

He took a quick step back when they both reappeared in the courtyard above, far from the guards keeping the dungeon on lockdown. He expected Dana to attack him.

She only started walking.

Dana surprised him a second time by starting to talk while she headed deeper into the halls of Niflheimr. “I looked into the goat-woman thing for Marion.”

“You said you didn’t want to.”

“I’m a sucker.” She shrugged. “Actually, Penny’s a sucker. She thinks I need to be nice to Marion. Anyway. What I found doesn’t make any sense. There’re not a lot of goat-type critters running around these days. None of the ones that are still alive could present any threat to Marion.”

“What about dead ones?”

“There was one that hasn’t been seen since Genesis,” Dana said. “A librarian from Hell.”

Seth’s eyebrows lifted. “Hell librarian?”

“Laugh it up, but this librarian throws up all kinds of red flags. Her information’s been stripped from every the database I know how to access. I only found out she exists because pre-Genesis diaries from Hell mention her. Her name’s Onoskelis.”

“We’ll have to see if that rings any bells for Marion,” Seth said.

“It won’t. Bells wouldn’t ring bells for Marion. She’s not there anymore.” Dana tapped her temple.

“Don’t talk about her like that.”

“You might think this braindead Marion is cute, and that’s fine, but it’s not Marion. Don’t try to dispute me on this shit. You don’t know my sister like I do.”

“You’ve given up on her, so you can’t know her that well.”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Dana said.

She was taking Seth down a familiar hallway—the same one where Marion had led him during the engagement party.

Dana stopped at the corner and peered around the side. “Shit. The Hardwicks’ apartment is being guarded by Raven Knights.”

That was easy enough to get past.

Seth grabbed her elbow and phased again.

They reappeared in the rooms past the guards. He’d taken care to materialize in the bathroom, just to be sure that they wouldn’t get caught, but nobody was inside the room.

“The servers are in here?” Seth asked, stepping out of the bathroom.

Dana shoved past him. “The entrance to the server room should be. I’ve got a lot of triadist friends, and one of them told me that Pierce Hardwick had a secret passage.”

She flung the pantry door open. There were still old utensils scattered across the dusty floor from when Marion had tripped. It had been too dark for Seth to see that one of the floor tiles was discolored in the back of the pantry, and set a few centimeters higher than the others.

No wonder Marion had tripped. She was ordinarily so graceful, it was hard to imagine she could have stumbled over her own feet.

Dana took a stone key out of a pouch on her belt and tapped it against the tile.

Unseelie magic flared. The tile melted away, revealing a tunnel underneath.

“Ta-da,” she said. “You coming?”

Seth felt Lucifer’s USB drive in his pants pocket. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

Dana dropped down first, and Seth followed second. It wasn’t a long drop. The hallway underneath was darker and chillier than anywhere else he’d seen in the palace. It also branched off in three directions.

“This way.” She led him down the left-hand hall. It was so long that it vanished into darkness. “Five miles that way, under the ocean, behind a big-ass door. That’s where the servers are kept.”

“Do you have a map?”

Dana pulled one out. It wasn’t magical, like the one she’d loaned him for use in Sheol, but hand-drawn. It only showed the sub-level that they stood on. That was probably because the rest of Niflheimr was too complex to be mapped properly.

“Here’s where we are.” She pointed at one end. “And here’s where the tunnel is.”

Seth could visualize it, but he really hated teleporting places he’d never been before.

“All right.” He took a bracing breath. “Let’s do this.”

He grabbed Dana’s elbow a third time.

They phased.

And they reappeared without ground under their feet.

Seth didn’t even have an instant to swear out loud before they plunged into black water so frigid that it should have been solid. But it wasn’t. It consumed their bodies instantly.

Water flooded his nose and throat. It flooded the wound on his belly, exposed underneath the glamour, and blinded him with cold.

Dana’s arm slipped out of his hand. The bubbles of her breath escaping her lungs slid past him, silver in the darkness.

Wearing stone armor made her drop fast.

Seth propelled himself toward her, feet kicking and arms outstretched. He had never tried to phase underwater before. He didn’t know if attempting it would displace the water or if it would fill him—maybe even finish killing him.

He could only swim. Dana sank faster than he did, and the black water seemed bottomless.

She faded out of sight.

Seth kept swimming, kept pushing, even when his lungs strained for air. He couldn’t give up. He couldn’t tell Marion her sister was dead.

And then the water churned around him.

Dana reappeared, shoved upward by frothing sidhe magic. She caught him in hands gauntleted by stone, nearly wrenching the arms out of his sockets by the speed of her rise.

They erupted on the surface together. Their gasps for air echoed into the lightless cavern.

“I’m sorry,” Seth panted, treading water. Water plastered his shirt to his shoulders. His booted feet were sluggish. “I must have missed. The map—I’m bad with maps.”

“You didn’t miss.” Dana sounded a hell of a lot calmer than he was. “Grab my belt and hold on.” He did as instructed. She reengaged the sidhe magic, using it to push them across the surface of the water. “That five-mile tunnel was flooded halfway down. I’d planned to use these spells to get me to the surface before I ran out of air.”

“You knew it was flooded? And you didn’t tell me?”

“You didn’t ask.” Dana got them to a narrow stone platform and hauled herself out. She offered a hand to help Seth too, but he escaped on his own.

He lifted the hem of his shirt to check the wound. Water seemed to be seeping out of his skin, but he couldn’t see any sign of additional fraying around the glamour.

“Your six pack is still intact,” Dana said dryly, tossing a witchlight onto the ground between them. It lit up the disc of the floor they stood on—barely twelve feet in diameter—and a single computer workstation at its center. The light illuminated Dana from underneath her chin, casting long shadows onto her forehead that made her look downright demonic.

“This is the server?” Seth asked. The computer didn’t look like it could host websites that caused as much trouble as those on the darknet.

She dropped into the chair and cracked her knuckles before resting her fingers on the keyboard. “It’s just the access point.” It looked like a normal computer, as far as Seth could tell—aside from its position under the ocean in the Winter Court. The monitor was old, probably almost as old as Genesis, and its cables led into the stone under their feet.

Dana pressed the power button.

Lights arced up the walls around them, which Seth hadn’t been able to see until that moment. The cavern was wider than a football field and shaped like they were inside of an egg.

The walls were made entirely of servers.

“Oh my God,” Seth said, turning where he stood. He gazed up at the flashing lights in shock. He’d never seen so much equipment before. It hummed like a snoring giant.

A login screen blinked to life on the monitor. Dana started typing.

“My wife’s a computer nerd, so she just needs one special account on here to download all the data that’s ever touched the servers,” she explained. “And the security on the darknet systems isn’t as good once you’re in here because nobody should be able to get in, between the magical and physical barriers.”

“Wait,” Seth said.

He took the USB drive out of his pocket. It didn’t look damaged, but he shook all the water out of it before plugging it into a port on the side of the monitor.

“What are you doing?” Dana asked.

A window popped up on the screen. Text scrolled quickly by. Seth didn’t understand it, but he assumed it was Lucifer’s program going to work. “I don’t just want information on balefire. I promised a vampire that I’d get him access to the servers in exchange for getting turned.”

“Turned? Into a
vampire
?” Disgust curled her upper lip. “Why in the hells would you want to do that?”

“I can’t die,” Seth said, patting his chest.

“Fuck that.” She reached for the USB drive to unplug it, but Seth caught her wrist.

“Please,” he said. “I need this.”

“You don’t want to be one of the bloodless. I hunt them for a reason. Being undead is miserable! And if you turn your avatar into some corpse, you might never die, and never go back to being God.”

“That’s kind of the point.”

The chair’s legs squealed as Dana pushed it back, standing up to stare Seth in the eye. “I can’t believe you’d rather be a vampire than a god.”

“If I become a vampire, I’d get to keep the life I’ve built,” Seth said. “My life…and Marion.”

Doubt flickered through Dana’s eyes. “It’s like that, huh?”

“She needs me right now. That’s all I’m saying.”

“You’re fucking stupid,” she said matter-of-factly. But she sat back down and didn’t try to pull out the thumb drive. “Extra stupid because I can’t find nothing about balefire while this program is running, and I can’t give Penny a login either. Great job, Einstein.”

“You can ask Lucifer for a login,” Seth said. He doubted that Lucifer would give Dana anything, given her propensity for vampire slaying.

She seemed to take that as a challenge, though. Mirth smoldered in her eyes. “Sure. I can ‘ask.’” Dana leaned back in the chair, folding her arms across her chest. “What are you going to do about my sister?”

“She asked me to reveal myself as God and endorse her wedding,” Seth said.

“Will you do it?”

He ran a hand down his chest, feeling the convincing glamour Sinead McGrath had made for him. “If Lucifer changes me, I can’t go around claiming I’m a god, can I?”

“Seems like you’ve got a problem, then,” Dana said. “Because if you endorse Marion’s wedding, she’s gonna get married. But if you don’t, you’re gonna lose her even if you do become a vampire.”

His mouth was dry. He swallowed hard. “Yeah. I know.”

“Then it sounds like you’ve got a decision to make.” She laughed. “Sucks to be you.”