Free Cast in Faefire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 3) by S.M. Reine Page A

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