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

Ari let out a cool laugh that belied the blazing heat in her eyes. “You don’t give me orders.”

“No, I don’t,” Tharion said. “But I’m giving you advice. You kill Ithan, you hurt him beyond repair, and you will have more enemies than you know what to do with. Starting with Tristan Flynn—who might seem like an irreverent idiot, but is fully capable of ripping you apart with his bare hands—and ending with me.”

Ariadne let out a snort and tried to stride around him. Tharion gripped her by the arm, the claws at the tips of his fingers digging into her soft flesh. “I mean it.”

“And what about me?” she sneered.

“What about you?”

“Are you warning Ithan Holstrom not to harm me?”

He blinked. “You’re a dragon.”

Another one of those humorless laughs. “I have a job to do. I swore oaths, too.”

“Always looking out for number one.”

She tried to pry her arm free, but he dug his fingers in further. She hissed, “I’m not a part of your little cabal, and I don’t want to be. I don’t give a shit about you, or whatever you’re trying to pull against the Asteri. It’s clearly going to get you all killed.”

“Then what do you want, Ari? A life of this?”

Her skin heated, searing his palm, and he had no choice but to release her. She stalked toward the hall door that led to the eerily quiet pit. As the Viper Queen had promised, only she would watch.

Ariadne opened the door, but tossed over a shoulder, “Do you like your wolf cooked with barbecue sauce or gravy?”



* * *



“So a phone,” Nesta said, overpronouncing the word as they crossed yet another small stream, hopping from stone to stone, “can take these photographs that capture a moment in time, but not the people in it?”

“Phones have cameras,” Bryce answered, “and the camera is the thing that … yeah. It’s like an instant drawing of the moment.” Gods, so many words and terms from her own language to explain. She forged ahead. “But with all the details rendered perfectly. And don’t ask me more than that, because I seriously have no idea how it actually works.”

Nesta chuckled as she landed gracefully on the opposite bank. Azriel strode ahead into the dark, the carvings around him lit by Bryce’s star: more war, more death, more suffering … this time on a larger scale, entire cities burning, people screaming in pain, devastation and grief on a whole new level. No paradise to counter the suffering. Just death.

Nesta paused on the stream bank to wait for Bryce to finish crossing. “And it also holds music. Like a Symphonia?”

“I don’t know what that is, but yes, it holds music. I’ve got a few thousand songs on here.”

“Thousand?” Nesta whirled as Bryce jumped from the last stone onto the bank, pebbles skittering from beneath her sneakers. “In that tiny thing? You recorded it all?”

“No—there’s a whole industry of people whose job it is to record it, and again, I don’t know how it works.” Finding her footing, Bryce followed Azriel, now a hulking shadow silhouetted against the larger dark.

Nesta fell into step beside her. “And it’s a way of talking mind-to-mind with other people.”

“Sort of. It can connect to other people’s phones, and your voices are linked in real time …”

“And let me guess: you don’t know exactly how it works.”

Bryce snorted. “Pathetic, but true. We take our tech and don’t ask what the Hel makes it operate. I couldn’t even tell you how the flashlight in the phone works.” To demonstrate, she hit the button and the cave illuminated, the battle scenes and suffering on the walls around them even more stark. Azriel hissed from up ahead, whirling their way with his eyes shielded, and Bryce quickly turned it off.

Nesta smirked. “I’m surprised it can’t cook you food and change your clothes, too.”

“Give it a few years, and maybe it will.”

“But you have magic to do these things?”

Bryce shrugged. “Yeah. Magic and tech kind of overlap in my world. But for those of us without much in the way of the former, tech really helps fill the gap.”

“And that weaponry you showed us,” Azriel said quietly, pausing his steps to let them catch up. “Those … guns.”

“That’s tech,” Bryce said, “not magic. But some Vanir have found ways to combine magic and machine to deadly effect.”

Their silence was heavy.

“We’re here,” Azriel said, motioning to the darkness ahead. The reason, it turned out, that he had halted.

A massive metal wall now blocked their way, thirty feet high and thirty feet wide at least, with a colossal eight-pointed star in its center.

The carvings continued straight up to it: battle and suffering, two females running on either side of the passage, as if running for this very wall … Indeed, around the star, an archway had been etched. Like this was the destination all along.

Bryce glanced back at Nesta. “Is this where you saw my star?”

Nesta slowly shook her head, eyeing the wall, the embossed star, the cave that surrounded them. “I don’t know where this place is. What it is.”

“Only one way to find out,” Bryce said with a bravado she didn’t feel, and approached the wall. Azriel, a live wire beside her, approached as well, a hand already on Truth-Teller.