House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3)

“Is that … okay with you?”

She gave him a true smile. It made her seem younger, lighter—the person she might have been if Urd hadn’t taken her down her particular fucked-up life path. It knocked the breath from him. “Yeah, Ruhn. It’s okay with me.”

He smiled back, remembering how she’d chastised him when they’d first met for saying “Yeah,” for being so casual.

Ahead, Ruhn saw that they were approaching a dented metal door marked Do Not Enter. “Now, that’s practically an invitation,” he said, earning a laugh from Lidia as he kicked in the door.



* * *



The sight of the imperial battleships in the Istros robbed Tharion of any joy at the river’s familiar, beckoning scent. So did the presence of the Omega-boats docked with them. And right by the Black Dock … the SPQM Faustus. The very Omega-boat they’d barely outrun that day on Ydra.

He hadn’t dared venture into the northernmost part of the city to see the damage to Asphodel Meadows. They weren’t here for that, and he knew he’d see nothing that would make him feel any better. The city was eerily quiet. As if in mourning.

Face and hair hidden under a sunball cap, Tharion glowered at the armada for long enough as he stood on the quay that Sathia warned, “You’ll draw attention to us with all that glaring.”

“I should slip into the water and blast holes in all their hulls,” Tharion snarled.

“Focus,” she said. “You do that, and we won’t accomplish what we came here to do.” She frowned at the ships. “Which is clearly still necessary.”

“They’re holding the city hostage.”

“All the more reason to plead with the River Queen to take people in.”

Tharion found only cool determination on Sathia’s heart-shaped face. “You’re right,” he said. He let out a low whistle, and waited.

An otter in a bright yellow vest leapt onto the quay, dripping everywhere. It rose onto its hind legs in front of Tharion, whiskers twitching, spraying droplets of water.

Sathia grinned.

“Stop it,” Tharion muttered. “It only encourages them to be cuter.”

She bit her lip, and though it was thoroughly distracting, Tharion got his act together enough to say to the otter, “Tell the River Queen that Tharion Ketos wants a meeting.”

The whiskers twitched again.

Sathia added, “Please.”

Tharion avoided the urge to roll his eyes, but also added, “Please.” He fished out a gold coin. “And make it speedy, friend.”

The otter took the coin in his little black fingers and turned it over, eyes brightening at the outrageous sum. With a flick of his long tail, he leapt back into the clear turquoise water with barely a ripple and was gone.

Tharion watched him gracefully swim out into the depths, then vanish over the drop into the dark, to the Blue Court Beneath. Only tiny, glimmering lights showed any signs of life there.

“What now?” Sathia asked, again eyeing the warships docked in the river. If just one of the soldiers on them recognized Tharion …

He tugged his sunball hat over his hair. “Now we lurk in the shadows and wait.”



* * *



“This doesn’t seem safe,” Ember said for the fifth time as Bryce stood before the Northern Rift’s archway. Hunt waited ten paces behind her, freezing his feathers off. “This seems like the opposite of safe. You’re opening the Northern Rift to Hel. And we’re supposed to believe these demons—the princes, for Urd’s sake—are good?”

“I’m not sure they’re good,” Bryce said. “But they’re on our side. Just trust me, Mom.”

“Trust her, Ember,” Randall said, but from the tightness in his voice, Hunt knew the man wasn’t too happy, either.

“When you’re ready, Athalar,” Bryce called to him.

“I thought you didn’t need me to fuel you up anymore,” Hunt said. “Especially with all that extra power you’ve got now.”

“I don’t want to try it on my own for this,” Bryce said. “Seems like a high-stakes situation to test out my new abilities.”

“I bet you could do it,” Hunt called over the wind, “but all right. On three.” Bryce stilled, squaring her shoulders.

Hunt rallied his lightning. Prayed to every god, even if they’d mostly fucked him over until this point. The power of his lightning was familiar, yet suddenly foreign. Helfire, Apollion had called it.

Answers—at long last, answers about why he was what he was, about why he and no one else had the lightning. Even the thunderbirds, made by Hel, had been hunted to extinction by the Asteri. With Sofie’s death, they were truly gone.

Though the Harpy’s resurrection—another thing that was his fucking fault—suggested that the Asteri now had other methods of raising the dead.

Only if they could get their hands on more of his lightning. He’d sooner die.

“One …,” Hunt breathed, and lifted a hand wreathed in lightning.

Lord of Lightning, the Oracle had called him.

“Two …”

Had the Oracle seen what he was, where his power came from, that day?

You remind me of that which was lost long ago. The thunderbirds, hunted to extinction.

Was that the wind ruffling her parka, or was Bryce shaking as she waited for the blow? Hunt didn’t give himself a moment to reconsider. To halt.

“Three.”

He launched a spear of lightning at his mate.





76


As it had that day at the Asteri’s palace, when she had leapt from her own world to another, Hunt’s lightning lanced through Bryce’s back, through the Horn, into the star on her chest—and out into the Gate.

Ember shouted in fear, and even Randall stumbled back a step, but Hunt let his lightning flow into Bryce, kept a steady stream of it surging between them.

“Open,” Bryce said, her voice carrying on the wind. A sliver of darkness began to spread in the middle of the Gate.

Hunt funneled more lightning into her, and the sliver widened, inch by inch.

The Northern Rift had been fixed on Hel—until now. Until his power had passed through not only the Horn on Bryce, but the star on her chest, too—that link to a different world. Reorienting the Gate, as it had that day in the Eternal Palace, to open elsewhere. That was their theory, at least. No one had ever tried to manipulate the Northern Rift to open somewhere other than Hel, but— “That’s enough, Hunt,” Ember warned.

Hunt ignored her and sent another spike of power into his mate. Bryce’s hair floated up, snow and ice drifting with it, but she maintained an eerie calm until the void filled the entirety of the massive Gate.

Hunt cut off his lightning, running to where Bryce stood before the wall of darkness.

Darkness—flecked by starlight.

A female with golden-brown hair sat in an armchair before a fireplace on the other side of it. All that darkness was the starry night beyond her windows.

And her face was a portrait of pure shock as Bryce lifted a hand in greeting and said, “Hello, Nesta.”



* * *



The River Queen sat in a chair before a computer panel in the control room connected to the west air lock, a makeshift throne in the sterile, utilitarian space. The tech who operated the computer had vacated the chamber in a near-sprint at the queen’s snapped command.

Tharion was well aware that the air lock could be easily hosed down to remove any and all traces of blood. A body flushed out through it would go straight to the sobeks circling outside like Reapers.

If Sathia noted those details, if she understood that she and Tharion had been brought here purely for the convenience of getting rid of his corpse, she didn’t let on.

His wife simply curtsied, a graceful swoop downward, at odds with her casual leggings and white sweater, the cashmere now streaked with dirt and torn along the bottom hem. “Your Majesty,” Sathia said, her voice cultured yet unthreatening. “It is an honor to meet you.”

The River Queen’s dark eyes swept over Sathia. “Am I supposed to open my arms to the female who usurped my daughter?”