Transcendent (26 page)

“No, you're not,” she whispered back. “I know where to find you. I'll always know.”

After a moment, he pulled away from her again. This time, she let him.

“She'll be back soon,” he said, glancing in the direction his mother had gone. “I'll have to go with her.”

“I know. And I'm coming with you.”

“Heather—”

“You gonna argue with me, Aristarchos?”

“Will I win?”

“No.”

“Then . . . no.”

Cal's Maserati was a thing of sleek, sublime automotive beauty. Painted a dark shade of metallic blue, it sported the venerable company's logo on the front grill that, up until that very moment, Heather had never even noticed.

A three-pronged spear. A trident.

“Coincidence?” she murmured to Roth gesturing to the symbol as they circled around the back end of the car.

He glanced at Cal's mother, settling herself in the front passenger seat, and then raised an eyebrow at Heather.

“Yeah . . . ,” she said. “Probably not so much.”

As they drove through the city, they noticed increased movement. Activity. People were beginning to wake up. Clambering to their feet, wailing in panic or weeping silently. Some just sitting on the sidewalk, others shambling like zombies. Everyone wondering what in the world had happened.

Cal slowed down to steer around a yellow cab that was on its side in the middle of the intersection at Lexington and East Ninety-Eighth. Under normal circumstances—and Heather almost laughed out loud as she framed the thought . . .
Normal? Seriously?
—Cal probably would have cut across the park at Ninety-Sixth. But on the way to the car, he'd told Heather about what had happened on the way up to Gosforth, when she'd been unconscious. And, yeah. She heartily agreed that, if there was a chance that any draugr were left alive in Central Park, it was best to avoid that—like the plague—in their quest to get to the East River.

With that supremely irritating arrogance she had, Daria had told them where they had to go—Wards Island—but not exactly why. Heather wondered how much of her information was guesswork, and how much Gwen had told her of what would come to pass over the years. She felt a stab of anguish at the thought of the purple-haired girl's slight body plummeting into nothingness. When she'd first come to find Heather in her dorm room, Gwen had told her she'd
seen
the place Daria had taken Roth—what had turned out to be the top of Rockefeller Center—but that she didn't know it. All Gwen knew was that, in her vision, she'd felt as though she would “fall into the sky.”

And she had.

Because Heather had told her what that place was, and taken her there.

I am not going to think like that. Gwen's death was not my fault
.

No. It wasn't. It was Daria's
.

“I'm assuming you've recently become reacquainted with your father,” Daria was saying to Cal, her voice tight and icy, like a frost-coated piano wire.

“Why would you assume that?” Cal asked.

She laughed bitterly. “Because the last time you and I had dinner together, your salad fork wasn't made of water.”

“He didn't show me how to do that, you know,” Cal said defensively. “I figured it out on my own.”

“Once he told you what you are. I knew it.” Daria sighed, and it was a genuinely weary sound. “I knew one day he would come back to try and take you away from me—”

“He saved my life! And he didn't try to take me away from you.” Cal's hands tightened on the steering wheel in frustration. “In fact,
he
was the one who told me go to back into the city to find you. Mom . . . I just don't get it. He doesn't seem like such a monster—”

“That's
exactly
what he is, darling. A very charming monster.”

“What does that make me?”

“The monster's victim. As I was.”

“You really hate him that much?”

“Cal, don't pretend you know anything about such things at your age,” Daria hissed. “You don't know what hate is. It's less than a hair's-breadth away from love, and I don't expect you to truly know what
that
is either.”

Heather wondered what Roth, sitting silent and hollow-eyed beside her in the backseat, must have felt about that
sentiment. She glanced worriedly at him. With the emotional and psychic trauma he'd experienced, compounded by the physical trauma of the ax wound to his shoulder, Heather suspected it might have been better if they'd just left him at Gosforth. Not that she considered it even a remote possibility that Roth would have agreed to that. Still, he looked like he was close to the point of collapse.

“Well, monster or not, Mom,” Cal was saying, “I suggest you slip into charming mode yourself. Because the only way we're going to get to where we have to go, is if Dad helps us out.”

“What—”

“I called him before we left Gosforth,” Cal said. “He'll be waiting for us at the East Ninetieth Street ferry docks with his yacht.”

His mother's knuckles went bone white as her hands clenched in her lap around a silk drawstring bag that looked yellow and brittle with age. She spat a string of words under her breath that sounded as though they may have been in Greek. They also sounded pretty impolite. Heather decided in that moment she would be very nice to Douglas Muir when she met him. Anyone who'd stomached being married to that gorgon long enough for Cal to have been born was some kind of saint or bloody-minded masochist. Either way, he deserved a healthy dose of sympathy.

“Why aren't we just using the foot bridge at 102nd Street to get to the island?” she asked. “What do we need a boat for?”

“Because the footbridge will almost certainly be under
guard,” Roth said quietly. “Or the authorities will have raised the drawbridge middle section. The police and military are probably going mental wondering what the hell's going on behind the fog wall. And even though they can't get
in
to Manhattan, it's a pretty sure bet they don't want anything getting
out
.”

“Exactly,” Cal said. “Because of that, we're going to have to time our own escape from the city carefully. Dad told me he's using a few tricks he has up his sleeve to keep the yacht itself hidden from any Coast Guard or NYPD patrol boats prowling the East River. But we're still going to have to get onboard unseen. I don't quite have that worked out just yet.”

Cal pulled over as close to the ferry docks as he could without actually driving into the mist barrier and cut the engine. The Maserati was stopped in the middle of the road, but so was every other car, and Cal really didn't seem to care. They got out and clambered over a low section of a traffic barrier, heading toward where the fog edge stood between them and the water. Heather could see the docks. And she could hear the waves lapping against what sounded like the hull of a boat, but she couldn't see it.

All they had to do now was wait for the right moment when the Miasma wall fell, and make a run for it to get onboard. It already looked as though it was thinning in places, and Heather could hear voices drifting toward them from boats on the water. The authorities seemed to notice the change too, judging from the way they called out to one another.

The risk of being seen—and stopped—was huge.

“Wait.” Heather dug into her pocket and found the second runegold acorn Mason had given her. “Roth?” she said. “Can you use this somehow to help us?”

He frowned down at the little golden orb in her hand. “Where do you keep getting these from?” he asked, bemused.

“The acorn fairy,” Heather said.

“Right.” He plucked the thing from her hand and, after a moment's thought, grinned a bit. He carved a mark onto the gleaming surface with the point of his knife blade that looked a bit like an hourglass turned on its side. “This is the twilight rune. You can use it to cast an obscuring pall—kind of like a Faerie glamour—that should grant you a sort of temporary invisibility.”

“Cool.” Heather nodded. “What about the rest of you?”

“Well.” He glanced at Cal's mother and his grin twisted into a grimace. “I guess we'll just have to cozy up to you, hold hands, and hope for the best.”

Daria returned his gaze with a stony glare. Then she turned, her eyes half-closed and one hand stretched out in front of her. Heather figured she would be able to feel when the enchantment had dissipated enough to allow them to safely make a run for it. It was, after all, her stupid evil spell . . .

“Now.”

Daria reached down and took Heather's wrist—the one above the hand that held the runegold acorn in a tight fist—with fingers that were as strong as iron bands and surged forward, dragging Heather along. She barely had time to reach out and grab Roth as Cal put out a hand, grasping
for her invisible shoulder, and together they walked hastily, as silently as possible, through the ferry dock gates that swung eerily open, past random people who'd been caught in the Miasma barrier when the curse manifested, all of them writhing like goldfish out of water, wide-eyed and gasping with the horrors they experienced in the nightmare fog wall.

Heather swallowed the acidy taste of fear that rose in her throat at the sight of the afflicted New Yorkers and kept moving toward the end of the pier, where a shimmery distortion in the air and water wavered like a mirage.

“Watch your step,” came a low, deep voice from somewhere right ahead of them, just out over the water. “No, Daria—the gangplank's half a foot to the left. Careful now . . .”

In a linked chain like invisible schoolchildren, they trod the invisible ramp up onto the invisible luxury yacht of a semi-god. The sleek contours of the gleaming white craft faded into view as Heather clambered onboard and found herself standing on the smooth surface of a polished teak deck. She pocketed the acorn, now that the veil obscuring the yacht itself—and its occupants—kept them from the sight of any river patrols.

In front of Heather, Daria took a halting step toward a handsome man—like an older version of Cal—who was sitting in a wheelchair waiting for them.

“Douglas . . . ?” Daria's voice caught in her throat.

For a moment, Heather thought Cal's mom might actually faint. She could see the blood rushing from Daria's face, her
pupils dilating as she looked down at her ex-husband, who smiled back benignly. Heather suspected he was enjoying his wife's distress, and she glanced at Cal, knowing full well from the expression on his face that he'd purposefully neglected to mention the whole wheelchair thing to his mom.

Daria swallowed noisily, struggling for composure. “What—”

“Fishing accident.”

Heather blinked at Douglas Muir, startled by that. “But . . . you're a god,” she said. “Aren't you?”

“Semi-god, really. We're not quite as ‘bulletproof' as the full-blooded Olympians.” He winked at her. “We're susceptible to injury under extreme circumstances. Especially if the wound is something inflicted by another . . . supernatural agent, shall we say.”

From the corner of her eye, Heather saw Cal's hand flick up toward the scars on his face as Douglas rolled the chair forward and reached out a hand.

“You must be Heather,” he said. “Welcome aboard.”

“Uh. Thanks.” She took his offered hand. It was warm and strong.

“And Rothgar.” The two shook hands. “You look like your old man. Happy to know you don't think like him.”

“Thank you,” Roth said dryly. “Me too.”

“Who did that to you?” Daria asked, her gaze still fastened on Douglas's blanket-covered legs.

“Perses,” he answered.

Daria made an angry noise. “Damn you, Douglas—”

“He's a
non
-semi-god,” he explained to Heather, ignoring his ex-wife's outburst. “A very old, very grumpy Titan who thought he could alleviate his centuries of boredom by terrorizing the inhabitants of the smaller islands in a Mediterranean archipelago. He won't be doing that anymore.” Douglas shrugged his broad shoulders, as if he was describing a successful pest-control job. “Unfortunately, he got a couple of good shots in before the end. In the water, I'm the same as ever. On land, I just need a set of wheels. I thought it was a fair trade. I think the fishing village Perses had already eaten half of did too.”

“This.” Daria's face twisted into a disdainful sneer. “
This
kind of thing is why I left you.”

Douglas pegged her with a sharp stare, a spark of anger glittering in his sea-green eyes. “You didn't leave me, Daria. You had me surgically extracted from your life. And Cal's.” His hands tightened on the arm of his chair and Heather noticed that there were very fine membranes webbing the spaces between his fingers. They didn't go far—not more than half-way up to the first knuckle and she doubted she would have even noticed them if she hadn't known who—what—he was. “I had to find something worthwhile to do with my spare time while I was busy
not
raising my son.”

“I kept him from you because I didn't want him to end up like you.”

“What? Free?” Douglas snapped angrily. “You'd rather he
spent his existence as a servant of gods rather than as a god himself.”

“I'd rather he spent his existence as a human. Not as some kind of freakish hybrid.”

“Hey!” Cal rolled his eyes. “I'm right
here
?”

Daria waved off his protest, as usual. “It's not your fault, Calum.”

“She's right. It's mine.” There was hurt and hardness in Cal's dad's eyes as he looked at his ex-wife. “Silly me, I thought a little thing like love was more important than some stray, sparkly bits of DNA.”

“You can make light of it all you want,” Daria snapped. “It's that kind of thinking that has brought us to this point. Ask Yelena—oh, wait, no . . . you can't, because she's
dead
. All because Gunnar Starling wanted to dress up and play Odin. Mortals are not gods and they should stop acting like them.” There were angry tears shining in her eyes.