Cast in Godfire: The Mage Craft Series Read online

  Cast in Godfire

  The Mage Craft Series

  S M Reine

  Red Iris Books

  Contents

  About Cast in Godfire

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Dear Readers

  OTHER SERIES BY SM REINE

  The Descent Series

  The Ascension Series

  Seasons of the Moon

  The Cain Chronicles

  Tarot Witches

  Preternatural Affairs

  War of the Alphas

  The Mage Craft Series

  Dana McIntyre Must Die

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  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This book is sold DRM-free so that it can be enjoyed in any way the reader sees fit. Please keep all links and attributions intact when sharing. All rights reserved.

  Text and design © SM Reine 2017. Original cover art by Gene Mollica.

  tmcs05-v1.0v

  Published by Red Iris Books

  1180 Selmi Drive, Suite 201

  Reno, NV 89512

  About Cast in Godfire

  The gods are rallying to take down Marion, their ally and voice in the mortal worlds. She’s gotten her memories back to disastrous results. She’s destroying the faerie courts, and the rest of the universe is next. The other deities want Seth—also known as the God of Death—to stop Marion before she breaks something that can’t be fixed.

  Unfortunately, when Marion looks at Seth with those eyes and insists that she’s not doing anything wrong, he wants to believe her. Marion claims she isn’t trying to rewrite history. She’s protecting it.

  Seth wants to trust Marion. It’s only the universe that’s at stake, after all. And some women are worth shattering worlds over…

  * * *

  Salve, Regina, mater misericordiae:

  vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.

  Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevae.

  1

  The Infinite—March 2032

  Charity Ballard had grown up a girl of modest means, daughter of divorced and remarried parents. Both of her families had been hard working. Between her four parents, there had been seven jobs. Even so, her mom’s family occasionally resorted to food stamps to fill the pantry, and when she’d gone to college after Genesis, it had been on the backs of loans she never finished paying off.

  As a child, vacation had meant that her parents could take her to the big park in the next town over, where they had the better slides. As an adult, it had meant enjoying a staycation in the hotel down the street. She’d gotten to go on a cruise to Ensenada once. That had been pretty sweet.

  Other than that, she’d only left the state a couple of times—first on school trips, and then so she could become a nurse at a college with a shorter waiting list than her nearer options.

  And all that was fine.

  She wasn’t picky, she wasn’t spoiled, she wasn’t much for big dreams. She was into helping people, though. That never changed about her. Charity helped people, even when she’d gotten turned into an ugly, gangly vampire who lost her mind at a whiff of blood.

  Hunger was something she could quash. She could focus through that. She still had a purpose to fulfill.

  And that was fine too.

  Had somebody told six-year-old Charity—to whom the big yellow slide was the greatest thing the world had to offer—that she would eventually tag along outside the mortal worlds with a god… She probably wouldn’t have thought much about it because she had no context for things like that. It was so far outside the boundaries of her world as to be meaningless, just like trips to go shopping in Paris, or backpacking around Australia.

  Paris and Brisbane remained fantasy.

  Hanging out with gods was her reality.

  Charity carried Death through the Infinite by wearing a gris-gris on her wrist. It was the only way that her friend, also known as Seth Wilder, could keep from losing himself into the Infinite. “Everything there will be made of god-stuff,” he’d explained before the trip. “Without the gris-gris, I’ll be like someone dumping a water cup into the ocean.”

  “So you need me to be what…a bottle?” Charity had asked, twisting the gris-gris anxiously. She’d been wearing the Voice of God’s clever little loop of vines for days and still wasn’t used to having that much power.

  “You can be the bottle if you’re willing.” Seth had raked a hand over his hair. He’d already been losing grip on mortality at that point, and most visions of his limbs had looked like skeletons. “Not to guilt you into it, but there’s nobody I’d rather have help me with this.”

  That was a lie, and they both knew it.

  There was someone Seth would have rather had help him. But she was currently off doing faerie things with her faerie husband, most of which probably involved wearing slutty armor, waging civil war against the sidhe, and being snooty.

  That was Marion Garin now that she’d gotten her memories back: unrestrainedly arrogant and totally disinterested in piddly little things like empathy for suffering people, including the god she had once claimed to love.

  Charity seriously doubted anyone was suffering from what Marion did more than Seth.

  After that incident with Marion at the Veil, Seth had spent a whole week in the undercity with Charity—and Arawn—to help them settle the former inhabitants of Sheol. Seth had graciously performed a few illegal acts of omnipotence to make it more comfortable for demons. He’d even added a lake of sulfur, because he was nice like that.

  Seth had no fondness for demons, even if they were technically his people, since he was the God of Death. Charity had no doubts about why he’d spent that whole week lingering in the undercity. It wasn’t to be helpful. He didn’t care about sulfur lakes. He was there for the same reason he had informants keeping him up-to-date on the civil war.

  He was waiting to see if Marion would reach out to him.

  She didn’t.

  “It could be that she doesn’t have another gris-gris,” Charity had suggested once. She’d been trying to cheer Seth up on his seventh straight night of brooding. A brooding Death basically looked like the grumpiest fog ever.

  “She doesn’t need it,” Seth said. “I marked her. Accidentally. She can call me whenever she wants.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t wait for her to call first.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but we need to consider that subject off-limits,” he said.

  “Marks from gods?”

  “Marion,” Seth had said.

  It was the only time he’d said her name that week.

  So they didn’t talk about Marion.

  And for a whole week, Charity thought this might become her life now. No longer was she restrained to staycations in Holiday Inns with her fellow nursing students, marathoning Netflix originals. She was in
stead restrained to an undercity where it was dark enough for Arawn to survive, helping build a civilization for demons on Earth.

  Charity had Seth, she had Arawn, she had something resembling a community.

  Life could have been pretty sweet like that.

  Of course it didn’t last.

  Now she was in the Infinite. A bottle carrying godly water into a godly ocean.

  It had been easy to reach the Infinite. Unlike the complicated network of ley lines and portals that formed the mortal worlds, the Infinite was everywhere. It was everything. It was the very essence of eternity. Seth had only needed to blink, and they were there, leaving Arawn to manage the undercity on his own.

  Charity wasn’t sure how long she’d been up there in the Infinite. For that matter, she wasn’t even sure that the Infinite was “up” relative to everything else. It wasn’t like the Heaven she’d learned about in Sunday school. It was much more ghostly. They’d walked through about a million miles of faded city to walk through a million miles of faded forest before reaching their current faded location.

  “All things considered, this is much better than the Middle Worlds,” Charity said. The Infinite currently looked like an empty compound of houses in forested foothills. Colorado, she thought. Even ghostly and see-through towns didn’t break her brain the way that the Autumn Court did.

  Seth drifted at her side. He was the exact same color and consistency as everything else in the Infinite. The outline of a human being drifting through the outlines of a modern village.

  “This isn’t real,” Seth said.

  “Obviously,” Charity said. “I assume that this is just some construct you’ve made so that I can perceive the Infinite.”

  “You assume mostly right. I didn’t make this, though.”

  “Who did?”

  “James made it,” he said, “for Marion. She used to visit a lot. This is probably meaningful for her.”

  Seth walked up to one of the houses and pushed its front door open. There was a living room on the other side, cramped by the presence of bookshelves lining every wall. There was a fireplace. Wingback chairs. Old lady curtains. Charity’s sense of smell didn’t seem to work in the Infinite, but she assumed the room had the aroma of mothballs and soiled litter boxes.

  “James sure knows how to party,” Charity said. “He’s living in a musty grandma house for eternity? I mean, wow. Dream big.”

  “You sound like Arawn,” Seth said.

  She grimaced. “Ouch.”

  “Sorry,” he said with a shrug.

  Charity peered closely at a bookshelf. She couldn’t read any of the titles. They were swirling, blurry, indistinct. Sort of like trying to read a book in a dream. “Who exactly is James anyway? He’s another god, right?”

  “The ethereal god.” Seth hadn’t stopped to look at books. He was heading into the kitchen, and Charity followed to make sure he didn’t leave the sphere of influence from the gris-gris. “I need his help. If anyone knows what happened…”

  “What happened when?”

  Seth didn’t answer, which meant that this was probably brushing too close against She Who Would Not Be Named.

  Charity stepped in front of him, preventing him from opening a pantry door. “Look, Doc,” she said, “if you’re still trying to figure out what happened with Marion, it’s not a good idea. You’ve got a long time to live with whatever you learn.”

  His eyes were troubled, even in this ephemeral form. “But something bad’s about to happen.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what’s scary about it. I can’t see, and I’m supposed to be omnipotent.” He gently nudged Charity aside and opened the pantry.

  It wasn’t actually a pantry. It led to a set of stairs that sloped steeply underground.

  Charity went down first.

  The stairs, much like the forest, seemed to last for a million miles. Those million miles were longer than the first couple, since Seth had gone quietly pensive again.

  It was only then that Charity realized Seth hadn’t spent all this time brooding jealously over whatever Marion was doing with her stupid spouse.

  He was brooding because he was worried about Marion.

  And he felt helpless.

  A helpless god was not a happy god.

  “You’re a nice guy, Seth,” Charity said as they approached the bottom of the stairs. “Do you know that?”

  He grimaced. “I’ve heard it a few times. It doesn’t get more flattering as I get older.”

  “Sorry,” she said with a shrug.

  She was the one who opened the door at the bottom of the stairs. She was the one to push into the room waiting for them at that end of the Infinite.

  Color shocked back into Charity’s life when she crossed the threshold.

  They emerged from the murky Infinite into something that looked like a conservatory. It was an oversized room with a glass dome and a circle of stone at its heart, inside which grew an enormous tree.

  And by enormous, Charity really meant enormous. When she looked at the glass dome, it seemed to be about three stories tall. If she tried to focus on the top of the tree, it seemed about three thousand stories tall. So far away that the branches were teeny-weeny. Its roots were simultaneously contained by its stone basin and sprawling over the floor. She was tiny enough to crawl between the channels on the tree’s bark and yet so big that she could have reached up to pick an apple on its lowest branch.

  This room had not been designed to preserve a mortal’s fragile sanity the way that the rest of the Infinite had.

  So it took her a minute to realize there was a desk with that tree. It stood against the back windows, which looked out into an endless, starry expanse, featuring more galaxies than Arawn had attitude problems.

  There were two people sitting at the desk.

  The human man had a punchable face. Pronounced cheekbones, square jaw, straight nose, thoughtful eyes with a constant better-than-everyone gaze. His eyes were the exact same unsettlingly pale blue as Marion’s, but his hair was jet black in contrast to Marion’s chestnut.

  His companion was a goat. A bipedal goat wearing an orange robe.

  “What the fuck?” Seth asked by way of greeting.

  The man and the goat looked up from their books. They were both holding fountain pens that dripped ink. “Oh, Seth,” said the man. “Hello. I see Marion was successful.” He planted the pen in an inkwell. “Well done, Onoskelis.”

  “You shouldn’t have doubted me.” Onoskelis’s voice was gravelly and small.

  “What the fuck, James?” Seth repeated.

  So this was James, standing up from the desk. God was a tall man. He had the lean muscles of an elite athlete and the grace of a dancer. He took off his glasses when he rounded the desk to meet them.

  “I should ask the same of you,” James said. “You took long enough getting back here. And you brought…” His eyes swept down Charity from head to clawed toes. “A revenant, I believe. Your breed is one of our finer resurrections, in my opinion. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  He took Charity’s hand and shook it. She was shocked to feel human skin.

  Seth quivered with anger. He was shadow contrasting the blue-eyed shine of the other god. “What is this place?” he asked.

  “A conservatory,” Charity said. “Like in the game of Cluedo.”

  James looked amused. “Yes, a conservatory. It’s designed to bind cosmic beings to mortal-like forms.” He patted his chest to demonstrate his solidness. “While within this room, we have no access to existence outside the walls. It also removes most of our long-term memories as we generate them, which is a convenient way of flushing one’s mind of the burden of omnipotence once in a while. Worry not—all the information is preserved for later reference.” James gestured toward a stack of books on the desk.

  “Of course it is,” Onoskelis grumbled. “I’ve already got copies of everything, you know. This is redundancy.”

  �
��Yes, but angels need to feed off of the acquisition of knowledge to sustain themselves, and I can’t feed off of a Librarian,” James said patiently. It sounded like an argument they’d had dozens of times before.

  “What the hell did you want?” Seth asked.

  James had the nerve to look politely puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  Had Seth been anywhere but a power-smothering conservatory in the Infinite, Charity was pretty sure he would have smote James on the spot. “You sent Marion after me and you’re smothering my omnipotence. You wanted my attention. You’ve got it. What do you want?”

  “I’ve a better question,” James said. “What do you want? You were so angry that Elise bestowed godhood upon you that you fled to the mortal worlds, and even now, you’ve clearly come to visit rather than settle down. What will it take to get you to return to your responsibilities as a god?”

  “I’ve been hanging out in the Pit of Souls,” he said.

  “But not here, with us,” James said. “Changes are coming. Our triad must be strong.”

  “So strong that you’re blocking off my omnipotence.”

  “Some events in the Meta are so big that even gods can’t touch them,” Onoskelis said. “Mostly geneses. If you’re blanked out, other gods couldn’t have done it to you. You’re just not seeing the outcome of a genesis.”

  When she referred to geneses, it was obviously with a lowercase first letter, not the uppercase Genesis. Charity hadn’t even known that events like Genesis could happen often enough to be referred to in the plural.

  “Genesis happened years ago, in 2015,” Seth said.

  “Events now will precipitate events in the past. The Meta is linear, but not relative to what mortals perceive as linear time,” James said. “You must help Elise and I ensure that everything happens correctly. Tell me what you want in return to work with us even though you so strongly disdain it.”

  Seth gave a disbelieving laugh. “You know what I want? How about we start with a mortal life where you guys don’t interfere with me? How about you let me be Dr. Lucas Flynn again so I can live however I want, with whomever I want?”