Descendant (21 page)

“I was smiling.” She ran her fingertips over the dark-gold stubble that shadowed his jaw and chin. “You
could
use a shave.”

“I’ve been a little busy.”

“But you’re still not a werewolf, and
that
, at least, is a great comfort to me.” She felt her grin widening. “Only that’s not why I was smiling.”

“I really think you were on the verge of giggling.”

“I’m
happy
.”

“You are?” he said, and Mason could hear the apprehension in his voice.

“In spite of everything—”

“And in the middle of all this chaos.”

“—and in the middle of all this chaos . . .
yes
. I’m happy.”

Fennrys traced the curve of her cheek with the fingertips of one hand. His expression was starkly unguarded in that moment, and Mason was worried suddenly that it might all be too much for him. But then he saw the way she was looking at him, and his mouth bent back into that insanely kiss-worthy smile again.

“Hey,” she whispered against his fingertips as he ran them beneath her cheekbone and across the curve of her lips. Just the slightest touch from him left her skin tingling. “Don’t knock it.” He raised an eyebrow, and she explained. “I think that in a situation like this—not that I’ve ever really
been
in a situation like this before—you might as well try to find whatever joy you can and make the most of it. I mean, you never know what’s thundering on down the road toward you.”

“Speaking metaphorically, of course,” Fennrys said wryly.

“Of course.”

Mason grinned and reached up and pulled his head down so she could kiss him again. She had the distinct feeling she was going to enjoy being able to do that whenever she wanted to. Now that she knew how Fennrys
felt about her . . . she wanted to tell him in that moment that she loved him, too. But at the same time, she was almost afraid to. She didn’t know why, but it almost felt like if she did, she’d break some kind of spell or something. It was stupid. But she also wasn’t willing to tempt fate. Everybody else seemed to be doing that for her, and—what was worse—she’d let them. She’d let herself be blind to her father’s dark obsession. She’d let Rory use her claustrophobia against her. She’d let Heimdall manipulate her, using her dead mother’s face.

She’d stopped asking questions. . . .

Suddenly, a chill traced down her spine, in spite of the warmth of Fennrys’s body pressed against her, as Mason realized that she hadn’t even asked the biggest question of all.

“Hey.” Fennrys finally broke her long silence, putting a finger under her chin and tilting her face up so she had no choice but to look up into his eyes. “What is it? What’s bothering you?”

There were things moving through his gaze. Shadows. Secrets . . .

Mason shifted up onto her elbow so that she was looking down at him. She put her hand on his chest and felt the steady beating of his heart, thrumming against her palm.

“How did I cross over into Asgard?” she asked.

When his mouth opened and no words came out, Mason was pretty sure she knew. She just needed to hear him say it.

“Fenn?”

The muscles of Fennrys’s neck moved convulsively as he cleared his throat and found his voice. “Yeah?”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I can handle it.”

Are you sure?
whispered a small voice in her head.

“I know you can. I know. Mason . . .” Fennrys closed his eyes.

She waited.

When he opened them again, she saw the answer to her question in the depths of his blue gaze before the words were past his lips.

“You died.”

A sap pocket in one of the branches of their campfire suddenly popped loudly and hissed, spitting sparks and brightening the air with a brief orange flare that dwindled
almost instantly to nothing. The shadows in the room crowded closer. Mason could almost feel them. It was as if the shades that haunted North Brother Island had suddenly realized that she was kindred to them.

You are.

Dead.

She’d asked and he’d told her. And there it was. No sugarcoating.

It felt as if the world was falling away from her. The crumbling bricks, the leaves, the firelight . . . everything but Fennrys’s face, clouded with concern, was becoming insubstantial. As if the world was the ghost. Not Mason.

But you are.

Fennrys sat up and pulled her with him. Her head lolled on her shoulders, her ability to make her muscles work properly fleeing from her in that instant.

“Mason,” he said, giving her shoulders a shake. “Mase!”

She tried to focus on his face. She tried to breathe.

Am I supposed to breathe? Do I do that?

“Sweetheart . . .
listen
to me.”

He breathes . . . his hands are warm . . .

“It was a long time ago. And it doesn’t change a
thing
. It doesn’t change who you are, or how I feel about you.”

Dead girls don’t cry. . . .

But there was wetness on her lashes. It turned the firelight into golden spangles and made it seem like she was looking at Fennrys through a curtain of rain. He gazed at her, eyes locked on her face, unblinking, unfailingly steady. He was there. He was real. And he was dead too.

Mason drew a sudden, deep breath.

And the world snapped back into focus.

“How?” she asked. “When?”

“I can’t be sure, but I think it was probably right around the time that your claustrophobia first manifested.”

“Oh my god,” Mason murmured. “The hide-and-seek game . . .”

“Yeah,” Fennrys said. “I think so. I mean, it makes sense. I think your phobia is a result of the fact that you died. I mean, it didn’t take—obviously—but you crossed the threshold.”

“Something sent me back.”

Fennrys nodded.

Mason knew what the something—some
one
—was. “My mother.”

Fennrys nodded again. “That’s what I was thinking, too. I mean, I’d say that’s a pretty fair guess.”

“It’s
not
a guess. I know it was her,” Mason said. There was a sense of utter certainty as she said the words. Her mother was a queen of the underworld, and her mother had sent her back. Just like she’d sent Fennrys back.

And the thing was . . . Mason knew. She’d known it all along. Even though she had no memory of the event, no sense of what had actually happened to her, trapped in that shed, she had always, since that time, felt different. There was a distance . . . a detachment. A feeling that she was always on a slightly different vibrational plane from all the other students at Gosforth. Then there were the nightmares . . . the claustrophobia . . .

No. Not anymore. I will not be afraid of anything anymore.

Mason closed her eyes and felt herself grow light as air.

The air flowed into her lungs, her blood sang through her veins. Her hands were still on Fenn’s chest, and she could feel the beating of his heart. And then her own . . . as her heart began to beat along with his.

She was dead.
Was
dead. And now . . .

And now she felt more alive than she ever had.

Mason left one hand over Fennrys’s heart and put the other over her own. Her heartbeat was light and quick, strong and vibrant. Fennrys’s was deep and steady and powerful. With those two beats coursing through her, rhythm and counterrhythm, Mason strangely, surprisingly, didn’t care that she was dead. Or had been. Or however that had worked out. She didn’t care because the very same thing had happened to Fennrys, and that meant that the two of them were special in the same way.

If he could handle it, so could she.

Fenn was still gazing steadily at her, a shadow of worry twisting in the depths of his blue eyes. He needed to know that she was all right. She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around his neck and let him know she was. He pulled her close, and Mason let herself drift on the sensation of kissing Fennrys, but suddenly, he froze.
She thought for an instant she’d done something wrong, but she saw that his head was cocked to one side . . . listening . . .

Then she heard it too.

Howling.

Sorrowful, soul-deep, and fiercely, frighteningly angry.

Fennrys was up on his feet and loosening the blade he carried strapped to his leg in its sheath. The howling built to an echoing cacophony, and Mason shivered when she realized what it was. Wolf song.

Rafe.

Something was terribly wrong.

Mason leaped to her feet and kicked at the little bonfire until it was extinguished. Then she and Fennrys were running before Mason even had a chance to wonder what the hell was going on. As they rounded the southernmost tip of North Brother Island, Mason and Fennrys saw that their ride was waiting for them.

Just not quite in the way they had expected.

A
ken the ferryman floated in the water about ten feet from shore.

More precisely, pieces of him floated in the water. The boat that Aken had been meaning to transport them from the island in was smashed right through the middle, upended and jammed against a shoal of rocks. Its two distinct halves bobbed awkwardly just off shore.

Rafe hunched in the shallows of the water; a huge, sleek black wolf howling at the dark night sky. It was the most heart-wrenching, mournful sound that Mason
had ever heard. As she and Fennrys slowed to a stop, the howling died and Rafe’s outline blurred until he knelt on the shore in his transitional man-wolf state.

Mason heard him swear in what she could only assume must be his ancient Egyptian tongue, and she was glad she couldn’t actually understand what he was saying. It sounded like curses—in the original sense. After his outburst, Rafe seemed to deflate a little, his shoulders sagging. He mumbled something about needing to perform a ritual of passage for the dead demigod Aken’s spirit, and began uttering a low, singsong incantation full of raw, welling emotion.

Fennrys and Mason moved off down the shore to give him privacy, both of them pretending not to notice the tracks of bloodred tears that marred the fur of his cheeks as he did. As they walked down the beach, Mason couldn’t help but notice that Fenn’s hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists. He glanced over and saw that she was staring at him.

“Random boating accident?” she asked, hearing the tightly controlled anger in her own voice.

“Yeah.” Fennrys snorted in disgust. “What are the odds?”

“I think it’s fairly clear that someone doesn’t want us getting off this island,” Mason said quietly.

She sat down on a moss-covered rock at the edge of the trees, and her gaze drifted across the East River, toward the dark, glittering shapes of the towers in the city. Her father had offices in one. And a palatial penthouse apartment in another.

And what else?

There was a whole, hidden side to Gunnar Starling that Mason had never known about. Or maybe she’d always suspected it was there and she’d never been able to bring herself to wonder further. . . .

“Looks like there’s a fog rolling in,” she said, nodding toward where the lights of the skyscrapers were starting to shimmer with distortion, haloed in the evening light. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to broach the subject. But of course she would have to eventually. It seemed there were a lot of unpleasant truths she was having to face up to all of a sudden. She wasn’t sure just how much more she could handle. But she had to know.

Fennrys sat down beside her and waited.

“So tell me. As a . . . a Valkyrie, I would . . .” She hesitated, trying to frame the question in a way she could understand as she asked it. “I mean . . . what, exactly, was it my father wanted from me? What was I supposed to do?”

For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. But then he did. And she almost wished he hadn’t.

“There’s Valkyries and then there’s
Valkyries
, Mase,” he said. “Just like everything else, it’s a matter of degrees. The Valkyrie that your dad was trying to make out of
you
was to be the one who would choose a third Odin son to lead the Einherjar out of Valhalla.”

“A third.”

“Rory, Roth . . .” Fennrys ticked them off on his fingers. “You were, it seems, supposed to be the third. A son. And when you turned out otherwise, it seems Gunnar just assumed that the prophecy was flawed. Unattainable. According to Rafe, he was on the verge of letting it go for good. But then, thanks in large part to
my
dumb ass, the rift between the worlds opened. And I could walk between them. That’s when Gunnar’s plans got dusted off and adjusted. If I could fetch the Odin spear for him, Gunnar could make a Valkyrie. A Valkyrie can make an Odin son.” Fennrys glanced sideways at Mason from under his brows. “That’s what your dad wants.”

“Because, according to this prophecy, these Odin sons are needed to lead the Einherjar,” Mason said, struggling to understand, even though she strongly suspected that she already did. “Lead them to what?”

“Ragnarok.”

Mason closed her eyes, and all she saw was red.

Ragnarok.
She had always feared that word. Harsh and guttural, it was made of sounds that stuck in the throat like a death rattle. Which, she supposed, it was. Death. Ending. Mason had never understood the myths of her forefathers. She hadn’t embraced them the way Rory had—with his gruesome enthusiasm and sneering disdain for humanity—nor had she ever emulated them the way Roth had, with his silent, stoic, fatalistic approach to life. And she certainly hadn’t aspired to manifest them, as it appeared now her father always secretly had.

“Ragnarok. The end of the world.” Her voice echoed hollowly in her ears.

“Yeah,” Fennrys said quietly. “That certainly seems to be the direction your father’s pointing toward.”

My father . . .

He’d promised Mason, after that time with the game—the hide-and-seek game when she’d been lost, locked in the abandoned shed for three days—that he’d keep her safe. For what? So he could sacrifice her humanity later in life to fulfill some kind of twisted global death wish? She could barely believe it. And at the same time, something about it made absolutely perfect sense.

Bastard.