House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City #3) by Sarah J. Maas

They were ghosts here.

Apollion let out a low chuckle as Hunt backed toward Bryce’s side once more. “You will find that you cannot harm us, nor we you, in such a state.” His deep voice pealed like thunder off the walls.

Son. It wasn’t possible—

“Helena planned it that way,” Aidas said. His gaze remained fixed on Bryce while he explained, “During my time with Theia, Helena was a quiet girl, but she always listened.”

“You spoke too much,” Thanatos snapped.

Aidas ignored him. “Helena learned black salt would allow her to commune with us while protecting her mind and her soul.”

Just like the barrier of it that Bryce had sprinkled in her apartment, that day she’d summoned Aidas. When Hunt had still thought her a frivolous party girl, playing with fire.

“Fine,” Hunt cut in. “Great, we’re protected.” He eyed the Prince of the Pit. His very bones shook, but he forced himself past his fear, his dread. “What the fuck did you mean by calling me son?”

Thanatos scoffed. “You are no son of his.” He yanked off his war helmet, cradling it under an arm. “If anything, you are mine.”

Hunt’s knees buckled. “What?”

“Let us sit and be civilized about this,” Aidas said to Bryce, but she was peering into the shadows of the temple looming at the top of the steps.

“I think we’re good here,” she hedged. Hunt cleared his reeling thoughts enough to follow her line of vision.

He saw them, then. The dogs. Their milky eyes glowed from the gloom between the pillars.

“They will not harm you,” Aidas said, nodding toward the hounds that looked an awful lot like the Shepherd that Bryce and Hunt had fought in the Bone Quarter. “They are Thanatos’s companions.”

Hunt reached for his lightning, little that it could do in this insubstantial form. It zapped against his fingers, normally a familiar, comforting presence, but …

No one had ever known who had sired him. Where this lightning had come from.

“My concern exactly,” Bryce said, not taking her attention off the hounds. She nodded to Thanatos. “He eats souls—”

“The Temple of Chaos is a sacred place,” Apollion said sharply. “We shall never defile it with violence.” The words rumbled like thunder again.

Hunt sized up Apollion, then Thanatos. What the fucking fuck—

But Thanatos sniffed toward Bryce, almost as canine as the hounds in the shadows, and said, “Your starlight smells … fresher.”

The hunger lacing the male’s words stilled Hunt’s chaotic mind—honing him into a weapon primed for violence. He didn’t give a shit if he never got answers about his parentage. If that asshole made one move against Bryce, ghostly forms or no—

Bryce said nonchalantly, “New deodorant.”

“No,” Thanatos said, missing the joke entirely, “I can smell it on your spirit. I am the Prince of Souls—such things are known to me. Your power has been touched by something new.”

Bryce rolled her eyes, but for a heartbeat, Hunt wondered if Thanatos was right: Bryce had explained how the prism in the Autumn King’s office had revealed her light to now be laced with darkness, as if it had become the fading light of day, of twilight—

“We don’t have much time,” Aidas said irritably. “The dreaming draft will only last so long. Please—come into the temple.” He inclined his head in a half bow. “On my honor, no harm shall come to you.”

Hunt opened his mouth to say the Prince of the Chasm’s honor meant shit, but Bryce’s whiskey eyes assessed Aidas in a long, unhurried sweep. And then she said, “All right.”

Pushing aside every raging thought and question for the moment, Hunt kept one eye on the exit behind them as they traded the pebbled shore for the smooth temple steps. As they walked up those steps and entered a space that was a near-mirror to temples back home—indeed, its layout was identical to the last temple Hunt had stood in: Urd’s Temple.

He shut down the memory of Pippa Spetsos’s ambush, the desperate scramble for their lives. How they’d hidden behind the altar, barely escaping. In lieu of the black stone altar in the center of the temple, a bottomless pit was the main focal point. Five chairs of carved black wood encircled it.

Hunt and Bryce claimed the chairs closest to the stairs behind them—closest to the river and the boat still idling at the shore. Aidas took the one on Bryce’s other side, sitting with a smooth, feline grace. The braziers bounced their bluish light off his blond hair.

Apollion’s eyes glimmered like coals as he said to Hunt, “I am disappointed to see that you have not yet freed yourself from the black crown, Orion Athalar.”

“Someone explain what the fuck that is,” Hunt snapped. Of all the things he’d ever imagined for his life, sitting in a circle with three Princes of Hel hadn’t been anywhere on the list.

“The black crowns were collars in Hel,” Thanatos answered darkly. His powerful body seemed primed to leap across that pit to attack. Hunt monitored his every breath. “Spells, crafted by the Asteri to enslave us. They were a binding, one the Asteri adapted in their next war—upon Midgard.”

Hunt turned to Aidas. “You seemed surprised to see one on me that first time we met. Why?”