It hit him then, like a bucket of ice water. Bryce wasn’t entirely sure she could find anything to help her unite the blades. To kill the Asteri.

  So Ruhn squeezed her shoulder. “We’ll figure it out, Bryce.”

  She offered him a grim smile. It was all Ruhn could do to offer one back.

  * * *

  They found nothing else regarding the missing islands, the mists, or the sword and the knife in the hours they spent combing through the catalog. They’d barely made a dent in the collection by the time Bryce called it quits for dinner, her hands so achingly dry from all the dust that they burned.

  In silence, the group walked to the castle dining room. What a long, fucking day. Each of their trudging steps seemed to echo the sentiment.

  The dining room was empty, though a small buffet of food had been laid out for them.

  “Guess we’re early,” Tharion said as the group surveyed the firelit room, its faded tapestries depicting long-ago Fae hunts. Their quarry lay at the center of one: a chained, collared white horse.

  Bryce jolted. It wasn’t a horse. It was a winged horse.

  So they’d survived here, then—at least for a few generations. Before they’d either died out or the Fae had hunted them to extinction.

  “We’re not early,” Sathia said beside Tharion, her face tight. “The formal dinner started fifteen minutes ago. If I were to guess, it’s been moved to another location for everyone else.”

  “No one wants to eat with us?” Hunt asked.

  Bryce said, “They probably consider it beneath them to mingle with our ilk.” Hunt, Baxian, and Tharion turned to her with incredulous expressions. Bryce shrugged. “Welcome to my life.” Hunt was frowning deeply, and Bryce added to him, unable to help herself, “You don’t need to feel guilty about that one, you know.”

  He glared at her, and the others made themselves scarce.

  “What does that mean?” Hunt asked quietly.

  It wasn’t the time or place, but Bryce said, “I can’t get a read on you. Like, if you even want to be here or not.”

  “Of course I do,” Hunt growled, eyes flashing.

  She didn’t back down. “One moment you’re all in, the next you’re all broody and guilty—”

  “Don’t I have the right to feel that way?” he hissed. The others had already reached the table.

  “You do,” she said, keeping her voice low, though she knew the others could hear them. One of the downfalls of hanging with Vanir. “But each of us made choices that led us to all this. The weight of that’s not only on you, and it isn’t—”

  “I don’t want to talk about this.” He started walking toward the center of the room.

  “Hunt,” she started. He kept walking, wings tucking in tight.

  Across the room, she met Baxian’s stare from where he was pulling out a chair at the table. Give him time, the Helhound’s look seemed to say. Be gentle with him.

  Bryce sighed, nodding. She could do that.

  They served themselves, and sat at random spots along the massive table, large enough to seat forty: Ruhn, Flynn, Sathia, and Dec in one cluster; Tharion, Baxian, Hunt, and Bryce in another. Lidia claimed a chair beside Bryce, definitely not looking to where Ruhn watched them from down the table.

  “So this is Avallen,” Lidia said, breaking the awkward silence.

  “I know,” Bryce muttered. “I’m trying to scrape my jaw off the floor.”

  “It reminds me of my father’s house,” Lidia said quietly, digging into her potatoes and mutton. Hearty, simple food. Definitely not the fine feast Morven and his court were indulging in elsewhere.

  “They must both have a subscription to Medieval Living,” Bryce said, and Lidia’s mouth curved toward a smile.

  It was so weird to see the Hind smile. Like a person.

  The males must have been thinking the same thing, because Baxian asked, “How long, Lidia? How long since you turned spy?”

  Lidia gracefully carved her meat. “How long since you started believing in the cause?”

  “Since I met my mate, Danika Fendyr. Four years ago.”

  Bryce’s chest ached at the pride in his voice—and the pain. Her fingers itched with the urge to reach across the table to take his hand, just as she had last night.

  But Lidia blinked slowly. And said softly, “I’m sorry, Baxian.”

  Baxian nodded in acknowledgment. Then said to Lidia and Hunt, “I kind of can’t get over being here with the two of you. Considering where we were not that long ago. Who we were.”

  “I bet,” Bryce murmured.

  Hunt tested the edge of a knife with his thumb, then cut into his own meat. “Urd works in mysterious ways, I guess.”

  Lidia’s eyes glimmered. Hunt lifted his glass of water to her. “Thanks for saving our asses.”

  “It was nothing,” she replied, slicing into the mutton again.

  Baxian put down his fork. “You put everything on the line. We owe you.”

  Bryce glanced down the table and noticed Ruhn watching them. She gave him a pointed glance, as if to say, Chime in, asshole, but Ruhn ignored her.

  Lidia’s mouth kicked into a half smile. “Find a way to kill the Asteri, and we’re even.”

  The rest of dinner was mostly quiet, and Bryce found herself growing weary enough that by the time she’d finished her plate, she just wanted to lie down somewhere. Thankfully, one person in the castle deigned to engage with them: an older Fae woman who gruffly said she’d show them to their rooms.

  Even if they weren’t welcome, at least they were given decent accommodations, all along the same hall. Bryce didn’t really mark who bunked with whom, focusing solely on being shown to her own room, but she didn’t fail to notice the awkward beat when Tharion and Sathia were shown through a door together halfway down the hall.

  Bryce sighed once she and Hunt entered their own chamber. She wished she’d had the energy to talk to Ruhn, to really delve into what it had been like for him here, what he was feeling, but …

  “I need to lie down,” Bryce said, and slumped face-first onto the bed.

  “Today was weird,” Hunt said, helping to remove her sheathed sword and dagger. He placed them with expert care at the side of the bed, then gently turned her over. “You all right?”

  Bryce peered up into his face—the halo on his brow. “I really hope we find something here to make it worthwhile.”

  Hunt sat beside her, removing his own weapons and setting them on a side table. “You’re suddenly worried we won’t?”

  Bryce got to her feet, unable to sit still despite her exhaustion. She paced in front of the crackling fire. “I don’t know. It’s not like I was expecting a giant neon sign in the archives that said Answers Here! But if the Asteri are going after Flynn’s family …” She hadn’t let herself think about it earlier. There was nothing she could do from here, without phone or interweb service. “Then they’re going after mine.”

  “Randall and Ember can look after themselves.” But Hunt rose, walking to her and taking her hands. “They’ll be okay.” His hands were warm around hers, solid. She closed her eyes at the touch, savoring its love and comfort. “We’ll get there, Quinlan. You traveled between worlds, for fuck’s sake. This is nothing by comparison.”

  “Don’t tempt Urd.”

  “I’m not. I’m just telling you the truth. Don’t lose faith now.”

  Bryce sighed, examining his tattooed brow again. “We need to find some way to get this off you.”

  “Not a big priority.”

  “It is. I need you at your full power.” The words came out wrong, and she amended, “I need you to be free of them.”

  “I will be. We all will be.”

  Staring into his dark eyes, she believed him. “I’m sorry about earlier. If I pushed you too hard.”

  “I’m fine.” His voice didn’t sound fine.

  “I wasn’t trying to tell you how to feel,” she said. “I just want you to know that none of us, especially me, hold you responsible for all this shit. We’re a team.”

  He lowered his stare, and she hated the weight pressing on his head, drooping his wings. “I don’t know if I can do this again, Bryce.”

  Her heart strained. “Do what?”

  “Make choices that cost people their lives.” His eyes lifted to hers again, bleak. “It was easier for Shahar, you know. She didn’t care about other people’s lives, not really. And she died so fast, she didn’t have to endure the weight of the guilt that might have come later. Sometimes I envy her for it. I did envy her for it, back then. For escaping it all by dying.”

  “That’s the old Umbra Mortis talking,” Bryce said, fumbling for humor amid the cold wash of pain and worry at his words, his dead tone.

  “Maybe we need the Umbra Mortis right now.”

  She didn’t like that. Not one bit. “I need Hunt, not some helmeted assassin. I need my mate.” She kissed his cheek. “I need you.”

  The darkness in his eyes lightened, and it eased her heart, relief washing through her.

  She kissed his cheek again. “I know we should go wash up for bed and use the chamber pot or whatever excuse they have for a toilet in this museum, but …”

  “But?” He lifted his brows.

  Bryce rose onto her toes, brushing her mouth against his. And the taste of him … Gods, yes. “But I need to feel you first.”

  His hands tightened around her waist. “Thank fuck.”

  There was more to be discussed, of course. But right now …

  He lowered his face to hers, and Bryce met him, the kiss thorough and open, and just … bliss. Home and eternity and all she’d fought for. All she’d keep fighting for.

  From the way he returned the kiss, she knew he realized it, too. Hoped he let it burn through any lingering scraps of remorse.

  “I love you,” he said against her mouth, and deepened the kiss. She stifled a sob of relief, arms winding around his neck. Hunt’s hands slid around to her ass and he hefted her up, smoothly walking them over to the enormous, curtained bed.

  Clothes were peeled away. Mouths met, and explored, and tasted. Fingers caressed and stroked. Then Hunt was over her, and Bryce let her joy, her magic shine through her.

  “Look at you,” Hunt breathed, hips flexing beneath her hands, cock teasing her entrance. “Look at you.”

  Bryce smiled as she let more of that power shine through her: Starborn light so silvery bright it cast shadows upon the bed. “Like it?”

  Hunt’s thrust, driving himself in to the hilt, was his response. “You’re so fucking beautiful,” he whispered. Lightning gathered around his wings, his brow. Like his power couldn’t help but answer hers, even with the halo’s damper on it.

  Bryce moaned as he withdrew, nearly pulling out of her, then plunged back in.

  Hunt angled her hips to drive himself deeper. And as his cock brushed her innermost wall, as lightning flickered above her, in her …

  Mate. Husband. Prince. Hunt.

  “Yes,” Hunt said, and she must have voiced her thoughts aloud, because his thrusts turned deeper, harder. “I fucking love you, Bryce.”

  Her magic rose at his words, a surging wave. Or maybe that was her climax, rising along with it. She couldn’t get enough of him, couldn’t get close enough to him, needed to be in him, his very blood—

  “Solas, Bryce,” Hunt growled, pumping into her in a long, luxurious stroke. “I can’t—” She didn’t want him to. She gripped his ass, nails digging in deep in silent urging. “Bryce,” he warned, but he didn’t stop moving in her. Lightning crackled and snaked around them, an avalanche racing toward her.

  “Don’t stop,” she pleaded.

  Their magics collided—their souls. She scattered across the stars, across galaxies, lightning skittering in her wake.

  She had the dim sense of Hunt being thrown with her, of his shout of ecstasy and surprise. Knew that their bodies remained joined in some distant world, but here, in this place between places, all they were melted into one, crossed over and transferred and becoming something more.

  Stars and planets and rainbow clouds of nebulas swirled around them, darkness cut with lightning brighter than the sun. Sun and moon held together in perfect balance, suspended in the same sky. And beneath them, far below, she could see Avallen, thrumming with their magic, so much magic, as if Avallen were the very source of it, as if they were the very source of all magic and light and love—

  Then it ebbed away. Receded into muted color and warm air and heavy breathing. The weight of Hunt’s body atop hers, his cock pulsing inside her, his wings splayed open above them.

  “Holy shit,” Hunt said, lifting himself enough to look at her. “Holy … shit.”

  It had been more then fucking, or sex, or lovemaking. Hunt stared down at her, starlight shimmering in his hair. Just as she knew lightning licked through her own.

  “It felt like my power went into you,” Hunt said, eyes tracking the lightning as it slithered down her body. “It’s … yours.”

  “As mine is yours,” she said, touching a fleck of starlight glittering between the sable locks of his hair.

  “I feel weird,” he admitted, but didn’t move. “I feel …”

  She sensed it, then. Understood it at last. What it had always been, what she’d learned to call it in that other world.

  “Made,” Bryce whispered with a shade of fear. “That’s what it feels like. Whatever power can flow between us … my Made power from the Horn can, too.”

  Hunt looked down at himself, at where their bodies remained joined. She had a pang of guilt, then, for not telling him all she knew yet about the other Made objects in the universe—about the Mask, the Trove. “I guess it flows both ways: my power into you, and yours into me.”

  Hunt smiled and surveyed the room around them. “At least we seem to be past ending up somewhere new every time we fuck.”

  Bryce snorted. “That’s a relief. I don’t think Morven would have appreciated our naked asses landing in his room.”

  “Definitely not,” Hunt agreed, kissing her brow. He brushed back a strand of her hair. “But what difference does it make? That we’re connected this way?”

  Bryce lifted her head to kiss him. “Another thing for us to figure out.”

  “Team Caves all the way,” he said against her mouth.

  She laughed, their breath mingling, twining together like their souls. “I told you I should have ordered T-shirts.”

  51

  Tharion stood in the old-timey stone bedroom, complete with a curtained bed and tapestries on the wall, and had no idea what to say to his wife.

  Apparently, Sathia Flynn had no idea what to say to him, either, because she took a seat in a carved wooden chair before the crackling hearth and stared at the fire.

  They’d barely exchanged more than a word all day. But now, having to share a room—

  “You can take the bed,” he said, the words too loud, too big in the chamber.

  “Thank you,” she said, arms wrapping around herself. The firelight danced on her light brown hair, setting golden strands within it shining.

  “I don’t, uh—I don’t expect anything.”

  That earned him a wry look over her shoulder. “Good. Neither do I.”

  “Good,” he echoed, and winced, walking to the window. The starless night was a black wall beyond, interrupted only by a few glimmering fires at farmstead cottages. “Does it ever get … not gloomy here?”

  “This is my first visit, so I can’t say.” Her tone was a bit sharp, as if unused to speaking normally to people, but she added, “I hope so.”

  Tharion walked to the wooden chair opposite hers and sank onto it. The damn thing was hard as Hel. He shifted, trying to find a more comfortable angle, but gave up after a second and said, “Let’s start from the beginning. I’m Tharion Ketos. Former Captain of Intelligence for the River Queen—”

  “I know who you are,” she said quietly, her soft tone belied by the steely calm in her eyes.

  He arched a brow. “Oh? Good or bad?”

  She shook her head. “I’m Sathia Flynn, daughter of Lord Hawthorne.”

  “And?”

  She cocked her head to the side, strands of her long hair slipping over a shoulder. “What else is there?”

  He feigned contemplation. “Favorite color?”

  “Blue.”

  “Favorite food?”

  “Raspberry tarts.”

  He let out a laugh. “Really?”

  She frowned. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing,” he said, then added, “Mine’s cheese puffs.”

  She let out a hint of a laugh. But it faded as she said, “Why?”

  He ticked the reasons off on his fingers. “They’re crispy, they’re cheesy—”

  “No. I mean—why did you do this?” She gestured between them.

  Tharion debated how to spin his story, but … “This arrangement of ours might as well be an honest one.” He sighed. “I’m a wanted male. The Viper Queen has a bounty of five million gold marks on my head.”

  She choked. “What?”

  “Surprise,” he said. Then added, “Sorry. I feel like … maybe I should have mentioned that before.”

  “You think?” But she mastered herself, a practiced, calm demeanor stealing over her pale features before she said for a third time, “Why?”

  “I … may have been indirectly responsible for burning down the Meat Market, and now she wants to kill me. That was after I defected from the River Queen, who, uh, also wants to kill me. And then the Ocean Queen harbored me and forbade me from leaving her ship, but I disobeyed her order and bailed, and now here I am and … I’m really not doing a good job of making myself seem appealing, am I?”

  “My father is going to keel over dead,” Sathia said. Something like wicked amusement glinted in her eyes.

  He could work with a sense of humor.

  “As glad as I am to hear that,” Tharion said, earning another few millimeters of smile, “it’s a long way of saying … I’ve fucked up a lot.” Sigrid’s dead body flashed before his eyes, and he shoved it away. “Too much,” he amended.