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Starlight hit the prism, passed through it, and—
“Huh.”
It wasn’t a rainbow that emerged from the other side. Not even close.
It took her a moment to process what she was seeing: a gradient beam of starlight. Where the rainbow would have been full of color, this one began in shimmering white light and descended into shadow.
An anti-rainbow, as it were. Light falling into darkness, droplets of starlight raining from the highest beam into the shadowy band at the bottom, devoured by the darkness below.
Like the fading light of day—of dusk.
What did it mean? She was pretty sure her light had been pure before, but now, with Silene’s power mixed in … there was darkness there, too. Hidden beneath.
Et in Avallen ego.
Did it make a difference to her power? To her? To now have that layer of darkness?
Bryce buried the questions. She could think about it later. Right now …
She took the notebook on the desk and slid it into the inside pocket of her athletic jacket.
Then she nudged the prism on the desk a few inches to the side, angling it toward the device across the room. The one the Autumn King said might be able to recapture the light, possibly with more power added to it. But what if light blasted from either prism, meeting in the middle? What would happen in the collision of all that magic?
All that smashing light, those little bits of magic bashing into each other, would produce energy. And fuel her up like a battery.
She hoped.
“Only one way to find out,” she muttered to herself.
With a prayer to Cthona, she sent twin beams of light arcing around the prisms, shooting straight into them.
Twin bursts of that light flared from either prism, gunning for each other. Bands of light falling into darkness, her power stripped to its most elemental, basic form. They shot for each other, and where they met, light and darkness and darkness and light slamming into each other—
Bryce stepped into the explosion in the heart of it.
Stepped into her power.
It lit her up from the inside, lit up her very blood. Her hair drifted above her head, pens and papers and other office detritus flowing upward with it.
Such light and darkness—the power lay in the meeting of the two of them. She understood it now, how the darkness shaped the light.
But all that colliding power … it was the boost she needed.
With a parting middle finger to the floor at her feet and the Autumn King sulking beneath it, she teleported out of the villa to the place she wanted to be the most.
Home. Wherever that was in Midgard.
Because her home was no longer just a physical place, but a person, too.
Silene had claimed as much when she spoke of Theia and Aidas—their souls had found each other across worlds, because they were mates. They were each other’s homes.
And for Bryce, home was—and always would be—Hunt.
* * *
Exhaustion weighed so heavily on Ruhn that despite his aching neck, he couldn’t be bothered to shift into a more comfortable position in the chair. Machines beeped endlessly, like metal crickets marking the passing of the night.
He had a vague sense of Declan replacing Flynn. Then Dec left and it was Flynn again.
