House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3)

by Sarah J. Maas

you find that final piece of Theia’s power … if the cost of uniting the sword and knife is too much, Bryce Quinlan, then don’t do it. Choose life.” He glanced to Hunt. “Choose each other. I have lived with the alternative for millennia—the loss never gets easier to bear.”

Bryce exploded—into the twins’s minds, their bodies. Flooding them with starfire. A part of her recoiled in horror as their huge forms crumpled to the ground, steaming holes where their eyes had been. Where their brains had been. She’d melted their minds.

Bryce slashed down at the leash of shadows with a hand wreathed in starfire. It tore the darkness into ribbons.

Bryce stared at what she had done to the Autumn King’s fist. What had once been his hand. Only melted flesh and bone remained.

“My son could do the same—and he was trash in the end. Just like you.”

It was the Starsword. And it was Ruhn wielding it, standing behind him. Ruhn, who had driven the sword right through their father’s cold heart.

“If you plan to fight the Asteri, you will fail. It doesn’t matter if you unify every House. You will be wiped from the face of Midgard.”

I think doing so drained all the land’s magic from its ley lines, and repurposed it to encage Theia’s power. It made the land wither. Just as you said Silene’s own lands withered around the Prison while it held her own share of power.”

At the river of starlight that Helena had depicted at the bottom of every carving. Mere hours ago, she’d thought it was the bloodline of the Starborn in artistic form. But Silene had depicted the evil running beneath the Prison in her carvings, unwittingly warning about Vesperus … Perhaps Helena, too, had left a clue.

“I’m some weird demonic test-tube baby.”

Bryce sitting atop the ruins of what had once been a tower, tangles of blooming vines and roses all around her. A beautiful, surreal place for a Fae Queen to rest. The land seemed to know her, small blooming flowers nestling around her body, some of them even curling in the long strands of her hair.

The Snake, they called me, because I fucked over so many people. And Sandriel eventually heard about me and recruited me for her triarii—to be her spy-master and tracker. The Snake became the Helhound,

Just for the Hel of it, Flynn had grown a small grove of oak trees around them. His earth-based magic seemed to be exploding here now, as if the reborn land were calling to him to fill it, adorn it.

by Randall, thanks to his compulsory years in the peregrini army. All humans were forced to serve.

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.

“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.”

“She’s not the Harpy anymore,” Bryce said. “She’s like … some weird necromantically raised thing made by the Asteri thanks to whatever they managed to do with some of Hunt’s lightning. I don’t know, but we don’t want to meet whatever she is now.”

“Ithan Holstrom is my heir.”

She could have sworn the very world—all worlds—shuddered as Nesta’s hand crossed into Midgard and passed the Mask to Bryce.

The last image she had was of the darkness, of Rhysand’s power, slamming into the windows of Nesta’s room, her mother’s outraged face, Randall reaching for his rifle— Snow and mist returned. The Rift was shut. And her parents were on the other side of it.

There was nothing alive there, nothing remotely aware. She was a husk. A host. With one mission: kill.

“My sisters and I remember a world before the Asteri arrived and caused the land’s magic to wither. Entire islands vanished into the sea, our civilizations with them. And though we were limited in our power to stop them … we have tried, each in our own way.”

But it seemed that the dead, unlike the living, had a vision of her. And those symbols running from the bowl onto her skin … they were like tattoos. They looked oddly familiar.

“In Hel, the Reapers fed on and ruled the vampyrs, and when the vampyrs defected to this world, the Reapers followed their food source. And found the other beings on Midgard to be a veritable feast. So they have left the vampyrs to themselves, feeding as they please on the rest of the populace.”

was birthed by the Void, but my people …” He smiled cruelly at Ithan. “They were not unknown to your own ancestors, wolf. I crept through when they charged so blindly into Midgard. This place is much better suited to my needs than the caves and barrows I was confined to.”

“And she,” the Under-King went on, gesturing to that unusual depiction of Urd towering above him, “was not a goddess, but a force that governed worlds. A cauldron of life, brimming with the language of creation. Urd, they call her here—a bastardized version of her true name. Wyrd, we called her in that old world.”

Home—he was home. Her ability to teleport to him had only proved that. Home wasn’t a place or a thing, but him. Wherever Hunt was … that was where home was. She’d find him across galaxies, if need be.

then his lightning was sparking over his shoulders, across his wings, a band of it over his brow like a crown—

Starlight poured out of her, and his lightning skittered over her spine, ecstasy in its wake.

“No matter what happens tomorrow,” she said, breathing hard, “I’ll have this piece of you with me. Strengthening me.” She could almost summon it, that lightning. It flowed under her skin, so full of possibility that she had no idea how she’d sleep.

He wrapped his arms around her in a tight hug, her cinnamon-and-strawberry scent washing over him. Just as it always had—like she hadn’t taken the antidote.

“He abhors change.”

The Mask called, and the souls of the Fallen answered, drifting from the wall like a swarm of fireflies.

A storm wind from Hunt had the pins ripping free. All but two sets—one a familiar gray, one shiningly white—loosed into the world.

“You have no idea what powers you toy with, girl,” Rigelus said. “The Mask will curse your very soul—”

“So I sent three legions of my Asterian Guard to the Rift last night. I think they and their brimstone missiles will find Hel quite unguarded, with all its armies here.”

Well, there were plenty of dead demons and Asterian Guards with bodies intact enough for occupying. Twitching, as if adjusting to the new limbs, those corpses lurched to their feet.

Aidas unsheathed a shining silver blade that seemed to glow with bluish light.

Apollion stepped forward, a hand raised. Pure, devouring darkness destroyed Polaris’s light.

Polaris’s eyes widened as Bryce plunged the blades into her chest. And as those blades thrust through skin and bone, the star in Bryce’s own chest flared out to meet them. It collided with the blades, and both sword and knife blazed bright, as if white-hot.

Like whatever was happening at that intersection of the blades was drawing the world in, in, in. To the portal to nowhere.

That portal to nowhere, opening somehow inside Polaris, was dangerous not just to the Asteri, but to anyone in its reach.

Polaris imploded. Her chest caved in, sucked into the blades as if by a powerful vacuum. Followed by her abdomen and shoulders, and Polaris was screaming and screaming— Until he saw it, just a flash, so fast that in real time he’d never have witnessed it: the tiny, inky dot the two blades had made, right where they met.

The thing Polaris had been sucked into. A black dot.

They had come to help. And for a single heartbeat, pride at being a son of Hel threaded through him.

I love you. I fell in love with you in the depths of my soul, and it’s my soul that will find yours again in the next life.

It confirmed what Lidia had long guessed. Why she had named Brannon after the oldest legends from her family’s bloodline: of a Fae King from another world, fire in his veins, who had created stags with the power of flame to be his sacred guards.

Lidia turned Mordoc and the two snipers into ashes with a thought. Until all that remained of them was the molten silver from the darts in their collars, pooled on the ground.

Her fire a song in her blood, Lidia walked across the battlefield.

Ruhn exploded. Starlight, two beams of it straight to their eyes, blinded them. Just as Bryce had done to the Murder Twins. Twin whips of his shadows wrapped around their necks and squeezed.