House of Earth and Blood recap

In Crescent City on the world of Midgard, half-human, half-Fae Bryce Quinlan comes home one night to find her best friend, the wolf Alpha Danika Fendyr, and Danika's entire pack slaughtered, apparently by a demon. Two years later the killings resume, clearing the human rebel convicted of them, and the Archangel who governs the city orders Bryce to investigate alongside Hunt Athalar, an enslaved fallen angel promised his freedom if he finds the killer. Their search leads through a synthetic drug trade, a demon bred to hunt by scent, and the theft of the Horn of Luna, a broken Fae artifact that can open passages between worlds. The killer proves to be the Archangel himself, who murdered Danika for stealing the Horn and staged the later deaths to force it into the open. Bryce discovers that Danika hid the Horn by grinding it into the ink of Bryce's own tattoo. When the Archangel opens a rift and demons flood the city, Bryce wakes the Horn with Hunt's lightning, reveals herself as Starborn, and seals the rift. The Archangel dies, Hunt is freed, and Bryce comes into her full power.

Crescent City, also called Lunathion, is the largest city of Valbara on the world of Midgard, where immortal Vanir rule and humans live as a subject caste under the distant authority of the Asteri. Bryce Quinlan, twenty-three and half human, half Fae, works at Griffin Antiquities for the sorceress Jesiba Roga and shares an apartment with her closest friend, Danika Fendyr, Alpha of the Pack of Devils and heir to the wolves' leadership. Their nights are spent in the city's clubs with Danika's pack, including her Second, Connor Holstrom, who finally persuades Bryce to agree to a proper date. Danika has been tense and evasive about private security work she refuses to describe, and she talks Bryce into having a line of old Fae script inked down her spine. Danika's pack has recently arrested Philip Briggs, a human rebel accused of plotting to bomb a club, and he is released on a technicality. After a night out and a strange, hurried message from Danika, Bryce comes home to find Danika and the entire Pack of Devils torn apart in the apartment, apparently by a demon. Briggs is arrested for the killings, and Bryce is left alive and alone.

Two years later, Bryce is still at the gallery and still living with what she found in that apartment, holding her old friends at arm's length. Then a vampyr is killed in the city with the same signature as the massacre, something Philip Briggs, locked up ever since, could not have done. Micah Domitus, the Archangel who governs Valbara, orders Bryce to assist the investigation, since she knew the first victims better than anyone. He assigns her Hunt Athalar, the angel called the Umbra Mortis, a survivor of a failed rebellion against the Archangels who has been enslaved for two centuries and works off a debt of assassinations for whoever owns him. Micah offers Hunt an end to that debt if the killer is found. Neither of them wants the arrangement: he expects a spoiled party girl, she expects a minder. They begin retracing Danika's last days and the trail of a killer who has been quiet for two years.

The evidence points away from a human bomber and toward something summoned. The weapon is a kristallos, a hybrid demon whose venom the medwitches can identify, and a demon of that kind has to be called through by a powerful Vanir, which narrows the field to the city's leadership. The investigation drags Bryce back into Fae politics and toward her half-brother, Ruhn Danaan, Crown Prince of the Valbaran Fae, who carries the ancient Starsword and can speak mind to mind. Their father, the Autumn King, has never acknowledged Bryce publicly and takes an interest in the case for reasons of his own. Working together, Bryce and Hunt begin to take each other's measure: she learns what the halo on his brow costs him, and he learns that her flippancy is armor over two years of grief.

The trail runs down into the city's underside. In the Meat Market, a walled bazaar run by the Viper Queen, Bryce and Hunt find traces of synth, a synthetic drug that gives a user brief, violent power and burns out the body that takes it. Danika had been working private security for Redner Industries in her last months and had learned something she never passed on to Bryce. Bodies keep surfacing in the Istros, which draws in Tharion Ketos, Captain of Intelligence for the River Queen's court beneath the river. Slowly a second motive emerges behind the killings: whoever is directing the demon appears to be searching the city for an object rather than for a person, and the object is the Horn of Luna, a broken Fae artifact once able to open passages between worlds.

Attacks come closer to Bryce herself, and she and Hunt are nearly killed more than once. Her mother, Ember, and her stepfather, Randall, make plain how far they will go to keep her out of Vanir hands, and Bryce refuses to leave the city. Hunt tells her about Shahar, the Archangel who led the Fallen against the Asteri's order and died at the end of that rebellion, and about the two centuries he has spent being sold from one Archangel to the next since. The partnership shifts into something closer to trust. Meanwhile the picture of Danika's last weeks keeps darkening: her behaviour was not that of a bodyguard doing routine work, and Bryce has to accept that her best friend was keeping something enormous from her.

Chasing what Danika knew, Bryce and Hunt cross the Istros to the Bone Quarter, the walled necropolis where the city's dead are ferried and where the Under-King rules, and come away with more questions than answers about where Danika's soul went. Ruhn works his own sources among the Fae, including a visit to the Oracle. Fury Axtar, the assassin, and Juniper Andromeda, the dancer, come back into Bryce's life after two years of silence, and the old circle reassembles around the case. The pieces finally resolve into one conclusion: before she died, Danika stole the Horn of Luna and hid it somewhere nobody has been able to find, and that theft is why she and her entire pack were killed.

With the Horn established as the prize, everyone's interest in Bryce becomes clearer and more dangerous. Sabine Fendyr, Danika's mother and heir to the wolves' leadership, is openly hostile and a plausible suspect. The Autumn King wants the Horn for the Fae. Micah keeps a tight grip on both the investigation and on Hunt, and reminds Hunt regularly of what his freedom is worth. Bryce learns that Danika had been taking synth herself, another secret kept from her, and has to reconcile the friend she remembers with the one the evidence describes. Whatever is between her and Hunt stops being deniable, and both of them understand what it will cost him if Micah decides to notice.

The leaders of Valbara gather for the Summit: Micah, the Autumn King, Sabine, the newly crowned Witch-Queen Hypaxia Enador, and, from the war-torn continent of Pangera, the Archangel Sandriel, twin sister of the Shahar whom Hunt loved and followed into rebellion. Sandriel's reputation for what she does to those she owns arrives ahead of her, and her interest in acquiring the Umbra Mortis is immediate. Bryce uses the gathering to press the case in public and makes enemies doing it. Another attack makes it undeniable that the killer is one of the people in the room. By the end of the Summit, arrangements are under way to hand Hunt over to Sandriel, and the freedom he was promised is gone.

Hunt is transferred to Sandriel and taken into her household, where she makes plain what the rest of his existence will look like under her and her guard, chief among them Pollux Antonius, the Hammer. Rather than accept it, Hunt kills her, an act no enslaved angel is expected to survive. Bryce, cut off from him, keeps working the case alone and closes the last distance to the truth about Danika's final days: what she stole, why she hid it, and who wanted it badly enough to slaughter a pack of wolves in their own home.

The killer is Micah Domitus. He tore Danika and the Pack of Devils apart himself after she stole the Horn and refused to hand it over, disguising the murders as a demon attack, and he bred the kristallos precisely because it can scent the Horn. Every killing since was staged to flush the artifact into the open and to keep the investigation pointed anywhere but at him, and putting Bryce and Hunt on the case was itself part of the search. With the truth out he stops pretending: Hunt is shackled and beaten for killing Sandriel, and Micah turns his full attention to finding what Danika hid.

Bryce finally understands where the Horn has been for two years. Danika ground it to dust and mixed it into the ink of the tattoo she talked Bryce into having put down her back; Bryce has been carrying it the whole time. In the gallery the kristallos corners them, and Lehabah, the fire sprite of the library, burns herself out to save Bryce and Hunt. Micah takes Bryce, and once he has what he wants he opens a rift above Crescent City and lets Hel's demons pour through, intending to be seen closing it again. Hunt's wings are destroyed. Bryce swallows synth to stay on her feet, and in the fighting that follows Micah is killed. With the city overrun, Bryce runs its ancient Gates, paying each one in blood, and uses Hunt's lightning to wake the Horn buried in her skin. What answers is Starborn light, the mark of the oldest Fae line, and with it she seals the rift, turns the demons back, and heals what she can of the city. In the aftermath she makes the Drop into her full power with Hunt as her Anchor and comes back alive. Hunt's enslavement ends, and the two of them are left together in a city that now knows exactly what Bryce Quinlan is.

Micah Domitus is exposed as the murderer of Danika Fendyr and her pack, killed for stealing the Horn of Luna, and as the architect of the killings staged since to force the artifact into the open. He opens a rift above Crescent City so that he can be the one to close it, and demons overrun the streets. Lehabah dies saving Bryce and Hunt from the kristallos in the gallery library, and Hunt's wings are destroyed in the fighting. Micah is killed. Bryce, having realized that Danika hid the Horn by grinding it into the ink of her tattoo, runs the city's ancient Gates and channels Hunt's lightning through the Horn in her skin, waking Starborn light nobody knew she carried. She seals the rift, drives the demons back, and heals much of the damage, nearly dying in the process. Afterward she makes the Drop into her full immortal power with Hunt as her Anchor and survives it. Hunt's two centuries of enslavement end and he stays in Crescent City with her. Bryce is publicly acknowledged as Starborn and as a Fae princess she never wanted to be, watched now by her father the Autumn King, by the Asteri, and by the Princes of Hel, and she is still carrying the Horn. The empire's war against the human rebels of Pangera continues untouched.