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He merely inclined his head and resumed eating in silence.
* * *
Ithan strode down the steps of the House of Flame and Shadow in darkness so pure that even his wolf eyes couldn’t pierce it.
He’d never heard anything about what waited at the bottom of the stairs. But he figured he was out of options.
He lost track of how long he walked downward, the air tight and dry. Like a tomb.
The scuff of his sneakers against the steps echoed off the black walls. His eyes strained with the effort of trying to see, to no avail. If the steps ended in a plunge, he’d have no idea. No warning.
It was true, in the end, that he had no warning. But not for a drop. Metal clanked, and his skull with it, as Ithan slammed into a wall. He rebounded, swearing—
Light, golden and soft, cracked through the stairwell.
It wasn’t a wall. It was a door, and beyond it, silhouetted by the light, was a slim female figure. Even before he could make out her face, he knew the voice. Arch, cultured, bored.
“Well, that’s one way of knocking,” drawled Jesiba Roga.
31
Jesiba Roga led Ithan through a subterranean hall of black stone, lit only by crackling fires in hearths shaped like roaring, fanged mouths. In front of those fireplaces lounged draki of varying hues, vampyrs drinking goblets of blood, and daemonaki in business suits typing away on laptops.
A weirdly … normal place. Like a private club.
He supposed it was a private club, of sorts. The headquarters of any House were open to all its members, at any time. Some chose to dwell within them, mostly the workers who ran the House’s daily operations. But some just came to hang out, to meet, to rest.
Ithan, to his embarrassment, had never been to Lunathion’s House of Earth and Blood headquarters. Hadn’t been to its main headquarters, either, up in Hilene. Bryce had as a kid, he remembered, but he couldn’t recall the details.
Ithan followed Jesiba down the long hall, past people who barely looked his way, and then through a set of double doors of black wood carved with the horned skull sigil of the House.
He didn’t know what he’d expected. A council chamber, some fancy office …
Not the sleek, onyx bar, lit with deep blue lighting, like the heart of a flame. A jazz quartet played on a small stage beneath an archway in the rear of the space, the many high tables—all adorned with glass votives of that blue light—oriented toward the music. But Roga headed right for the obsidian glass bar, the gilded stools before it.
A golden-scaled draki female in a gauzy black dress worked the bar, and nodded toward Roga. The sorceress nodded back shallowly as she took a seat and patted the stool beside her, ordering Ithan, “Sit.”
Ithan threw the sorceress a glare at the blatant reference to his canine nature, but he obeyed.
A moment later, the bartender slid two dark glasses toward them, both rippling with smoke. Jesiba knocked hers back in one go, smoke curling from her mouth as she said, “I thought the porters had smoked too much mirthroot when they told me that Ithan Holstrom was walking down the entry steps.”
Ithan peered into his dark glass, at the amber liquid that looked and smelled like whiskey, though he’d never seen whiskey with smoke rising from it.
“It’s called a smokeshow,” Roga drawled. “Whiskey, grated ginger, and a little draki magic to make it look fancy.”
Ithan took her word for it and swallowed the whole thing in one mouthful. It burned all the way down—burned through the nothingness in him.
“Well,” Roga said, “based on how eagerly you drank that and the fact that you’re here at all, I can assume things are … not going well for you.”
“I need a necromancer.”
“And I need a new assistant, but you’d be surprised how few competent ones are out there.”
Ithan didn’t hide his glower. “I’m serious.”
Roga signaled the bartender for another round. “As am I. Ever since Quinlan left me to go work at the Fae Archives, I’ve been up to my neck in paperwork.”
Ithan was pretty sure that wasn’t how it had gone down with Bryce and Jesiba, but he said, “Look, I didn’t come here to talk to you—”
