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Bryce’s mouth twisted to the side, the portrait of skepticism, but Hunt said, “Better than nothing.” Bryce held the angel’s stare for longer than most people deemed wise.
Nothing good could come of it—Bryce and Athalar working together. Living together.
But Ruhn kept his mouth shut, and began reading.
“Any good sex scenes yet?” Bryce asked Ruhn idly, going over Danika’s location data for the third time. The first few of those locations, she’d realized, had been to Philip Briggs’s bomb lab just outside the city walls. Including the night of the bust itself.
She still remembered Danika and Connor limping into the apartment that night, after making the bust on Briggs and his Keres group two years ago. Danika had been fine, but Connor had sported a split lip and black eye that screamed some shit had gone down. They never told her what, and she hadn’t asked. She’d just made Connor sit at that piece-of-shit kitchen table and let her clean him up.
He’d kept his eyes fixed on her face, her mouth, the entire time she’d gently dabbed his lip. She’d known then and there that it was coming—that Connor was done waiting. That five years of friendship, of dancing around each other, was now going to change, and he’d make his move soon. It didn’t matter that she’d been dating Reid. Connor had let her take care of him, his eyes near-glowing, and she’d known it was time.
When Ruhn didn’t immediately respond to her taunting, Bryce looked up from the laptop. Her brother had kept reading—and didn’t seem to hear her. “Ruhn.”
Hunt halted his own searching through the gallery database. “Danaan.”
Ruhn snapped his head up, blinking. Bryce asked, “You found something?”
“Yes and no,” Ruhn said, sitting back in his chair. “This is just a three-page account of Prince Pelias and his bride, Lady Helena. But I didn’t realize that Pelias was actually the high general for a Fae Queen named Theia when they entered this world during the Crossing—and Helena was her daughter. From what it sounds like, Queen Theia was also Starborn, and her daughter possessed the same power. Theia had a younger daughter with the same gift, but only Lady Helena gets mentioned.” Ruhn cleared his throat and read, “Night-haired Helena, from whose golden skin poured starlight and shadows. It seems like Pelias was one of several Fae back then with the Starborn power.”
Bryce blinked. “So? What does it have to do with the Horn?”
“It mentions here that the sacred objects were made only for Fae like them. That the Horn worked only when that starlight flowed through it, when it was filled with power. This claims that the Starborn magic, in addition to a bunch of other crap, can be channeled through the sacred objects—bringing them to life. I sure as fuck have never been able to do anything like that, even with the Starsword. But it says that’s why the Prince of the Pit had to steal Pelias’s blood to make the kristallos to hunt the Horn—it contained that essence. I think the Horn could have been wielded by any of them, though.”
Hunt said, “But if the Prince of the Pit had gotten his hands on the Horn, he wouldn’t be able to use it unless he had a Starborn Fae to operate it.” He nodded to Ruhn. “Even if whoever wants the Horn now finds it, they’d have to use you.”
Ruhn considered. “But let’s not forget that whoever is summoning the demon to track the Horn—and kill these people—doesn’t have the Horn. Someone else stole it. So we’re essentially looking for two different people: the killer and whoever has the Horn.”
“Well, the Horn is broken anyway,” Bryce said.
Ruhn tapped the book. “Permanently broken, apparently. It says here that once it was cracked, the Fae claimed it could only be repaired by light that is not light; magic that is not magic. Basically a convoluted way of saying there’s no chance in Hel of it ever working again.”
Hunt said, “So we need to find out why someone would want it, then.” He frowned at Ruhn. “Your father wants it for what—some Fae PR campaign about the good old days of Faedom?”
Ruhn snorted, and Bryce smiled slightly. With lines like that, Athalar was in danger of becoming one of her favorite people. Ruhn said, “Basically, yeah. The Fae have been declining, according to him, for the past several thousand years. He claims our ancestors could burn entire forests to ash with half a thought—while he can probably torch a grove, and not much more.” Ruhn’s jaw tightened. “It drives him nuts that my Chosen One powers are barely more than a kernel.”
Bryce knew her own lack of power had been part of her father’s disgust with her.
Proof of the Fae’s failing influence.
She felt Hunt’s eyes on her, as if he could sense the bitterness that rippled through her. She half lied to him, “My own father never had a lick of interest in me for the same reason.”
“Especially after your visit to the Oracle,” Ruhn said.
Hunt’s brows rose, but Bryce shook her head at him, scowling. “It’s a long story.”
Hunt again looked at her in that considering, all-seeing way. So Bryce peered over at Ruhn’s tome, skimmed a few lines, and then looked back up at Ruhn. “This whole section is about your fancy Avallen cousins. Shadow-walking, mind-reading … I’m surprised they don’t claim they’re Starborn.”
“They wish they were,” Ruhn muttered. “They’re a bunch of pricks.”
She had a vague memory of Ruhn telling her the details about why, exactly, he felt that way, but asked, “No mind-reading for you?”
“It’s mind-speaking,” he grumbled, “and it has nothing to do with the Starborn stuff. Or this case.”
Hunt, apparently, seemed to agree, because he cut in, “What if we asked the Oracle about the Horn? Maybe she could see why someone would want a broken relic.”
Bryce and Ruhn straightened. But she said, “We’d be better off going to the mystics.”
Hunt cringed. “The mystics are some dark, fucked-up shit. We’ll try the Oracle first.”
