House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City Series)

Unarmed, Ruhn kept his gaze on the Malleus. “What’s it gonna be, Pollux?”

Lidia’s sons were watching him closely. Lidia said nothing. But the Hammer looked toward her. “I don’t see why I can’t have everything I want,” the angel said. Then grinned at Ruhn. “Wait your turn, princeling.”

It happened so fast.

Pollux pivoted to the boys. Fixed his stare on Brann. Pure, brute power flared around the angel.

Lidia screamed as Pollux unleashed a lethal spear of his power toward Brann.

Ruhn couldn’t turn away. Didn’t want to watch, and yet he knew he had to witness this crime, this unforgivable atrocity—

But Lidia ran, swift as the wind. Swifter than a bullet.

Ruhn didn’t understand what he saw next: How Lidia reached Brann in time. How she threw herself over her son, knocking him to the ground as she burst into white-hot flames.

They erupted from her like a brimstone missile, blasting Pollux off his feet. Not some freak accident or bomb, but fire magic, pouring out of Lidia. Searing from her.

“Brann,” she was panting down at her son, the boy untouched by the flame, scanning his stunned face, tugging the gag from his mouth. “Brannon.” She stifled a sob around the boy’s full name, but then Actaeon was there, hauling his brother away as best he could with the bonds still restraining them.

“What are you?” Ace breathed.

Still panting, blazing with fire, Lidia said, “An old bloodline,” and got to her feet.

It was Daybright, as Ruhn had seen her in his mind. She’d presented herself—her true self—to him all this time.

“Get them out of here,” Lidia said to Ruhn, hair floating up in a golden halo, embers swirling around her head. “Get the mer to a healer.” It was a miracle that Tharion wasn’t already dead, given the hole blasted through him.

Pollux got to his feet. “You cunt,” he spat. “What the fuck is this?”

“Shifters, as they used to be,” Lidia said, fire rippling from her mouth. “As Danika Fendyr told me we were. Now free of the Asteri’s parasite.”

Ruhn gaped at her. She was free of the parasite? She must have gotten that antidote, somehow—from Tharion?

Lidia was glorious, wreathed in flame and blazing with fury.

Pollux’s power surged again. “I’ll kill you all the same, bitch.”

“You can try,” Lidia said, smiling.

Pollux ran at her, striking with his magic. The hallway shook, debris raining down—

A wall of blue fire leapt between them. Pollux collided with it, then stuck. A fly in a burning web.

Lidia stalked toward the angel as Pollux struggled against the flames.

“You signed your death warrant when you touched my sons,” she said. And exhaled a breath.

Flame rippled from her mouth into Pollux’s flesh. The angel screamed—or tried to.

Freed of any secrets, of any need to keep them, Lidia seemed to unleash all that she was. Ruhn could only watch as fire poured down Pollux’s throat. Into his body. Roasting him from the inside out until he was nothing but smoldering cinders, a pillar of brimstone standing mid-strike, mouth still open.

She’d incinerated him.

Lidia held out a finger. And poked the towering pillar that had once been Pollux.

It sent Pollux’s ash-statue crumbling to the ground.

Her sons got to their feet, shock stark on their battered faces. The knife in Ruhn’s boot helped him make quick work of prying open their gorsian shackles, but it was Actaeon who whispered to Lidia, “Mom?”

She looked over a shoulder to her son. Her lips curved upward—at what he’d called her, Ruhn guessed.

The palace shook again—whatever was going on outside, it had to be bad.

“Get the mer to Declan to be healed. Even after taking the antidote, I don’t think Ketos’s own body can save him,” Lidia ordered. “And that’s the last vial of the antidote in his bag. My sister figured it out. Don’t jostle it, though—it’s volatile.”

“Lidia,” Ruhn said, but her eyes blazed with true fire.

“I need to help the others.” She launched into a run for the stairs. “Get my sons to safety, and we’re even. Save them, and I forgive you for shooting me.”

She glanced back at her boys, and then vanished up into the palace. Into the battle-torn world beyond.

Lidia had known, even as a child, that she was pure power, and she’d kept that power buried in her veins.

Not witch-power. She knew her flames were … different. Her father didn’t have them, either.

She’d kept them secret, even from the Asteri. Especially from the Asteri. No other shifters had them, to her knowledge, and she knew what revealing them would mean: becoming an experiment to be pulled apart by the Asteri.

Then she had run into Danika Fendyr, who had somehow learned things about Lidia’s paternal bloodline, and wanted to know if Lidia had any strange gifts. Fae-like, elemental gifts.

She’d debated killing Danika then and there to keep the gift secret. And what else did Danika know—could she know about her sons?

The shifters were Fae from another world, Danika had explained. Blessed with a Fae form and a humanoid one, gifted with elemental powers.

It confirmed what Lidia had long guessed. Why she had named Brannon after the oldest legends from her family’s bloodline: of a Fae King from another world, fire in his veins, who had created stags with the power of flame to be his sacred guards.

Lidia hadn’t mentioned any of that as Danika had filled her in on how they’d become shifters, and the Asteri’s experimentation with them on Midgard, which had eventually erased their pointed ears. She’d been glad when Danika had died, all her questions with her.

No longer.

After ingesting the antidote that her brilliant, brave sister had made, the fire had surged so close to the surface that she couldn’t deny it. Didn’t want to deny it.

Flame rippled from Lidia as she raced out of the palace, through the city, and onto the battlefield beyond. Untethered, unconquerable.

The dreadwolves scented her first, no doubt thanks to Mordoc’s keen bloodhound senses. Spotted her standing before the gates to the city. They knew her, even with the fire, and they raced for her in humanoid form, teeth bared. Mordoc led the pack, the hate practically radiating off him. Behind him, as always, ran Gedred and Vespasian, sniper rifles aimed.

It was time for Lidia to clean house.

“You—” Mordoc barked.

Lidia didn’t give him the chance to finish. No longer would this male, Danika Fendyr’s sire, spew his vitriol into the world. He was done inflicting pain upon Midgard.

Lidia turned Mordoc and the two snipers into ashes with a thought. Until all that remained of them was the molten silver from the darts in their collars, pooled on the ground. Another thought, and the pack of dreadwolves, now skidding to a halt in panic, met the same fate.

Angels in the Asterian Guard shot from the skies, power blasting.

Lidia obliterated them, too.

Demons paused, their long-dead Fallen allies with them, mech-suits going utterly still.

The Asterian Guard’s war-machines shifted directions and rumbled toward her, each mammoth tank armed with brimstone missiles. The angels manning them aimed their rifles at her and unleashed a barrage of bullets.

Her fire a song in her blood, Lidia walked across the battlefield. Bullets melted before they could reach her.

It was so much more natural than it had ever been. In the Cave of Princes, it had taken nearly all her concentration to douse the flames of the Autumn King around her companions. Only Morven had seemed to be surprised—the others hadn’t questioned how the flames had disappeared. There had been too much chaos for anyone to piece it together.

Now her fire flowed and flowed. Her truth was freed.

The war-machines halted. Angled their guns and bombers toward her. They’d wipe her from Midgard.

But she’d keep going until the end. She didn’t look behind her at the palace, where she could only pray that Ruhn—her mate—was getting her sons to safety.

For the first time in her miserable existence, she let the world see her for what she was. Let herself see all that she was.

The missile launchers turned white-hot. Lidia rallied her flames. Even if she intercepted the missiles in midair, the shrapnel alone could kill her allies—

There was one way to stop it. To get there first. Before the missiles launched. And take them all out, herself included.

She began running.

She wished she’d been able to say goodbye to her sons. To Ruhn. To tell him her answer to what he’d said.

I love you.

She cast the thought behind her, toward the Fae Prince she knew would keep her sons safe.

The war-machines followed her movements with their launchers. They’d try to blast her into Hel before she could reach them.

Emphasis on try.

It had been a short life, as far as Vanir were concerned, and a bad one, but there had been moments of joy. Moments that she now gathered and held close to her heart: cradling her newborn sons, smelling their baby-sweet scents. Talking with Ruhn for hours, when she knew him only as Night. Lying in his arms.

So few happy memories, but she wouldn’t have traded them for anything.

Would have done it all again, just for those memories.

Lidia dove deep, all the way into the simmering dregs of her power.

The war-machines loomed, black and blazing with power. Ready for her. Launch barrels stared her down, brimstone missiles glowing golden in their throats.

Lidia unleashed her own fire, ready for her final incineration.

But before her flame could touch those war-machines, before the brimstone missiles could fire, the launch barrels melted. Iron dripped away, sizzling on the dry earth.

And those brimstone missiles, caught in the melting machinery …

The explosions shook the very world as the missiles ruptured, turning the war-machines into death traps for the soldiers within. They melted into nothing. The heat of it singed Lidia’s face, and amid the burning and billowing smoke—

Three tiny white lights burned bright.

Fire sprites. Simmering with power.

Through the fire and smoke and drifting embers, Lidia recognized them. Sasa. Rithi. Malana. Blazing, raging with fire. They must have crept up unseen from behind enemy lines. Too small to be noticed, to ever be counted by arrogant Vanir.

Another war-machine rumbled forward, rolling over the ruins of the front line.

A stupid mistake. The metal treads melted, too, pinning the machine in place. Trapping the soldiers and pilots within it.

They tried to fire their missiles at Lidia, at the three sprites now coming to her side, but they never got the chance. One moment, the war-machine was there, missile launchers primed with their payload. The next, the metal of the machine flared white, and then melted.

Where the machine had been, a fourth sprite glowed, a hot, intense blue.

Irithys.

She lifted a small hand in greeting.

Lidia raised one back.

“We found her,” Sasa said to Lidia, breathless with adrenaline or hope or fear or all of them at once. “We told her what you and Bryce said.”

Malana added as Irithys zoomed for them, leaving a trail of blue embers in her wake, “But it did not take much convincing to get her here.”

“How did you know to come today?” Lidia asked as Irithys joined them, a blue star in the midst of the three shimmering lights of the others.

Irithys grinned, the first true smile Lidia had seen from the Sprite Queen. “We didn’t. They reached me yesterday, and we talked long into the night.” A fond smile at the three sprites, who turned raspberry pink with pleasure. “We were still awake when Bryce Quinlan and Hunt Athalar’s video went out. We raced down from Ravilis, hoping to help in any way we could.”

“We arrived in the nick of time, it seems,” Sasa said, nodding to the smoldering ruins.

“We wouldn’t have wanted to miss all the fun,” Rithi added with a wicked smile.

Irithys’s smile was more subdued as she studied Lidia. The queen’s flame set Lidia’s own sparking in answer. Dancing over her fingertips, her hair, in joyful recognition. “I sensed the fire in you the moment we met,” the queen said. “I didn’t think yours would manifest so brilliantly, though.”

Lidia sketched a bow, but refrained from telling the queen about the antidote just yet, how it would make Irithys’s flame even more lethal. Later—if they survived. But right now … Lidia smirked at the queen, at their gathering enemies. “Let’s burn it all down.”

Because ahead of them, dozens strong, an entire line of war-machines headed their way. Missile launchers groaned into position. All aiming for where they stood.

“With pleasure,” Irithys said, and even from a few feet away, Lidia’s skin seared with the heat of the queen’s flame. “We shall build a new world atop their ashes.”

Rithi, Sasa, and Malana turned blue, matching their queen’s fire with their own. The four fire sprites unleashed their power on the war-machines and the Vanir powering them. Lidia’s white-hot flames joined theirs, twining and dancing around it, as if every moment of recognition until now had built toward this, as if her flames had known theirs for millennia.

And as one flame, one unified people, as Bryce Quinlan had promised, their fire struck the enemy line.

Machines ruptured. Lidia staggered back, back, back with the force of it, still unfamiliar with the fire in her veins, after it had been so long suppressed.

But the sprites kept their fire concentrated on the machines and their pilots. And as Lidia hit the ground, as the missiles exploded upon contact with the flames, she cast the last of her power upward. To shield the allied forces fighting behind them and the fire sprites now ahead of her from the shrapnel, which melted until it became raining, molten metal.

It hissed where it hit the earth.

Irithys blazed like a blue star, shooting from machine to machine, leaving burning death in her wake. The three other sprites followed suit. Where they shimmered, imperial forces died.

And as the enemy melted at their fingertips … for a moment, just one, Lidia allowed herself to kindle a spark of hope.

“I’m okay,” Tharion panted, blood leaking from his mouth. “I’m okay.”

“I call bullshit,” Ruhn said, kneeling beside the mer, fumbling through his pack for the vial Lidia had mentioned. The mer would be dead already without the antidote in his veins. But if Ruhn didn’t do something to help Tharion now, he’d surely be dead in a few minutes.

“Get him into a sitting position,” Actaeon was saying to his brother. “Get his head above his chest so the blood doesn’t go out too fast.”

“We have to help her,” Brann said. “She’s out on the battlefield—”

“You guys aren’t going anywhere,” Ruhn said to the boys. He found the clear vial and knocked it back. “Help me get Ketos up. We’ve got two seconds before those shithead guards come back, maybe with Rigelus in tow—”

They didn’t have two seconds.

From the stairwell at the far end of the hall, the two angels who’d held the boys captive emerged. No sign of Rigelus, thank the gods, but right then, whatever was in that potion hit Ruhn’s stomach, his body, and the world tilted, surging, blacking out—

A moment, long enough so that when his vision returned, it was to see the two angels reaching for their guns.

Ruhn exploded.

Starlight, two beams of it straight to their eyes, blinded them. Just as Bryce had done to the Murder Twins. Twin whips of his shadows wrapped around their necks and squeezed.

“What the fuck,” Brann said, but Ruhn barely heard him. There was only power, surging as it never had before. His mind was starkly clear as he willed the shadows to begin slicing through angelic flesh.

Blood spurted. Bone cracked. Two heads rolled to the ground.

“Holy shit,” Brann breathed. Actaeon was gaping at Ruhn.

“The mer,” the kid said, whirling back to where Tharion had passed out again.

“Fuck,” Ruhn spat, and put a hand to Tharion’s chest to staunch the bleeding—

Warm, bright magic answered. Healing magic, rising to the surface as if it had been dormant in his blood.

He had no idea how to use it, how to do anything other than will it with a simple Save him.

In answer, light poured from his hands, and he could feel Tharion’s flesh and bone knitting back together beneath his fingers, mending, healing …

It had been a clean shot through the chest and out the back. And this new healing magic seemed to know what to do, how to close both entry and exit wounds. It couldn’t replace the blood, but if Ketos was no longer leaking … he might survive.

A shudder rocked the palace, and time slowed.

For a heartbeat, Ruhn thought it might be his own power, but no. He’d felt this before. Just a short time ago, when the world had rippled with what he knew, deep in his bones, was the impact of an Asteri dying. Like an Archangel’s death, but worse.

Another Asteri must be going down.

He willed that lovely, bright power to keep healing Ketos, though. To use the stretch of time to buy more of it for the mer, to heal, heal, heal—

It was eternity, and yet it was nothing. Time resumed, so fast that the boys lost their grip on Tharion, but the wound had healed over. Ruhn grunted as he hoisted the unconscious mer over a shoulder and said to the boys, “We gotta get out of here.”

Half of him wanted to dump the twins somewhere safe and race to wherever Lidia was, but his mate had asked him to protect the two most precious people in her world.

He wouldn’t break a gesture of trust so great. Not for anything.

They tore through the palace, its halls eerily empty. People must have gotten the evacuation order and fled. The guards had even left their stations at the doors and the front gates.

Ruhn and the boys made it into the city streets, and Ruhn reached for his phone to dial Flynn, praying the male had the van nearby. Only then did he get a look at the battlefield beyond the city. The cloud of darkness above the glowing lights.

That darkness was pure Pit. Fires blazed on the other side of the field—that had to be Lidia.

“Ruhn!” He knew that voice.

He turned, Tharion a limp weight on his shoulder, and found Ithan Holstrom sprinting toward them, a rifle over his shoulder.

He knew that rifle, too. The Godslayer Rifle.

Ithan’s face was splattered with dirt and blood, like he’d fought his way up here. “Is Ketos alive?” At Ruhn’s nod, Ithan asked, “Where’s Bryce?”

As if in answer, light flared from the palace above and behind them.

Ruhn’s blood turned to ice. “We told her and Athalar to meet us. But it was a trap … fuck.”

“I need to get to Bryce,” Ithan said urgently.

Ruhn pointed to the palace, and couldn’t find the words, any words, to say that the wolf might already be too late.

Ace and Brann looked up at him, at the palace, at the battlefield.

His charges. His to protect through the storm.

“Run,” Ruhn told Ithan, and motioned to the twins. “Keep close, and follow my lead.”