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

Time resumed—sped up to its normal rate. “Stop!” Bryce shouted, but too late.

Vesperus lifted a hand to her neck as Azriel’s blue light dissolved into her skin. She let out a strangled laugh as blood leaked from her mouth. “Still so ignorant. Your power is and will always be mine.”

Blue magic appeared at her fingertips, absorbed from the Illyrian’s attack. She wrapped it around one hand like a glove and grasped the Starsword’s handle.

As if it provided the barrier she needed, allowing her to touch the blade, Vesperus yanked the Starsword free and let it clatter to the stones, coated with gore.

It … it hadn’t worked. The sword and dagger united hadn’t killed her.

Hand glowing blue, Vesperus studied the dagger still in her chest and then smiled at Bryce as she wrapped her fingers, still wreathed in lightning, around the hilt. “I’m going to carve you up with this, girl.”

Nesta rotated Ataraxia in her hand and swung upward. Azriel shouted at her, “Throw your power in the blade!”

“No!” Bryce screamed. The Starsword and Truth-Teller had clearly been weakening the Asteri. If she could figure out how to amplify their power, she’d know how to kill them all—

Vesperus had just yanked Truth-Teller from her chest in a smooth slide when Ataraxia severed flesh and bone, dark blood—or whatever ichor flowed in an Asteri’s veins—spraying.

Vesperus’s dark head tumbled to the stones.

Silver fire wreathed Ataraxia as Nesta plunged the blade into the Asteri’s fallen head. Again. And again. Ichor and light leaked from the broken body, and between one stab and the next, Nesta’s arm slowed, slowed, slowed—

That was time slowing again. Bryce could see every spark of silver flame coiling about the blade, see it reflected in Nesta’s eyes.

The sword descended into Vesperus’s head one last time. Inch by inch, shattering bone and spraying gore—

Time snapped back into movement, but Vesperus did not.

Vesperus, the only Asteri left on this world, lay dead.



* * *



There was a small boat waiting for them. That much had gone right.

Tharion couldn’t stand to look at Ithan. At any of his friends, even the sprites, who’d done so much for him.

The captain was waving to them, a silent order to hurry up while they still had the cover of darkness. Dawn was beginning to turn the sky gray.

They ditched the car at the end of the dock and walked quickly toward the small boat. Once they were on the Depth Charger, they’d be untraceable, even if the Viper Queen tracked the car here.

Tharion slid a hand into his pocket and fingered the white stone that would summon the ship. Dec, Flynn, and the sprites jumped into the boat, Dec quietly talking to the captain, but Holstrom had paused at the edge of the dock.

Silently, Tharion came up beside him.

The water was clear, even twenty feet above the bottom. Where he might have once jumped in, luxuriated in the crisp ocean water …

He didn’t dare send a ripple through the waters of the world announcing his presence. Coward.

Flynn called to them, “Get on, assholes!”

Tharion glanced to Ithan, but the wolf was staring at the eastern horizon. The rising sun.

“Ready?” Tharion asked.

“I have to go back,” Holstrom rasped.

“What?” Tharion faced him fully. “What do you mean?”

The wolf slowly turned to look at him, his eyes bleak. Tharion felt the weight of his guilt at what he’d done to this male, in having Holstrom fight for him.

“To Crescent City,” Ithan said, face like stone. “I have to go back.”

“Why?”

“Holstrom! Ketos!” Dec hollered as the boat’s engine churned.

Ithan just said quietly, “To make it right.”

A shudder of muscle and a ripple of light, and the human form became a massive wolf.

“Ithan—” Tharion started.

The wolf turned and sprinted down the dock, back toward the arid countryside, golden in the rising light.

Flynn bellowed, “Holstrom, what the fuck!”

But the wolf had already reached the shore. Then the main building of the marina. Then the alley beside it … and then he vanished.

Silence fell, interrupted only by the grumble and splash of the engine. Tharion turned back toward the boat, toward the two friends onboard, the sprites gleaming like three small stars between them.

“What the fuck happened?” Flynn demanded.

Tharion shook his head, at a loss for words, and stepped onto the boat.

His fault—all of it. He lifted his face to the sky as the boat peeled toward the open ocean, and wondered if he’d ever see Valbara again.

If he even deserved to.





27


Bryce couldn’t move for a moment. Vesperus was dead.

Nesta slashed her hand and the creature’s body burned with that strange silver fire.

As the Asteri was reduced to ashes, Bryce grabbed the sword and dagger from the ground, both blades dripping with Vesperus’s blood.

She whirled on Nesta, on Azriel. “You shouldn’t have killed her. If we could have gotten her under control, the amount of information that we could have pried from her—”

“Do you have any idea what you almost did here?” Nesta raged, covered in Vesperus’s dark ichor. She still gripped Ataraxia in one hand, as if not yet decided whether she was done killing. “What you unleashed?”