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

And it had created this nightmare.

Rigelus had to have guessed they’d come to the Northern Rift, and planted the Harpy to lie in wait.

Hunt rallied his lightning, making the mists glow eerily around him, but Bryce said, “What did they do to you?”

The Harpy didn’t answer. She didn’t show any sign that she’d heard or cared. As if she’d lost her voice. Her very identity.

“Fry the bitch,” Bryce muttered to Hunt, and he didn’t wait before sending a plume of lightning for the Harpy.

She dodged it, those white-painted wings as fast as they had ever been—

No, they hadn’t been painted white. They’d turned white. As if whatever the Asteri had done to her with Hunt’s lightning had bleached the color out of them.

Hunt threw another bolt of lightning, then another, and he might have lit up the whole fucking sky if not for that gods-damned halo—

“Athalar!” A familiar male voice rang from the mists above them. Hunt didn’t dare take his focus off the Harpy as the voice clicked.

Isaiah.

“What the Hel—” an equally familiar female voice said. Naomi.

But it was the third voice, coming from behind him as its owner landed in the snow, that made Hunt’s blood go cold. “What new evil is this?”

The Governor of Valbara had arrived.



* * *



Bryce didn’t know which was worse: Celestina or the Harpy. The female who’d stabbed them in the back, or the one who’d literally tried to slit Ruhn’s throat.

She and Hunt couldn’t take on two enemies at once—not in subfreezing temperatures, totally drained from opening the Rift, with the mists obscuring almost everything.

The Harpy swooped, and Hunt launched his lightning, so fast only the swiftest of angels could evade the strike. The Harpy did, and plunged earthward, mist streaming off her white wings, straight for Bryce. Bryce rolled out of the way and the Harpy hit the ground, snow exploding around her, but she was instantly up, lunging for Bryce again.

Isaiah blasted the Harpy with a wall of wind, knocking her back. But Celestina stood three yards away, and Hunt was already whirling to face her—

Bryce unzipped her thick jacket, the cold wind instantly biting into her skin. She grabbed the Mask.

And gave no warning at all as she fitted the icy gold to her face.



* * *



Wearing the Mask was like being underwater, or at a very high altitude. Her head was full of its power, her blood thrumming, pulsing in time with the presence in her head, her bones. The world seemed to dilute into its basics: alive or dead. She was alive, but with the Mask, she might escape even death itself and live forever.

The star in her chest hummed, welcoming that power like an old friend.

Bryce shoved aside her revulsion. Hunt was readying his lightning for Celestina, the mists glowing with each crackle, and the Harpy had broken through Isaiah’s power and was diving for Bryce again—

“Stop,” Bryce said to the Harpy. It was her voice, but not.

The Harpy halted.

Everyone halted.

“Bryce,” Hunt breathed, but he was far away. He was alive, and her business was with the dead.

“Kneel.”

The Harpy fell to her knees in the snow.

Celestina started, “What evil weapon have you—”

“I shall deal with you later,” Bryce said in that voice that resonated through her and created ripples in the mist.

Even the Archangel fell silent as Bryce approached the Harpy. Peered down into her narrow, hateful face. Truly soulless.

A body with no pilot.

Cold horror lurched through Bryce, despite the Mask’s unholy embrace. Maybe it was a mercy, she thought as she stared into the vacant, raging face of the Harpy. Maybe it was a mercy to do this.

There was no soul to grab onto, to command. Only the body. But the Mask seemed to understand what was needed. “Your work is done,” Bryce said, her voice reverberating through the frozen landscape. “Be at rest.”

It was sickening—and yet it was a relief as the Harpy’s eyes closed and she collapsed to the ground. As her skin began to wither, her body reclaiming the form it had known in death.

The cheekbones sank, decaying over the Harpy’s face. Bryce knew that beneath the angel’s white gear, her body would be doing the same.

When the Harpy lay desiccated in the snow, Bryce finally peeled the Mask off—only to find Naomi, Isaiah, and Celestina staring at her, awash in shock and dread.





79


“Nah,” Ruhn said into the phone as he and Lidia once again wended through the sewers, “they weren’t at the triarii’s private barracks. We waited for hours, but they’re deserted. No one came or went. From the look of Isaiah’s and Naomi’s rooms, no one’s been there for days.”

Lidia trudged ahead, neck bent forward as she checked a burner phone she’d brought with her from the Depth Charger—years ago, it seemed.

“So what do we do?” Flynn asked. “Keep waiting? Dec was able to hack into the Aux’s computers while I scouted around the area, but he found nothing about their movements, either. It doesn’t seem like the Aux even knows they’re gone.” With the Asteri out to punish anyone caught associating with them, it had been safest to observe the Aux from a distance, rather than directly talk to anyone. Not to mention the risk of being sold out to the Asteri by any enterprising sorts.

Ruhn considered. “If Isaiah and Naomi are missing, Celestina probably wants to keep their absence unnoticed.”

In the background, Declan said, “You think she killed them?”

“It’s possible,” Ruhn said as Flynn switched him to speakerphone. “We’re going to circle back there tomorrow. See if we can pick up anything else. You two be on the lookout for any sign of them. Check the squares where they do the crucifixions.”

“Fuck,” Flynn said.

“I’ll try to access the security footage from the Comitium,” Dec volunteered. “Maybe there’s something there that can point us in the right direction.”

Ruhn sighed. “Be careful. Let’s rendezvous at sunset—the northeastern corner of the intersection just past the shooting range.”

“Copy,” Flynn and Dec said, and hung up.

Ruhn and Lidia walked another block or so in the reeking quiet before he said, “You lulled me to sleep with a story once. About a witch who turned into a monster.”

“What of it?” She glanced sidelong at him.

“Is it a real story, or did you make it up?”

“It was a story my mother told me,” she said softly. “The only story I remember her telling me as a child before she … let me go.”

He’d been about to ask if the similarities between the evil prince and Pollux, the kind knight and himself, had been meant prophetically, but at the sadness in her voice … “I’m really sorry you went through that, Lidia. I can’t imagine doing that to a child. The thought of letting my own kid go into the arms of a stranger—”

“I did it, though,” she said, staring ahead at nothing. “What my mother did to me, I did exactly the same thing to my sons.”

His heart ached at the pain and guilt in her voice. “You entrusted your sons to a loving family—”

“I didn’t know that. I had no idea who they were going to be living with.”

“But the alternative was taking them with you.”

“Maybe I should have. Maybe I should have run into the wilds and hidden forever with them.”

“What kind of life would that have been? You gave them a real life, and a happy one, on the Depth Charger.”

“A true mother would have—”

“You are a true mother,” he said, and grabbed her hand, turning her to face him. “Lidia, you made an impossible choice—you decided to protect your children, even if it meant you wouldn’t see them grow up. Fuck, if that doesn’t make you a true mother, then I don’t know what does.”