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

Cormac was dead. Had he died that day at the lab, or had it been afterward—perhaps in the Asteri’s dungeons, under their questioning? Or had they simply sent the male home to his shitty father and let the King of Avallen rip him to shreds for dishonoring his household?

The Autumn King smiled like he’d won. “Then you are dismissed. I shall see you tomorrow.”

She pushed past her twisting grief to say, “Fuck you.”

He merely inclined his head and resumed eating in silence.



* * *



Ithan strode down the steps of the House of Flame and Shadow in darkness so pure that even his wolf eyes couldn’t pierce it.

He’d never heard anything about what waited at the bottom of the stairs. But he figured he was out of options.

He lost track of how long he walked downward, the air tight and dry. Like a tomb.

The scuff of his sneakers against the steps echoed off the black walls. His eyes strained with the effort of trying to see, to no avail. If the steps ended in a plunge, he’d have no idea. No warning.

It was true, in the end, that he had no warning. But not for a drop. Metal clanked, and his skull with it, as Ithan slammed into a wall. He rebounded, swearing—

Light, golden and soft, cracked through the stairwell.

It wasn’t a wall. It was a door, and beyond it, silhouetted by the light, was a slim female figure. Even before he could make out her face, he knew the voice. Arch, cultured, bored.

“Well, that’s one way of knocking,” drawled Jesiba Roga.





31


Jesiba Roga led Ithan through a subterranean hall of black stone, lit only by crackling fires in hearths shaped like roaring, fanged mouths. In front of those fireplaces lounged draki of varying hues, vampyrs drinking goblets of blood, and daemonaki in business suits typing away on laptops.

A weirdly … normal place. Like a private club.

He supposed it was a private club, of sorts. The headquarters of any House were open to all its members, at any time. Some chose to dwell within them, mostly the workers who ran the House’s daily operations. But some just came to hang out, to meet, to rest.

Ithan, to his embarrassment, had never been to Lunathion’s House of Earth and Blood headquarters. Hadn’t been to its main headquarters, either, up in Hilene. Bryce had as a kid, he remembered, but he couldn’t recall the details.

Ithan followed Jesiba down the long hall, past people who barely looked his way, and then through a set of double doors of black wood carved with the horned skull sigil of the House.

He didn’t know what he’d expected. A council chamber, some fancy office …

Not the sleek, onyx bar, lit with deep blue lighting, like the heart of a flame. A jazz quartet played on a small stage beneath an archway in the rear of the space, the many high tables—all adorned with glass votives of that blue light—oriented toward the music. But Roga headed right for the obsidian glass bar, the gilded stools before it.

A golden-scaled draki female in a gauzy black dress worked the bar, and nodded toward Roga. The sorceress nodded back shallowly as she took a seat and patted the stool beside her, ordering Ithan, “Sit.”

Ithan threw the sorceress a glare at the blatant reference to his canine nature, but he obeyed.

A moment later, the bartender slid two dark glasses toward them, both rippling with smoke. Jesiba knocked hers back in one go, smoke curling from her mouth as she said, “I thought the porters had smoked too much mirthroot when they told me that Ithan Holstrom was walking down the entry steps.”

Ithan peered into his dark glass, at the amber liquid that looked and smelled like whiskey, though he’d never seen whiskey with smoke rising from it.

“It’s called a smokeshow,” Roga drawled. “Whiskey, grated ginger, and a little draki magic to make it look fancy.”

Ithan took her word for it and swallowed the whole thing in one mouthful. It burned all the way down—burned through the nothingness in him.

“Well,” Roga said, “based on how eagerly you drank that and the fact that you’re here at all, I can assume things are … not going well for you.”

“I need a necromancer.”

“And I need a new assistant, but you’d be surprised how few competent ones are out there.”

Ithan didn’t hide his glower. “I’m serious.”

Roga signaled the bartender for another round. “As am I. Ever since Quinlan left me to go work at the Fae Archives, I’ve been up to my neck in paperwork.”

Ithan was pretty sure that wasn’t how it had gone down with Bryce and Jesiba, but he said, “Look, I didn’t come here to talk to you—”

“Yes, but you’re lucky as Hel that the porters called me to deal with you, and not someone else. One of the vamps might have taken a taste by now.”

She nodded to the nearest high table behind them, where two gorgeous blonds in skintight black dresses perched, no drinks before them. They were surveying the people in the room, as if looking over a menu.

Ithan cleared his throat. “I need a necromancer,” he said again. “Immediately.”

Jesiba sighed, and nodded her thanks to the bartender as she slid over another smokeshow. “Your brother’s been dead for too long.”

“Not for my brother,” Ithan said. “For someone else.”

Jesiba drank slowly this time. Smoke fluttered from her lips as she swallowed. “Whatever it is, pup, I’d suggest making peace with it.”

“There’s no making peace with it,” Ithan snarled. He could have sworn the glasses rattled, that the jazz quartet faltered, that the two vamps turned his way. A glance from Jesiba, and the room resumed its rhythms.

“Who did you kill?” Jesiba asked, voice so low it was barely audible.

Ithan’s throat constricted. He couldn’t breathe—

“Holstrom.” Her eyes glowed like the flames in the sconces behind the bar.

There was no fixing this, no undoing it. He was a traitor and a murderer and—

“Who do you need to raise?” Roga’s question was cold as ice.

Ithan made himself meet her gaze, made himself face what he’d done.

“A lost Fendyr heir.”



* * *



“I’m assuming the food last night was reheated leftovers, if that shitty little yogurt you left outside my door this morning counts as breakfast,” Bryce said to the Autumn King as she plopped into a red leather armchair and watched his orrery tick away.

Her father, sitting across the oversized desk, ignored her.

“How long are you going to keep me here?”

“Are we playing the question game again? I thought you’d tired of it last night.” He didn’t look up from what he was writing, his sheet of red hair slipping over a broad shoulder.

She clenched her teeth. “Just trying to calculate how much borrowed time I have left.”

His golden pen—a fountain pen, for fuck’s sake—slashed across the paper. “I shall procure more groceries, if my breakfast provisions are inadequate.”

Bryce crossed her legs, the leather chair creaking as she leaned back. “Look at you: cooking your own meals and grocery shopping. Why, you could almost pass as a functional adult and not some pampered brat.”

The fabric of his gray T-shirt pulled over his chest as his shoulders tensed.

Bryce pointed to the orrery. “The Astronomer said you had some Avallen craftsmen make that for you. Fancy.” The Autumn King’s eyes narrowed at the mention of the Astronomer, but he didn’t look up from his paper. Bryce plowed on, “He said the orrery is to contemplate fundamental questions about ourselves, like who we are and where we came from. I have a hard time believing you’re in here all day, thinking about anything that profound.”

His pen stalled on the paper. “The Fae bloodlines have been weakening for generations now. It is my life’s work to investigate why. This orrery was built in pursuit of answering that question.”

She blew on her nails. “Especially after little old me became a certified Starborn Princess, huh?”

His fingers tightened on his pen, hard enough that she was surprised the gold plating didn’t dent. “The question of our failing bloodlines plagued me long before you were born.”

“Why? Who cares?”

He lifted his head at last, his eyes cold and dead. “I care if our people are weakening. If we become lesser than the angels, the shifters, the witches.”