House of Flame and Shadow: The INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER third instalment in the Crescent City series
House of Flame and Shadow: Part 2 – Chapter 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.”

“So it’s about your ego, then.”

“It’s about our survival. The Fae stand in a favorable position with the Asteri. If our power wanes, they will lose interest in maintaining that. Others will creep in to take what we have, predators around a carcass. And the Asteri won’t lift a finger to stop them.”

“And this is why you and Morven schemed to throw me and Cormac together?”

“King Morven has noticed the fading as well. But he has the luxury of hiding behind Avallen’s mists.”

Bryce drummed her fingers on the smooth rolled arm of her chair. “Is it true that the Asteri can’t pierce the mists around Avallen?”

“Morven is almost certain they can’t. Though I don’t know if Rigelus has ever tried to breach the barriers.” He glanced toward the tall windows to his left, toward the dome of the glamour shimmering above the olive trees and lavender beds. As much of a barrier as he could ever hope to hide behind.

Bryce weighed her options, and ultimately dared to go for it as she asked, “Does the term thin place mean anything to you?”

He angled his head, and damn if it didn’t freak her the fuck out to see how similar the motion was to her own habits. “No. What is it?”

“Just something I heard once.”

“You lie. You learned of it in the home world of the Fae.”

Maybe she shouldn’t have asked. Maybe it was too dangerous to have revealed this to him. Not for her, but for the world she’d left. Bryce halted her fingers’ drumming, laying her hand flat on the cool, smooth leather arm. “I only heard the phrase, not the definition.”

He surveyed her, sensing that lie as well, but something like admiration brightened his eyes. “Defiant to a fault.”

Still seated, she sketched a half bow.

The Autumn King went on, idly twirling the pen between his fingers, “I always knew your mother was hiding something about you. She went to such lengths to conceal you from me.”

“Maybe because you’re a sociopath?”

His fingers tightened around the pen once more. “Ember loved me, once upon a time. Only something enormous would have severed that love.”

Bryce propped her chin on a fist, all innocent curiosity. “Like when you hit her? Something enormous like that?”

Fire licked along his shoulders, in his long hair. But his voice remained flat. “Let us not retread old ground. I have told you my feelings on the matter.”

“Yeah, you’re so sorry about it. Sorry enough that now you’ve done exactly what she was so scared of all along: locked me up in your villa.”

He motioned to the windows. “Has it occurred to you that here, hidden from the world and any spying eyes, you are safe? That should anyone on Midgard have learned of your return, word would soon have reached the Eternal Palace and you would be dead?”

Bryce put a hand on her chest. “I totally love how you’re building yourself up as my savior—really, A for effort on that front—but let’s cut the bullshit. I’m locked up here because you want something from me. What is it?”

He didn’t answer, and instead twisted to adjust one of the settings on some sort of prism-like device. Whatever he’d done sent the sunlight piercing through the orrery’s assortment of planets.

A prism—the total opposite of what she’d done with her powers when she’d fought Nesta and Azriel. Where she’d condensed light, the prism fractured it.

She glanced at her hands, so pale against the bloodred of the leather chair. She’d been riding on adrenaline and despair and bravado. How had she managed to make her light into a laser in those last moments in the Fae world? It had been intuitive in the moment, but now … Maybe it was better not to know. Not to think about how her light seemed to be edging closer to the properties of an Asteri’s destructive power.

“Ruhn told me that you hole up in here all day looking for patterns,” Bryce said, nodding to the orrery, the prism device, the assortment of golden tools on the desk. “What sort of patterns?” She and Ruhn had enjoyed a good laugh over that—the thought of the mighty Autumn King as little more than a conspiracy theorist. What does he think he’s going to replace? Ruhn had asked, snickering. That the universe is playing a giant game of tic-tac-toe?

Bryce’s heart twanged with the memory.

The Autumn King jotted down another note, pen scraping too loudly in the heavy quiet. “Why should I trust a loud-mouthed child with no discretion to keep my secrets?”

“It’s a secret, huh? So this is some controversial shit?”

Disdain warped his handsome face. “I once asked your brother to provide me with a seed of his starlight.”

“Gross. Don’t call it that.”

His nostrils flared. “What little seed he was able to produce allowed me to use this in a way I found … beneficial.” He patted the gold-plated device that held the prism.

“I didn’t realize making rainbows on the wall was so important to you.”

He ignored her. “This device refracts the light, pulling it apart so I might study every facet of it.” He pointed to a sister device positioned directly across from it. “That device gathers it back into one beam again. I am attempting to add more to the light in the process of re-forming it. If the light might be pulled apart and strengthened in its most basic form, there’s a chance that it will coalesce into a more powerful version of itself.”

She refrained from mentioning the blue stones Azriel had wielded—how they’d condensed and directed his power. Instead, she drawled, “And this is a good use of your time because …?”

His silence was biting.

“Let me do the math.” She began ticking items off on her fingers. “The Asteri are made of light. They feed on firstlight. You are studying light, its properties, beyond what science can already tell us …”

A muscle ticked in his jaw.

“Am I getting warm?” Bryce asked. “But if you have such questions about the Asteri, why not ask them yourself?” She hummed in contemplation. “Maybe you want to use this against them?”

He arched a brow. “Your imagination does run rampant.”

“Oh, totally. But you took zero interest in me as a kid. And now suddenly, once I revealed my magic light, you want me to be part of your fucked-up little family.”

“My only interest in you lies in the bloodline you stand to pass on.”

“Too bad Hunt complicates that.”

“More than you know.”

She paused, but didn’t fall for the trap of asking about it. She continued to lead him down the path of her rambling, resuming her counting on her fingers.

“So your daughter has light powers, you’re interested in patterns in light … you want the information hidden from the Asteri …” She chuckled, lowering her hand at last. “Oh, don’t even try to deny it,” she said when he opened his mouth. “If you wanted to help them, you’d have turned me over to them already.”

The Autumn King smiled. It was a thing of nightmarish beauty. “You truly are my child. More so than Ruhn ever was.”

“That’s not a compliment.” But she went on, content to needle him with her guesses. “You want to know if I can kill them, don’t you? The Asteri. If the Starborn light is different from their light, and how it is different. That’s where the orrery comes in: contemplating where we come from … what sort of light we have, how it can be weaponized.”

His nostrils flared again. “And did you learn such things on your journey?”

Bryce tapped her gorsian-shackled wrist. “Remove these and I can show you what I learned.”

He smirked, and picked up the prism device again. “I’ll wait.”

She hadn’t thought for a second that would work—but it seemed he knew it, too. That this was a game, a dance between them.

Bryce nodded to where he’d left the Starsword and Truth-Teller on the desk the day before. According to Ruhn, the Autumn King had rarely dared to touch the sword. It seemed like that was true, if he hadn’t moved the blades since her crash landing. “Let’s talk about how we can add another notch to my Magical Starborn Princess belt: I united the sword and knife. Prophecy fulfilled.”

“You don’t know anything about that prophecy,” the Autumn King said, and returned to his work.

She asked sweetly, “So my interpretation is wrong? When knife and sword are reunited, so shall our people be. Well, I went to our old world. Met some people. Reminded them we exist. Came back here. Thus, two people reunited.”

He shook his head in pure disgust. “You know as little about those blades as you do your own true nature.”

She made a show of yawning. “Well, I do know that only the Chosen One can handle the blades. Wait—does that mean you can’t? Since last I checked … only Ruhn and I got the Chosen One membership cards.”

“Ruhn doesn’t possess the raw power to handle such a thing correctly.”

“But I do?” she asked innocently. “Is that why I’m here? We’re going to cooperate in some kind of training montage so I can take down the Asteri for you?”

“Who says I want to get rid of the Asteri?”

“You’ve been really careful not to mention one way or another how you feel about them. One moment, you’re protecting me from them, the next you’re trying to keep the Fae in their good graces. Which is it?”

“Can it not be both?”

“Sure. But if you get rid of the Asteri, it’d give you even more power than whatever scheme you had planned that involved my marrying Cormac.”

He adjusted a dial on his device, the light shifting a millimeter to the right. “Does it matter who is in power, so long as the Fae survive?”

“Um, yeah. One option is a parasitic blight upon this world. Let’s not go with that choice.”

He set the device down again. “Explain this … parasite. You mentioned something about the Asteri taking some of our power through the Drop.”

Bryce debated it. He held her stare, seeing that debate rage in her.

Who would he tell, though? At this point, the more people who knew, even the assholes, the better it was. That way the secret couldn’t die with her.

And after all the shit she’d learned and been through … maybe it’d help to lay out all the pieces at once.

So Bryce told him. Everything she’d learned about the Asteri, their history, their feeding patterns, the firstlight and secondlight. Gods, it was worse saying it aloud.

She finished, slumping back in the armchair. “So we’re basically a giant buffet for the Asteri.”

He’d been still and watchful while she’d related the information, but now he said quietly, “Perhaps the Asteri have been taking too much, for too long, from our people. That is why the bloodlines have weakened, generation after generation.” He spoke more to himself than to her, but his eyes snapped to Bryce’s as he said, “So all the water on Midgard is contaminated.”

“I don’t think a filter’s gonna help you, if that’s what you’re planning.”

He cut her a glare. “Yet the Fae in the other world do not have this affliction?”

“No. The Asteri hadn’t developed this nasty little method of theft when they occupied their world.” She rubbed her temples. “Maybe that sword and dagger can cleanse the parasite, though.” She hummed again, as if thinking it over. “Maybe you should let me impale you with them and we can see what happens.”

“You will never understand how they work,” he said flatly.

“So you do?” She let her skepticism show in her voice. “How?”

“You’re not the only one with access to ancient texts. Jesiba Roga’s collection is but a fraction of mine—and a fraction of what lies in Avallen. I have studied the lore long enough to draw some conclusions.”

“Good for you. You’re a genius.”

Fire crackled at his fingertips—the same flame he’d used to burn Ruhn as a kid. She shut down the thought as he warned, “I wouldn’t be so impertinent if I were you. Your survival depends entirely upon my goodwill.”

Oily, churning nausea coursed through her gut. Whatever game or dance they’d been engaging in … he could have this round. “Gods, you’re the worst.”

He picked up a nearby notebook and cracked open its green cover. It was full of scribbling. His research records and thoughts. A stack of paper lay underneath it, also covered with his writing. Leafing through the notebook, his voice was bland as he said, “I tire of you. Take your leave.”