Starling (36 page)

Roth nodded brusquely to him and said, “We have a big problem.”

“Oh … it’s bigger than you think,” Rafe said, grimly. He turned to Fennrys and nodded a brisk greeting.

“Nice to see you again,” Fennrys said flatly. “Or, y’know, not.”

Rafe snorted. “Remember what I said to you about prophecies having a funny way of coming true in ways you don’t expect? I didn’t mean funny ha-ha.”

“Tell me.”

“Tell him, Rothgar,” Rafe said.

“Gunnar, my father, believes in Ragnarok,” Roth said. “The end of the world. A mythic apocalypse of—”

“I
know
what Ragnarok is, dumbass.” Fennrys rolled his eyes.

“Right. Anyway. He thinks it’s the only way for the world to become good again, but his belief in the prophecy had faded over time because he was missing a fundamental piece of the puzzle.”

“And that is?”

“Long story short … it turns out that for the prophecy to be fulfilled, Gunnar needs a Valkyrie. That’s to be Mason’s fate—but only so long as someone could walk into Asgard and out again, carrying the spear of Odin. If Gunnar gets the spear, he can turn my sister into a chooser of the slain. After that, the rest of his plan falls into place.”

Cal went cold as ice. He should have told her. He should have told Mason all about the meeting between Rafe and his mother and Roth. He’d had the opportunity—when he’d told her about the sea-monsters, or just before the competition—but he’d bitten his tongue both times and said nothing. Sure, he’d been wary about breaking his promise to Roth, but it was more than that. He’d been so angry with her. Angry and jealous. And now Mason was gone, maybe in some kind of serious trouble, and it was his fault. He should have told her to be careful or tried to protect her.

Fennrys was staring daggers at Roth. “You didn’t come here looking for Mason. Your father sent you here to get me, didn’t he?”

“No.” Roth hesitated a moment. And then nodded. “Well … yes. I mean, I was supposed to find you and bring you to Bifrost—the rainbow bridge to Asgard—with the intention of forcing you to cross over and get the spear.”

“And how exactly were you going to do that?”

Roth looked back and forth between Fennrys and Rafe. “The magick of Bifrost was woven into a train bridge called the Hell Gate. It spans the East River.”

“Wait.” Fennrys frowned, holding up a hand. “I know that bridge. I think I met the troll that lives under it.”

Cal blinked at him. “Figure of speech?”

Fennrys shook his head. “I don’t think so.... He said the island the bridge passes over is—what did he call it?—Dead Ground.”

“Well, it
is
a gateway to the underworld,” Rafe muttered, clearly getting impatient. He gestured for Roth to move it along.

“Right.” Roth ran a hand through his hair. “Well, the plan was for Rory to get Mason after the competition and take her to the other side of the bridge. I was supposed to track you down and tell you to cross after him.”

“Track me down? How were you going to do that, exactly?”

“I have my ways.”

“Those ways don’t include wolfhounds, do they?”

Rafe frowned in confusion. “No,” he said. “They don’t.”

Cal took a step forward. “My mother keeps wolfhounds,” he said.

Fennrys looked at him and shook his head. Then he turned back to Roth. “Why take Mason across?”

“Insurance policy. Nobody expected you to go willingly. Rory was to threaten her—threaten to hurt her—if you didn’t cross on your own.”

“You son of a—”

“Wait!” Roth put up his hands. “This whole thing was Gunnar’s plan. And Rory’s.
Not
mine! I’ve never wanted Ragnarok. Ask Rafe here. I’ve been meeting secretly with him and Calum’s mother. She’s a powerful woman in her own right. We’ve been trying to find a way to stop this madness.”

“It’s true.” Cal nodded.

“I
didn’t
come here to find you, I swear. There’s no way in hell I want you anywhere near that bridge. I was just trying to get to Mason before Rory did,” Roth said, a strangely helpless expression crossing his face. It didn’t suit him at all.

Fennrys just sneered at him. “You didn’t try hard enough.”

“Hang on a second …,” Cal said. “What happens if one of the living tries to cross over this bridge? I mean, a regular mortal?”

“Nothing.” Roth shrugged. “You cross a bridge. Just a bridge. Wind up in Queens, no harm done. Except you’re in Queens.”

Fennrys shook his head. “So I’m the only guy who can cross it into Asgard.”

“The only
guy
, yeah,” Rafe said quietly.

All eyes turned to him.

“What?”

“Remember that bigger problem I mentioned?” Rafe’s gaze was troubled. “Mason Starling’s not exactly …
living
.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Fennrys looked as if he might actually kill Rafe for saying that. “If something’s happened to her, I’ll—”

“No. That’s not what I meant. I wasn’t sure at first. Her true nature was … hidden from me somehow.” The shadow of a frown darkened his brow. “I’m a god in exile, remember, and nowhere near as powerful as I once was. I suspected something when I realized that she could see the vision Etienne conjured for you of your time in Valhalla. She shouldn’t have been able to. Etienne confirmed it for me, though. Mason has—at one time or another—passed through to the underworld and made it back out again. Roth … your sister
died
.”

Cal didn’t even pretend to understand half of what he’d just heard. He just looked at Roth, who had gone very,
very
pale. “Oh, god … the game. There was a hide-and-seek game when she was little. She was trapped in a shed for three days. I never even thought that she …,” Roth murmured, stricken. “But we found her. She was alive!”

“Someone must have revived her,” Rafe said.

Fennrys swore quietly. “I guess that explains the claustrophobia.”

“Rory doesn’t know!” Roth exclaimed suddenly, a frantic light growing in his eyes. “When he tries to take her over the bridge—”

“She’ll cross over. Into the beyond. And if Mason somehow finds the Odin spear on her own, the touch of it will turn her into a Valkyrie,” Rafe said. “She’ll become a chooser of the slain whether she wants to or not. It’ll drive her. Control her. We have to stop your brother before he gets to that bridge.”

Roth turned to one of his silent companions. “Give him the keys to your bike,” he said, nodding toward Fennrys. “Can you ride?”

“No. I’ve never—”

“I can,” Cal said as he stepped forward and caught the tossed keys out of the air. He glanced at Fennrys. “I’ll double you on the handlebars, hero,” he said sardonically, and spun the key ring on his finger as he stalked past. “Let’s go.”

M
ason was dimly aware of a sense of movement. It penetrated the fog of panic that had wrapped itself around her mind and turned her world into a red-and-gray nightmare that she was experiencing as though it was happening to someone else. Which was probably for the best. She knew that if she could have looked into a mirror in that moment, she wouldn’t have even recognized herself. She would have seen a wild-eyed, openmouthed apparition. Pale and screaming. She knew that she’d screamed her throat raw. The stale stench of canvas and rubber choked her; dirt scratched her eyeballs and gathered under her lids. Her muscles ached from thrashing wildly.

None of it mattered. All that mattered was that she was trapped. All that mattered was that she get free. She knew, in that far corner of her brain where her rational mind had gone to cower, squeezed into a tiny ball like a terrified animal, that she would do anything, say anything, become anything to escape the confinement.

The roar of an engine started up and she recognized the throaty purr as that of Rory’s car. The rumble of movement indicated that they were traveling at some speed, zigzagging in and out of traffic in the typical way that Rory was used to driving. She felt herself rolling and sliding, bouncing off the walls of the trunk and jabbing her ribs painfully on the spare tire mount—from which the tire had been removed, no doubt for just this occasion. After several infinitely long minutes, she felt the sensation of the car rolling up a ramp and the engine cutting out. Doors slamming. Heather’s voice raised in woozy outrage was cut short by the sound of Tag Overlea’s coarse laughter, all of it fading into the distance.

There was a long moment of extended, suffocating silence. Still the pitch darkness of the canvas bag inside the trunk and the sensation of the world shrinking around Mason. Closing in on her. Any moment it would crush her.

But then there was a lurch and the car began to vibrate again, although Mason knew that the engine was turned off. Over the panicked huffing of her own breathing and the thunder of her pulse in her ears, she figured it out. She recognized the sounds, the familiar swaying and chugging motion. Rory’s Aston Martin, she knew, was now sitting in the transport compartment of Gunnar Starling’s private train.

Mason thrashed around and punched at the canvas that trapped her, twisting and tightening about her arms and legs like mummy wrapping—she felt as if she’d been bound for burial. Felt as if she’d already been entombed. But when her fingers touched the edges of a sewn seam in the canvas where the stitching felt like it had begun to pull away from a frayed edge, Mason felt a tiny, tenuous sliver of hope twist painfully in her heart.

After a few minutes of frantic activity, she forced herself to stop. To listen. There was nothing beyond the sound of the train rumbling along tracks. A small part of her wondered where in hell Rory was taking her. The rest of her didn’t care. If he’d already done this much to her—knowing her as well as he did—whatever her brother had in mind couldn’t be good. Mason managed to thrust her head and one arm out of the tear she’d opened in the canvas bag. She wriggled and struggled, drenched in sweat and sticky with dirt but exerting an almost superhuman effort to escape. She had to stay focused on that.

She already sensed, with a kind of clinical detachment that kept her from vomiting, that she’d torn away her fingernails on most of her fingers forcing her way out of the bag. She could feel the wetness of the blood flowing down to pool in the webbing between her fingers and in the palms of her hands.

She didn’t care.

She had to get out. Twisting herself around so that her shoulders were wedged against the back of the trunk, Mason began to kick at the partition in between the trunk and the seat backs. Roth had always scoffed at Rory’s “toy car,” telling him it was a flimsy piece of James Bond-wannabe showy crap. Mason aimed to prove his assertions, even if she wasn’t thinking about it as rationally as all that. She kicked and kicked until one of her shoes went straight through the particleboard and stuck in the horsehair padding and spring coils, the ends of which caught in the flesh at the back of her calf. Mason didn’t even feel it. She kept kicking until the passenger seat wrenched off its moorings with a protesting screech and folded forward, leaving her with a ragged hole to crawl through.

In the darkness, she made her way over the wrecked backseat through to the front of the car. When she caught sight of her reflection in the windshield glass, it was like staring at just another monster. Pale and hollow eyed, cheeks and forehead streaked with grime, her hoodie and leggings painted with stripes of blood and grease. Her black hair hung lank around her face like a shroud, and her face looked gaunt and ghostly. She groped wildly for the door handle and tumbled out onto the floor of the train car when it opened abruptly—and her gear bag, which Tag or Rory must have thrown in the car when they’d taken her, tumbled out too. Frantically Mason pawed through it, and her hand closed on the scabbarded silver swept-hilt sword Fennrys had given her. She’d taken it with her to the competition, for luck. She almost laughed wildly at the thought. Some luck. Still, she pulled it out and slung the strap of the baldric across her body so that the sword hung from her left hip.

She didn’t know why she did that.

It wasn’t as if she was going to stab Rory when she found him, was it?

No. No … she wasn’t even going to go looking for him. Whatever he was playing at, he was serious. He never would have done such a thing to her otherwise. This was no game. The sound of her rasping breath was so loud in her ears that she was sure Rory or Tag would hear it and come running and stuff her back into the confines of the Aston Martin, making sure she couldn’t get out this time. Or worse.