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

The war-machines loomed, black and blazing with power. Ready for her. Launch barrels stared her down, brimstone missiles glowing golden in their throats.

Lidia unleashed her own fire, ready for her final incineration.

But before her flame could touch those war-machines, before the brimstone missiles could fire, the launch barrels melted. Iron dripped away, sizzling on the dry earth.

And those brimstone missiles, caught in the melting machinery …

The explosions shook the very world as the missiles ruptured, turning the war-machines into death traps for the soldiers within. They melted into nothing. The heat of it singed Lidia’s face, and amid the burning and billowing smoke—

Three tiny white lights burned bright.

Fire sprites. Simmering with power.

Through the fire and smoke and drifting embers, Lidia recognized them. Sasa. Rithi. Malana. Blazing, raging with fire. They must have crept up unseen from behind enemy lines. Too small to be noticed, to ever be counted by arrogant Vanir.

Another war-machine rumbled forward, rolling over the ruins of the front line.

A stupid mistake. The metal treads melted, too, pinning the machine in place. Trapping the soldiers and pilots within it.

They tried to fire their missiles at Lidia, at the three sprites now coming to her side, but they never got the chance. One moment, the war-machine was there, missile launchers primed with their payload. The next, the metal of the machine flared white, and then melted.

Where the machine had been, a fourth sprite glowed, a hot, intense blue.

Irithys.

She lifted a small hand in greeting.

Lidia raised one back.

“We found her,” Sasa said to Lidia, breathless with adrenaline or hope or fear or all of them at once. “We told her what you and Bryce said.”

Malana added as Irithys zoomed for them, leaving a trail of blue embers in her wake, “But it did not take much convincing to get her here.”

“How did you know to come today?” Lidia asked as Irithys joined them, a blue star in the midst of the three shimmering lights of the others.

Irithys grinned, the first true smile Lidia had seen from the Sprite Queen. “We didn’t. They reached me yesterday, and we talked long into the night.” A fond smile at the three sprites, who turned raspberry pink with pleasure. “We were still awake when Bryce Quinlan and Hunt Athalar’s video went out. We raced down from Ravilis, hoping to help in any way we could.”

“We arrived in the nick of time, it seems,” Sasa said, nodding to the smoldering ruins.

“We wouldn’t have wanted to miss all the fun,” Rithi added with a wicked smile.

Irithys’s smile was more subdued as she studied Lidia. The queen’s flame set Lidia’s own sparking in answer. Dancing over her fingertips, her hair, in joyful recognition. “I sensed the fire in you the moment we met,” the queen said. “I didn’t think yours would manifest so brilliantly, though.”

Lidia sketched a bow, but refrained from telling the queen about the antidote just yet, how it would make Irithys’s flame even more lethal. Later—if they survived. But right now … Lidia smirked at the queen, at their gathering enemies. “Let’s burn it all down.”

Because ahead of them, dozens strong, an entire line of war-machines headed their way. Missile launchers groaned into position. All aiming for where they stood.

“With pleasure,” Irithys said, and even from a few feet away, Lidia’s skin seared with the heat of the queen’s flame. “We shall build a new world atop their ashes.”

Rithi, Sasa, and Malana turned blue, matching their queen’s fire with their own. The four fire sprites unleashed their power on the war-machines and the Vanir powering them. Lidia’s white-hot flames joined theirs, twining and dancing around it, as if every moment of recognition until now had built toward this, as if her flames had known theirs for millennia.

And as one flame, one unified people, as Bryce Quinlan had promised, their fire struck the enemy line.

Machines ruptured. Lidia staggered back, back, back with the force of it, still unfamiliar with the fire in her veins, after it had been so long suppressed.

But the sprites kept their fire concentrated on the machines and their pilots. And as Lidia hit the ground, as the missiles exploded upon contact with the flames, she cast the last of her power upward. To shield the allied forces fighting behind them and the fire sprites now ahead of her from the shrapnel, which melted until it became raining, molten metal.

It hissed where it hit the earth.

Irithys blazed like a blue star, shooting from machine to machine, leaving burning death in her wake. The three other sprites followed suit. Where they shimmered, imperial forces died.

And as the enemy melted at their fingertips … for a moment, just one, Lidia allowed herself to kindle a spark of hope.



* * *



“I’m okay,” Tharion panted, blood leaking from his mouth. “I’m okay.”

“I call bullshit,” Ruhn said, kneeling beside the mer, fumbling through his pack for the vial Lidia had mentioned. The mer would be dead already without the antidote in his veins. But if Ruhn didn’t do something to help Tharion now, he’d surely be dead in a few minutes.

“Get him into a sitting position,” Actaeon was saying to his brother. “Get his head above his chest so the blood doesn’t go out too fast.”

“We have to help her,” Brann said. “She’s out on the battlefield—”

“You guys aren’t going anywhere,” Ruhn said to the boys. He found the clear vial and knocked it back. “Help me get Ketos up. We’ve got two seconds before those shithead guards come back, maybe with Rigelus in tow—”

They didn’t have two seconds.

From the stairwell at the far end of the hall, the two angels who’d held the boys captive emerged. No sign of Rigelus, thank the gods, but right then, whatever was in that potion hit Ruhn’s stomach, his body, and the world tilted, surging, blacking out—

A moment, long enough so that when his vision returned, it was to see the two angels reaching for their guns.

Ruhn exploded.

Starlight, two beams of it straight to their eyes, blinded them. Just as Bryce had done to the Murder Twins. Twin whips of his shadows wrapped around their necks and squeezed.

“What the fuck,” Brann said, but Ruhn barely heard him. There was only power, surging as it never had before. His mind was starkly clear as he willed the shadows to begin slicing through angelic flesh.

Blood spurted. Bone cracked. Two heads rolled to the ground.

“Holy shit,” Brann breathed. Actaeon was gaping at Ruhn.

“The mer,” the kid said, whirling back to where Tharion had passed out again.

“Fuck,” Ruhn spat, and put a hand to Tharion’s chest to staunch the bleeding—

Warm, bright magic answered. Healing magic, rising to the surface as if it had been dormant in his blood.

He had no idea how to use it, how to do anything other than will it with a simple Save him.

In answer, light poured from his hands, and he could feel Tharion’s flesh and bone knitting back together beneath his fingers, mending, healing …

It had been a clean shot through the chest and out the back. And this new healing magic seemed to know what to do, how to close both entry and exit wounds. It couldn’t replace the blood, but if Ketos was no longer leaking … he might survive.

A shudder rocked the palace, and time slowed.

For a heartbeat, Ruhn thought it might be his own power, but no. He’d felt this before. Just a short time ago, when the world had rippled with what he knew, deep in his bones, was the impact of an Asteri dying. Like an Archangel’s death, but worse.

Another Asteri must be going down.

He willed that lovely, bright power to keep healing Ketos, though. To use the stretch of time to buy more of it for the mer, to heal, heal, heal—