Transcendent (2 page)

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean, Ms. Starling?”

Honora's eyes narrowed as she held Mason's gaze. Her voice was quiet, but it was firm. Mason realized that she might find understanding in this woman, but not sympathy. Honora knew what Mason had asked Rafe to do, and she most likely understood why. But it was apparent in that instant that she did not approve. Not even a little bit. Mason wondered under what circumstances Honora had made
her
bargain with Anubis.

“I
mean
, you just turned that boy into a monster,” Honora continued. “Now you're going to have to step back and let us
help him hold on to his humanity. If he can.” Then she turned on the heels of her sensible-but-sexy black leather pumps and stalked after her pack, her god, and Fennrys.

Mason watched her go, and then turned to find that only a handful of people were left standing on that windswept square of stone perched high above the city: Toby and Heather, both of them eyeing her warily, as if worried about what she might do next, and Calum—transfigured, transformed, alien to Mason on almost every level now, and looking strangely adrift in the wake of the chaos.

Maddox stood before Daria Aristarchos—one hand held out in front of her and the spiked silver chain he wielded so expertly dangling from his other fist. The high priestess of the Eleusinian mysteries barely seemed to notice the Janus Guard. She seemed frozen, her gaze the only thing about her that moved as it flicked back and forth, rife with disbelief, shifting with suspicion, from Mason to the blood on the terrace, to the face of her son, Cal.

The son Daria had believed was dead.

That belief had been the catalyst that had triggered a diabolically planned—but long dormant—revenge scheme and pushed Daria to conjure a blood curse, using Rothgar Starling, Mason's beloved brother, as fuel. Because Roth was a kin killer. He lay sprawled on top of the black marble surface of the terrible altar, senseless and twitching in agony. Behind him, Gwen Littlefield—slender, purple-haired, her face a mask of anguish—still stood with her hands pressed to the cold stone,
pale fingers splayed wide, as the blood curse coursed from Roth through her . . . and out into the city.

Gwen was Daria's haruspex—a young, hapless sorceress the Elusinian priestess had trapped into serving as her seer—and the conduit for her terrible blood magick. Mason could feel the power emanating from the slight, fragile-looking girl. It rolled off her in waves.

Roth was incoherent, his arms and chest covered in long shallow cuts made by the sickle in Daria's fist. The wounds must have been painful, but they weren't life threatening. It was only the curse that seriously afflicted him.

Just as it afflicted the girl he shared the terrible connection with.

Mason stooped to pick up the long knife lying in the puddled blood and water at her feet—the one that Fennrys had dropped when Cal had stabbed him through the chest—and she stalked over to Daria. The priestess swept the elegantly curved blade she held up to ward off the furious young Valkyrie, but Mason just ducked past the blur of the sickle and smashed her armor-clad elbow against Daria's wrist. Then she grabbed her by the front of her priestess robes and brought her own knife up to press against Cal's mother's throat.

The silver blade in Daria's hand clattered to the stone tiles and she backed up as far as she could, stumbling over the hem of her robes and grabbing at the low stone buttress surrounding the terrace—the only barrier left to keep her from plummeting off the building now that the glass panels had been blown to smithereens.

The wind pushed at Mason's back.

“Mason!” Cal cried out in alarm.

She ignored him.

“Make this stop,” she said, her voice shuddering through the air like thunder.

For a moment, Daria just looked at her as if she was speaking in tongues. Her gaze raked up and down over Mason's Valkyrie armor, and she shook her head in dazed disbelief. Or denial. Her sharp shoulders, draped in the white tunic of her priestess order, began to quake as though she was on the verge of either sobbing or laughing hysterically.

Mason shook her by the arm, hard. “The curse,” she said. “Make it stop!”

Cal took a wary step toward them. “Mase—”

Mason shot him a look from beneath the brim of her helmet that stopped him in his tracks. Then she turned back to Daria.
“Now.”

“I can't . . . ,” she said in a ragged croak.

A sickly, silver light twisted in the black depths of Daria's widely dilated eyes, and Mason realized that the priestess was still caught in the throes of the enchantment herself.

“Once begun, the Miasma will continue until the engine that drives the curse is no more,” Daria continued. “You want me to end it? That means breaking the link between your brother and my haruspex—a link that can only be broken by death.”

Death . . .

The word knifed through Mason's brain, acid-sweet,
seductive as Siren song.

Down below in the streets, amid the wrecked cars and the brownstone blocks on fire, she could
feel
death. All of them. Every single one. She could sense—distantly, but distinctly—the passing of each and every human life that was ending in the city that night. And those numbers were creeping steadily upward. It was like a thousand tiny wounds, cutting her up inside. Mason felt a blinding rush of rage filling her head. She heard herself snarling like an animal as she pressed the knife blade into the flesh of Daria's throat. The high priestess bent backward, hanging out over the empty space high above Rockefeller Plaza, real fear carving the planes of her face.

Through the haze of incandescent anger, Mason heard someone calling her name again, but it wasn't Cal this time. “Mason!” Toby Fortier, Mason's erstwhile coach, shouted. “Stand down! Drop that weapon, Starling!”

Her knee-jerk reflexes from hundreds of hours obeying the fencing master's barked commands almost made her do just that.

“Mason!
Do you hear me?
”

She did. But she ignored both him and the impulse to disengage, and instead tightened her grip around the weapon's hilt and pressed the blade tighter to Daria's throat.

“Mason—”

“It's too late!” Daria screeched. “It's
your
father, Mason, who pushed me to this! He would end us all—you, me, the world!—if I don't stop him. You . . . you don't want that! I
know you don't. Help me. Defy him. We can build a paradise on Earth. Don't let your brother's noble sacrifice be in vain—”

Over the sound of Toby's yelling, and the howling wind, and the skirling words of Daria's desperate pleas, Mason suddenly heard another noise. A low, gentle moaning, it was a sound that was full of sorrow and love . . .

And good-bye.

It took her a moment to place the voice—an older version of the one she used to hear chattering shyly with Roth in the Gosforth school quad when they were children. Gwen Littlefield's voice. The voice of a child who had grown up to become a power in her own right, except for the fact that she'd been harnessed—and used and abused—by Daria Aristarchos.

Gwen . . .

Mason turned and glanced over her shoulder, just in time to see Gwen lean down over the altar stone. Somehow, through a sheer act of iron will, she had managed to take back a measure of control over her rigid, curse-afflicted body and had pried her hands off the stone altar. Her palms were bloodied, but she didn't seem to notice as she placed a long, lingering kiss on Roth's lips. He struggled against the effects of the curse to reach for her as well. In vain.

Gwen drew back, shook her head sharply, eyes suddenly clear-witted and sparkling with tears beneath the fringe of her purple hair. Then she spun and sprinted for the edge of the terrace, swifter than a gazelle. Mason watched, horrified, as Gwen opened her arms wide . . .

And threw herself off the tower, into the embrace of the night.

G
unnar Starling stood looking into the enormous smoked glass mirror hanging on the wall of the sitting room in the palatial midtown condominium, staring past his own reflection as if he could see hidden things moving beyond. Rory stood in the doorway of the room staring at his father, at the way the light from the flames in the fireplace was echoed by the golden glow in Gunnar Starling's left eye. The shadows that leaped up the wall behind Gunnar seemed more . . . animated than they perhaps should. And Rory could have sworn he smelled smoke that was different from just the apple-wood scent the flames usually gave off in the sleek designer fireplace. He could smell the acrid tang of melting
metal. And . . . flesh. He could smell blood.

He closed his eyes and, for a brief disorienting moment, he thought he could hear screaming. He opened them again and the sound vanished, and he wondered if it was just the muted strains of the chaos far below in the streets of the city. But the balcony doors were closed against the fierce, freezing rain and driving winds. Lightning strobed against the angry darkness of thunderheads that were so low in the sky Rory felt that if he stepped outside and lifted his hand—his shining,
silver
hand—he could touch them.

He turned back to watch his father and saw that the mirror no longer reflected the room he stood in. Rather, the image enclosed in the heavy oak frame was both familiar and utterly alien. A white room, lit with red and purple light, and his sister standing in the middle of it. Only . . . she looked . . .

Fantastic.

And terrifying.

Rory had never thought of Mouse in either of those terms before. But seeing her standing there, a raven-winged helmet on her brow, clothed head to toe in shimmering silver chain mail and supple black leather, a midnight-blue cloak swept back from her shoulder and a tall, slender spear held in her fist . . .

“She's magnificent,” Gunnar said, “isn't she?”

The paternal pride in his voice grated Rory's nerves raw. Magnificent? More magnificent than a son with a silver hand?

“Yeah.” Rory tried to muster enough enthusiasm so as not
to incur his father's displeasure. Gunnar doted on Mason and so Rory had to play nice. For now. “She's something, all right,” he said. “Nice hat.”

Gunnar sighed and turned away from the mirror, pegging his youngest son with a disconcerting stare. Even though Rory knew his father had sacrificed the physical sight in his left eye to the Norns for the gift of “other” sight, it was
that
eye that seemed to see him most clearly. The thread of twisting golden light shimmered for a moment in the depths of that eye, flickering and fading as Gunnar dropped his hand from the surface of the mirror and the image of Mason and her companions faded to shadows. Gunnar crossed the room and put a hand on his son's shoulder, drawing him over to the fireplace. The light of the flames reflecting on the elder Starling's strong, angular features and the pale silver lion's mane of his hair made him look as if he were a god of fire. The thunderstorm raged outside, and the floor-to-ceiling windows of the penthouse behind Gunnar only served to heighten the effect. Rory was struck by a moment of awe as he stood regarding the man whom he had loved and hated—and feared—all his life.

“Rory . . . you are my son. You are precious to me, even though I know that you, yourself, do not believe that. And because you are my son, I have in the past turned a blind eye to your . . . indiscretions.” Before Rory could even fully form the thought in his own mind, Gunnar's lip twisted in the shadow of a grin. “And no,” he said, “that is not a joke, present circumstances notwithstanding. Now that I have sacrificed one of my eyes to gain true vision, I
see
so many things.”

He gestured to the figures in the mirror and Rory saw Roth lying flat on his back and staring up with roaming, sightless eyes. It looked like someone had taken a truncheon to him—he was all blood and gashes—and his face was drawn in an expression of agony that went deeper than physical pain. And even as Rory's gut twisted in horror at the sight something else inside of him whispered,
Good
.

“Your brother has betrayed me,” Gunnar said. “But it is all to the purpose. He doesn't know it yet, but his struggle against his fate is what has brought him face-to-face with it. I see that now.” He turned to Rory. “As I see you. I understand you a little better, I think. You are a survivor. And that is as it should be. That is
your
destiny.”

Rory wanted more than survival. But he was smart enough not to say so. And Top Gunn did have a point. Survival was a pretty intrinsic step to achieving what he wanted. And that was . . . well, everything. The goods, the glory, the girls . . . He wanted the Heather Palmerstons of the world to worship him and the Calum Aristarchoses to bring him drinks and grovel abjectly for mercy when they were too slow—mercy that Rory would be typically reluctant to grant. Of course, he realized he was, essentially, reveling in the potential of megalomania. Whatever. For some reason, pretty much everyone he'd ever known had pegged Rory as a bad seed from the time he was a little kid. Who was he to defy expectations?

“You know why we do this. You understand this drive toward oblivion.” Gunnar gazed at him with that unblinking half stare that Rory could feel penetrating to the back of his
skull. “You know there must be an end so there can be a new beginning. We do this out of love, Rory. Love for this world and the desire to make it whole again in the face of all that humankind has wrought upon the most precious creation in the universe.”

Love?
Rory thought. He didn't even have to struggle to school his expression in the face of his father's ridiculous sentimentality. It was
so
laughable that he almost felt sorry for the old man. Still, he had to be careful. If he was going to survive what was to come, he was going to need Gunnar. Right up until the moment he met his destiny. Which, if Rory understood correctly, was to fulfill the great god Odin's role and be slaughtered in battle by—if what his father had said was true—Mason's new boyfriend.