House of Earth and Blood

“Just keep your snarling and eye rolling to yourself,” she snapped at him, and called into the gloom, “I’m here to buy, not collect.”

One of the doors cracked open, and a pale-skinned, dark-haired satyr hobbled toward them, his furred legs hidden by trousers. His pageboy hat must have hid little, curling horns. The clopping of the hooves gave him away.

The male barely came up to Bryce’s chest, his shrunken, twisted body half the size of the bulls that Hunt had witnessed tearing people into shreds on battlefields. And that he had faced himself in Sandriel’s arena. The male’s slitted pupils, knobbed at either side like a goat’s, expanded.

Fear—and not at Hunt’s presence, he realized with a jolt.

Bryce dipped her fingers into a lead bowl of pink salt, plucking up a few pieces and letting them drop into the dish with faint, hollow cracks. “I need the obsidian.”

The satyr shifted, hooves clopping faintly, rubbing his hairy, pale neck. “Don’t deal in that.”

She smiled slightly. “Oh?” She went over to another bowl, stirring the powder-fine black salt in there. “Grade A, whole-rock obsidian salt. Seven pounds, seven ounces. Now.”

The male’s throat bobbed. “It’s illegal.”

“Are you quoting the motto of the Meat Market, or trying to tell me that you somehow don’t have precisely what I need?”

Hunt scanned the room. White salt for purification; pink for protection; gray for spellwork; red for … he forgot what the Hel red was for. But obsidian … Shit.

Hunt fell back on centuries of training to keep the shock off his face. Black salts were used for summoning demons directly—bypassing the Northern Rift entirely—or for various dark spellwork. A salt that went beyond black, a salt like the obsidian … It could summon something big.

Hel was severed from them by time and space, but still accessible through the twin sealed portals at the north and south poles—the Northern Rift and the Southern Rift, respectively. Or by idiots who tried to summon demons through salts of varying powers.

A lot of fucked-up shit, Hunt had always thought. The benefit of using salts, at least, was that only one demon could be summoned at a time. Though if things went badly, the summoner could wind up dead. And a demon could wind up stuck in Midgard, hungry.

It was why the creeps existed in their world at all: most had been hunted after those long-ago wars between realms, but every so often, demons got loose. Reproduced, usually by force.

The result of those horrible unions: the daemonaki. Most walking the streets were diluted, weaker incarnations and hybrids of the purebred demons in Hel. Many were pariahs, through no fault of their own beyond genetics, and they usually worked hard to integrate into the Republic. But the lowest-level purebred demon fresh out of Hel could bring an entire city to a standstill as it went on a rampage. And for centuries now, Hunt had been tasked with tracking them down.

This satyr had to be a big-time dealer then, if he peddled obsidian salt.

Bryce took a step toward the satyr. The male retreated. Her amber eyes gleamed with feral amusement, no doubt from her Fae side. A far cry from the party girl getting her nails done.

Hunt tensed. She couldn’t be that foolish, could she? To show him that she knew how to and could easily acquire the same type of salt that had probably been used to summon the demon that killed Tertian and Danika? Another tally scratched itself into the Suspect column in his mind.

Bryce shrugged with one shoulder. “I could call your queen. See what she makes of it.”

“You—you don’t have the rank to summon her.”

“No,” Bryce said, “I don’t. But I bet if I go down to the main floor and start screaming for the Viper Queen, she’ll drag herself out of that fighting pit to see what the fuss is about.”

Burning Solas, she was serious, wasn’t she?

Sweat beaded the satyr’s brow. “Obsidian’s too dangerous. I can’t in good conscience sell it.”

Bryce crooned, “Did you say that when you sold it to Philip Briggs for his bombs?”

Hunt stilled, and the male went a sickly white. He glanced to Hunt, noting the tattoo across his brow, the armor he wore. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I—I was cleared by the investigators. I never sold Briggs anything.”

“I’m sure he paid you in cash to hide the money trail,” Bryce said. She yawned. “Look, I’m tired and hungry, and I don’t feel like playing this game. Name your price so I can be on my way.”

Those goatlike eyes snapped to hers. “Fifty thousand gold marks.”

Bryce smiled as Hunt held in his curse. “Do you know my boss paid fifty thousand to watch a pack of Helhounds rip apart a satyr? Said it was the best minute of her miserable life.”

“Forty-five.”

“Don’t waste my time with nonsense offers.”

“I won’t go below thirty. Not for that much obsidian.”

“Ten.” Ten thousand gold marks was still outrageous. But summoning salts were extraordinarily valuable. How many demons had he hunted because of them? How many dismembered bodies had he seen from summonings gone wrong? Or right, if it was a targeted attack?

Bryce held up her phone. “In five minutes, I’m expected to call Jesiba, and say that the obsidian salt is in my possession. In six minutes, if I do not make that phone call, someone will knock on that door. And it will not be someone for me.”

Hunt honestly couldn’t tell if Quinlan was bluffing. She likely wouldn’t have told him—could have gotten that order from her boss while he was sitting on the roof. If Jesiba Roga was dealing with whatever shit the obsidian implied, either for her own uses or on behalf of the Under-King … Maybe Bryce hadn’t committed the murder, but rather abetted it.

“Four minutes,” Bryce said.

Sweat slid down the satyr’s temple and into his thick beard. Silence.

Despite his suspicions, Hunt had the creeping feeling that this assignment was either going to be a fuck-ton of fun or a nightmare. If it got him to his end goal, he didn’t care one way or another.

Bryce perched on the rotting arm of the chair and began typing into her phone, no more than a bored young woman avoiding social interaction.

The satyr whirled toward Hunt. “You’re the Umbra Mortis.” He swallowed audibly. “You’re one of the triarii. You protect us—you serve the Governor.”

Before Hunt could reply, Bryce lifted her phone to show him a photo of two fat, roly-poly puppies. “Look what my cousin just adopted,” she told him. “That one is Osirys, and the one on the right is Set.” She lowered the phone before he could come up with a response, thumbs flying.

But she glanced at Hunt from under her thick lashes. Play along, please, she seemed to say.

So Hunt said, “Cute dogs.”

The satyr let out a small whine of distress. Bryce lifted her head, curtain of red hair limned with silver in her screen’s light. “I thought you’d be running to get the salt by now. Maybe you should, considering you’ve got”—a glance at the phone, fingers flying—“oh. Ninety seconds.”

She opened what looked like a message thread and began typing.

The satyr whispered, “T-twenty thousand.”