Page 43 of A House of Fangs & Deceit

“They’re keeping it hush-hush.” I shrugged.

“Yeah, but I’m supposed to be joining the Alpha Pack in less than a year. I’m already privy to all sorts of information in preparation for that.” She waved a hand. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I need a list of all the outposts that have been attacked and the dates it happened.”

“I’ll send a striker with it to our usual drop-off. Do you need anything else?”

“That’s enough to get me started. Ideally, I’d like to visit some of the outposts myself, but that will take time to arrange.” She went predatorily still in the way she often did when she was thinking. With her soft-spoken nature, it was sometimes easy to forget that my friend was a lycanthrope and frequently shifted into a dangerous beast.

I waited silently for Rynn to think through whatever had snagged her attention.

If Cali was here, she and I would be trading amused looks right now, both of us used to Rynn’s tendency to zone out mid-conversation, but she wasn’t here.

A fact that still made me nervous. She usually always answered calls.

“You should reach out to Roth,” Rynn said finally. “They’re back at Drudonia using the library there to research more about Lunarian history. They might be able to shed some light on how the wraiths are getting past the blood wards.”

“Roth?” I tilted my head back as my brows furrowed together. Why was that name so familiar?

It came to me almost instantly. A young Moroi girl, a year younger than us, arriving at Drudonia. We’d been in the grand library when she’d arrived, and I still remembered the expression of awe on her face as she took in the seemingly endless amount of books and scrolls. It’d taken her a solid five minutes to snap out of it before she saw us sitting there and introduced herself.

“I’m Astaroth Devereux.”And then, a little hesitantly, she said,“I prefer Roth.”

The rest of what Rynn had said filtered in, and I noted the use ofthey. It fit them, the same way that Roth better suited them than Astaroth. Although both names were pretty badass.

“How are they doing?” Envy crept into my voice. While I was happy with the direction my life was now headed in, partof me was jealous of Roth being able to dedicate their time to studying our history. What little we knew of it, anyway.

The spell our human ancestors had cast to turn us into monsters cost us so much more than our humanity, it also cost us our past. Entire generations’ worth of wisdom that would usually have been passed down through stories, advice, song, and a myriad of other ways was simply gone. Which meant we were completely reliant on what had been written and books were painfully fragile.

We kept lists of past human settlements and noted their current state. The vast majority of them had been burnt to the ground or reduced to rubble after monsters had torn through them. Whatever knowledge they had forever lost to us. While the Fae fortresses still stood, many had been completely stripped of anything valuable, which suggested that at least some of the Fae had made it out alive. Where they had gone, we had no idea.

Any books or documents that we did manage to find were taken to Drudonia. It was the central source of all our history and knowledge now. And Roth had all that at their fingertips.

I hadn’t interacted with Roth all that much while at Drudonia. They’d been Rynn’s friend more than mine, but I got the impression that they were still figuring a lot of things out. Both about themselves and their place in the world.

House Devereux was a smaller House like the one Kieran was born into, which meant it was full of schemers and Moroi with scrupulous morals. Growing up in it couldn’t have been fun.

“I think they’re okay…”

When Rynn didn’t say anything else, I leaned forward in the tub, my unruly long hair plastered along my shoulders and back. “Are they back at Drudonia because they want to be back there or because shit went down in their House after they went back?”

Roth wasn’t in line to take over the House leadership. If I remembered correctly, they were a cousin to the current Moroi ruling House Devereux, but since they were still family, it was expected that they would do whatever the House asked of them. Whether they wanted to or not.

Rynn bit her lip. “I got the impression it was the latter, but you know what Roth is like. They didn’t offer any personal information, and I didn’t push.”

No. Rynn wouldn’t push. She never did. It’s why Roth had always liked her, but never bothered with me or Cali. We were nosey assholes. It hadn’t helped that I’d quickly become attracted to them, and my flirtation might have been atadover the top. I was used to the flirty banter between me and Kieran. Roth had not been impressed with my attempts, and it’d led to a bit of awkwardness between us.

Well, awkwardness on my side. Roth had simply moved on like it’d never happened. Despite never getting particularly close to Roth, I still liked them. And I felt a sort of camaraderie with them because of our time together at Drudonia.

Not many people went there to study. There had only been a dozen of us of similar age the entire time we’d been there. I knew Cali felt the same, and if she thought House Devereux was being cruel to Roth, she would have flown straight to the House and given them a piece of her mind.

I would have been one step behind, rooting her on. I had calmed down over the years and developed a more “political mindset,” as Rynn called it, but Cali… Cali still embraced her inner fire and refused all attempts by the world to snuff it out.

No matter how dangerous that was.

“I’ll reach out to Roth when I get back. If House Devereux wants to throw them away, I’ll snatch them up for House Harker, just like we did with Kieran. A mind like Roth’s shouldn’t be wasted just because they don’t want to play bullshit House politics.”

I rose from the tub, and Rynn quickly averted her eyes. How someone who regularly stripped down and shifted into a wolf was shy about nudity, I’d never understand. I wrapped a towel around myself before doing the same to my hair. “Alright, now that we’ve gotten the talk about the attacks out of the way, I think it’s time we discuss Cali.”

Rynn’s gaze fell on me again, and she nodded, causing tendrils of shadow to drift off her. “Something’s wrong.”

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