Transcendent (15 page)

They burst through the doors—Mason and Toby first, to secure the foyer and make sure the place was, indeed, still safe. Next came Daria with Roth, his arm draped heavily across her shoulder. Then Cal with Heather, cradled carefully in his arms. Rafe and Fennrys were last, shifting back to their human forms just before they entered.

The doors swung shut behind them as Rafe called an all-clear and ordered them locked up tight. Toby hurried to the electronic control panel off to one side and activated the mag locks by entering a coded sequence on a number pad. Mason remembered another time when they'd been locked into a Gosforth building that way. It had done nothing to stop the nightmares from finding a way in. She hugged her elbows and watched as Daria helped Roth over to a leather couch and
Fennrys paced back and forth, his fists clenched and his chest heaving.

The sudden silence in the hall as the massive arched doors slammed shut was deafening. With the constant hiss of rain, the rolling thunder, and the snap of lightning strikes muffled to nothing, Mason could hear her heart pounding in her ears. She could hear everyone else's, too, including Fennrys's. It was like a drumbeat calling to her from somewhere far away, strong, insistent, hypnotizing . . .

Mason took a step toward him before she realized what she was doing but was brought up short by another pulse beat that suddenly registered at the edge of her awareness. This one was rabbit-fast and freaked out, and Mason turned to alert the others when, suddenly, Carrie Morgan came bursting through the double doors leading to the classroom wing.

The last time Mason had seen her, Carrie had made a concerted effort to publicly humiliate her. Thanks to Heather, the attempt had backfired gloriously and helped solidify a growing bond of friendship between Heather and Mason.

Carrie's head was down and she was clutching her cell phone in one fist, glowering at it fiercely and cursing its stupid crappy lack of signal. She clearly hadn't been expecting to see anyone else in the Gosforth lobby—certainly not the storm bedraggled collection of Mason and her unlikely group of companions—but when her head snapped up and her gaze landed on Heather, lying limp and pale in Cal's arms, she screamed.

Cal barely spared her a glance as he stalked past. He just
continued on through the hall and out again toward the dorm wing without stopping, carrying Heather with him.

“Holy crap! Palmerston!” Carrie exclaimed. “Is she dead?”

“She's not dead, Carrie,” Toby said.

“What did you weirdos
do
to her?” she demanded, ignoring the fencing coach and turning a glare that was probably meant to be withering on Mason, but that just came across as flustered and belligerent. “What the hell is going on?”

“Carrie?” Mason said quietly. “For once in your life shut up and be helpful.”

Carrie's jaw opened and shut a couple of times as her expression wavered between mutinous and flooded with relief at the sight of other people walking around, seemingly unaffected by the chaos in the rest of the city.

“Do you think you can do that?”

“I . . . Yes.” She glared stonily at Mason. “Of course I can.”

“Good.” Mason nodded. “How many students are left on the grounds?”

Carrie crossed her arms over her chest and said, “I don't know.”

“That's not helpful.” Mason turned to walk away.

“I
mean
I don't know exactly,” Carrie blurted. She seemed utterly terrified at the prospect that she might be left alone. “Like, I didn't do a head count or anything. But it's not that many. Like, five of us maybe. A bunch of parents started pulling their kids out when the earthquake tremors started. Of course,
my
idiot parents chose this week to go on vacation and
they haven't even so much as called to see if I'm alive.” She shook the phone in her hand. “
Thanks
, Mom and Dad . . .”

“Are any of the faculty still on campus?”

Carrie tilted her head, disdain heavy in her tone as she said, “Are you kidding? Like our teachers actually care if we all die or something.”

Toby glanced heavenward, no doubt silently begging for patience, before explaining to Mason and the others in a low murmur: “The headmaster and most of the teaching staff were scheduled to be at a curriculum planning session off-campus when this went down yesterday. I think they'd already canceled all the classes for the day. When the Miasma hit, they were probably just as vulnerable as everyone else in the city.”

“A couple of teaching assistants were hanging around, but I think they must have taken off when things started to get weird with the weather.” Carrie sniffed. “Losers. I'm going to tell my dad to get them all fired.”

“Sure.” Mason sighed. “You do that, Carrie. That's if any of them are still alive.”

That was enough to shut her up for a moment.

“The faculty might try to head back here once the Miasma fully lifts,” Daria suggested.

“Would you?” Fennrys asked. He turned to the school's fencing master—and current ranking administrator. “You guys get danger pay?”

Toby grunted in grim amusement and shook his head. “They're not coming back. I say we raise shields, load
torpedoes, and hunker down. Daria? If you'd be so kind as to get the mag locks? The
other
mag locks?”

Cal's mother lifted a shoulder in an elegant shrug and strode over to a brass plaque set into the wall, engraved with various symbols. Mason had never given it much of a second glance. She always thought it was decorative—just part of the old building's gothic adornment. Daria placed her palm flat on the square and her hand seemed to sink into the metallic surface of the panel, which turned opalescent, and a shiver of light danced across her knuckles.

Cal raised an eyebrow at his mother. “Here all this time I always thought ‘mag locks' just meant they were ‘magnetic.' Not, you know, ‘magick,'” he said.

“We've got both,” Toby said. “The security in this place—when it's fully up and running—rivals the Pentagon.”

“Does the Pentagon have magick?” Mason asked.

Toby just raised an eyebrow at her and remained silent.

“Oh . . .”

Quiet descended again for a moment as Mason and the others were left to contemplate that. And what and how the Powers That Be would respond to the otherworldly threat of the Manhattan situation if it looked like it might spill beyond the borders of the city and out into the wider world. Mason suddenly understood why Daria had invoked the Miasma curse in order to isolate the city and try to deal with Gunnar Starling in a contained arena. Mason wondered for the first time if the Elusinian priestess might have had the right idea, after all. She looked over at the leather couch, where Roth sat,
pale and bleeding, and saw that he might have been thinking the same thing. His gaze was fastened on Daria, and while the hurt in his eyes hadn't lessened to any degree whatsoever, the hatred just might have.

Nothing, it seemed, was ever simple.

Not even hate
, Mason thought.

Suddenly, the phone hanging on the wall beside the security desk rang.

Loudly. So loud it was like the tolling of a warning bell.

It kept on ringing until Carrie finally huffed, “Isn't anyone going to
get
that?” When no one moved, she huffed louder and stalked over to the desk, snatching up the handset. “Gosforth Academy; this better be Emergency Services telling us you'll be here with hot food and internet—oh. Hang on . . .” She rolled her eyes epically. “It's for you, Starling.” She handed over the phone.

Mason stared apprehensively down at the handset Carrie had shoved into her palm and then slowly raised it to her ear. “Hello?”

“Hello, honey,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. “It's your father.”

Mason's blood ran cold at the sound of Gunnar Starling's voice.

“What do you want?” she asked, trying not to choke on her own words.

“I miss you, honey,” her father said.

His voice was warm and soothing. Just like it always had been when she was little and had cried out in her sleep, racked
by nightmares. She could almost feel her father's strong arms wrapped around her, rocking her as he chased away the demons that lurked in the dark corners of her room . . . and her mind. The one person who had always been there for her. She wanted to throw the phone down and run outside and find him and throw herself into his embrace. She wanted to beg his forgiveness.

“I wanted to talk to you,” her father continued. “To tell you how proud I am of you. And right now, I want you to do something for me, honey. I want you to put the phone down and I want you to go outside. Rory is waiting for you.”

And
that
, thankfully, threw cold water in Mason's face.

“Rory can go suck a magick acorn, Dad,” she snapped. “And so can you.”

The silence on the other end of the line wasn't exactly what she would describe as “shocked” although Mason had never, in her entire existence, spoken to her father like that—but it was heavy and deep and . . .
cold
.

“Here's the deal, Dad,” she said. “I'm not going outside. I'm not going to end the world. I spent almost a month researching the paper I have due next week and I'm not going to let that go to waste. I have a ton of work to do on my saber technique if I'm going to get a chance for a do-over at the Nationals. And I
am
going to get that chance.” She glanced at Toby, who gave her a thumbs-up. “For the first time in my high school career I have friends—real ones—and I don't want them to die in some stupid apocalypse. I have things to do, Dad. I have a
date
.” She glanced at Fennrys, who grinned a bit
wickedly. “And as screwed up and selfish and out of whack as the world is, I happen to think it's worth trying to save. Not obliterate.”

“You're just like your mother,” Gunnar said in a soft, heavy voice.

“People keep telling me that,” she said, a twinge in her heart. “If it's true, I have to think she'd be just as sad as I am that you're doing all this. Dad . . . can't you just
stop
?”

“Mason,” his voice turned hard. “Listen to me. The people you are with are poisoning your mind. You have a destiny and it's not what you think. It's not evil.
I'm
not evil. I'm your father. Do you think I would have raised you to do something terrible? Is that what you think?”

Mason was silent for a long moment. And then she said, “You did raise me. And you raised Roth. But . . . you raised Rory, too, Dad.”

“Honey—”

She hung up the handset, then grabbed the entire phone console, pulled it off the wall, along with a large chunk of drywall, and hurled it into the corner of the oak-paneled lobby where it smashed to pieces. As they clattered to the ground, the red rage that had momentarily wrapped around Mason's brain vanished. She turned back to the others to find Carrie staring at her, openmouthed.

“They're
totally
gonna make you pay for that!” she said.

“They can send the bill to my dad.” Mason smiled acidly. “In Valhalla.”

Carrie just flipped her hair over her shoulder and stalked
off huffily, back to her corner of the lobby, where she could stare angrily at her useless phone some more.

“Is there an ancient cult dedicated to the god of pains in the ass?” Mason muttered drily. “Because I figure that's gotta be
her
deal.”

“Actually,” Toby said from over her shoulder, “Carrie Morgan's family is dedicated on her mother's side to Epona.”

Mason turned and raised an eyebrow at him.

“Celtic horse goddess.” He shrugged. “Carrie has no idea, but I happen to know it's the truth. It's the reason she's won all those equestrian trophies.”

“You're kidding,” Mason said.

“Funny thing,” Toby mused, “Epona is also the goddess of donkeys and mules, which might explain the temperament.” He grinned at Mason.

“Wow,” she said. “And that
totally
makes sense.”

It did. And, in a weird way, it almost made Mason sympathetic toward Carrie because it meant there was a possibility that she had never really intended to be such a bitch. Maybe the circumstances at play at Gosforth Academy afflicted the student body in ways most of them weren't even aware of. It would go a long way toward explaining Mason's love of sword fighting. Maybe, she thought, it even went so far as to explain her brother Rory's behavior. She frowned, thinking about that. About him.

When did he become such a monster?
she wondered.
And why?

Was it something already inside of him? Some kind of
destiny or fate or predetermined role that he was playing in spite of himself? And, if that was the case, could Mason ever find it within
herself
to forgive him for the terrible things he'd done?

What about the things I've done? And might still do . . .

She shook her head sharply to rid herself of the shiver of heat that ran up her spine and the redness that had begun, once again, to tinge the edges of her vision. The urge to just let loose and go haywire with a weapon at the slightest provocation.

Stop!
she thought.
You have to
stop
feeling this way
.

Feeling like she would, at any moment, give in and unleash the Valkyrie that stirred so restlessly within her. It was a feeling that was so close to the panic attacks she would experience in enclosed spaces—except for one thing. Instead of fear, all she felt was rage. If the first instance evoked a “flight” response in her, the second most definitely evoked “fight.” She was spoiling for it. Mason took a deep breath and turned to Toby.

“I think we should gather all of the stragglers left in the Academy,” she said. “It'll be safer that way. Do you think maybe Carrie could help you track everyone down and bring them to the dining hall?”