Descendant (2 page)

Fennrys drove the knife blade straight past her teeth, smashed through the roof of her mouth, and buried it to the hilt in the creature’s vile brain. In her final
convulsions, Scylla’s teeth clamped down on Fenn’s arm. The monster went stiff and toppled over backward, taking Fennrys with her, and the two combatants collapsed on the ground in a tangle of blood and body parts. Fennrys lay there gasping, his fist still firmly wedged inside the sea monster’s mouth. After Scylla finally stopped twitching, Rafe walked over to stand by Fennrys’s head, looking down.

“You killed a sea monster,” Rafe said. “Now that . . . is fairly damn impressive.”

Fennrys turned his head so he could look up at the ancient Egyptian werewolf death god. “
Some
thing good had to come out of this night,” he said in a voice scraped thin by exhaustion.

“It was also disgusting,” Rafe continued. “And brave . . . and kinda stupid.”

“Uh-huh,” Fenn grunted, his chest heaving.

“And you’re stuck.” Rafe gestured at where Fenn’s limb was trapped. Scylla’s teeth were angled backward like barbs. If Fennrys tried to pull his arm free, he would shred every inch of flesh from his bones. “What, exactly, are you gonna do now?”

“Dunno. Little help, maybe?”

Fenn’s vision was beginning to tunnel. He hadn’t, he supposed, really thought this one through completely. Rafe smiled grimly and flicked his wrist, conjuring a long, coppery-colored blade out of thin air, and raised it over Fennrys’s arm.

“Right,” he said, a gleam in his eye. “I guess
that’s
gotta come off.”

The blade slashed down and Fennrys shouted a ragged protest, bracing himself for the searing explosion of pain that would come as Rafe hacked through his arm. But the blade hit its mark less than a quarter of an inch below Fenn’s trapped limb, slicing neatly through the dead Scylla’s neck. Her spinal column severed, Rafe reached around behind her head and jammed his fingers into a divot beneath the skull. The creature’s jaws popped open like the trunk of a car and Fennrys pulled his arm free, leaving his blade buried deep in Scylla’s brain.

He staggered to his feet, right arm stinging, left arm utterly useless from the bullet wound. Funny. He’d been so busy fighting an immortal sea monster of ancient legend, he’d almost forgotten about the mere mortal who’d tried to kill him earlier that evening. He glared at
the horrifying creature who now lay dead at his feet, knowing that Rory Starling was still alive.

“Immortality isn’t what it used to be,” Fenn muttered as his legs threatened to give out.

“It really isn’t,” Rafe agreed, propping Fennrys up.

In the distance, Fennrys heard the quiet coughing of a small outboard motor. He looked up to see an old, aluminum-sided fishing boat gliding out of the darkness, piloted by a spare, hunched man with coffee-brown skin and a long silver goatee, dressed in a tattered gray rain slicker. The ember on his cigarette glowed like a tiny red beacon in the gloom. The boat bumped and grated to a halt on the rocky shingle of the beach, and with Rafe’s help, Fennrys dragged himself out knee-deep into the cold, oily water.

“He’s not quite dead yet,” said the sailor as Fenn half fell into the boat.

“No, he’s not dead—at least not
this
time—and he’s not going to die, either,” Rafe said irritably. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“Goin’ soft, boss?” the man asked, taking a drag on his smoke.

“Shut up, Aken.” Rafe grabbed onto the prow of the little craft and heaved it back toward deeper water before throwing a leg over the side and climbing in. “This is just a cab ride tonight. Not a final journey.”

“Highly irregular.” The boatman shook his head, regarding Fennrys skeptically. “Can he pay?”

“This one’s on me.” Rafe grinned coldly. “Get us to where we’re going before he dies and I’ll knock a week’s worth off your bar tab.”

Aken brightened considerably at the offer and revved the little engine.

His bar tab, Fenn thought distantly, must have been significant.

Wonder what
I’ll
wind up owing when all this is over. . . .

“Where to, boss?” Aken asked.

And then a dense, shimmering fog descended, and Fennrys’s last coherent thought was a memory—the image of Mason, standing on top of the train car, her black hair spread out like wings, her sword hanging at her side, both hands reaching out to him as the brightness of the Bifrost bridge portal swallowed her in light.

Gone . . .

She was gone.

Across the bridge . . .

“Y
ou can’t go across the bridge. Bad things will happen. Do you understand?”
The words echoed in Mason’s head. Where had she heard that? When?

Bad things . . .

“Hello, Mason. Welcome to Hel.”

Nightmare. I have nightmares all the time. This is just another one of those.

Wake up, Mase. Wake the hell up!

“I’m your mother and I’ve been waiting for you.”

And in that moment, Mason knew it was no dream.

My mother . . . ?

The dark-haired woman reached toward Mason but stopped short of embracing her. Instead, she plucked up the iron medallion that hung on a braided leather cord around Mason’s neck. Fenn’s medallion. A talisman that he’d promised would keep her safe. Bring her luck.

Fennrys . . .

“So. He failed . . . and now you are here.”

“I don’t know where here is,” Mason said.

I don’t know who you are. . . .

“It doesn’t matter. You have to leave,” the woman said. “At once.”

“You just said you’ve been waiting for me—”

“And I would have been content to wait an eternity.” A humorless smile bent the corners of the woman’s mouth. “Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say I have been
dreading
this moment, not waiting for it. . . .”

She dropped the medallion back onto Mason’s chest. It hurt when the iron disk hit her skin—as if it weighed far more than it should have. Mason tried, unsuccessfully, not to flinch.

She felt a moaning breeze begin to stir, bringing with it a chill, dreary dampness. Stray wisps of fog rose up out of the ground and swirled all around her. As the mists thickened, Mason thought she could make out shapes, rising up out of the ground with the veil of fog. People—or the shades of them—hunched or stretched thin, they looked like ghosts. On every side, wherever Mason turned, there was nothing but a bleak, wide-open plain as far as the eye could see. She looked down at the ground
beneath her and saw faces. Twisted bodies, reaching hands . . . the endless plain upon which she stood seemed as if it was composed of an infinite number of bodies all jammed together into a solid mass. The eyes of the face Mason looked at, numb with horror, seemed in that moment to look back. The ground felt to her as if it writhed ever so slightly. She felt her stomach heave.

Her left hand convulsively gripped the collar of the black leather scabbard that hung at her side, home to her silver, swept-hilt rapier. Her right hand gripped the sword’s hilt. Both her hands were slick with blood. Mason had torn the ends of her fingertips to shreds, ripping away most of her nails, escaping the confines of the trunk of her brother’s car, trying to flee from him.

She still didn’t even know why he’d done that.

And now she didn’t know where she was.

She didn’t, at that moment, care.

One moment, Mason had been standing on top of the transport compartment of her father’s private train as it crossed over the Hell Gate Bridge in New York City. The next, she was standing here. In a twilight-tinged wasteland, a vast empty vista ringed with thunderclouds. It was an eerie, alien place that Mason knew instinctively was very,
very
far from home. She heard her own voice cry out, and she squeezed her eyes shut.

The brightness had swallowed Mason whole, then darkness.

Then . . . here.

“Mason! Did you hear what I said?” The words, sharp and commanding, broke her reverie. “For your own good—for the good of
all
—you must leave this place.”

“I don’t know how to get back,” Mason answered, her voice sounding very small.

She turned to face the tall, beautiful woman cloaked in darkness who stood in front of her. Her mother. At least . . . that was who she’d said she was. Mason felt her throat closing against a hot surge of tears.

“I don’t even know how I
got
here. . . .”

“
I
know how to get you home,” the woman said. “I rule here in this place, and I can help you. But you must come with me. Now.”

Wait. You’re my mother . . . and a queen . . . and . . .

“You want me to leave?” Mason asked. It wasn’t the
question she wanted to ask. But the other one stuck in her throat.
Are you my mother?

“Your presence here is an anomaly.”

An anomaly . . . that’s not a very maternal thing to say to the daughter you’ve just met for the first time. . . .

“I don’t say that to be cruel.” The woman’s face softened, as if she sensed Mason’s thoughts. “But your presence in the Beyond Realms creates an . . . imbalance. Something that could, if you stay, cascade into something much worse. I’m sorry, but you must go back.”

Her mother reached out for her arm, as if she would drag her forcibly away, and Mason stepped back. Her hand convulsed, sticky with blood, on the hilt of her sword and she almost drew the weapon Fennrys had given her as a gift.

Wait.

Fennrys . . .

He’d been there.

On . . . on the train.

The train . . .

Fennrys had been on the same train that had brought her to this place. Hadn’t he? Mason squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think about exactly what had happened. But it was all so jumbled—images of blinding light and rainbows that set the sky on fire . . . a massive, eight-legged horse pulling the train . . . and a sleek black wolf that chased them across the bridge . . . and Rory, her brother.

Rory, his arm twisted, the bones shattered in a brutal fight with Fennrys.

Rory . . . with a gun. Not just
with
a gun . . . but aiming it. Pulling the trigger.

No!

Mason could see him, his face purple and distorted with rage, spittle flying from his lips and his mouth stretched wide as he howled at her and pointed the weapon.

Blood . . . oh god!

He shot Fennrys.

Mason remembered the bright-dark burst of crimson, blooming out from Fenn’s shoulder. Fenn falling . . . tumbling through the air, off the back of the train . . . gone.

“NO!”

Her cry shook the air and was answered by an echoing howl of anguish that sounded as if it came from far away. All of a sudden, as if triggered by the sound, the ground beneath Mason’s feet buckled and surged upward, throwing her backward and away from the dark, stern woman who stood before her. And who added her own cry of denial as a fissure opened up in the ground directly under Mason’s feet and she felt herself tumbling, falling into darkness.

She skidded and bounced down a steep incline, and as she fell, she could feel arms and hands thrusting out from the rock face, fingers reaching to clasp at her hair and clothing, snatching at her limbs. It was horrifying, a nightmare, and yet Mason almost felt the urge to grab hold of those hands to keep herself from falling farther.

She could hear her own voice screaming; a sharp, shrill sound ricocheting off the side of the rocky crevasse, and—high above—she heard the frantic calls of the woman who’d called herself her mother.

Suddenly, the incline leveled sharply and Mason’s feet jarred painfully against what seemed to be the rocky floor of the cavern. Shock waves rippled up her shins, and she grunted in pain as she catapulted forward, instinctively tucking into a shoulder roll to protect her head and face as she tumbled through the darkness to come, finally, to a stop against what felt like the base of a jutting outcrop of jagged stone. She lay there, panting, for a long few minutes after the sounds of her own screams and the roaring of her pulse in her ears had faded to silence.

“You can’t go across the bridge. Bad things will happen. Do you understand?”

Fennrys.

He’d
been the one who’d warned her with those words. Back in New York, on the train as it had thundered toward the Hell Gate Bridge. He had been trying to help her. Trying to save her—again—and all she’d been able to do was stand there, frozen in shock, as he’d gotten himself shot for his troubles. She’d just stood there, dumb. And her father’s train had crossed the bridge with her on it. She’d realized in that moment that it hadn’t been just any old bridge.

Bifrost.

The rainbow bridge of Norse myth. The causeway between the mortal world and the realm of the gods.

“Bad things will happen . . .”

Had she, then, crossed over to somewhere where just her very existence spelled disaster? Squinting in the almost total darkness, Mason looked down at the ruined fencing jacket she wore. The once-bright white fabric was stained with her own blood and striped with grease from when she’d forced her way out of the trunk of her brother’s Aston Martin, trying to escape both from it and from the train that had carried the sports car over the bridge. Her hands were a red disaster and her leggings were torn, more blood trickling down from a deep gash in her calf, pooling in her sneaker.

She ignored it and struggled to stretch out with her senses. At first, she thought the red-tinged glow that seemed to diffuse in the gloom was just the afterimage of blood vessels in her own eyes. But the harder she peered into the dark, the brighter the ruddy light grew until she could make out the jagged contours of the cave in which she’d found herself. Slowly, steadily, her eyes began to adjust, and the glow resolved itself into flickering torchlight. Mason could smell the thick, smoky burn of pitch, and she could hear the whisper-quiet crackle of flames. She thought she heard the rustle of movement from somewhere, and she held her breath. But the only other sound that she could positively identify was a slow, steady drip—like water from a leaky tap.