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

“Pick one, and we’ll start with that.”

“Is this how you get witnesses to talk?”

He leaned back in his seat, wings adjusting around its low back. “It’s how you and I are going to make this list.”

She weighed his stare, his solid, thrumming presence. She swallowed. “The tattoo on my back—she and I got it done that week. We got stupid drunk one night, and I was so out of it I didn’t even know what the fuck she put on my back until I’d gotten over my hangover.”

His lips twitched. “I hope it was something good, at least.”

Her chest ached, but she smiled. “It was.”

Hunt sat forward and tapped the paper. “Write it down.”

She did. He asked, “What’d Danika do during that day before you got the tattoo?”

The question was calm, but he weighed her every movement. As if he were reading something, assessing something that she couldn’t see.

Eager to avoid that too-aware look, Bryce picked up the pen, and began writing, one memory after another. Kept writing her recollections of Danika’s whereabouts that week: that silly wish on the Old Square Gate, the pizza she and Danika had devoured while standing at the counter of the shop, swigging from bottles of beer and talking shit; the hair salon where Bryce flipped through gossip magazines while Danika had gotten her purple, blue, and pink streaks touched up; the grocery store two blocks down where she and Thorne had found Danika stuffing her face with a bag of chips she hadn’t yet paid for and teased her for hours afterward; the CCU sunball arena where she and Danika had ogled the hot players on Ithan’s team during practice and called dibs on them … She kept writing and writing, until the walls pressed in again.

Her knee bounced relentlessly beneath the table. “I think we can stop there for today.”

Hunt opened his mouth, glancing to the list—but her phone buzzed.

Thanking Urd for the well-timed intervention, Bryce glanced at the message on the screen and scowled. The expression was apparently intriguing enough that Hunt peered over her shoulder.

Ruhn had written, Meet me at Luna’s Temple in thirty minutes.

Hunt asked, “Think it’s got to do with last night?”

Bryce didn’t answer as she typed back, Why?

Ruhn replied. Because it’s one of the few places in this city without cameras.

“Interesting,” she murmured. “You think I should give him a heads-up that you’re coming?”

Hunt’s grin was pure wickedness. “Hel no.”

Bryce couldn’t keep herself from grinning back.





21

Ruhn Danaan leaned against one of the marble pillars of the inner sanctum of Luna’s Temple and waited for his sister to arrive. Tourists drifted past, snapping photos, none marking his presence, thanks to the shadow veil he’d pulled around himself.

The chamber was long, its ceiling lofty. It had to be, to accommodate the statue enthroned at the back.

Thirty feet high, Luna sat in a carved golden throne, the goddess lovingly rendered in shimmering moonstone. A silver tiara of a full moon held by two crescent ones graced her upswept curling hair. At her sandaled feet lay twin wolves, their baleful eyes daring any pilgrim to come closer. Across the back of her throne, a bow of solid gold had been slung, its quiver full of silver arrows. The pleats of her thigh-length robe draped across her lap, veiling the slim fingers resting there.

Both wolves and Fae claimed Luna as their patron goddess—had gone to war over whom she favored in millennia long past. And while the wolves’ connection to her had been carved into the statue with stunning detail, the nod to the Fae had been missing for two years. Maybe the Autumn King had a point about restoring the Fae to glory. Not in the haughty, sneering way his father intended, but … the lack of Fae heritage on the statue raked down Ruhn’s nerves.

Footsteps scuffed in the courtyard beyond the sanctum doors, followed by excited whispers and the click of cameras.

“The courtyard itself is modeled after the one in the Eternal City,” a female voice was saying as a new flock of tourists entered the temple, trailing their guide like ducklings.

And at the rear of the group—a wine-red head of hair.

And a too-recognizable pair of gray wings.

Ruhn gritted his teeth, keeping hidden in the shadows. At least she’d shown up.

The tour group stopped in the center of the inner sanctum, the guide speaking loudly as everyone spread out, cameras flashing like Athalar’s lightning in the gloom. “And here it is, folks: the statue of Luna herself. Lunathion’s patron goddess was crafted from a single block of marble hewn from the famed Caliprian Quarries by the Melanthos River up north. This temple was the first thing built upon the city’s founding five hundred years ago; the location of this city was selected precisely because of the way the Istros River bends through the land. Can anyone tell me what shape the river makes?”

“A crescent!” someone called out, the words echoing off the marble pillars, wending through the curling smoke from the bowl of incense laid between the wolves at the goddess’s feet.

Ruhn saw Bryce and Hunt scan the sanctum for him, and he let the shadows peel back long enough for them to spy his location. Bryce’s face revealed nothing. Athalar just grinned.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

With all the tourists focused on their guide, no one noticed the unusual pair crossing the space. Ruhn kept the shadows at bay until Bryce and Hunt reached him—and then willed them to encompass them as well.