House of Earth and Blood

Hunt looked up from the evidence report he’d been skimming and was about to answer when the front doorbell rang. Ruhn’s face appeared on the camera feed, and Bryce let out a long, long sigh before silently buzzing him in.

Hunt rotated his stiff shoulder. His arm still throbbed a bit, an echo of the lethal venom that had ripped his magic right from his body.

The prince’s black boots appeared on the green carpeted steps seconds later, apparently taking a hint about their location thanks to the open library door. Lehabah was instantly zooming across the space, sparks in her wake, as she beamed and said, “Your Highness!”

Ruhn offered her a half smile, his eyes going right to Quinlan. They missed none of the quiet, brooding exhaustion. Or the tone in Bryce’s voice as she said, “To what do we owe this pleasure?”

Ruhn slid into a seat across from them at the book-strewn table. The Starsword sheathed down his back didn’t reflect the lights in the library. “I wanted to check in. Anything new?”

Neither of them had told him about Sabine. And apparently Declan hadn’t, either.

“No,” Bryce said. “Anything about the Horn?”

Ruhn ignored her question. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Her spine stiffened.

Ruhn looked ready to get into it with his cousin, so Hunt did both of them—and himself, if he was being honest—a favor and said, “We’ve been waiting on a Many Waters contact to get back to us about a possible pattern with the demon attacks. Have you come across any information about the kristallos negating magic?” Days later, he couldn’t stop thinking about it—how it’d felt for his power to just sputter and die in his veins.

“No. I still haven’t found anything about the creation of the kristallos except that it was made from the blood of the first Starborn Prince and the essence of the Star-Eater himself. Nothing about it negating magic.” Ruhn nodded at him. “You’ve never come across a demon that can do that?”

“Not one. Witch spells and gorsian stones negate magic, but this was different.” He’d dealt with both. Before they’d bound him using the witch-ink on his brow, they’d shackled him with manacles hewn from the gorsian stones of the Dolos Mountains, a rare metal whose properties numbed one’s access to magic. They were used on high-profile enemies of the empire—the Hind herself was particularly fond of using them as she and her interrogators broke the Vanir among the rebel spies and leaders. But for years now, rumors had swirled in the 33rd’s barracks that rebels were experimenting with ways to render the metal into a spray that could be unleashed upon Vanir warriors on the battlefields.

Ruhn motioned to the ancient book he’d left on the table days ago, still open to a passage about the Starborn Fae. “If the Star-Eater himself put his essence in the kristallos, that’s probably what gave the demon the ability to eat magic. Just as Prince Pelias’s blood gave it the ability to look for the Horn.”

Bryce frowned. “So that Chosen One sense of yours hasn’t detected a trace of the Horn?”

Ruhn tugged at the silver ring through his bottom lip. “No. But I got a message this morning from a medwitch I met the other day—the one who stitched up Hunt in the night garden. It’s a shot in the dark, but she mentioned that there’s a relatively new drug on the market that’s just starting to come into use. It’s a synthetic healing magic.” Hunt and Bryce straightened. “It can have some wicked side effects if not carefully controlled. She didn’t have access to its exact formula or the trials, but she said research showed it capable of healing at rates nearly double that of firstlight.”

Bryce said, “You think something like that could repair the Horn?”

“It’s a possibility. It’d fit with that stupid riddle about light that’s not light, magic that’s not magic repairing the Horn. That’s kind of what a synthetic compound like that is.”

Her eyes flickered. “And it’s … readily available?”

“It entered the market at some point in the past few years, apparently. No one has tested it on inanimate objects, but who knows? If real magic couldn’t heal it, maybe a synthetic compound could.”

“I’ve never heard of synthetic magic,” Hunt said.

“Neither have I,” Ruhn admitted.

“So we have a potential way to repair the Horn,” Bryce mused, “but not the Horn itself.” She sighed. “And we still don’t know if Danika stole the Horn on a lark or for some actual purpose.”

Ruhn started. “Danika did what?”

Bryce winced, then filled the prince in on all they’d learned. When she finished, Ruhn leaned back in his chair, shock written on every line of his face.

Hunt said into the silence, “Regardless of whether Danika stole the Horn for fun or to do something with it, the fact remains that she stole it.”

Ruhn asked carefully, “Do you think she wanted it for herself? To repair it and use it?”

“No,” Bryce said quietly. “No, Danika might have kept things from me, but I knew her heart. She never would have sought a weapon as dangerous as the Horn—something that could jeopardize the world like that.” She ran her hands over her face. “Her killer is still out there. Danika must have taken the Horn to keep them from getting it. They killed her for it, but they must not have found it, if they’re still using the kristallos to search for it.” She waved a hand at Ruhn’s sword. “That thing can’t help you find it? I still think luring the killer with the Horn is probably the most surefire way to find them.”

Ruhn shook his head. “The sword doesn’t work like that. Aside from being picky about who draws it, the sword has no power without the knife.”

“The knife?” Hunt asked.

Ruhn drew the sword, the metal whining, and laid it on the table between them. Bryce leaned back, away from it, as a bead of starlight sang down the fuller and sparkled at the tip.

“Fancy,” Hunt said, earning a glare from Ruhn, who had raised a brow at Bryce, no doubt expecting some kind of reverence from her at a sword that was older than this city, older than the Vanir’s first step in Midgard.

“The sword was part of a pair,” Ruhn said to him. “A long-bladed knife was forged from the iridium mined from the same meteorite, which fell on our old world.” The world the Fae had left to travel through the Northern Rift and into Midgard. “But we lost the knife eons ago. Even the Fae Archives have no record of how it might have been lost, but it seems to have been sometime during the First Wars.”

“It’s another of the Fae’s countless inane prophecies,” Bryce muttered. “When knife and sword are reunited, so shall our people be.”

“It’s literally carved above the Fae Archives entrance—whatever the fuck it means,” Ruhn said. Bryce gave a small smile at that.

Hunt grinned. Her little smile was like seeing the sun after days of rain.

Bryce pretended not to notice his grin, but Ruhn gave him a sharp look.

Like he knew every filthy thing Hunt had thought about Bryce, everything he’d done to pleasure himself while imagining it was her mouth around him, her hands, her soft body.

Shit—he was in such deep, unrelenting shit.