“You’re hovering.”
“Sorry, sorry.” Ithan paced the morgue that Hypaxia had swiftly converted into a lab. “I just don’t know what to do with myself while you’re working on all that science stuff.”
Hunched over the desk, Hypaxia was setting up the things she’d need to begin her experiments.
She said idly, without lifting her head, “I could use a sample of the parasite.”
He halted. “How?” He answered his own question. “Oh. A glass of water.” He glanced to the sink. “You think there are tons of them swimming around?”
“I doubt it’s that obvious, considering how many scientists and medwitches have studied our water over the years. But it must be in there somewhere, if we’re all infected.”
Ithan sighed and walked over to the sink, grabbing a mug that said Korinth University College of Mortuary Science. He filled it with water and plunked it down beside Hypaxia. “There. The Istros’s finest.”
“That mug could be contaminated,” Hypaxia said, using a ruler to sketch out a grid on a piece of paper. “We need a sterile container first. And samples from several different water sources.”
“Did I mention that I hate science?”
“Well, I love it,” Hypaxia said, still without looking up. “There are sterile cups in the cabinet along the back wall. Get multiple samples from this tap, from the Istros itself, and one from a bottle of store-bought water. We’ll need a wider sample base, but that’ll do for the initial phases.” Ithan gathered a bunch of the sterile containers and headed for the door.
He was a glorified water boy. He’d never hear the end of it from his sunball buddies. That is, if he ever talked to them again.
But Ithan said nothing before slipping out, and Hypaxia didn’t call after him.
Ithan bottled and labeled the various samples, gave Hypaxia a few vials of his blood as a base for an infected person, and then she sent him back out for more water samples from different sources. The dining hall, a nearby restaurant, and—best of all—the sewers.
He was on his way back through the dark door of the House of Flame and Shadow when the hair on the back of his neck rose. He knew that eerie, unsettled feeling. He whirled—
It wasn’t Sigrid. A different female Reaper, veiled head to toe in black, glided smoothly over the quay. People outright fled—the street behind her was wholly empty.
But she continued toward the door, where Ithan stood frozen. He had no option, really, but to hold the door open for her.
The Reaper drifted by, black veils billowing. Acid-green eyes gleamed beneath the dark fabric over her face, and her rasping voice turned his bowels watery as she said, “Thank you,” and continued into the stairwell.
Ithan waited five whole minutes before following. She had no scent at all. Not even the reek of a corpse. As if she’d ceased to exist in any earthly way. It drove his wolf nuts.
But—
Ithan sniffed the air of the stairwell again as he descended toward the lowest levels of the House and the morgue-lab. As he slipped into the lab and shut the door behind him, he asked, “What happens to the parasite when we die?”
Hypaxia finally looked up from her papers and vials and forms. “What?”
“I just saw a Reaper,” he said. “They’re dead. Well, they died. So do they still have the parasite? They don’t eat or drink, so they couldn’t be reinfected, right? But does the parasite disappear when we die? Does it die, too?”
Hypaxia blinked slowly. “That’s an interesting question. And if the parasite does indeed die when the host does, then Reapers might provide a way to locate the parasite simply by the lack of it in their own bodies.”
“Why do I feel like you’re going to ask me to—”
“I need you to get me a Reaper.”
Dawn broke, purple and golden, over the islands of Avallen. But Bryce only had eyes for the helicopter making its descent onto the grassy, blooming field before the ruins of Morven’s castle. She smiled grimly.
The roar was deafening to her Fae ears, but she had insisted on being here. On seeing this: Fury waving from the pilot’s seat, June waving frantically from beside her.
Bryce waved back, her throat tight to the point of pain, and then the side door to the helicopter slid open, and a yip cut through the air.
There was no stopping Syrinx as he bounded off the helicopter and raced for her through the high grasses. She dropped to her knees to hug him, kiss him, let him lick all over her face as he wiggled his little lion’s tail and yowled with joy.
Boots crunched in the grass, and Randall was walking toward her, a pack on his back and a rifle slung over his shoulder. His eyes were bright as he beheld her, and he clapped the tall boy at his side—Emile, now Cooper—on the shoulder.
And Bryce couldn’t stop her laugh of pure joy as her mother leapt out of the helicopter behind them, took one look at Bryce kneeling in the meadow, and said, “Bryce Adelaide Quinlan, what’s all this talk about you jumping around between worlds?”
