House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City Series)
House of Flame and Shadow: Part 1 – Chapter 23

If the prisoners had done something as drastic as biting off Ruhn’s hand, they had to be dangerously close to breaking. Which left Lidia with too little time, and too few options.

The one before her now seemed the wisest and swiftest. She could only trust that Declan Emmet had gotten the coded message she’d sent through her secure labyrinth of channels and was turning the cameras away at this very moment.

The Mistress of the Mystics had scuttled off as soon as Lidia had stalked through the doors to the dank hall—surely to grouse to Rigelus about Lidia’s unexpected arrival. She’d ordered Lidia to wait at the front desk.

Lidia had lingered long enough to ensure the mistress had indeed left, then promptly ignored her order.

“Irithys,” Lidia said to the sprite lying on the bottom of the crystal ball. Curled on her side, the queen remained asleep. Or pretended to be. “I need your help.”

The Sprite Queen cracked open an eye. “To torture more people?”

“To torture me.”

Irithys opened both eyes this time. Slowly sat up. “What?”

Lidia brought her face close to the crystal and said quietly, “There is an angel in the dungeon. Hunt Athalar.”

Irithys sucked in a breath—she knew him. How could she not, as one of the Fallen in her own way? Though Irithys hadn’t fought in the failed rebellion, she’d been born into the consequences: heir to a damned people, a queen enslaved upon the moment of her crowning. She’d know every key player in the saga—know every decision that had led to the punishment that rippled across generations of sprites.

“He has begun the fight anew. And this spring, a sprite befriended him; she died to save his mate. Her name was Lehabah. She claimed to be a descendent of Queen Ranthia Drahl.” Just as Lidia had seen the footage of Athalar slaying Sandriel, so, too, had she witnessed the final stand of the fire sprite who had saved Bryce Quinlan. Rigelus had considered it imperative that Lidia know everything about the threat to the Asteri’s power.

Irithys’s eyes widened at the mention of their long-dead queen’s line. The bloodline believed gone. The queen whose decision to rebel alongside Athalar and his Archangel had led to this enslaved fate for all sprites, for Irithys herself. But she said evenly, “So?”

Lidia said, “I need you to help me free Hunt Athalar and two of his companions.”

Irithys stood, flame a mistrusting yellow. “Is this another warm-up?”

Lidia didn’t have time for lies, for games. “The warm-up with Hilde was a test. Not to see what you could do, but who you are.”

The queen’s head angled. The yellow hue remained.

Lidia said, “To see if you were as honorable as I had hoped. As trustworthy.”

“For what?” The sprite spat the words, sparks of pure red flying from her.

“To help me with a diversion—one that might save more lives than the three in the dungeon.”

Irithys sniffed. “You are Rigelus’s pet.” She waved with a burning hand to the mystics slumbering in their tanks. “No better than them, obeying him in all things. They would lie if he commanded them to. Would drown themselves, if he so much as breathed the word.”

“I can explain later. Right now I only have”—she choked on the word—“trust to offer.”

“What of the cameras?” Irithys glanced to the ever-watchful eyes mounted throughout the space.

“I have people in my employ who have ensured that they are looking elsewhere right now,” Lidia said, praying that it was true.

And with an appeal to Luna, she tapped the crystal ball, dissolving it. She still had the access Rigelus had granted in her blood to open the ball—she could still make this happen.

She’d intended to use the Sprite Queen to attempt to melt the gorsian shackles off Ruhn, Baxian, and Athalar, but things had changed. She needed Irithys for something far bigger.

Irithys stood in the open air, arms crossed, now a familiar, wary orange shade. “And this?” She gestured to the ink on her neck.

Lidia said quietly, as calmly as she could, “I made a bargain with Hilde for her freedom. She need only do one favor for me when the time comes, and she’ll walk free.”

Irithys angled her head again. “And the part about me torturing you …?”

“Will come after that. To make it believable.”

“Make what believable?”

Lidia checked her watch. Not much time. “I need to know if you’re in or out.”

To her credit, the Sprite Queen didn’t waste time. Lidia held her stare, and let the queen see all that lay beneath it. Surprise lit Irithys’s face … but she nodded slowly, turning a determined hue of ruby.

“Get the hag,” the queen said.

It was a matter of a few minutes to get Hilde brought down. The guards didn’t question the Hind, and her luck had held—the mistress was still off complaining to Rigelus.

Hilde glared at Lidia as she stood before the sprite, the queen free of her crystal and burning a bright bloodred. “And I walk free as soon as I do this favor for you?”

“No one shall stop you.”

Hilde weighed Lidia’s expression. “What is it, then?”

Lidia nodded toward Irithys. “Undo what you did years ago. Remove the tattoo from her neck.”

Hilde showed no shock, not even a glimmer. Instead, she again glanced between Lidia and the sprite, who remained silent and watchful. “Won’t your master punish you for that?”

Lidia said, “All I do is in service of Rigelus’s will, even if he cannot always see it.” A pretty lie.

But Hilde nodded slowly, her wispy silver hair gleaming with the red of Irithys’s flame. “I shall seek shelter in my House until you have officially cleared my name, then.”

Lidia produced a key to the hag’s gorsian shackles. Irithys simmered beside her, now a tense violet, as the lock clicked.

The hag’s shackles fell free.

Before they could hit the floor, Hilde whirled toward Lidia, mouth opening in a scream of fury—

Lidia drew her gun faster than the eye could follow and pressed it against the side of the hag’s head. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re a traitorous pile of filth. Rigelus will reward me handsomely when I tell him about this.”

Lidia pushed the barrel of the gun into the hag’s temple. “Free the queen now, or this bullet goes into your brain. And the shackles go back on.”

The injury would be permanent with gorsian shackles slowing the healing. Death would replace her almost instantaneously.

Hilde spat, a wad of greenish-brown phlegm splattering at Lidia’s feet. “Who’s to say you won’t kill me afterward?”

“I swear on Luna’s golden bow that I shall not kill you.”

There were few stronger vows, short of the blood oath of the Fae. It seemed to do the trick for the hag, who bared her rotted teeth but said, “Fine.”

A wave of a gnarled hand and some chanted, guttural words, and the ink melted down Irithys’s fiery neck. Like black rain, it sluiced down her flaming blue body, dripping to the stones below.

And in its wake, as it cleared, the sprite began to blaze a blinding white.

Lidia lowered the gun from the hag’s head. “As promised.”

Hilde sneered, “What now? I leave, knowing you have some scheme afoot?”

Lidia slid her gaze to Irithys. “Your move, sprite.”

Irithys smiled, and crooked a small, white-hot finger.

Hilde burst into flames. The hag didn’t even have time to scream before she was ash on the floor. Amid the acrid smoke curling through the room, Irithys glowed like a newborn star.

“And now, Hind?” the Sprite Queen asked, bright as Solas himself.

Lidia held out her forearm. “Now you make it look like an accident.”

“What?”

“Burn me.” She nodded to Hilde’s ashes. “Not like that, but … enough. So it looks convincing when I tell the others you overpowered me and Hilde when I fetched you for more help torturing the prisoners, and then you got away.”

Irithys’s white flame again turned yellow. “Got away to do what, though?”

“Create a diversion.”

“It will hurt.”

Lidia held the sprite’s stare. “Good. In order to be real, it needs to hurt.”

She laid out her plan for the queen as quickly as she could, telling her how to navigate the path of disabled cameras to get out of the palace, where to hide, and when and where to strike. And if somehow, against all odds, she succeeded … she laid out what would be required of Irithys after that. As insane and unlikely as it was.

All of it relied on the queen. When Lidia had finished, Irithys was shaking her head—not with refusal, but with shock.

“Can I trust you?” Lidia asked the sprite.

Irithys began to glow white again—white-hot. “You don’t have any other choice now, do you?”

Lidia extended her arm once more. “Make it hurt, Your Majesty.”

Darkness and debris and dust. Coughs and groans.

From the sounds behind her, Bryce knew Nesta and Azriel were alive. What state they were in … Well, she didn’t particularly care at the moment.

The power she’d siphoned from this place, from Silene herself, thrummed through her body, familiar and yet foreign. It was part of her now—not like a temporary charge from Hunt, but rather something that had stuck to her own power, bound itself there.

Like called to like. As if her star had known this magic existed and drawn her toward it, as if they were sister powers—

And they were. Bryce bore Theia’s light through Helena’s line. And this light … it was Theia’s light through Silene. Two sisters, united at last. But Silene’s light, now mixed with Bryce’s …

It was light, but it wasn’t quite the same as the power she’d possessed before. She couldn’t figure it out, didn’t have the time to explore its nuances, as she got to her feet and beheld the faint shimmer filling the chamber they’d fallen into. The one that had been hidden a level below the star.

A sarcophagus made of clear quartz lay in the center of the space. And inside it, preserved in eternal youth and beauty, lay a dark-haired female.

Bryce’s mind sped through possibilities. This place had once been an Asteri palace before Theia had claimed it. And in the tunnel carvings, made by Silene to depict her mother’s teachings …

Evil always waited below them.

What if Silene had never realized what, exactly, Theia had meant? That it wasn’t just a metaphor?

That here, literally right under them, slumbering in that forgotten coffin …

Here lay the evil beneath.