An idea flared, and she weighed it, considering. She could try. She had to try.
Bryce took a bracing breath. In her hand, Danika’s sword shook like a reed in the wind.
She could make it. Somehow, she’d find a way.
She leapt into the blood-slick streets, sword held ready to attack. She didn’t look back at the shelter behind her as she began to run, blind memory of the city grid sinking in to guide her on the fastest route. A snarl rumbled from around a corner, and Bryce barely brought up her sword in time to intercept the demon. She partially severed its neck, and was running again before it fully hit the ground. She had to keep moving. Had to get to the Old Square—
Dead shifters and the Viper Queen’s soldiers lay in the streets. Even more dead humans around them. Most in pieces.
Another demon barreled from the red sky—
She screamed as it knocked her back, slamming her into a car so hard the windows shattered. She had all of a second to wrench open the passenger-side door and climb in before it landed again. Attacked the car.
Bryce scrambled over the armrests and stick shift, fumbling for the driver’s-side door. She yanked on the handle and half fell into the street, the demon so distracted with shredding the tires on the opposite side that it didn’t see her lurch into a sprint.
The Old Square. If she could make it to the Old Square—
Two demons raced for her. The only thing she could do was run as the light began to fade.
Alone. She was alone out here.
86
The city was starting to go quiet. Every time Declan checked the audio in another district, more screams had diminished, cut off one by one.
Not from any calm or salvation, Hunt knew.
The voids in the Gates remained open. The sunset gave way to bruised purple skies. When true night fell, he could imagine what sort of horrors Hel would send through. The kind that did not like the light, that had been bred and learned to hunt in the dark.
Bryce was still out there. One mistake, one misstep, and she would be dead.
There would be no healing, no regeneration. Not without the Drop.
She made it over the border of the Old Square. But she didn’t run for safety. No, she seemed to be running for the Heart Gate, where the flow of demons had halted. As if Hel were indeed waiting for true night to begin before its second round.
His heart thundered as she paused down the block from the Gate. As she ducked into the alcove of a nearby shelter. Illuminated by the firstlight lamp mounted outside it, she slid to the ground, her sword loosely gripped in one hand.
Hunt knew that position, that angle of the head.
A soldier who had fought a good, hard battle. A soldier who was exhausted, but would take this moment, this last moment, to rally before their final stand.
Hunt bared his teeth at the screen, “Get up, Bryce.”
Ruhn was shaking his head, terror stark on his face. The Autumn King said nothing. Did nothing as he watched his daughter on the feed Declan placed on the main screen.
Bryce reached into her shirt to pull out her phone. Her hands were shaking so hard she could barely hold it. But she hit a button on the screen and lifted it to her ear. Hunt knew what that was, too. Her final chance to say goodbye to her parents, her loved ones.
A faint ringing sounded in the conference room. From the table at its center. Hunt looked to Jesiba, but her phone remained dark. Ruhn’s stayed dark as well. Everyone went silent as Sandriel pulled a phone from her pocket. Hunt’s phone.
Sandriel glanced toward him, shock slackening her face. Every thought eddied from Hunt’s head.
“Give him the phone,” Ruhn said softly.
Sandriel just stared at the screen. Debating.
“Give him the fucking phone,” Ruhn ordered her.
Sandriel, to Hunt’s shock, did. With trembling hands, he picked up.
“Bryce?”
On the video feed, he could see her wide eyes. “Hunt?” Her voice was so raw. “I—I thought it would go to audiomail—”
“Help is coming soon, Bryce.”
The stark terror on her face as she surveyed the last of the sunlight destroyed him. “No—no, it’ll be too late.”
“It won’t. I need you to get up, Bryce. Get to a safer location. Do not go any closer to that Gate.”
She bit her lip, trembling. “It’s still wide open—”
“Go to your apartment and stay there until help comes.” The panicked terror on her face hardened into something calm at his order. Focused. Good.
“Hunt, I need you to call my mom.”
“Don’t start making those kinds of goodbyes—”
“I need you to call my mom,” she said quietly. “I need you to tell her that I love her, and that everything I am is because of her. Her strength and her courage and her love. And I’m sorry for all the bullshit I put her through.”
“Stop—”
“Tell my dad …,” she whispered. The Autumn King stiffened. Looked back toward Hunt. “Tell Randall,” she clarified, “that I’m so proud I got to call him my father. That he was the only one that ever mattered.”
Hunt could have sworn something like shame flitted across the Autumn King’s face. But Hunt implored, “Bryce, you need to move to safer ground now.”
She did no such thing. “Tell Fury I’m sorry I lied. That I would have told her the truth eventually.” Across the room, the assassin had tears running down her face. “Tell Juniper …” Bryce’s voice broke. “Tell her thank you—for that night on the roof.” She swallowed a sob. “Tell her that I know now why she stopped me from jumping. It was so I could get here—to help today.”
Hunt’s heart cracked entirely. He hadn’t known, hadn’t guessed that things had ever been that bad for her—
From the pure devastation on Ruhn’s face, her brother hadn’t known, either.
“Tell Ruhn I forgive him,” Bryce said, shaking again. Tears streamed down the prince’s face.
“I forgave him a long time ago,” Bryce said. “I just didn’t know how to tell him. Tell him I’m sorry I hid the truth, and that I only did it because I love him and didn’t want to take anything away from him. He’ll always be the better one of us.”
The agony on Ruhn’s face turned to confusion.
But Hunt couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t take another word of this. “Bryce, please—”
“Hunt.” The entire world went quiet. “I was waiting for you.”
“Bryce, sweetheart, just get back to your apartment and give me an hour and—”
“No,” she whispered, closing her eyes. She put her hand on her chest. Over her heart. “I was waiting for you—in here.”
Hunt couldn’t stop his own tears then. “I was waiting for you, too.”
She smiled, even as she sobbed again.
“Please,” Hunt begged. “Please, Bryce. You have to go now. Before more come through.”
She opened her eyes and got to her feet as true night fell. Faced the Gate halfway down the block. “I forgive you—for the shit with the synth. For all of it. None of it matters. Not anymore.” She ended the call and leaned Danika’s sword against the wall of the shelter alcove. Placed her phone carefully on the ground next to it.
Hunt shot from his seat. “BRYCE—”
She ran for the Gate.
87
“No,” Ruhn was saying, over and over. “No, no—”
But Hunt heard nothing. Felt nothing. It had all crumbled inside him the moment she’d hung up.
Bryce leapt the fence around the Gate and halted before its towering archway. Before the terrible black void within it.
A faint white radiance began to glow around her.
“What is that?” Fury whispered.
It flickered, growing brighter in the night.
Enough to illuminate her slender hands cupping a sparkling, pulsing light before her chest.
The light was coming from her chest—had been pulled from inside it. Like i
t had dwelled inside her all along. Bryce’s eyes were closed, her face serene.
Her hair drifted above her head. Bits of debris floated up around her, too. As if gravity had ceased to exist.
The light she held was so stark it cast the rest of the world into grays and blacks. Slowly, her eyes opened, amber blazing like the first pure rays of dawn. A soft, secret smile graced her mouth.
Her eyes lifted to the Gate looming above her. The light between her hands grew stronger.
Ruhn fell to his knees.
“I am Bryce Quinlan,” she said to the Gate, to the void, to all of Hel behind it. Her voice was serene—wise and laughing. “Heir to the Starborn Fae.”
The ground slid out from under Hunt as the light between her hands, the star she’d drawn from her shattered heart, flared as bright as the sun.
Danika knelt on the asphalt, hands interlocked behind her blood-soaked hair. The two gunshot wounds to her leg had stopped leaking blood, but Bryce knew the bullets remained lodged in her upper thigh. The pain from kneeling had to be unbearable.
“You stupid cunt,” the asp shifter spat at her, opening the chamber of his handgun with brutal precision. Bullets were on the way—as soon as his associate found them, that gun would be loaded.
The agony in Bryce’s injured arm was secondary. All of it was secondary to that gun.
The motorcycle smoldered thirty feet away, the rifle thrown even farther into the arid scrub. Down the road, the semitruck idled, its cargo hold filled with all those petrified animals on their way to gods knew where.
They had failed. Their wild rescue attempt had failed.
Danika’s caramel eyes met the asp shifter’s. The leader of this horrific smuggling ring. The male responsible for this moment, when the shootout that had taken place at a hundred miles an hour had turned on them. Danika had been steering the motorcycle, an arm looped through Bryce’s leg to hold her steady as she’d aimed her rifle. Taken out the asps’ two sedans full of equally hateful males intent on hurting and selling those animals. They’d been nearing the racing semi when the male before them had managed a shot to the motorcycle’s tires.
The motorcycle had flipped, and Danika had reacted with a wolf’s speed. She had wrapped her body around Bryce. And taken the brunt of the impact.
Her shredded skin, the fractured pelvis—all thanks to that.
“Bryce,” Danika whispered, tears running down her face now as the reality of this colossal fuckup set in. “Bryce, I love you. And I’m sorry.”
Bryce shook her head. “I don’t regret it.” The truth.
And then the asp shifter’s associate arrived, bullets in hand. Their clink as they loaded into the gun echoed through Bryce’s bones.
Danika sobbed. “I love you, Bryce.”
The words rippled between them. Cleaved Bryce’s heart wide open.
“I love you,” Danika said again.
Danika had never said those words to her. Not once in four years of college. Not once to anyone, Bryce knew. Not even Sabine.
Especially not Sabine.
Bryce watched the tears roll down Danika’s proud, fierce face. A lock clicked open in Bryce’s heart. Her soul.
“Close your eyes, Danika,” she said softly. Danika just stared at her.
Only for this. Only for Danika would she do this, risk this.
The gravel around Bryce began to shiver. Began to float upward. Danika’s eyes widened. Bryce’s hair drifted as if underwater. In deep space.
The asp shifter finished loading the bullets and pointed the gun at Danika’s face. His colleague smirked from a step behind him.
Bryce held Danika’s stare. Did not look away as she said again, “Danika, close your eyes.” Trembling, Danika obeyed. Squeezed them shut.
The asp shifter clicked off the gun’s safety, not even glancing at Bryce and the debris that floated toward the sky. “Yeah, you’d better close your eyes, you—”
Bryce exploded. White, blinding light ruptured from her, unleashed from that secret place in her heart.
Right into the eyes of the asp shifter. He screamed, clawing at his face. Blazing bright as the sun, Bryce moved.
Pain forgotten, she had his arm in her hands in a heartbeat. Twisted it so he dropped the gun into her waiting palm. Another movement and he was sprawled on the asphalt.
Where she fired that bullet meant for Danika into his heart.
His accomplice was screaming, on his knees and clawing at his eyes. Bryce fired again.
He stopped screaming.
But Bryce did not stop burning. Not as she raced for the semi’s cab—for the final asp now trying to start its engine. Danika trembled on the ground, hands over her head, eyes squeezed shut against the brightness.
The asp shifter gave up on the engine and fled the cab, sprinting down the road. Bryce took aim, just as Randall had taught her, and waited for the shot to come to her.
Another crack of the gun. The male dropped.
Bryce blazed for a long moment, the world bleached into blinding white.
Slowly, carefully, she spooled the light back into herself. Smothered it, the secret she and her parents had kept for so long. From her sire, from the Asteri, from Midgard.
From Ruhn.
The pure light of a star—from another world. From long, long ago. The gift of the ancient Fae, reborn again. Light, but nothing more than that. Not an Asteri, who possessed brute power of the stars. Just light.
It meant nothing to her. But the Starborn gifts, the title—they had always meant something to Ruhn. And that first time she’d met him, she’d intended to share her secret with him. He’d been kind, joyful at finding a new sister. She’d instantly known she could trust him with this secret, hidden thing.
But then she’d seen their father’s cruelty. Seen how that Starborn gift gave her brother just the slightest edge against that fucking monster. Seen the pride her brother denied but undoubtedly felt at being Starborn, blessed and chosen by Urd.
She couldn’t bring herself to tell Ruhn the truth. Even after things fell apart, she hid it. Would never tell anyone—anyone at all. Except Danika.
Blue skies and olive trees filtered back in, color returning to the world as Bryce hid the last of her starlight inside her chest. Danika still trembled on the asphalt.
“Danika,” Bryce said.
Danika lowered her hands from her face. Opened her eyes. Bryce waited for the terror her mother had warned about, should someone learn what she bore. The strange, terrible light that had come from another world.
But there was only wonder on Danika’s face.
Wonder—and love.
Bryce stood before the Gate, holding the star she’d kept hidden within her heart, and let the light build. Let it flow out of her chest, untethered and pure.
Even with the void mere feet away, Hel just a step beyond it, a strange sense of calm wended through her. She’d kept this light a secret for so long, had lived in such utter terror of anyone finding out, that despite everything, relief filled her.
There had been so many times these weeks when she was sure Ruhn would realize it at last. Her blatant disinterest in learning about anything related to the first Starborn, Prince Pelias and Queen Theia, had bordered on suspicious, she’d feared. And when he’d laid the Starsword on the table in the gallery library and it had hummed, shimmering, she’d had to physically pull back to avoid the instinct to touch it, to answer its silent, lovely song.
Her sword—it was her sword, and Ruhn’s. And with that light in her veins, with the star that slumbered inside her heart, the Starsword had recognized her not as a royal, worthy Fae, but as kin. Kin to those who had forged it so long ago.
Like called to like. Even the kristallos’s venom in her leg had not been able to stifle the essence of what she was. It had blocked her access to the light, but not what lay stamped in her blood. The moment the venom had come out of her leg, as Hunt’s lips had met hers that first time, she’d felt it awaken again. Freed.
&
nbsp; And now here she was, the starlight building within her hands.
It was a useless gift, she’d decided as a child. It couldn’t do much at all beyond blinding people, as she’d done to her father’s men when they came after her and her mother and Randall, as had happened to the Oracle when the seer peered into her future and beheld only her blazing light, as she’d done to those asp-hole smugglers.
Only her father’s unfaltering Fae arrogance and snobbery had kept him from realizing it after her Oracle visit. The male was incapable of imagining anyone but pure Fae being blessed by fate.
Blessed—as if this gift made her something special. It didn’t. It was an old power and nothing more. She had no interest in the throne or crown or palace that could come with it. None.
But Ruhn … He might have claimed otherwise, but the first time he’d told her about his Ordeal, when he’d won the sword from its ancient resting place in Avallen, she’d seen how his face had glowed with pride that he’d been able to draw the sword from its sheath.
So she’d let him have it, the title and the sword. Had tried to open Ruhn’s eyes to their father’s true nature as often as she could, even if it made her father resent her further.
She would have kept this burning, shining secret inside her until her dying day. But she’d realized what she had to do for her city. This world.
The dregs of the light flowed out of her chest, all of it now cupped between her palms.
She’d never done it before—wholly removed the star itself. She’d only glowed and blinded, never summoned its burning core from inside her. Her knees wobbled, and she gritted her teeth against the strain of holding the light in place.
At least she’d spoken to Hunt one last time. She hadn’t expected him to be able to pick up. Had thought the phone would go right to audiomail where she could say everything she wanted. The words she still hadn’t said aloud to him.
She didn’t let herself think of it as she took the final step to the Gate’s quartz archway.
She was Starborn, and the Horn lay within her, repaired and now filled with her light.
House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City) Page 72