Descendant (16 page)

Behind her, the raven on the throne cried out in a harsh, urgent voice. Mason turned and saw that the spear was glowing so brightly it looked as if it would burst into flame. The image of it began to waver, like a mirage before her eyes, and Mason sensed that she was facing a “now or never” scenario.

“Mase!” Fennrys called out, his voice shredded.

No. She couldn’t bear to turn and seen him mangled by whatever death stroke had sent him there and so, instead, she turned away and reached for the spear in front of her. The music of it screamed at her. Still, she hesitated.

You could stay,
whispered a voice in her head.

Stay there, in Valhalla, and be with him . . .

Watch Fennrys engage, day after day, in endless, mindless battle. See him turn into one of the Einherjar . . . A thing of senseless brutality, hacked to pieces again and again and put back together time after time but each time losing a little more of his humanity . . . Fennrys had told her that, growing up in the Otherworld,
this
was what he’d wanted all his life. This hall, this place. An
honorable fate, a destiny. A glorious death that would guarantee him a place in Odin’s Hall in Asgard, where he would battle and feast and it would go on and on until the End of Days.
This
was a Viking prince’s reward for a life of violence lived. It was horrible.

It was Fennrys’s.

“Mason!” he cried out again, closer now. “Stop!”

As she stood there, torn, a horrible image flashed through her mind—Fenn reaching her, taking her in his arms, winding her in a blood-soaked embrace as he clutched her to his ruined chest. . . .

She could almost feel the sticky-wet press of his wounds against her skin. . . .

“
Mason!
” He was running now, she could hear. Running toward her.

Mason didn’t know what else to do. The pace of Fennrys’s heavy, weary footsteps increased behind her, and a surge of panic crawled up her throat. She wasn’t brave enough. She couldn’t see him like that. It would kill her. . . .

Take the spear!

I can’t . . .

“Mason! Don’t touch the spear!”

I can’t see him like that. . . .

Take the spear!

Mason squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. She thrust her hand once more toward the spear, fingers hooked like the talons of the raven above her, reaching to grip it. She heard the raven’s triumphant hiss—

A last ragged cry of “
Mase!
”

—and her fist slammed closed.

On warm, solid flesh.

Mason felt long, strong fingers closing around her own, and then she found herself pulled sharply back, away from the throne and the spear and the screeching black bird . . . and into Fenn’s arms. He wrapped her in a fierce embrace and whispered her name over and over into her hair, and she clung to him.

She was sobbing into the torn material of his T-shirt. “Why are you here?” she cried. “Why are you
dead
? Oh god . . .” She could barely make out the sense of her own
words through the thickness of the grief that clogged her throat. “I’m sorry, Fenn . . . I’m so
sorry
. . . .”

But he was shushing her. Rocking her back and forth, held tightly against the warmth of his chest. He was real and solid and
there
. And she felt no blood on his shirt, nothing sticky and congealing that bound them together.

“Mason,” Fenn said, “I’m not dead. Not again. I
promise
.”

A roaring silence filled her ears with those words.

Slowly, barely daring to hope, she opened her eyes and tilted her face up so that she could look into his eyes. They were red-rimmed with grief, or maybe it was fatigue, but they were Fenn’s eyes, full of life. And—in that very moment—full of something that might just have been love.

“I’m
not
dead,” he said again.

He dipped his head, and as if to prove to her just how very much alive he was, he kissed her. Mason’s whole body melted, and she felt as though she might collapse, but he held her upright. Her lips opened beneath his, and she inhaled the breath from Fennrys’s lungs, deep into her own. The warmth of his kiss felt like it was jump-starting her own heart back to life, and without even thinking, she reached up to wrap her arms tightly around his neck as he crushed her gently to him once again in a warm, real,
living
embrace. Mason could feel a flood of wetness on her cheeks, but she couldn’t tell whose tears they were. She suspected that they were hers.

Fenn confirmed as much when he loosened his grip on her and reached up to brush them gently from under her eyes with his thumbs. He was smiling—that strange, rare, beautiful smile—and his frost-blue eyes gleamed brightly down at her.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he whispered. “I missed you.”

“How . . . ?”

He silenced her question with a kiss. And then another. Then, reluctantly, he pulled away from her and took her face in his hands.

“We can talk later, okay?” he said. “Now? We need to go.”

She put a hand over his beating heart—just to make sure—and nodded. He was alive all right. Even though
the T-shirt he wore was so torn up it looked as though he’d just walked through a giant bread slicer. Aside from the shirt’s decimation, though, Fennrys himself appeared to be unharmed. Breathing hard and disheveled, but unharmed.

“Yeah . . .” He covered her hand with his and pressed it to his chest. “There were a couple of draugr on the way in. And you know what a pain in the ass those guys are. But I had a little help. It’s weird, but there’s this guy out there in a letterman jacket—”

“You saw Tag?” Mason blinked up at him in surprise.

“Yeah. Friend of yours, right?”

“Friend of Rory’s,” Mason said, and watched as Fennrys’s expression darkened. “Fenn . . . what the
hell
happened? And how did I wind up here?”

He hesitated for a moment. “I know some of it. But here—
especially
here—isn’t the place to talk about it, Mase. Trust me. First we need to get somewhere safe.”

She nodded, and exhausted and elated both, she let Fennrys wrap an arm around her shoulders and lead her down the dais steps. Questions could wait. As they walked down the long hall, a shadow swept over them. Mason flinched, ducking as the raven flew past, out the open archway, where it disappeared in the light streaming over the threshold of Odin’s Valhalla.

As they approached the door themselves, Mason plucked at the material of Fennrys’s shirt. It was hanging off the collar band in shredded pieces that flapped when he walked, and she noticed that it sported the remains of a Blue Moon beer logo on it. For some reason, she found that faintly hilarious.

“This is a truly unfortunate fashion statement, y’know,” she said, grinning.

“My lifestyle is hell on a wardrobe.”

“I think you should go Abercrombie. The boys in those ads never have to worry about ruining shirts,” Mason said, not actually expecting that without missing a beat, Fennrys would reach up to the collar of what was left of his shirt and tear the thing effortlessly from around his neck.

He dropped the wrecked rag at the threshold of the hall and said, “Better?”

Mason felt herself smiling broadly for the first time in what seemed like forever. She stopped him before he could leave Odin’s mighty feast hall and slowly ran her hands up his bare, scarred, beautiful chest. She felt him
shiver at her touch, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled his head down to hers.

“Definitely better,” she murmured against his lips. And when he kissed her back, for a long, lovely moment, she let herself forget about everything else that was waiting for them beyond the doors of Valhalla.

O
utside the hall, the ground was littered with lank gray body parts and splashes of thick black blood. The field was ringed with Einherjar who stood like sentinels, weapons lowered, but still ready at hand. And Rafe was cleaning the edge of his bronze-bladed sword with a tattered rag that must have come from the tunic of one of the dead zombie warriors. Dead
er
zombie warriors.

“Wow,” Fennrys said drily. “What did I miss?” “You mean, aside from your shirt?” Rafe raised an eyebrow at Fennrys’s lack of apparel. “I gave you that shirt.” “Fine. I
owe you a shirt.”

Rafe turned and winked at Mason. “Mason. Nice to see you again.”

“You too. I think I owe you—”

“Unh!” Rafe held up a hand. “
Never
say that to someone who might just collect one day. Do you hear me? Never say ‘owe.’”

He smiled to soften the admonishment, but Mason remembered that she’d done something similar with a bunch of river goddesses. They had yet to make good on their claim, but hearing Rafe say that gave her a fleeting rush of worry, nevertheless.

Rafe glanced back at Fennrys. “The shirt-owing thing, I’ll probably just let slide. It was just a promotional item anyway.”

The coppery blade wiped free of gore, Rafe held it out in front of him and, with a flick of his wrist, made it disappear. Mason wondered fleetingly why he would need to clean a blade that was made of magick anyway, but she appreciated the gesture. She’d certainly never left a fencing practice without oiling and checking her weapon, filing it for stray burrs, making sure the hilt was properly tightened. . . .

At the thought of swords, Mason turned suddenly and ran for the stacks of weapons piled up outside the doors of Valhalla. She sighed in relief to see that her sword was still there where she’d left it, resting on top of a heap of old rusted weapons. She plucked it from the pile and slung the black leather strap over her head so that it hung properly across her torso. The weight of the sword hanging at her side made Mason feel instantly, infinitely better.

Until she turned back and saw the tall, black-cloaked figure of Hel gliding through the ranks of the Einherjar, who shifted uneasily to make way.

“Daughter.” Hel’s eyes flicked over Mason, her glance taking in the sword at her hip and the obvious lack of Odin spear in her hands.

Mason lifted her chin and steeled herself for whatever wrath was about to fall upon her, but before Hel could say anything, Fennrys stepped forward, almost—but not quite—interposing himself between mother and daughter.

“Hello there,” he said. “Again.” There was a wary edge to his voice.

Mason looked up at him and then back at her mother. From the corner of her eye, she saw that Rafe had quietly
circled around so that he was standing on Mason’s other side. She suddenly felt like she was flanked by bodyguards.

“You two know each other?” she asked Fennrys.

Fennrys nodded, his eyes never leaving Mason’s mother. “This . . . lady looks an awful lot like the one who busted me out of Asgard the first time.”

“She’s my
mother
,” Mason said to Rafe. “Can you
believe
that?”

“Huh,” Rafe murmured. His gaze, too, was fastened firmly on the slender, dark-haired woman. “I really can’t. . . .”

Hel turned a bleak, frosty glare on Rafe. It was fairly clear to Mason that she knew she was in the presence of a fellow deity. And wasn’t very happy about it.

“I dunno. I can see the family resemblance,” Fennrys said. “The eyes . . . the hair. Can’t believe I didn’t put two and two together, but it’s all starting to make a bit more sense now. Listen . . . I never got the chance to say thanks for the jailbreak last time.” His posture belied the casual tone of his voice. “So, y’know . . . Thanks. And now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to go.”

Mason was a little startled by his reaction. For one thing, it was her mother he was talking to, and even if Mason herself didn’t exactly harbor warm, sentimental feelings toward the woman, she would have thought that Fennrys would have exhibited his usual gruff charm. Especially if, as he’d said, she was the one who’d helped him escape from the torturous dungeon he’d been confined to. Just knowing that, in fact, went a long way toward softening Mason’s feelings toward Hel.

“Of course you must leave.” Hel inclined her head. “For the good of all. But my daughter still needs the spear of Odin to return to the mortal realm.”

“Yeah . . . I’m a little bit fuzzy on something here,” Fennrys said.

He didn’t
sound
the least bit fuzzy on anything, Mason thought. Instead, he just sounded a little bit dangerous.

His voice lowered to a warning growl. “
I
didn’t need a spear.”

Hel’s expression suddenly turned from hard and cold to blazing with ill-repressed fury. Mason could see it smoldering in her eyes.

“All
I
needed,” Fennrys continued, “was your rainbow pal.”

“
My
rainbow pal,” Rafe interjected.

Fennrys ignored him. “I’m not sure why you wouldn’t just call her up again to get your daughter home, if that’s what you wanted.”

“Iris is a goddess in her own right.” Hel shrugged. “She does not always come at my bidding. Nor should she.”

“But she did. For me. Because
you
asked her to,” Fennrys said. “Didn’t you? I find it hard to believe that getting me out of Hel was more important to you than getting Mason home.”

“Fenn . . .” Mason put a hand on his arm.
Where is he going with this?
she wondered.

“You were needed to protect her,” Hel said. “Time was of the essence.”

“Right,” Fennrys said. “But I recently got to thinking . . . I mean . . . here’s Bifrost, the rainbow bridge between the mortal realm and Asgard, and it comes out right smack in the middle of Manhattan. So then I got to thinking that maybe you—maybe
Hel
, that is—had some kind of beef with the bridgekeeper of the Aesir. What’s his name again? Heimdall?”

On the other side of her, Mason heard Rafe draw in a sharp breath.

Fennrys ignored that, too, and continued on. “I remember him from the stories. Grumpy sort, I seem to recall. Didn’t really get on with some of the other gods, like . . . Loki. But this Heimdall guy is a bit of a slippery character too. Isn’t he?”

Mason was listening very carefully to what Fennrys was saying, even though she still wasn’t entirely certain what his point was. But then he glanced sideways at her, and his meaning became crystal clear with the next words out of his mouth.