She didn’t look up, but she said a shade quietly, “Thanks.”
Athalar, wisely, didn’t say a word.
Ruhn scanned the shelves, waiting to feel a tug toward anything beyond the sister who’d spoken more to him in the past few days than she had in nine years. The titles were in the common language, the Old Language of the Fae, the mer, and a few other alphabets he didn’t recognize. “This collection is amazing.”
Ruhn reached for a blue tome whose spine glittered with gold foil. Words of the Gods.
“Don’t touch it,” Lehabah warned. “It might bite.”
Ruhn snatched back his hand as the book stirred, rumbling on the shelf. His shadows murmured inside him, readying to strike. He willed them to settle. “Why does the book move?”
“Because they’re special—” Lehabah began.
“Enough, Lele,” Bryce warned. “Ruhn, don’t touch anything without permission.”
“From you or the book?”
“Both,” she said. As if in answer, a book high up on the shelf rustled. Ruhn craned his head to look, and saw a green tome … shining. Beckoning. His shadows murmured, as if in urging. All right, then.
It was a matter of moments to drag over the brass ladder and scale it. Bryce said, seemingly to the library itself, “Don’t bother him,” before Ruhn pulled the book from its resting place. He rolled his eyes at the title. Great Romances of the Fae.
Starborn power indeed. Tucking the book into the crook of his arm, he descended the ladder and returned to the table.
Bryce choked on a laugh at the title. “You sure that Starborn power isn’t for finding smut?” She called to Lehabah, “This one’s right up your alley.”
Lehabah burned to a raspberry pink. “BB, you’re horrible.”
Athalar winked at him. “Enjoy.”
“I will,” Ruhn shot back, flipping open the book. His phone buzzed before he could begin. He fished it from his back pocket and glanced at the screen. “Dec’s got the intel you wanted.”
Bryce and Athalar went still. Ruhn opened the email, then his fingers hovered over the forwarding screen. “I, uh … is your email still the same?” he asked her. “And I don’t have yours, Athalar.”
Hunt rattled his off, but Bryce frowned at Ruhn for a long moment, as if weighing whether she wanted to open yet another door into her life. She then sighed and answered, “Yes, it’s the same.”
“Sent,” Ruhn said, and opened up the attachment Declan had emailed over.
It was full of coordinates and their correlating locations. Danika’s daily routine as Alpha of the Pack of Devils had her moving throughout the Old Square and beyond. Not to mention her healthy social life after sundown. The list covered everything from the apartment, the Den, the City Head office at the Comitium, a tattoo parlor, a burger joint, too many pizza places to count, bars, a concert venue, the CCU sunball arena, hair salons, the gym … Fuck, had she ever gotten any sleep? The list dated back two weeks prior to her death. From the silence around the table, he knew Bryce and Hunt were also skimming over the locations. Then—
Surprise lit Hunt’s dark eyes as he looked to her. Bryce murmured, “Danika wasn’t merely on duty near Luna’s Temple around that time—this says Danika was stationed at the temple for the two days before the Horn was stolen. And during the night of the blackout.”
Hunt asked, “You think she saw whoever took it and they killed her to cover it up?”
Could it be that easy? Ruhn prayed it was.
Bryce shook her head. “If Danika saw the Horn being stolen, she would have reported it.” She sighed again. “Danika wasn’t usually stationed at the temple, but Sabine often switched her schedule around for spite. Maybe Danika had some of the Horn’s scent on her from being on duty and the demon tracked her down.”
“Go through it again,” Ruhn urged. “Maybe there’s something you’re missing.”
Bryce’s mouth twisted to the side, the portrait of skepticism, but Hunt said, “Better than nothing.” Bryce held the angel’s stare for longer than most people deemed wise.
Nothing good could come of it—Bryce and Athalar working together. Living together.
But Ruhn kept his mouth shut, and began reading.
“Any good sex scenes yet?” Bryce asked Ruhn idly, going over Danika’s location data for the third time. The first few of those locations, she’d realized, had been to Philip Briggs’s bomb lab just outside the city walls. Including the night of the bust itself.
She still remembered Danika and Connor limping into the apartment that night, after making the bust on Briggs and his Keres group two years ago. Danika had been fine, but Connor had sported a split lip and black eye that screamed some shit had gone down. They never told her what, and she hadn’t asked. She’d just made Connor sit at that piece-of-shit kitchen table and let her clean him up.
He’d kept his eyes fixed on her face, her mouth, the entire time she’d gently dabbed his lip. She’d known then and there that it was coming—that Connor was done waiting. That five years of friendship, of dancing around each other, was now going to change, and he’d make his move soon. It didn’t matter that she’d been dating Reid. Connor had let her take care of him, his eyes near-glowing, and she’d known it was time.
When Ruhn didn’t immediately respond to her taunting, Bryce looked up from the laptop. Her brother had kept reading—and didn’t seem to hear her. “Ruhn.”
Hunt halted his own searching through the gallery database. “Danaan.”
Ruhn snapped his head up, blinking. Bryce asked, “You found something?”
“Yes and no,” Ruhn said, sitting back in his chair. “This is just a three-page account of Prince Pelias and his bride, Lady Helena. But I didn’t realize that Pelias was actually the high general for a Fae Queen named Theia when they entered this world during the Crossing—and Helena was her daughter. From what it sounds like, Queen Theia was also Starborn, and her daughter possessed the same power. Theia had a younger daughter with the same gift, but only Lady Helena gets mentioned.” Ruhn cleared his throat and read, “Night-haired Helena, from whose golden skin poured starlight and shadows. It seems like Pelias was one of several Fae back then with the Starborn power.”
Bryce blinked. “So? What does it have to do with the Horn?”
“It mentions here that the sacred objects were made only for Fae like them. That the Horn worked only when that starlight flowed through it, when it was filled with power. This claims that the Starborn magic, in addition to a bunch of other crap, can be channeled through the sacred objects—bringing them to life. I sure as fuck have never been able to do anything like that, even with the Starsword. But it says that’s why the Prince of the Pit had to steal Pelias’s blood to make the kristallos to hunt the Horn—it contained that essence. I think the Horn could have been wielded by any of them, though.”
Hunt said, “But if the Prince of the Pit had gotten his hands on the Horn, he wouldn’t be able to use it unless he had a Starborn Fae to operate it.” He nodded to Ruhn. “Even if whoever wants the Horn now finds it, they’d have to use you.”
Ruhn considered. “But let’s not forget that whoever is summoning the demon to track the Horn—and kill these people—doesn’t have the Horn. Someone else stole it. So we’re essentially looking for two different people: the killer and whoever has the Horn.”
“Well, the Horn is broken anyway,” Bryce said.
Ruhn tapped the book. “Permanently broken, apparently. It says here that once it was cracked, the Fae claimed it could only be repaired by light that is not light; magic that is not magic. Basically a convoluted way of saying there’s no chance in Hel of it ever working again.”
Hunt said, “So we need to find out why someone would want it, then.” He frowned at Ruhn. “Your father wants it for what—some Fae PR campaign about the good old days of Faedom?”
Ruhn snorted, and Bryce smiled slightly. With lines like that, Athalar was in danger of becoming one of her favorite people. Ruhn said, “Basically, yeah. The Fae have been declining, according to him, for the past several thousand years. He claims our ancestors could burn entire forests to ash with half a thought—while he can probably torch a grove, and not much more.” Ruhn’s jaw tightened. “It drives him nuts that my Chosen One powers are barely more than a kernel.”
Bryce knew her own lack of power had been part of her father’s disgust with her.
Proof of the Fae’s failing influence.
She felt Hunt’s eyes on her, as if he could sense the bitterness that rippled through her. She half lied to him, “My own father never had a lick of interest in me for the same reason.”
“Especially after your visit to the Oracle,” Ruhn said.
Hunt’s brows rose, but Bryce shook her head at him, scowling. “It’s a long story.”
Hunt again looked at her in that considering, all-seeing way. So Bryce peered over at Ruhn’s tome, skimmed a few lines, and then looked back up at Ruhn. “This whole section is about your fancy Avallen cousins. Shadow-walking, mind-reading … I’m surprised they don’t claim they’re Starborn.”
“They wish they were,” Ruhn muttered. “They’re a bunch of pricks.”
She had a vague memory of Ruhn telling her the details about why, exactly, he felt that way, but asked, “No mind-reading for you?”
“It’s mind-speaking,” he grumbled, “and it has nothing to do with the Starborn stuff. Or this case.”
Hunt, apparently, seemed to agree, because he cut in, “What if we asked the Oracle about the Horn? Maybe she could see why someone would want a broken relic.”
Bryce and Ruhn straightened. But she said, “We’d be better off going to the mystics.”
Hunt cringed. “The mystics are some dark, fucked-up shit. We’ll try the Oracle first.”
“Well, I’m not going,” Bryce said quickly.
Hunt’s eyes darkened. “Because of what happened at your visit?”
“Right,” she said tightly.
Ruhn cut in and said to Hunt, “You go, then.”
Hunt snickered. “You have a bad experience, too, Danaan?”
Bryce found herself carefully watching her brother. Ruhn had never mentioned the Oracle to her. But he just shrugged and said, “Yeah.”
Hunt threw up his hands. “Fine, assholes. I’ll go. I’ve never been. It always seemed too gimmicky.”
It wasn’t. Bryce blocked out the image of the golden sphinx who’d sat before the hole in the floor of her dim, black chamber—how that human woman’s face had monitored her every breath.
“You’ll need an appointment,” she managed to say.
Silence fell. A buzzing interrupted it, and Hunt sighed as he pulled out his phone. “I gotta take this,” he said, and didn’t wait for them to reply before striding up the stairs out of the library. A moment later, the front door to the gallery shut.
With Lehabah still watching her show behind them, Ruhn quietly said to Bryce, “Your power levels never mattered to me, Bryce. You know that, right?”
She went back to looking through Danika’s data. “Yeah. I know.” She lifted an eyebrow. “What’s your deal with the Oracle?”
His face shuttered. “Nothing. She told me everything the Autumn King wanted to hear.”
“What—you’re upset that it wasn’t something as disastrous as mine?”
Ruhn rose from his seat, piercings glittering in the firstlights. “Look, I’ve got an Aux meeting this afternoon that I need to prep for, but I’ll see you later.”
“Sure.”
Ruhn paused, as if debating saying something else, but continued toward the stairs and out.
“Your cousin is dreamy,” Lehabah sighed from her couch.
“I thought Athalar was your one true love,” Bryce said.
“Can’t they both be?”