Cast in Faefire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 3) (6 page)

There were other things to get from the Academy, though.

Marion had found diagrams of its layout before her visit, and those guided her through the halls. She had a very specific destination: the administrative offices on the first floor, opposite the gender-segregated student dormitories.

Marion didn’t look at anyone as she glided through the halls. She kept her back straight, chin lifted. Many students looked at her, though. They lived there during the school year—the period of time that fell between August and May—and they knew when people were neither staff nor student.

Someone would also know what her eyes meant, so whispers about her presence would spread quickly.

She needed to be out of the administrative offices before that happened.

Her visit with Rylie Gresham had been timed for eleven in the morning, and the administrative offices shut down at noon for lunch. Marion had allowed enough time to pass while exploring. She reached the office when a man wearing business casual was hanging an “out to lunch” sign on the outer office doors.

“Can I help you?” He smiled at Marion.

She smiled back at him and let the full force of her energy shine. “No thank you.”

He looked dazed, but managed to walk away without falling over.

Marion took his place in front of the door and knocked on it. Nothing happened. “
Merde
,” she muttered.

Her ability to open doors by knocking was god-given, and that meant that if the gods weren’t paying attention, it had zero impact. Elise didn’t care if Marion got into the admin offices.

Marion reached into the energy that flowed through the Academy as one of its witch students might, tapping into it as she focused on a rune.

“Open,” she said as she grabbed the knob.

The lock opened with a flare of magic that any witch in the Academy would feel if they were paying attention.

Marion was in.

She didn’t waste time with the computers in the front offices. She went straight to the principal’s room in the back, whose name (“Summer Gresham”) suggested more than a hint of nepotism at work at the Academy.

Who was this Summer woman? One of Rylie’s actual daughters? Someone who had grown up adored by a powerful, maternal Alpha werewolf? Marion was shocked by how jealous it made her feel to know there were people who had grown up in the privilege of Rylie’s care. People who were not Marion, rejected by a mother who wouldn’t even attend her wedding.

At least Rylie would be there.

Marion grabbed the doorknob. “Open,” she said again.

And it did.

Summer Gresham’s office made it look as though she was working from the inside of a giant computer. Every wall was covered in metal cages filled with a tangle of cables, blinking lights, and buzzing fans. Her floor was twelve inches above the floor in the hallway outside. The temperature was warmer and dryer than outside, too. Her desk was little more than a chair in front of a table big enough to hold an energy drink.

Strange as it looked, the office glowed with as much knowledge as the more rustic classrooms outside. Regardless of her title, Summer Gresham was a woman in the business of acquiring information. The lifeblood of angels.

Marion’s nose wrinkled as she swept the trash off of Summer’s desk. She used a tissue to wipe down the keyboard. Then she sat gingerly and rolled up to the monitor.

Summer had left herself logged in.

“Such trust,” Marion murmured. But why shouldn’t she trust? She was in the heart of the blissful shapeshifter sanctuary, an area secured against all enemies.

There was an icon for the OPA database on the desktop. Marion clicked.

The interface wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. Marion had been required to fill out a few forms on computers at the United Nations during the summit, and it seemed to use the same sort of program. She easily found the database search.

“Goat…woman…” Marion said to herself as she typed. She felt a bit stupid about it.

She felt slightly less stupid when the search brought up several results.

Five individual demons, one entire class of demons, and three shifters.

“Oh my.”

Marion took out her cell phone and plugged it into the computer. She didn’t need to be a hacker to copy the records over within minutes.

That should have been all that Marion risked. Sanctuary witches may have already alerted Rylie to what she was up to. It was time to run home to study the files on goat-looking women. But she had access to so much information, and she was still giddy from the brush of energy she’d felt in the school.

Marion typed her own name into the OPA search field.

There was one primary record, which she copied over to her phone’s memory. That one file took much longer than the nine listings for “goat women.”

While it downloaded, she skimmed the notes.

There were a staggering number of personal testimonies submitted by OPA allies talking about Marion. The testimony at the top had been submitted by Rylie. It was a video, which played as soon as Marion clicked on it.

Rylie had been filmed somewhere that looked like a living room. “Now?” she asked the camera, patting her straight blond hair to neaten it. “Right now?”

A voice off-screen said, “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Yes, she’s dangerous,” Rylie said, as though answering a question that had been asked before filming. “I’ve watched her grow up, and she’s had sleepovers with my kids, but—what do you expect me to say, Fritz?”

“I want to know if you think we can trust her,” said the man, presumably Fritz. “What threat level is she?”

“The highest,” Rylie said. “You should absolutely be prepared to kill her. I have been for years. We’d be stupid if we weren’t prepared to kill Marion Garin.”

M
ost people stopped
when they hit Rock Bottom. Seth went lower. He wrapped his wounds in cotton and leather and descended to the recesses of his past.

With a snap of his fingers, he returned to the werewolf sanctuary.

Seth remembered the last time that he had visited the sanctuary outside Northgate. He’d left Las Vegas while UNLV had been on winter break, hoping to get insight into a case he was working with the police. It hadn’t been the case that had broken him—the one with the vampires, with all the blood—but it had been the one right before that. And he had been considering moving back to the sanctuary.

He’d arrived from dry, barren Nevada to find Northgate buried under snow taller than he was. Everyone at the sanctuary had been assigned to shoveling duty. Even after Genesis, when Rylie had snowplows at her disposal, the pack had still preferred manual labor.

Seth had grabbed a shovel and jumped in out of habit. That was just life at the sanctuary. Everyone worked together to make things happen. They were one big family, even if it had become far bigger after Genesis.

Rylie had been working one of the smaller side roads. The Alpha still hadn’t been too good to do her own work, and she’d been happy to have Seth join in.

“Our security’s been great,” Rylie had said to him. “The wards do a lot of the work. Then we rotate out nightly schedules with patrols, just like we used to with the cooking.” Her hair had been trapped under a saggy knitted hat, but a few flyaway strands had floated around cheeks pinkened by cold.

Even wrapped in multitude of layers of winter gear, her form had been petite but strong, both fragile and unbreakable.

Her belly must have been swelling with her next child, but Seth hadn’t been able to tell that under the jacket.

“Are you even listening to me?” Rylie had asked, not unkindly.

He hadn’t been. He’d just been looking at her, drinking in the sight of the woman who had once been his world. “Sorry. What did you say?”

She’d reached up to pull his hat over his ears, then swipe her gloved hands over his shoulders to clear snow away. “I said security is fine. Everything is fine. Thank you for checking. That’s not the only reason you came back, is it?”

Not the only reason, but the most important.

Seth had been imagining that things couldn’t be going well at the sanctuary after Genesis. Rylie had been put in the position of handling thousands upon thousands of new preternaturals—mostly shifters—and the volume should have been overwhelming.

He’d spent all semester at UNLV imagining the struggle at the sanctuary. Having Abel for support couldn’t have been much support at all. Abel had always been bad at logistics, and thinking, and anything else that didn’t involve shooting things.

Seth had expected Rylie to ask for help.

She hadn’t.

Rylie had said, “Everything is fine.” And she’d kept shoveling, accompanied by hundreds of shifters.

That had been more than a decade ago. He hadn’t gone to the sanctuary since, nor had he spoken to Rylie. But he returned to the sanctuary after his talk with Lucifer at Rock Bottom.

Seth arrived on the road from Northgate, right where it broke through the pass. He was surprised that he could get there. Nobody should have been able to teleport inside the wards—even Seth. But he couldn’t even feel them pushing back. One of the benefits of being a god, he supposed.

So he appeared on the road in a swirl of brimstone smoke, about two miles closer to the sanctuary than he’d expected, and the sight of his past basically punched him in the face.

Everything was old, but new.

The same mountains, the same waterfall, the same fields. Same old cottages that he’d helped build by hand.

But there were new cottages too, and even an apartment building. He saw a white square of a building that must have been a hospital—something they’d never had in his time there, since it wasn’t like the average shifter needed much medical care. Even though he couldn’t see the school from there, a sign directing him up the road toward the Academy meant it existed. That had always been Rylie’s dream. A school. A way to teach the shifter kids. A place for them to belong.

She had everything she’d always wanted.

Ten years later, Rylie still didn’t need Seth.

He saw nothing but unfamiliar faces on his way into town. New people were weirder than new buildings. Seth had always known the entire pack.

He hadn’t called ahead, so Rylie wasn’t expecting him and he didn’t have a meeting place established. But he knew where she was. He could feel her presence in the way that he could feel all of the other lives around him—the long threads unspooling as time marched onward. All were vibrant in the way that only gaean lives could be.

None were as vibrant as that of the Alpha.

He followed the gleaming thread of her life toward the waterfall.

By the time he ended up walking among the cottages, things looked so unchanged that Seth could almost convince himself that it was the old days again. He’d built many of those roofs and hung most of the doors. The cottages were uniform in Rylie’s taste: gold with white trim and protective pentacles over the windows.

The road sloped down, drawing him nearer the beach.

New cottages had been built in the style of the old ones, pushing the neighborhood nearer to the lake. But the lake itself was still pristine, untouched. It stretched toward the cliff face from which the waterfall sprang.

One end of the beach was busy with children playing under the watchful eye of the babysitter. The rockier end was uninhabited.

Except for
her
.

Seth stood on the edge of the rocks for a long time—gods only knew how long. He wasn’t paying attention to the passage of heartbeats and fading of lives.

He let himself drink in the sight of the werewolf Alpha sitting on a rocky outcropping, leaning forward on her hands. A suit jacket was puddled on the rocks beside her. She’d kicked her shoes off and left them soles-up on top of the jacket. Her hair hung in a glossy sheet over her shoulders, long and straight.

Without being able to see her face, Rylie almost looked like the girl he’d met at summer camp back when she’d been just fifteen years old. Right after she had been bitten by a werewolf.

She straightened slowly, as if aware she was being watched. Her head tipped back.

Rylie was smelling the air.

He heard the quick intake of her breath. He saw the way she went still, as if afraid to move and break the moment.

Then she twisted. The face peering at him from the rocks was a little rounder, a little more lined, but still
hers
.

“Seth,” Rylie whispered.

* * *

“
D
oes it hurt
?” Rylie asked. It was the first thing she’d managed to say in five minutes.

Seth let the hem of his shirt drop, concealing the wound left by the Hounds. “Yeah.”

“Oh, Seth,” she said, still barely above a whisper. It was strange to hear the Alpha talking like she couldn’t breathe.

She hadn’t seen him in ten years, aside from the moment at the summit, but he’d seen her in glimpses. Always on the news or on the back jacket of her autobiography. Every time, she’d been in leader mode, her most glorious persona. After the years she’d spent struggling to take ownership of her power as Alpha, it was incredible to see that come to fruition.

Now she was a teenage girl again, uncertain in the face of painful changes.

This girl was no “girl” anymore. She was in her forties and looked every inch of it. She was also every inch as beautiful as the lake that they sat beside, right next to each other, the way that they used to as kids.

Gorgeous.

Except for the fact she looked so horrified.

“That’s why I need your help,” Seth said.

“What did Genesis do to you?” Her forefinger traced the corner of his eyes, the space between his eyebrows, the edge of his lips. The exact places where Rylie’s skin was getting its deepest furrows.

“It wasn’t Genesis. It was Elise,” Seth said.

She lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. “Six of one…”

“I’m like her,” Seth said, lowering his voice. He knew that the shifter kids playing on the beach were too far away to hear—shifter senses didn’t develop fully until puberty—but he couldn’t help it. “I’m like both of them. The third.”

Rylie’s lips parted. She exhaled slowly. “
Oh
. Another triad.”

There had been three gods before Genesis too. Adam, Eve, and Lilith had represented the three major factions: gaeans, angels, and demons respectively. The three of them had never gotten along. Those personality clashes had been what ultimately led to Elise killing them, and Genesis in general.

“It seems like the universe needs a triad,” Seth said. “Guess which one I am.”

“You’re like Lilith, round two.” Rylie leaned her head against his shoulder. And she said again, “Oh, Seth.”

The sympathy felt better than he would have expected. “Not exactly like Lilith. I seem to be mortal for the moment.”

“You came to Earth as an avatar.”

“Is that what it’s called?” Another thought struck him. “How would you know that?”

“I’ve been in contact with Elise and James since Genesis. We’ve talked about a few things.”

“Through Marion?” Seth asked.

Rylie’s eyebrows crimped. “Yes, through Marion.” What little composure the Alpha had began to crumble. “Why would you have come back to talk to her? Why not me, or your brother, or Abram, or…
anyone
? We thought you were dead!”

“She found me first. I wouldn’t have talked to anyone if I could have avoided it.”

“Marion told me what you’ve been doing in Ransom Falls.” Rylie bit her bottom lip hard enough that the teeth left dents. “You could have told me. I wouldn’t have bothered you.”

“I had reasons to hide.” He patted his chest. “Speaking of which, I’m still hiding. Don’t tell anyone I’m around.”

“I never speak to Elise directly, so you don’t need to worry about that.”

“She’s not the only one I’m hiding from now.” Dana McIntyre was a child who’d grown up fostered in the sanctuary environment too, after all.

“I hope you’ll tell me everything that you’re dealing with soon.” Rylie’s fingers inched over the coarse rock toward his. “I understand why you might not want to yet. And every resource I have at my disposal belongs to you. If there’s anything I can do to help, Seth, you only have to ask me.” Her eyes were the same color as the summer sunlight. “
Anything
.”

“You can start by having witches heal my human body.” They wouldn’t be able to save him completely—nobody could—but they would give him more time to decide if he wanted to take Lucifer up on his offer.

“Done,” Rylie said.

Their fingers overlapped on the rock, just a little.

* * *

R
ylie had
to dismiss a dozen guards before she could take Seth anywhere in private. Even then, privacy with the Alpha werewolf at her sanctuary was not much privacy at all; all those unfamiliar faces that had ignored Seth on his way into town were interested now that he was with Rylie. Even taking the back roads, they passed dozens of shifters on their way to the Academy.

“The whole valley is structured to encourage socializing,” Rylie said apologetically. “We’ve found that shifters live longer, happier, healthier lives if we’re forced to be close together.”

“It’s only been fifteen years. You haven’t had a lot of time for experimentation.”

“We ended up with a shocking number of senior citizens returning from Genesis as preternaturals. We’ve dealt with more end-of-life care for shifters than you’d expect.”

Seth actually did expect that. He’d seen his fair share of it in Ransom Falls. “Is that why you have a hospital?”

Rylie nodded. “We’re employing Whytes again. Can you believe it?”

“Whytes? People related to Scott and Stephanie?
Really
?”

“Really. We’ve got Stephanie’s cousins from the Half Moon Bay Coven.”

Scott Whyte had been a therapist—and a witch—who had treated Rylie early in her werewolf life. Stephanie was his daughter, an emergency room doctor who had partially inspired Seth to pursue medicine. Both had ultimately betrayed the pack. Betrayal had been a common theme before Genesis, though. War between gods had radiated through the entire world, from the most important people to the most trivial, and it had hurt everyone.