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

“I don’t know.” Bryce let out a bitter laugh. “I thought maybe … maybe they’d have some answer about how to kill the Asteri. But she glossed over that part. I thought that in the thousands of years since then, maybe the Fae of Midgard had evolved into the reprehensible shitheads they are. Not that they were reprehensible all along.”

She scrubbed at her face, eyes stinging. “I thought having Theia’s light was … good. Like she was somehow better than Pelias. But she wasn’t.” And Aidas had loved her? “I thought it’d somehow give me an edge in this shitshow. But it fucking doesn’t. It just means I’m the heir to a legacy of selfish, scheming assholes.”

And worse, that parasite in Midgard’s waters … what could even be done against that? Bryce sucked in a shuddering breath.

A gentle hand rested on her shoulder. Nesta.

“We need to tell Rhys,” Azriel said hoarsely. Like he was still reeling from all he’d heard. “Immediately.”

Bryce’s gaze snapped to his face. The concern and determination there. Everything he’d seen … it was a threat to this world, to the people in it.

Azriel asked her with terrifying calm, “What happened to the Horn?”

Bryce held his stare, seething, beyond trying to spin any bullshit.

But Nesta said, “She is the Horn, Azriel. It’s inked into her flesh.” She lowered her hand from Bryce’s shoulder and peered at her. “Isn’t that right? It’s the only thing that would have made your tattoo react that way earlier.”

Azriel’s hazel eyes flickered with predatory intent. He’d carve it out of her fucking back.

If she ran for the exit tunnel … They’d said something about a climb out of here, then a hike down a mountain.

But this court was an island. She wouldn’t be able to get away from them.

Azriel began circling her with an unhurried, calculating precision. Bryce turned with him, keeping him in sight, but doing so exposed her back to Nesta, who she suspected might be the apex predator in the room.

“That’s how you got to this world,” Nesta went on, backing up a step—no doubt to provide space to draw Ataraxia. “Why you, and no one else, can come. Why you said no one would be able to follow you here. Because only you have the Horn. Only you can move between worlds.”

“You got me,” Bryce said, throwing up her hands in mock surrender and taking a step out of Nesta’s range. “I’m a big, bad, world-jumping monster. Like my ancestors.”

“You’re a liability,” Nesta said flatly, eyes taking on that silvery sheen—that otherworldly fire.

“I told you guys a hundred times already: I didn’t even want to come here—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Nesta said. “You did come here, to the place where the Daglan are still apparently dead set on returning.”

“The Asteri would need the Horn to open a portal. They might find me, but they can’t get in.”

“But you want to go home,” Nesta said, “and for that you’ll have to open a door to Midgard. What if Rigelus is right there? Waiting to come through?”

Bryce turned to keep facing Azriel, but—

Only shadows surrounded her.

Nesta had distracted her, enough that her focus had slipped and Azriel had vanished. They’d worked in silent, perfect tandem.

Not to attack, she realized, as a shadow darker than the ones around it raced for the tunnel across the chamber. But to go get reinforcements.

“No!” Bryce threw out a hand, and light ruptured from her fingers. It slammed into Azriel’s shadows, fracturing the darkness and revealing the warrior beneath. But not enough to stop his sprint—

She needed more power.

The eight-pointed star at her feet glimmered. As if her magic had nudged something within it. Like embers flaring in stirred ashes. What if her star hadn’t been guiding her to the knowledge, but to something … different? Something tangible.

Like calls to like.

To you, in this very stone, Silene had said, I leave the inheritance and the burden that my own mother passed to me.

This place, this Prison and the court it had once been, was Bryce’s inheritance. Hers to command, as Silene had commanded it.

And that memory, of Silene lying next to the Harp in the center of this room, reaching for one of the carvings with a kernel of light forming at her finger …

In this very stone …

Silene had warped her former palace and home into this Prison. She must have imbued some magic in the rock to do it. Must have given over some part of her power to not only change the terrain, but to house the monsters in their cells.

Theia had shown her how to do it. In those last moments with her daughters, Theia had used the Harp to transfer magic from herself into Silene and Helena, to protect them. It had appeared as a star. Had Silene replicated that here?

Was it possible that the Harp, in that moment that Silene reached for it, power at the ready, had been able to transfer her magic to this place?

… I leave the inheritance and the burden that my own mother passed to me.

And precisely as Theia had gifted her own power to Silene … perhaps Silene had in turn left that same power here, to be claimed by a future scion.

One by one, rapid as shooting stars, the thoughts raced through Bryce. More on instinct than anything else, she dropped to her knees and slammed her hand atop the eight-pointed star. Bryce reached with her mind, through layers of rock and earth—and there it was. Slumbering beneath her.

Not firstlight, not as she knew it on Midgard—but raw Fae power from a time before the Drop. The power ascended toward her through the stone, like a glimmering arrow fired into the dark—

Azriel flapped his wings and was instantly airborne, swooping for the tunnel exit.

Like a small sun emerging from the stone itself, a ball of light burst from the floor. A star, twin to the one in Bryce’s chest. Her starlight at last awoke again, as if reaching with shining fingers for that star hovering inches away.

With trembling hands, Bryce guided the star to the one gleaming on her chest. Into her body.

White light erupted everywhere.

Power, uncut and ancient, scorched through her veins. The hair on her head rose. Debris floated upward. She was everywhere and nowhere. She was the evening star and the last rays of color before the dark.

Azriel had nearly reached the tunnel. Another flap of his wings and he’d be swallowed by its dark mouth.

But at a mere thought from Bryce, stalactites and stalagmites formed, closing in on him. The room became a wolf, its jaws snapping for the winged warrior—

The rock had moved for her, as it had for Silene.

“Stop him,” she said in a voice that was more like her father’s than anything she’d ever heard come out of her mouth.

Azriel swept for the tunnel archway—and slammed into a wall of stone. The exit had sealed.

Slowly, he turned, wings rustling. Blood trickled out of his nose from his face-first collision with the rock now in his path. He spread his wings, bracing for a fight.

The mountain shook, the chamber with it. Debris fell from the ceiling. Walls began shifting, rock groaning against rock. As if the place this had once been was fighting to emerge from the stone.

But Nesta raced at Bryce, Ataraxia drawn, silver flame wreathing the blade.

Bryce lifted a hand, and spike after spike of rock ruptured from the ground, blocking Nesta’s advance. The chamber shuddered again—

“Stop,” Azriel roared, something like panic in his voice. “The cells—”

From far away, she could sense it: the things lurking within the mountain, her mountain. Twisted, wretched creatures. Some had been here since Silene had trapped them. Had been contemplating their escape and revenge all this time. She’d let them out if she restored the mountain to its former glory.

And in that moment, the mountain—the island—spoke to her.

Alone. It was so alone—it had been waiting all this time. Cold and adrift in this thrashing gray sea. If she could reach out, if she could open her heart to it … it might sing again. Awaken. There was a beating, vibrant heart locked away, far beneath them. If she freed it, the land would rise from its slumber, and such wonders would spring again from its earth—