House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City #1) by Sarah J. Maas

Hunt again scanned her face. Her eyes.

Us, he’d said earlier. A unit. A team. A two-person pack.

Hunt’s wings shifted slightly in the wind off the Istros. “We’re going to find whoever is behind all this, Bryce. I promise.”

And for some reason, she believed him.

She was brushing her teeth when her phone rang.

Declan Emmet.

She spat out her toothpaste before answering. “Hi.”

“You still have my number saved? I’m touched, B.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. What’s up?”

“I found something interesting in the footage. The taxpaying residents of this city should revolt at how their money’s being blown on second-rate analysts instead of people like me.”

Bryce padded into the hall, then into the great room—then to Hunt’s door. She knocked on it once, and said to Declan, “Are you going to tell me or just gloat about it?”

Hunt opened the door.

Burning. Fucking. Solas.

He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and from the look of it, had been in the middle of brushing his teeth, too. But she didn’t give a shit about his dental hygiene when he looked like that.

Muscles upon muscles upon muscles, all covered by golden-brown skin that glowed in the firstlights. It was outrageous. She’d seen him shirtless before, but she hadn’t noticed—not like this.

She’d seen more than her fair share of cut, beautiful male bodies, but Hunt Athalar’s blew them all away.

He was pining for a lost love, she reminded herself. Had made that very clear earlier tonight. Through an effort of will, she lifted her eyes and found a shit-eating smirk on his face.

But his smug-ass smile faded when she put Declan on speaker. Dec said, “I don’t know if I should tell you to sit down or not.”

Hunt stepped into the great room, frowning. “Just tell me,” Bryce said.

“Okay, so I’ll admit someone could easily have made a mistake. Thanks to the blackout, the footage is just darkness with some sounds. Ordinary city sounds of people reacting to the blackout. So I pulled apart each audio thread from the street outside the temple. Amped up the ones in the background that the government computers might not have had the tech to hear. You know what I heard? People giggling, goading each other to touch it.”

“Please tell me this isn’t going to end grossly,” Bryce said. Hunt snorted.

“It was people at the Rose Gate. I could hear people at the Rose Gate in FiRo daring each other to touch the disk on the dial pad in the blackout, to see if it still worked. It did, by the way. But I could also hear them oohing about the night-blooming flowers on the Gate itself.”

Hunt leaned in, his scent wrapping around her, dizzying her, as he said into the phone, “The Rose Gate is halfway across the city from Luna’s Temple.”

Declan chuckled. “Hey, Athalar. Enjoying playing houseguest with Bryce?”

“Just tell us,” Bryce said, grinding her teeth. Taking a big, careful step away from Hunt.

“Someone swapped the footage of the temple during the time of the Horn’s theft. It was clever fucking work—they patched it right in so that there isn’t so much as a flicker in the time stamp. They picked audio footage that was a near-match for what it would have sounded like at the temple, with the angle of the buildings and everything. Really smart shit. But not smart enough. The 33rd should have come to me. I’d have found an error like that.”

Bryce’s heart pounded. “Can you find who did this?”

“I already did.” Any smugness faded from Declan’s voice. “I looked at who was responsible for heading up the investigation of the video footage that night. They’d be the only one with the clearance to make a swap like that.”

Bryce tapped her foot on the ground, and Athalar brushed his wing against her shoulder in quiet reassurance. “Who is it, Dec?”

Declan sighed. “Look, I’m not saying it’s this person one hundred percent … but the official who headed up that part of the investigation was Sabine Fendyr.”





PART III

THE CANYON





38

“It makes sense,” Hunt said carefully, watching Bryce where she sat on the rolled arm of her sofa, chewing on her lower lip. She’d barely thanked Declan before hanging up.

Hunt said, “The demon has been staying out of view of the cameras in the city. Sabine would know where those cameras are, especially if she had the authority to oversee the video footage of criminal cases.”

Sabine’s behavior earlier tonight … He’d wanted to kill her.

He’d seen Bryce laugh in the face of the Viper Queen, go toe-to-toe with Philip Briggs, and taunt three of the most lethal Fae warriors in this city—and yet she’d trembled before Sabine.

He hadn’t been able to stand it, her fear and misery and guilt.

When Bryce didn’t reply, he said again, “It makes sense that Sabine could be behind this.” He sat beside her on the sectional. He’d put on a shirt a moment ago, even though he’d enjoyed the look of pure admiration on Bryce’s face as she got an eyeful of him.

“Sabine wouldn’t have killed her own daughter.”

“You really believe that?”

Bryce wrapped her arms around her knees. “No.” In a pair of sleeping shorts and an oversize, worn T-shirt, she looked young. Small. Tired.