Descendant (29 page)

The news anchor spoke of repeated attempts to contact their affiliates in the Manhattan stations, to no avail. The National Guard and terrorist response teams had been called in. No one had any idea what was happening. But it seemed that anyone who made it inside the fog barrier—even lowered from helicopters in full protective hazmat gear and respirators—succumbed almost instantly.
New York, it seemed, was under siege. Authorities had offered varying opinions as to whether it was natural, biochemical, or something else entirely. None of them had so far speculated that the attack was of a mystical origin.

Mason couldn’t tear her eyes away from the screen.

Eventually, Fennrys cleared his throat and said, “So what you’re saying is that we’re not getting into Manhattan anytime soon.”

“That’s pretty much what I’m saying, yes.” Toby ran a hand over his face. “It would seem that, somehow, Daria Aristarchos has managed to procure herself a kin killer. A powerful one. And she’s found an even more powerful conduit to draw on all the stray magick that’s been pouring into the river from the rift between the realms. She’s using both to focus that power and channel it into casting a curse.”

“Her conduit is probably that haruspex she’s been keeping on the payroll,” Douglas said.

Toby nodded. “Most likely.”

Mason raised her hand again. “What’s a haruspex?”

Douglas grimaced in distaste. “A diviner. Normally someone who reads the entrails of slaughtered animals to see the future.”

“And yeah,” Rafe added. “That
is
as disgusting as it sounds.”

“
This
one,” Douglas continued, “if it’s the girl I think it is, can also tap into deeper magick. Much deeper. She’s sort of like a supercharged sorceress . . . the kind that only comes along once in a thousand years. Like Semiramis, or Merlin, or Medea. Only in this case, this girl has never been in control of the magick, or even her ability to access it. Anything beyond reading the future in the guts of a goat, and she needs someone else to pull the strings and channel the magick into a working enchantment.” He spun his chair in a half circle and wheeled over to the tall window, yanking the pale curtain aside and peering out, even though the view was mostly just darkness and trees. “That someone, in this case,” he said, “would be my beloved ex-wife. The harpy.”

“She is?” Rafe asked.

“Oh. Ah, no.” Douglas grinned sourly. “I only meant that as an insult. She’s not an
actual
harpy.”

“There was one of those outside her window, though. Last
week. I saw it . . . with this guy.” Cal pointed at Rafe. “You were there with Mason’s brother. You work with my mom.”

“Not exactly.” Rafe shrugged. “I maintain alliances with several factions. Mostly, I’m just trying to work at keeping the status quo. And Roth was secretly meeting with Daria because he doesn’t want Ragnarok any more than the rest of us. No matter what his father thinks.”

“Can somebody please cut to the chase here?” Mason stood up and paced restlessly. “I mean, I get it. There is very suddenly a whole lot more to the world—the
worlds
—than I ever thought. I understand that Gosforth is some kind of . . . link. Hub. Whatever. I get that we’re all caught up in this. What I want to know is what
this
really is.” She gestured in the general direction of the city. “This Miasma. Blood curse. Whatever. I mean, okay, my dad—who is clearly a lunatic—wants to end the world. But . . . aside from stopping
him
, what does your mom want?”

“Well . . . ,” Douglas answered for Cal. “Daria
does
want to avert the end of the world. But only because she wants to reshape the world in her own, particular way. And she can’t do that if Gunnar Starling wipes the slate clean. Now that he’s ready to pull the trigger on Ragnarok, Daria is desperate. But the same set of circumstances that give Gunnar his chance also give Daria her own window of opportunity.”

“The rift between the realms,” Rafe said.

Douglas nodded. “All that arcane energy leaking out into the East River. Exactly. With Manhattan completely surrounded by water, the flow of magick is circling the island like a castle moat.”

“So that’s why she’s used the Miasma—she’s drawing it up out of the water in order to isolate the island. She’s turning Manhattan into an arena.” Toby grunted. “Her own personal coliseum.”

“A fit stage for a fight to the death,” Douglas said, “between her forces and Gunnar Starling’s for what is, in her mind, the noblest of causes.”

“And a whole shit-ton of collateral damage means nothing to her,” Fennrys said, the words laced with disgust.

Douglas sighed. “No. It doesn’t. We used to argue bitterly about it. In her dearest-held dreams, she wants to
turn the mortal realm back into a place that the gods—
her
gods, the Greek gods—would once again feel welcome in. The role of humanity would simply be to serve those gods.”

“All of which sounds pretty much like ending the world, too,” Cal murmured. “At least, the world as we know it.”

Douglas nodded. “And most people’s existence in it. That is, unless they have a fondness for toiling in the service of a bunch of spoiled-rotten superior beings. No offense.” He nodded at Rafe.

“None taken.” The god nodded graciously. “I am rather superior. And I naturally assume the ‘spoiled-rotten’ was directed at others.”

“I can’t believe Mom would do this,” Cal murmured.

“Gunnar’s forced her hand. But really, his Ragnarok ambitions are just a convenient excuse for her, son,” Douglas said. “A way to get her biggest competition and, to date, her strongest deterrent out of the way once and for all.”

“She’s using the threat of Ragnarok to convince the other Eleusinians that what
she’s
doing is to protect them,” Toby explained. “And all of humanity.”

“If only she were that noble of spirit,” Douglas said. “The reality of it is, she’s always wanted this kind of power for herself. Power and revenge.”

“Revenge?” Mason asked.

“Yelena Starling was Daria’s best and dearest friend,” Douglas said. “From the time they were kids, those two were inseparable—closer than sisters—and Daria was the one who introduced Yelena to Gunnar way back in the day. She’d never admit it, but I think she holds herself partially responsible for Mason’s mother’s death because of that. Of course, nowhere
near
as responsible as she holds Gunnar. And I hate to say it, you, Mason . . .”

There was compassion in Douglas’s green eyes. But Mason wanted none of it just then. She knew perfectly well what she was responsible for. And what she wasn’t. And most of all, she knew what she would
never
be responsible for—and
that
was the end of the world.

No way.

Her hand tightened reflexively on the grip of her sword.

“Look,” she said, the crackle of barely leashed anger suffusing her words. “The Odin spear is back in Asgard.
I’m
not
. Even if I was, knowing what I know now, do you think I’d actually go within a mile of that thing? So if there’s no chance of me becoming a Valkyrie, then there’s no reason for your crazy ex-wife to keep up with this blood magick Miasma crap. I say we find a way to get that message across to her. In the most forceful way possible. And then . . . we do the same with my dad.”

“She’s got a point,” Douglas said to the others. He smoothed his beard, thoughtful, and turned to his son. “Mason might also be the only person who can stop her father. And I think that
you
are definitely the only one who can stop your mother.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Cal frowned. “Even if we could somehow get to her, she’s not going to listen to me—”

“Cal . . . you’re the
reason
she’s doing this.” Douglas leaned forward in his wheelchair. “Don’t you get that? The reason she’s finally gone to this extreme. There have been other times in the past when she could have made a move against Gunnar—broken the Gosforth pact—but she held the peace. Now she thinks she’s got nothing to lose because she thinks you’re
dead
.”

Cal snorted, but there was a moment of genuine pain that flashed across his face as he said, “Like she cares.”

Douglas shook his head and looked away. “More than you know. Clearly. I wish . . .” He trailed away into a silence that stretched out between father and son. “Look. I know Daria. It’s only when she’s lost something that matters to her that she goes off the rails. And you’re the thing that matters to her most. But if you can get to her . . . If she actually sees with her own eyes that you’re all right . . . you might be able to talk some sense into her.”

“Except that we’re out here, she’s in there,” Toby pointed out.

Mason frowned, thinking for a moment of everything that had just been discussed. It was a lot to take in, and she still wasn’t entirely certain that she understood half of it. But the thing she knew was that she needed to get into the city to stop Daria, and she needed to see her father. Even if she didn’t have the faintest idea what she was going to happen when she saw him.

“Okay,” she said to Cal’s father. “Explain to me this whole Miasma thing. What,
exactly
, does it do?”

“The Miasma is also called the Death Sleep,” he said. “In the Middle Ages, a watered-down version of the concept found its way into fairy tales like ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ where
a whole kingdom is isolated by an impenetrable barrier and cast into a magickal slumber. In more modern times, the word ‘miasma’ came to mean an airborne sickness or plague. Again—something that would require isolation.” Douglas had a storyteller’s voice, and it was easy to think that the tale he was telling was just that. A story. A fairy tale. “In reality, it’s an ancient magick that was traditionally dished out by the gods, through their mortal agents—their priestesses and priests: a punishment that would afflict an entire tribe or a kingdom—turn them into sleepers—most often as a consequence of the wrongdoings of its kings and queens, when one of them had committed an unforgivable crime. A blood crime usually. The murder of a relative was one thing that drew down the Miasma.”

“Okay . . . so that would be the whole ‘kin killer’ thing you mentioned,” Mason said, holding up a hand, concentrating hard on following the logic of the magick. “Are you saying that Cal’s mom killed a family member?”

Cal was frowning deeply, and Mason knew he was probably wondering the exact same thing.

What a horrible thing to think about someone that you love,
she thought.

But Douglas shook his head. “No,” he said. “Daria isn’t the one
being
cursed—she’s
doing
the cursing—using some poor wretch who has murdered kin as the engine of her curse. New York City is a big place full of a lot of people, and some of them, I’m sure, have done some very bad things. She’d found one who’s done the
worst
thing.”

“What do you mean ‘poor wretch’?” Mason scoffed. “Someone murders a family member, I say they deserve whatever’s coming to them.”

“Maybe.” Douglas shrugged. “Maybe not. I prefer not to judge unless I know all the facts.”

Mason felt her cheeks grow warm at the subtle rebuke. Okay, sure. That
had
been pretty judgmental. Still, she wondered if she could be forgiving under circumstances like that. . . .

“Whatever the circumstances, as Toby said, this is blood magick, and blood magick is the most powerful there is. What Daria is doing is using a kin killer as a focus for the curse, her haruspex as the instrument to implement it, and the raging magick spill in the waters around Manhattan to fuel it,” Rafe explained.

Mason shuddered. “That’s horrible.”

“That’s Mom.”

Mason looked over at Cal. The water from the glass now hovered in front of him like a crystal globe, rotating slowly.

“The circumstances are stacked up pretty overwhelmingly in Daria’s favor at the moment—it’s like a mystical ‘perfect storm’—and I don’t doubt she’ll be able to keep the damned thing going as long as she keeps her kin killer alive. She’ll have Gunnar trapped like a rat on the island for as long as she needs to find him and take him down. And you can bet he’ll put up a hell of a fight, especially now that he’s had the means to bring about Ragnarok just beyond the tips of his fingers. Whatever forces he has mustered and hers will tear the city to shreds before they’re done if we don’t stop them.”

“So, all we have to do is keep your mom from wrecking the city, and my dad from wrecking . . . everything else,” Mason said. “We have some truly screwed-up parents.” She rolled an eye at Douglas. “Present company excluded. I guess.”

Cal’s father nodded graciously in reply.

“What would happen to us?” she asked him, waving a hand in the general direction of the fog-shrouded city on the island. “In there? Would we be just as useless as all the rest of those . . . sleepers?”

Douglas smiled at her. “Well . . . as I said. It’s called the Death Sleep. But together in this room, we have a god of
death
, a couple of kids who’ve already proven they can walk beyond the walls of
death
, my son—whose blood makes him an immortal, so no
death
there—and . . . well, and then there’s Toby. Who can handle himself better than most, even under conditions such as these, I would think.”

Mason turned and stared at Toby, who avoided making eye contact. He just shrugged and muttered something about “Yeah . . . perfectly able to take care of myself in a Miasma . . . been there, done that,” and Mason decided that, when time allowed, she was going to have to make a point of sitting down and having a long, informative chat with her fencing instructor. Whoever—or
whatever
—he really was.

“The Miasma was created by gods, and they’re not stupid,” Douglas continued. “The Death Sleep was designed to act on human physiology, human weakness. It
doesn’t affect the divine, or the semidivine. But the real problem would be getting past the Miasma’s outer wall. Passing through the barrier, even for you lot, would still be like walking through your worst nightmare. It would probably render you all temporarily psychotic, which is why I didn’t recommend it.” He shrugged. “But . . . if you could somehow get past that, then no, I don’t think you’d have too much of a problem with the Miasma itself. The only things still sentient in Manhattan will be anything with magickal protection . . . or magickal blood.”