House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City Series)

His Umbra Mortis helmet discarded in the rubble beside him, Hunt stared at the giant, dark thing that had appeared in the center of the city and was slowly devouring everything around it.

Bryce was in that hole. A dark wind whipped at Hunt’s hair, and he knew without looking who had arrived at his side.

“I told her to choose to live,” Aidas murmured sadly, gazing toward the starry black expanse.

“She wouldn’t be Bryce if she had chosen herself,” Hunt said hoarsely. He wouldn’t love her this much if she wasn’t the sort of person who would have jumped in. “We have to help her,” he growled, wings braced against the tug of the black hole trying to pull all of Midgard in with it.

“There’s nothing that can be done,” Aidas said, his voice full of sorrow.

“I have to try.” Hunt’s knees bent, his wings spread, preparing himself for that leap into space. To Bryce. And that eternal wall of black beyond where his mate glowed.

“You go in there, and you will die,” Aidas said. “There is no air to propel you, nothing for your wings to grasp onto to carry you forward to her. You will drift, and she will still wind up with Rigelus in the Void, and you will follow her in, helpless, a few minutes later.”

“But she left the portal open,” Hunt said. “To Midgard.”

Aidas turned those weary eyes to him. “I believe it shall shut when she and the Horn in her back are obliterated.”

“She left it open to come home,” Hunt snarled. He studied the Mask in his hands. She’d left it with him … why? He’d have no ability to get it back to the Fae in their home world. Hel, he couldn’t even wield the damn thing. He wasn’t Made; he couldn’t command it.

“She is likely already dead from lack of oxygen,” Aidas said softly. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t accept that for one minute,” Hunt raged. “I refuse to accept that—”

“Then go die with her,” Aidas said, not unkindly. “If that’s your wish, then do so now. She and Rigelus already approach the Void’s edge.”

Hunt studied the Mask again.

Bryce did nothing without a reason. She had left him with the Mask, knowing she was headed to her death. She’d left it with her mate … her mate, who had a little bit of her Made essence in him thanks to their lovemaking last night.

Which might make him capable of wielding it. For just long enough.

She had given everything for Midgard. For him.

That day last spring, when all hope had been lost, she had made the Drop alone. To save him, and to save the city—and she had done it from pure love. She had done it without expecting to come back.

Just as she must have jumped through this portal suspecting she’d never return.

Demons were spilling into the streets, and the Asterian Guard was still fighting, unaware that their remaining masters were headed toward obliteration. The mech-suits of the Fallen and their enemies clashed.

Bryce had gone into death itself for him that day in the spring.

Hunt could do no less for her.

“Athalar,” Aidas said as he gazed at the hole in the world. “It is done. Come—we must finish this. Even with the Asteri gone, there are other battles to fight before the day is won.”

The words might have sunk in then—the Asteri gone—but the ground shook behind him.

Hunt turned. A mech-suit stood there, towering over him. No pilot—this was one of the Fallen. The glowing green eyes shifted between him and the hole in the universe, the small bit of light drifting, drifting toward that infinite darkness.

The mech-suit held out a hand, and Hunt knew.

He knew which of the Fallen controlled this suit, whose soul had come to offer a hand. To help him do the impossible.

“Shahar,” he said, tears falling.

The mech-suit, the Archangel’s soul within it, inclined its head. Aidas took a step back, as if surprised.

In the streets, the other suits halted. Fell to their knees, bowing. Hunt could feel them—the souls of the Fallen. Swarming around him, around the suit.

But Shahar simply knelt before Hunt and opened the pilot’s door.

His wings might not work in space, but the propulsion from the suit’s weapons would.

Hunt didn’t hesitate. He climbed in, wings furled tight in the small interior, and yanked the metal door shut.

“Thank you,” he said to the Archangel, to the Fallen he now felt pressing around him.

He’d once been forced to take mech-suits apart on the battlefield to help Shahar’s sister destroy humans. Now this one would help him save a life. The life that mattered to him more than any other.

Hunt didn’t look at Aidas, at the collapsed palace sending debris skittering toward the portal, the black hole so enormous its pull threatened to drag them all in. Hunt just stared directly at the void as he began running, suit thundering around him, straight for that portal.

And leapt in after his mate.

It was too far.

Not for the suit, whose blasts of power sent Hunt careening toward Bryce and Rigelus, but for the oxygen systems. They screamed at him on the screens, flashing red. Air became thin; his lungs ached—

Hunt did the only thing he could think to do. He slid the Mask onto his face.

To escape death, he’d don its trappings. The Umbra Mortis in truth.

The Mask ripped apart his soul.

Life and death—that was all that space, the universe, really was. But that chasm yawning wide, so close to Bryce and Rigelus … that was death incarnate.

They were struggling. He could see that now. Light flaring between them, rippling into nothing, both trying to get away from the other, to blast away—

There was only one brimstone missile left in the suit. Hunt took aim toward his mate and Rigelus. They were moving too swiftly, too closely. To shoot one would be to shoot the other.

He could have sworn a light, ghostly hand guided his to the release button.

“She’ll get thrown in, too,” Hunt whispered to Shahar.

That ghostly hand pressed—lightly, as if it was all she could manage—on his hand. On the button.

As if to say, Fire.

And the gods had never done him any favors, Urd had certainly never helped him, yet …

Maybe they had.

Maybe that day he’d first met Bryce, the gods had sent him there. Not to be some instrument of Hel, but because Urd knew that there would be a female who would be kind and selfless and brave, who would give everything for her city, for her planet. And that she would need someone to give everything back to her.

Bryce had given him a life, and a beautiful one. He didn’t need all the photo evidence that had streamed in front of his face when he’d been in the Comitium’s holding cell to realize it. She had brought joy, and laughter, and love, had pried him free of that cold, dark existence and pulled him into the light. Her light.

He wouldn’t let it be extinguished.

So Hunt pushed the missile-launch button. One push, and it blasted from the shoulder panel on the mech-suit.

And as it left the suit, spiraling through space, golden with all that angelic wrath …

He felt Shahar leave with it.

Could have sworn he saw great, shining wings wrap around that missile as it spiraled through space, straight for Bryce and Rigelus.

The Fallen’s cause, ended at last with this final blow.

Bryce and Rigelus halted their struggle at the glowing missile’s approach.

And Hunt knew it was Shahar, it was every one of the Fallen, it was all who’d stood against the Asteri, who guided that missile for a direct hit into Rigelus’s face.

It didn’t explode. It launched him away from Bryce, the Bright Hand now tumbling for the event horizon, the missile with him—

And Bryce was free. Drifting.

But still too close to the edge.

Using the suit’s precious cache of firepower for momentum, Hunt propelled himself forward, racing through space for his mate, his wife, his love—

The missile and Rigelus crossed the event horizon.

Time slowed.

It stretched and rippled as a flare of light plumed, either Rigelus or the erupting missile, Shahar and the Fallen’s cause vanishing with it into darkness.

And then Bryce was before him, her hair floating like she was underwater. Face crusted—frozen. Unconscious.

The Mask said a different word, but he ignored it.

Ignored it and reached and reached, time still so fucking slow—

The metal hands of the suit wrapped around her waist just as time resumed. He deployed the remaining small artillery and blasted toward home. Toward the portal, now beginning to slide shut.

It could only mean one thing. The Mask had been trying to tell him, but he refused to believe it. He wouldn’t believe it for one second.

But the portal was closing, getting smaller and smaller, and—

A glowing, black figure filled it. Then another.

Aidas and Apollion.

Their power grabbed the edges of the portal and held it a little wider. Held it open a moment longer.

And with what little strength he had left, Hunt threw a desperate, raging, blazing-hot rope of lightning toward Apollion. The only being on Midgard who could handle his power.

Apollion caught it, in that humanoid form once more, and pulled.

Aidas flared with black light, pushing back against the sealing portal, against Urd’s wishes. Hunt was close enough to see the princes’ strained faces, Apollion’s teeth flashing as he dragged Hunt by his lightning, inch by inch, closer and closer. Aidas was sweating, panting as he fought to keep the portal open—

And then Ruhn was there. Starlight flaring. Pushing back against the impossible. Lidia was beside him, crackling with fire.

Tharion. Holstrom. Flynn and Dec. A fire sprite, her small body bright with flame. Isaiah and Naomi.

So many hands, so many powers, from almost every House.

The friends they’d made were what mattered in the end. Not the enemies.

Through love, all is possible.

It was love that was holding the portal open. That held it open until the very end, until Hunt and Bryce were through, crashing into the dirt of Midgard, the blue sky filling his sight and all that beautiful air filling his lungs—

The portal shut, sealing the black hole and all of space behind it.

The Asteri were gone.

Hunt was out of the mech-suit in a heartbeat, shattering the metal panel, swinging down to where Bryce lay on the ground. She wasn’t moving. Wasn’t breathing.

And he finally let the Mask say the word he’d been ignoring since he’d grabbed her in the depths of space.

Dead.