House of Flame and Shadow: The INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER third instalment in the Crescent City series
House of Flame and Shadow: Part 2 – Chapter 49

“I’m telling you, Ketos, she is the worst,” Flynn growled at Tharion in the shadows of the pillars flanking one side of the throne room. Normal shadows, thankfully. Not the awful ones the Fae King commanded. “This is a terrible idea. It will ruin your life.”

“My life is already ruined,” Tharion said, voice as hollow as he felt. “If we live through this, we can get a divorce.”

“The Fae don’t divorce.” Flynn gripped his arm hard. “It’s literally marriage until death.”

“Well, I’m not Fae—”

“She is. If you divorce her, she won’t have any chance of ever marrying again. She’ll be sullied goods. After the first marriage, the only ways out are death or widowhood. A widow can remarry, but a divorcée … it’s not even a thing. She’d be persona non grata.”

On the opposite side of the room, Declan and Ruhn were talking to Sathia in hushed tones. Likely having the same conversation.

Morven glowered away on his throne, shadows like a hissing nest of asps around him, the monstrous twins now flanking him on either side. Tharion had detected the oily shadows creeping toward his mind the moment the twins had arrived. He’d instinctively thrown up a roaring river of water, creating a mental moat around himself. He had no idea what he was doing, but it had worked. The shadows had drowned.

It only made this decision easier. To have anyone forced to endure the Murder Twins’ presence, to marry someone who could pry into minds—

Tharion now said to Flynn, “Your sister would be a pariah amongst the Fae only. Normal people won’t have a problem with divorce.”

Flynn didn’t back down one inch, his teeth flashing. “She is the daughter of Lord Hawthorne. She’s always going to want to marry within the Fae.”

“She accepted my offer.” With the quietest and blandest yes he’d ever heard, but still. A clear acceptance.

Flynn snapped, “Because she’s desperate and scared—you think that’s a good state of mind to make an informed decision?”

Tharion held the male’s stare. “I don’t see anyone else stepping forward to help her.”

Flynn growled. “Look, she’s spoiled and petty and mean as a snake, but she’s my little sister.”

“So replace some alternative that doesn’t involve her death to get her out of this.”

Flynn glared, and Tharion glared right back.

Across the way, Sathia shoved past Dec and Ruhn and stormed toward them. She was short—but stood with a presence that commanded the room. Her dark eyes were pure fire as they met Tharion’s. “Are we doing this?”

Gone was that quiet, bland tone.

Bryce, Athalar, and Baxian were watching from the rear of the room, the Hind a few steps to the side.

None of them had expected the day to go this way. Starting with Tharion bailing on the Ocean Queen, and culminating in this shitshow. But if it had been Lesia in Sathia’s stead … he would have wanted someone to step up to help her, faithless soldier or no.

So Tharion said to Sathia, “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

Morven wasted no time in summoning a Priestess of Cthona. Like the bastard was trying to call Tharion’s bluff.

Not five minutes later, Tharion found himself with a wife.

“You,” Sigrid growled at Ithan, her rasping voice barely more than a whisper.

Ithan could hardly process what he was hearing—seeing.

“What happened?” Jesiba shouted at Hypaxia, who was still clinging to Ithan—who, in turn, was backing them toward the door.

But it was Sigrid who answered, more stitches popping as her neck moved, revealing a brutal scar now etched there. “We came to a doorway. She wanted to go one way …” A smile twisted her face. “I went the other.”

Hypaxia shook her head, frantic. “She wouldn’t come, she slipped through my fingers—”

“I had no interest in letting such a prize go,” intoned a cold voice.

Even Jesiba got to her feet as the Under-King appeared in the morgue doorway.

As he had on the night of the Autumnal Equinox, he wore dark, fraying robes that floated on a phantom breeze.

“You had no right,” Hypaxia challenged, pushing past Ithan as his every sense went into overdrive at the Under-King’s unearthly presence, his ageless might. “No right to turn her—”

“Am I not lord of the dead?” He remained in the doorway, hovering as if standing on air. “She had no Sailing. Her soul was there for the claiming. You offered her one option, witch. I gave her another.”

He beckoned to Sigrid, who moved off the table as if she were alive. As if she had never been dead. Were it not for the acid-green eyes, the scars, Ithan might have believed it.

A Fendyr was a Reaper. A half-life, a walking corpse—

It was sacrilege. A disgrace.

And it was all his fault.

“Which is the more attractive choice?” the Under-King mused as Sigrid took his hand. “To have been raised by you, Hypaxia, to be under your command and thrall … or to be free?”

“To be your servant,” Hypaxia corrected with impressive steel.

“Better mine than yours,” the Under-King countered. He then inclined his head to Ithan. “Young Holstrom. You have my gratitude. Her soul might have drifted forever. She’s in capable hands now.”

“What—what are you going to do?” Ithan dared ask.

The Under-King peered down at Sigrid and smiled, revealing too-large, brown teeth. “Come, my pet. You have much to learn.”

But Sigrid turned to Ithan, and he’d never known such self-loathing as he did when she said in that rasping Reaper’s voice, “You killed me.”

“I’m sorry.” The words didn’t even cover it. Would never cover it.

“I won’t forget this.”

Neither would he. As long as he lived. He held her stare, hating those acid-green eyes, the deadness in them—

“We will speak soon,” the Under-King said to Jesiba, more warning than invitation. Before Jesiba could reply, the Under-King and Sigrid vanished on a dark wind.

Only when its scraps of shadow had faded from the morgue did Jesiba say, “What a disaster.”

Hypaxia was staring at her hands, as if trying to walk herself through her mistake.

Ithan couldn’t stop the shaking that overtook him from head to toe, right down to his very bones. “Fix this.”

Hypaxia didn’t look up.

Ithan growled, his heart racing swiftly, “Fix this.”

Jesiba clicked her tongue. “What’s done is done, pup.”

“I don’t accept that.” Ithan bared his teeth at her, then pointed at Hypaxia. “Undo what you just did.”

Slowly, Hypaxia lifted her eyes to his. Bleak, pleading, tired. “Ithan—”

“FIX IT!” Ithan roared, the witch’s necromantic instruments rattling in the wake of the sound. He didn’t care. Nothing fucking mattered but this. “FIX HER!” He whirled on Jesiba. “Did you know this would happen?” His voice broke.

Jesiba gave him a flat look. “No. And if you take that tone with me again—”

“There might be a way,” Hypaxia said quietly.

Even Jesiba blinked, turning with Ithan to survey the former witch-queen. “Once the dead have crossed that threshold into Reaperdom—”

Hypaxia’s gaze met Ithan’s and held, the pain bleeding away to pure determination. “Necromancy can lead her to that threshold; it can haul her back again, too.”

“How?” Jesiba asked. Ithan could barely breathe.

“We need a thunderbird.”

Jesiba threw up her hands. “There are none left.”

“Sofie Renast was a thunderbird,” Ithan said, more to himself than to the others. “We thought her brother might be one, too, but—”

“Sofie Renast is dead,” Jesiba said.

Hypaxia only asked, “Where’s her body?” The question rang like a death knell through the morgue.

Jesiba got it before Ithan did. “After that debacle,” she said, pointing to the examination table where Sigrid had laid moments before, the sheet now discarded on the floor beside it, “you really want to try raising the dead again?”

“Sofie’s been dead for too long to raise,” Ithan said, nausea churning in his gut. And, he didn’t add, he couldn’t help but agree with Roga about Hypaxia’s track record.

“If she hasn’t been given a Sailing, then it should work—though the decayed state of her body will be … gruesome.” Hypaxia paced the room. “She should still have enough lightning lingering in her veins to bridge the gap between life and death. The thunderbirds were once able to aid necromancers, to use their lightning to hold the souls of the dead. They could even imbue their power into ordinary objects, like weapons, and give them magical properties—”

“And you think it can somehow undo Sigrid becoming a Reaper?” Ithan said.

“I think the lightning might be able to pull her soul back toward life,” Hypaxia said. “And give her the chance to make the choice again. A few days as a Reaper might change her mind.”

Silence fell. Ithan looked to Jesiba, but the sorceress was silent, as if weighing Hypaxia’s every word.

Ithan swallowed hard. “Will it work?”

Jesiba didn’t take her eyes from Hypaxia as she said quietly, “It might.”

“But where’s her body?” Ithan pushed. “The last I heard from my friends, the Ocean Queen had it on her ship. She could have sent it out the air lock for all we know—”

“Give me thirty minutes,” Jesiba said, and didn’t wait for a reply before stalking out of the room.

There was nothing to do but wait. Ithan didn’t feel like doing anything except sitting at the desk and looking at his hands.

His inept, bloodstained hands.

He’d tried to save Sigrid from the Astronomer, and had only succeeded in killing her. And then turning her corpse into a Reaper. Every choice he’d made had led them from bad to worse to catastrophic.

Jesiba breezed through the metal doors of the morgue exactly thirty minutes later. “Well, it took more bribes than I’d have liked, but I have good news and bad news,” she declared.

“Good first,” Ithan said, looking up from his hands at last. Hypaxia had sat in the other desk chair the entire time, silent and thoughtful.

“I know where Sofie’s body is,” Jesiba said.

“And the bad news?” Hypaxia asked quietly.

Jesiba glanced between them, gray eyes blazing. “It’s on Avallen. With the Stag King.”