Flynn called to them, “Get on, assholes!”
Tharion glanced to Ithan, but the wolf was staring at the eastern horizon. The rising sun.
“Ready?” Tharion asked.
“I have to go back,” Holstrom rasped.
“What?” Tharion faced him fully. “What do you mean?”
The wolf slowly turned to look at him, his eyes bleak. Tharion felt the weight of his guilt at what he’d done to this male, in having Holstrom fight for him.
“To Crescent City,” Ithan said, face like stone. “I have to go back.”
“Why?”
“Holstrom! Ketos!” Dec hollered as the boat’s engine churned.
Ithan just said quietly, “To make it right.”
A shudder of muscle and a ripple of light, and the human form became a massive wolf.
“Ithan—” Tharion started.
The wolf turned and sprinted down the dock, back toward the arid countryside, golden in the rising light.
Flynn bellowed, “Holstrom, what the fuck!”
But the wolf had already reached the shore. Then the main building of the marina. Then the alley beside it … and then he vanished.
Silence fell, interrupted only by the grumble and splash of the engine. Tharion turned back toward the boat, toward the two friends onboard, the sprites gleaming like three small stars between them.
“What the fuck happened?” Flynn demanded.
Tharion shook his head, at a loss for words, and stepped onto the boat.
His fault—all of it. He lifted his face to the sky as the boat peeled toward the open ocean, and wondered if he’d ever see Valbara again.
If he even deserved to.
27
Bryce couldn’t move for a moment. Vesperus was dead.
Nesta slashed her hand and the creature’s body burned with that strange silver fire.
As the Asteri was reduced to ashes, Bryce grabbed the sword and dagger from the ground, both blades dripping with Vesperus’s blood.
She whirled on Nesta, on Azriel. “You shouldn’t have killed her. If we could have gotten her under control, the amount of information that we could have pried from her—”
“Do you have any idea what you almost did here?” Nesta raged, covered in Vesperus’s dark ichor. She still gripped Ataraxia in one hand, as if not yet decided whether she was done killing. “What you unleashed?”
“Trust me, I know better than you guys what the Asteri can do.”
“Then you have even less of an excuse for your actions,” Nesta snapped. Her sword rose.
Azriel extended a scarred hand to Bryce, panting hard. “Open the passage out of here. You’re coming back with us. Right now.”
To that cell under a different mountain. Where she had no doubt she’d be subjected to the interrogation Vesperus should have received.
Bryce snorted. “Like Hel I am.” Debris began floating around her. “You killed the one person here who might have given me the answer I needed.”
“You’re looking for ways to kill the Daglan. Well, I just killed that monster,” Nesta said. “Isn’t that answer enough?”
“No,” Bryce said. “You’ve only left me with more questions.”
She let her power flow outward from the star in her chest. From the Horn in her back.
“Don’t you dare,” Azriel warned with lethal softness.
But Bryce shoved out a slice of her power. Sharp and targeted, as Silene had used to carve the stones. As Azriel had focused his own power on her star earlier.
Light cut through stone and sizzled, a line literally drawn at Azriel’s feet.
Whatever had changed in her power with the addition of Silene’s magic … Fuck yeah. This would be useful.
“I won’t tell them about you,” Bryce said coolly, even as part of her marveled at the laser she’d created out of pure magic. The other part of her cringed from it—from the power that was eerily similar to what Rigelus had used against her before she jumped through the Gate in the Eternal Palace. “I swear it on my mate’s life. Even if Rigelus …” She shook her head. “I won’t breathe a word to them about this place.”
Azriel dared to put one foot over the line she’d blasted into the floor. “They’ll pry it from you. People like me, like them … we always get the information we need.” His gaze darkened with the promise of unending pain.
“I won’t let it come to that,” Bryce said, and sent her power searing through her star again—right into the crystal sarcophagus.
Crystal like the Gate that had opened the way to this world.