This was what really mattered in the end.

  70

  Ithan was thoroughly sick of playing bodyguard, even from a floor below. While Hypaxia had been comparing what she’d observed in the Reaper to the water samples and Ithan’s own blood, he’d been packing up artifacts in Jesiba’s office. And glancing at the door every other minute as if Hypaxia would burst in and declare that she’d developed an antidote to the parasite. She never did.

  When he entered the morgue, he found Hypaxia at the desk, head in her hands. Vials of all sizes and shapes littered the metal surface beside her.

  Ithan dared to lay a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t give up. You’re exhausted—you’ve been working for hours. You’ll find a cure.”

  “I already found it.”

  It took him a moment to process what she’d said. “You … Really?”

  Her head bobbed, and she nudged a vial of clear liquid with a fingertip. “It went faster than I had even dared to hope. I was able to use the synth antidote as a template. Synth and the parasite have magic-altering properties in common—I’ll spare you the details. With the changes I made, though, I think this will isolate the parasite and kill it the same way the synth antidote worked.” She pointed at more small vials on a low table behind her. “I made as much as I could. But …”

  “But?” He could barely breathe.

  She sighed. “But it’s far from perfect. I had to use Athalar’s lightning to bind it together. I had to use all of it, I’m afraid.”

  She motioned to her desk, where six quartz crystals now lay. Dormant. Empty.

  His heart twisted. “It’s okay.” Sigrid would remain a Reaper for the time being, but he wouldn’t give up on trying to help her.

  “Athalar’s lightning holds it together, but not permanently,” Hypaxia went on. “The antidote is highly unstable—a little jostling, and it might go completely stale. If I had more time, I might find a way to stabilize it, but for right now …”

  He squeezed her shoulder. “Just tell me.”

  Her mouth twisted to the side before she said, “The antidote’s not a permanent fix. Its effect will wear off—and since the water of Midgard is still contaminated with the parasite, we will be reinfected as soon as it does.”

  “How long will a dose work?”

  “I don’t know. A few weeks? Months? Longer than a few days, I think, but I’ll need to keep refining it. Find some way to make it permanent.”

  “But it’ll work for now?”

  “In theory. So long as Athalar’s lightning binds it together. But I haven’t gathered the nerve to test it on myself. To see if it works and is safe, but also … to find out who I might be without this thing feeding on me.” She raised her head and met his stare, her face bleak and exhausted. “If we remove this parasite, what will it accomplish? What will you do with the extra power?”

  “I’ll help my friends, for whatever good it’ll do.”

  “And the wolves?”

  “What about them?”

  “If you get more power, it could put you beyond Sabine’s abilities. Make you strong enough that you could challenge her.” She looked at him seriously. “You might be able to end Sabine’s tyranny, Ithan.”

  “I …” He couldn’t find the right words. “I didn’t really think about what we’d do next.”

  She wasn’t impressed. “You need to. All of us do.”

  He stiffened. “I’m not a planner. I’m a sunball player, for fuck’s sake—”

  “You were a sunball player,” she said. “And I suspect you haven’t thought about the implications of having the most power among the wolves because you’re avoiding thinking about what you really want.”

  He glared at her. “And what is that?”

  “You want Sabine gone. No one but you is going to come along and do it.”

  He felt sick. “I don’t want to lead anyone.”

  She gave him a look, as if seeing through him. But she said, with a disappointment that cut right to his heart, “All this arguing’s of no use. We don’t even know if the antidote works.” She eyed the vial.

  She would do it, he knew. She’d try it, risk herself—

  Ithan didn’t broadcast his moves before he snatched up the vial. Before he lifted it to his mouth and swallowed.

  Hypaxia whirled toward him, eyes wide with apprehension—

  Then there was only black.

  * * *

  There was his body … and more than his body.

  His wolf, and him, and power, like he could leap between entire continents in one bound—

  Ithan’s eyes flew open. Had the world always been so sharp, so clear? Had the morgue smelled so strongly of antiseptic? Was there a body rotting away in one of the boxes? When had that arrived? Or had it been lying there all along?

  And that smell, of lavender and eucalyptus …

  Hypaxia was kneeling over him, breathing hard. “Ithan—”

  A blink, and a flash, and he shifted. She staggered back at the wolf that appeared, faster than he’d ever changed before.

  Another blink and flash, and he was back in his humanoid body.

  As easy as breathing. Fast as the wind. Something was different, something was …

  His blood howled toward an unseen moon. His fingers curled on the floor as he sat up, claws scraping.

  “Ithan?” The witch’s voice was a whisper.

  “It worked.” The words echoed through the room, the world. “It’s gone—I can tell.”

  Somehow, a barrier had been removed. One that had ordered him to stand down, to obey … It was nothing but ashes now. Only dominance remained. Untethered.

  But filling the void of that barrier with a rising, raging force—

  Ithan held out his hand and willed the thing under his skin to come forward. Ice and snow appeared in his palm. They did not melt against his skin.

  He could fucking summon snow. The magic sang in him, an old and strange melody.

  Wolves didn’t have magic like this. Never had, as far as he’d heard. Shifting and strength, yes, but this elemental power … it shouldn’t exist in a wolf, yet there it was. Rising in him, filling the place where he’d never realized the parasite had existed.

  Ithan said roughly, “We need to get this to our friends.”

  Hypaxia smiled grimly. “What are you going to do?”

  Ithan eyed the door to the hall. “I think it’s time for me to start making some plans.”

  * * *

  “Only my daughter would drag us up to Nena,” Ember groused, shivering against the cold that stole even Hunt’s breath away. “You couldn’t have done this in, oh, I don’t know, the Coronal Islands?”

  “The Northern Rift, Mom,” Bryce said through chattering teeth, “is in the north.”

  “There’s a southern one,” Ember muttered.

  “It’s even colder down there,” Bryce said, and looked to Hunt and Randall for help.

  Hunt chuckled despite the frigid temperatures and howling wind that had hit them from the moment they’d stepped out of the helicopter.

  They could fly no further. The massive black wall stretched for miles in either direction before curving northward, with wards protecting the airspace above it. Hunt knew from maps that the area the wall encircled was forty-nine miles in diameter—seven times seven, the holiest of numbers—and that at its center, somewhere in the barren, snow-blasted terrain, lay the Northern Rift, shrouded in mist. Barriers upon barriers protected Midgard from the Rift, and Hel beyond it.

  “We better get going,” Randall said, nodding to the lead doors in the wall before them.

  “There aren’t any sentries,” Hunt observed, falling into step beside the male, grateful for the snow gear Axtar had somehow procured for all of them. “There should be at least fifteen here.”

  “Maybe they bailed because it was too fucking cold,” Bryce said, shivering miserably.

  “An angelic guard never bails,” Randall said, tugging the faux-fur-lined hood of his parka further over his face. “If they’re not here … it’s not a good sign.”

  Hunt nodded to the rifle in Randall’s gloved hands. “That work in these temperatures?”

  “It’d better,” Ember grumbled.

  But Hunt caught Bryce’s look, and summoned his lightning to the ready. He knew her starfire was already warming beneath her gloves. With Theia’s power now united within her … he couldn’t decide if he was eager to see what that starfire could do, or dreading it.

  “Is it a trap?” Ember said as they approached the towering, sealed gates and abandoned guard post.

  Hunt peered into the frosted window of the booth, then yanked open the door. The ice was crusted so thickly he had to use a considerable amount of strength to pry it free. A swift examination of the interior revealed rime coating the controls, the chairs, the water station. “No one’s been here for a while.”

  “I don’t like this,” Ember said. “It’s too easy.”

  Hunt glanced to Bryce, her eyes teary with cold, the tip of her nose bright red. In these temperatures, they wouldn’t last ten more minutes before frostbite set in. He and his mate would recover, but Ember and Randall, with their human blood …

  “Let’s get this booth warmed up,” Bryce said. She stepped inside and began brushing frost off the switches. “Maybe the heater still works.”

  Ember gave her daughter a look that said she was well aware Bryce and Hunt had avoided addressing her concerns, but stepped inside as well.

  * * *

  They got the heater working—just one of them. The others were too frosted over to sputter to life. But it was enough to warm the small space and offer her parents a sliver of shelter as Bryce and Hunt again explored the frigid terrain, studying the wall and its gate.

  “You think it’s a trap?” Bryce said through the scarf she’d tugged up over her mouth and nose. She’d found some pairs of snow goggles in the booth, and the world was sharp through the stark clarity of the lenses. Was this how it had looked through Hunt’s Umbra Mortis helmet?

  Hunt said, wearing polarized goggles of his own, “I’ve never known the guard station at the Northern Rift to be empty, so … something’s up, for sure.”

  “Maybe Apollion did us a favor and sent a few deathstalkers to clear it out.” As she spoke the demon prince’s name, the wind seemed to quiet. “Well, that’s not spooky at all.”

  “This far north,” Hunt said, turning in place to survey the terrain, “maybe all those bullshit warnings about not speaking his name on this side of the Rift are true.”

  Bryce didn’t dare test it out again. But she walked to the lead gates in the wall and laid a gloved hand on them. “I heard the wall and the gates both had white salt built into them.” For protection against Hel.

  “Hasn’t stopped the demons from slipping through,” Hunt noted, face unreadable with the goggles and his own scarf over his mouth. “I hunted down enough of them to know how fallible the wall is. And the guards, I suppose.”

  “I hate to imagine what’s been getting past without guards here.” Hunt said nothing, which wasn’t remotely comforting. “So how do we get through?” Bryce asked.

  “There’s a button inside the booth,” Hunt said. “Nothing fancy.”

  Bryce nudged him. “Easy-peasy, for once.” A blast of icy wind slammed into her back, as if throwing her toward the wall. Even with the layers of winter gear, she could have sworn the cold bit her very bones.

  “We should go before we lose the light.” Hunt nodded at the sun already sinking toward the horizon. “Daylight’s only a few hours up here.”

  “Bryce?” her dad called from the booth. “You guys need to see this.”

  They found Ember and Randall in front of a flickering monitor.

  “The security footage.” Ember pointed with a shaking gloved finger. Bryce knew the trembling wasn’t from cold. Her mom hit a key on the computer and the footage began rolling.

  “Is that …,” Bryce breathed.

  “We need to get to the Rift,” Hunt growled. “Now.”

  71

  “You set foot in that Den without an invitation from the Prime or Sabine and you’re dead, pup.”

  “I know,” Ithan said, packing yet another crate for Jesiba. The task was stupidly mundane given all the shit that was going down. But when he’d burst into the office moments ago to tell her the good news, Jesiba had refused to speak to him until he earned his keep for a few minutes. So here he was, packing and talking at the same time. “But if Hypaxia and I are heading off to the Eternal City, we might … die.” He choked on the word. “I want them to know the truth.”

  “And what truth is that?”

  Ithan straightened from where he’d been bent over the crate. “The truth of what I did to Sigrid. That Sigrid exists, I guess, even if she is a Reaper. That—”

  “So it’s about you easing your guilty conscience.”

  Ithan cut her a look. “I want them to know what happened. That yeah, Sigrid is a Reaper, and I totally failed at trying to undo that, but … they do technically have an alternative to Sabine—even if it’s a half-life. It’d be radical and unheard of to accept a Reaper as Prime, but stranger things have happened, right?”

  Jesiba began typing away on her computer. “Why do you care?”

  “Because the wolves have to change. They need to know they can choose someone other than Sabine.” He looked down at his palm, willing ice to form there. It cracked over his skin in a thin film before melting away. “They need to know there’s an antidote that might grant them powers beyond hers. That they don’t need to be subservient to her.”

  “The wolves will need proof regarding that bit,” Jesiba said, “or you won’t walk out of there alive.”

  “Isn’t this enough?” He formed a shard of ice on his fingertip, as much as he could reliably control. He supposed he’d need to seek out the Fae or some sort of ice sprite to teach him how to command this new ability.

  Hypaxia had taken the antidote minutes after him. She’d blacked out, as he had, but awoken thrumming with power. He could have sworn a light, playful breeze now played about her hair constantly—and that a steady sort of power seemed to emanate from her, even when she wasn’t using it.

  He’d offered Jesiba a vial upon telling her the news, but the sorceress had said, It won’t help me, pup. And then ordered him to begin this miserable work while he explained the rest.

  Jesiba now said, “Knowing the wolves, they’ll think Quinlan asked me to do something to you that made you … unnatural.”

  “They know Bryce is a good person.”

  “Do they? As far as I recall, they’ve been anything but kind to her since Danika and the Pack died. You included.”

  Ithan’s cheeks warmed. “It was a rough time. For all of us.”

  “Danika Fendyr would have skewered all of you to the front gates of the Den for how you treated Quinlan.”

  “Danika would have …” Ithan trailed off as a thought struck him. “Danika questioned the wolf power structure, you know. Even she thought it was weird that the Fendyrs went unchecked for so long.”

  “Did she?”

  Ithan turned toward the sorceress’s desk. “Bryce and I found some research papers Danika had hidden. She wanted to know why the Fendyrs were so dominant—I don’t think she approved of it, either.” He nodded to himself. “She would have encouraged the others to take the antidote. To kick Sabine to the curb.”

  Jesiba’s brows rose. “If you say so. You knew Danika far better than I ever did.”

  “I know she hated her mother—and thought the hierarchies were grossly unfair.” Ithan paced a few steps. “I have to get those papers. I’ll bring them to the Den to show everyone that it’s not just me questioning this, but that even one of the Fendyrs disagreed with their unchecked dominance. It might help sway them toward accepting an alternative to Sabine. Sigrid’s a Fendyr, but she’s not in the direct line. That might help them accept her as an alternative.”

  “They’ll say you forged them.” Jesiba typed away at her keyboard.

  “That’s a risk I have to take,” Ithan said, striding to the door. “The days of Sabine keeping the wolves down, of making us stand by while innocents suffer … that has to end. We need a change. A big one. And maybe, if Urd’s got our backs, what’s most important within Sigrid still remains intact, unchanged by becoming a Reaper. If that’s the case, I’ll take Sigrid over Sabine any day.”

  Maybe it wasn’t a matter of undoing what had been done, but rather of playing the bad hand that had been dealt to him. Of adapting.

  “Open-minded as that is, Holstrom,” Jesiba said, shutting her laptop, “do you really think it’s a wise decision to not only go to the Den utterly defenseless, but to start preaching that they accept a Reaper as their Prime Apparent? Let’s not forget that some of the wolves might still like Sabine and her style of leadership. Many probably do, in fact.”

  “Yeah, but it’s time to give them the chance to choose otherwise. To break free of her control.”

  “You forget,” Jesiba said darkly, “that from the very start, they’ve been the Asteri’s chief enforcers. They’ve never shown any inclination to break free of anyone’s control.”

  “It’s a risk I have to take,” he insisted. “And I can’t sit around.”

  “Quinlan told you to protect Hypaxia.”

  “This won’t take long. Keep an eye on her for me—please.”

  He walked to the door, and Jesiba spoke as he wrapped his fingers around the knob. Her voice was heavy, resigned. “Be careful, pup.”

  * * *

  Ithan snuck over to Bryce’s apartment using the House of Flame and Shadow’s unnervingly accurate map of the sewers. He didn’t want to think about who else made regular use of those tunnels.

  Even with the access that Danika had long ago granted him, he entered the building through the roof door. There was no doubt the building was being watched, and he kept to the shadows as much as he could. If the guard downstairs saw him on the cameras, no one came to investigate.