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

Bryce got to her feet, unable to sit still despite her exhaustion. She paced in front of the crackling fire. “I don’t know. It’s not like I was expecting a giant neon sign in the archives that said Answers Here! But if the Asteri are going after Flynn’s family …” She hadn’t let herself think about it earlier. There was nothing she could do from here, without phone or interweb service. “Then they’re going after mine.”

“Randall and Ember can look after themselves.” But Hunt rose, walking to her and taking her hands. “They’ll be okay.” His hands were warm around hers, solid. She closed her eyes at the touch, savoring its love and comfort. “We’ll get there, Quinlan. You traveled between worlds, for fuck’s sake. This is nothing by comparison.”

“Don’t tempt Urd.”

“I’m not. I’m just telling you the truth. Don’t lose faith now.”

Bryce sighed, examining his tattooed brow again. “We need to find some way to get this off you.”

“Not a big priority.”

“It is. I need you at your full power.” The words came out wrong, and she amended, “I need you to be free of them.”

“I will be. We all will be.”

Staring into his dark eyes, she believed him. “I’m sorry about earlier. If I pushed you too hard.”

“I’m fine.” His voice didn’t sound fine.

“I wasn’t trying to tell you how to feel,” she said. “I just want you to know that none of us, especially me, hold you responsible for all this shit. We’re a team.”

He lowered his stare, and she hated the weight pressing on his head, drooping his wings. “I don’t know if I can do this again, Bryce.”

Her heart strained. “Do what?”

“Make choices that cost people their lives.” His eyes lifted to hers again, bleak. “It was easier for Shahar, you know. She didn’t care about other people’s lives, not really. And she died so fast, she didn’t have to endure the weight of the guilt that might have come later. Sometimes I envy her for it. I did envy her for it, back then. For escaping it all by dying.”

“That’s the old Umbra Mortis talking,” Bryce said, fumbling for humor amid the cold wash of pain and worry at his words, his dead tone.

“Maybe we need the Umbra Mortis right now.”

She didn’t like that. Not one bit. “I need Hunt, not some helmeted assassin. I need my mate.” She kissed his cheek. “I need you.”

The darkness in his eyes lightened, and it eased her heart, relief washing through her.

She kissed his cheek again. “I know we should go wash up for bed and use the chamber pot or whatever excuse they have for a toilet in this museum, but …”

“But?” He lifted his brows.

Bryce rose onto her toes, brushing her mouth against his. And the taste of him … Gods, yes. “But I need to feel you first.”

His hands tightened around her waist. “Thank fuck.”

There was more to be discussed, of course. But right now …

He lowered his face to hers, and Bryce met him, the kiss thorough and open, and just … bliss. Home and eternity and all she’d fought for. All she’d keep fighting for.

From the way he returned the kiss, she knew he realized it, too. Hoped he let it burn through any lingering scraps of remorse.

“I love you,” he said against her mouth, and deepened the kiss. She stifled a sob of relief, arms winding around his neck. Hunt’s hands slid around to her ass and he hefted her up, smoothly walking them over to the enormous, curtained bed.

Clothes were peeled away. Mouths met, and explored, and tasted. Fingers caressed and stroked. Then Hunt was over her, and Bryce let her joy, her magic shine through her.

“Look at you,” Hunt breathed, hips flexing beneath her hands, cock teasing her entrance. “Look at you.”

Bryce smiled as she let more of that power shine through her: Starborn light so silvery bright it cast shadows upon the bed. “Like it?”

Hunt’s thrust, driving himself in to the hilt, was his response. “You’re so fucking beautiful,” he whispered. Lightning gathered around his wings, his brow. Like his power couldn’t help but answer hers, even with the halo’s damper on it.

Bryce moaned as he withdrew, nearly pulling out of her, then plunged back in.

Hunt angled her hips to drive himself deeper. And as his cock brushed her innermost wall, as lightning flickered above her, in her …

Mate. Husband. Prince. Hunt.

“Yes,” Hunt said, and she must have voiced her thoughts aloud, because his thrusts turned deeper, harder. “I fucking love you, Bryce.”

Her magic rose at his words, a surging wave. Or maybe that was her climax, rising along with it. She couldn’t get enough of him, couldn’t get close enough to him, needed to be in him, his very blood—

“Solas, Bryce,” Hunt growled, pumping into her in a long, luxurious stroke. “I can’t—” She didn’t want him to. She gripped his ass, nails digging in deep in silent urging. “Bryce,” he warned, but he didn’t stop moving in her. Lightning crackled and snaked around them, an avalanche racing toward her.

“Don’t stop,” she pleaded.

Their magics collided—their souls. She scattered across the stars, across galaxies, lightning skittering in her wake.

She had the dim sense of Hunt being thrown with her, of his shout of ecstasy and surprise. Knew that their bodies remained joined in some distant world, but here, in this place between places, all they were melted into one, crossed over and transferred and becoming something more.

Stars and planets and rainbow clouds of nebulas swirled around them, darkness cut with lightning brighter than the sun. Sun and moon held together in perfect balance, suspended in the same sky. And beneath them, far below, she could see Avallen, thrumming with their magic, so much magic, as if Avallen were the very source of it, as if they were the very source of all magic and light and love—

Then it ebbed away. Receded into muted color and warm air and heavy breathing. The weight of Hunt’s body atop hers, his cock pulsing inside her, his wings splayed open above them.

“Holy shit,” Hunt said, lifting himself enough to look at her. “Holy … shit.”

It had been more then fucking, or sex, or lovemaking. Hunt stared down at her, starlight shimmering in his hair. Just as she knew lightning licked through her own.

“It felt like my power went into you,” Hunt said, eyes tracking the lightning as it slithered down her body. “It’s … yours.”

“As mine is yours,” she said, touching a fleck of starlight glittering between the sable locks of his hair.

“I feel weird,” he admitted, but didn’t move. “I feel …”

She sensed it, then. Understood it at last. What it had always been, what she’d learned to call it in that other world.

“Made,” Bryce whispered with a shade of fear. “That’s what it feels like. Whatever power can flow between us … my Made power from the Horn can, too.”

Hunt looked down at himself, at where their bodies remained joined. She had a pang of guilt, then, for not telling him all she knew yet about the other Made objects in the universe—about the Mask, the Trove. “I guess it flows both ways: my power into you, and yours into me.”

Hunt smiled and surveyed the room around them. “At least we seem to be past ending up somewhere new every time we fuck.”

Bryce snorted. “That’s a relief. I don’t think Morven would have appreciated our naked asses landing in his room.”

“Definitely not,” Hunt agreed, kissing her brow. He brushed back a strand of her hair. “But what difference does it make? That we’re connected this way?”

Bryce lifted her head to kiss him. “Another thing for us to figure out.”

“Team Caves all the way,” he said against her mouth.

She laughed, their breath mingling, twining together like their souls. “I told you I should have ordered T-shirts.”





51


Tharion stood in the old-timey stone bedroom, complete with a curtained bed and tapestries on the wall, and had no idea what to say to his wife.

Apparently, Sathia Flynn had no idea what to say to him, either, because she took a seat in a carved wooden chair before the crackling hearth and stared at the fire.

They’d barely exchanged more than a word all day. But now, having to share a room—

“You can take the bed,” he said, the words too loud, too big in the chamber.

“Thank you,” she said, arms wrapping around herself. The firelight danced on her light brown hair, setting golden strands within it shining.