House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City #2) by Sarah J. Maas

“You don’t get to pretend that this is some savior story.”

Rigelus chuckled, and the sound knocked her from her fury enough to remember Hunt and Ruhn, and, oh gods, if Rigelus knew she was here, he’d find them—

“Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“You left such a noble audiomail to your friend Juniper. Of course, once I heard it, I knew there was only one place you could be going. Here. To me. Precisely as I had hoped—and planned.”

She shut away her questions, instead demanding, “Why do you want me here?”

“To reopen the Rifts.”

Her blood froze. “I can’t.”

“Can’t you?” The cold voice slithered through the intercom. “You are Starborn, and have the Horn bound to your body and power. Your ancestors wielded the Horn and another Fae object that allowed them to enter this world. Stolen, of course, from their original masters—our people. Our people, who built fearsome warriors in that world to be their army. All of them prototypes for the angels in this one. And all of them traitors to their creators, joining the Fae to overthrow my brothers and sisters a thousand years before we arrived on Midgard. They slew my siblings.”

Her head spun. “I don’t understand.”

“Midgard is a base. We opened the doors to other worlds to lure their citizens here—so many powerful beings, all so eager to conquer new planets. Not realizing we were their conquerors. But we also opened the doors so we might conquer those other worlds as well. The Fae—Queen Theia and her two foolish daughters—realized that, though too late. Her people were already here, but she and the princesses discovered where my siblings had hidden the access points in their world.”

Rage rippled through his every word. “Your Starborn ancestors shut the gates to stop us from invading their realm once more and reminding them who their true masters are. And in the process, they shut the gates to all other worlds, including those to Hel, their stalwart allies. And so we have been trapped here. Cut off from the cosmos. All that is left of our people, though our mystics beneath this palace have long sought to find any other survivors, any planets where they might be hiding.”

Bryce shook. The Astronomer had been right about the host of mystics here. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Why do you think we allowed you to live this spring? You are the key to opening the doors between worlds again. You will undo the actions of one ignorant princess fifteen thousand years ago.”

“Not a chance.”

“Are your mate and brother not here with you?”

“No.”

Rigelus laughed. “You’re so like Danika—a born liar.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” She lifted her chin. “You knew she was onto you.”

“Of course. Her quest for the truth began with her bloodhound gift. Not a gift of the body’s strength, but of magic, such as the shifters should not have. She could scent other shifters with strange powers.”

Like Sofie. And Baxian. Danika had found him through researching his bloodline, but had she scented it, too?

“It prompted her to investigate her own bloodline’s history, all the way back to the shifters’ arrival in this world, to learn where her gifts came from. And she eventually began to suspect the truth.”

Bryce’s throat worked. “Look, I already did the whole villain monologuing thing with Micah this spring, so cut to the chase.”

Rigelus chuckled again. “We shall get to that in a moment.” He went on, “Danika realized that the shifters are Fae.”

Bryce blinked. “What?”

“Not your kind of Fae, of course—your breed dwelled in a lovely, verdant land, rich with magic. If it’s of any interest to you, your Starborn bloodline specifically hailed from a small isle a few miles from the mainland. And while the mainland had all manner of climes, the isle existed in beautiful, near-permanent twilight. But only a select few in the entirety of your world could shift from their humanoid forms to animal ones. The Midgard shifters were Fae from a different planet. All the Fae in that world shared their form with an animal. The mer descended from them, too. Perhaps they once shared a world with your breed of Fae, but they had been alone on their planet for long enough to develop their own gifts.”

“They don’t have pointed ears.”

“Oh, we bred that out of them. It was gone within a few generations.”

An isle of near-permanent twilight, the home world of her breed of Fae … A land of Dusk.

“Dusk’s Truth,” Bryce breathed. It wasn’t just the name of this room that Danika had been talking about with Sofie.

Rigelus didn’t answer, and she didn’t know what to make of it. But Bryce asked, “Why lie to everyone?”

“Two breeds of Fae? Both rich in magic? They were ideal food. We couldn’t allow them to unify against us.”

“So you turned them against each other. Made them two species at odds.”

“Yes. The shifters easily and swiftly forgot what they had once been. They gladly gave themselves to us and did our bidding. Led our armies. And still do.”

The Prime had said something similar. The wolves had lost what they had once been. Danika had known that. Danika had known the shifters had once been Fae. Were still Fae—but a different kind.