Transcendent (30 page)

“It's all a little hard to wrap my head around,” Mason said.

Sigyn nodded. “I imagine it is, yes. Yelena and I talked and she told me of the prophecy the Norns had given your father. She told me that she had denied her foretold fate and willed you to be born a daughter, and not a son. That's when I knew that Yelena had power of her own. And I took her to Loki, who granted her even more. Together, we vowed that we would one day set things right for our children if we could.”

“Why didn't Loki give
you
the original Hel's power?”

“I had been a shade for too long by then.” Sigyn shrugged. “Yelena still had the echo of her humanity about her. And she had
willed
you to be born a girl. She had strength enough to withstand the bestowing. And she made a fine goddess.”

Mason smiled at her mother where she sat, talking to Rafe. Pride for the woman who went through so much so that she could give Mason a chance to beat the prophesied odds. She vowed not to let her down. The only thing was, she didn't know how to make that happen.

“How are we going to win this?” Mason asked, and even she could hear the hint of desperation in her voice. “Everything we do seems to bring the inevitable closer. Now we've raised the Ship of Souls. Just another piece on the Ragnarok chessboard. Isn't this what my father wants?”

“He wants the game to go his way, yes. But in order to play by your own rules, you still have to put all the pieces on the board. How you move them is up to you.” Sigyn reached out to lay a hand on Mason's shoulder. Then, without another word, she rose and moved to speak with the gray shape piloting the ship.

Mason watched her go and then turned her attention to the scenery passing swiftly by. She didn't know where they were going, and she didn't know what they would find when they got there. But it suddenly occurred to her that maybe she should find out. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out Rory's pilfered phone.

The boat was gathering speed as the river widened perceptibly in front of them, when Fennrys heard Mason utter a dismayed groan. He glanced over and, telling Toby he'd be right back, stepped over the rowers' benches to get to the back of the boat.

“What's the matter?” he asked.

Mason was holding a phone in her hand and with a look of weary resignation, she showed him the image on the glowing screen.

“What am I looking at?” he asked, staring down at the blue line snaking in a twisty squiggle across a field of variegated green and brown and gray. “Besides a map, I mean. I know it's a map.”

“Do you see that?” She pointed to the place where the blue line thickened and spread out into a narrow wedge, flowing into a wider blue expanse that was dotted with a couple of
green splotches and crisscrossed with a few straight lines.

“I'm going to assume that this is the river we're on”—Fennrys tapped the same place Mason had pointed to—“and this is where it ends?”

“Yup.”

“And that is?”

“The East River.”

Fennrys frowned and overlaid the image with what he knew of New York in his mind. Suddenly he understood Mason's reaction. “Ah,” he said. “And
that
little dot, right there, would be North Brother Island. Yeah?”

“Yup.”

“And
that
line . . . the one near the bottom of the screen . . . would be the Hell Gate Bridge?”

“Oh yeah.” Mason nodded.

“So I fought the sea monster
there
. . . and Cal's Nereids attacked us
there
.”

“Right.” She smiled at him with mock enthusiasm. “Lucky us! We're heading straight back into the heart of New York City's very own supernatural Bermuda Triangle.”

“Of course we are,” Toby said, stepping over a bench to join them.

Fennrys saw that the fencing coach was moving stiffly, as if his joints pained him. Mason reached out a hand to help steady him as he teetered a bit and sat down heavily, and Toby batted it away irritably. Then he snorted and said, “Sorry, Mase. I'm fine. Just . . . I don't have my sea legs yet.”

Fenn exchanged a fleeting glance with the old warrior and saw in his eyes that it wasn't just that. But Toby was stubborn and he was proud and he certainly wasn't about to admit that he was in anything less than fighting trim. Not on the cusp of what might well prove to be the biggest battle he'd ever had to fight in all his long life. Fennrys had respected Toby from the moment he'd met him, protecting his students in the Gosforth gym from an onslaught of monsters. But his admiration for him doubled in that moment.

Mason pretty clearly felt the same way. She left Toby's diminished state unremarked upon and turned back to the phone, tapping on the screen again. “I'm texting Heather,” she said. “I just asked her where she is.”

After a few moments, the phone buzzed and she turned the phone around to show them Heather's reply.

On Cal's DAD's boat. SO weird
.

East River
.

Me, Cal, Beeotch Face, and ur bro
.

The hot non-psycho one
.

“I guess they left the school after we did,” Toby said. “They must have hooked back up with Douglas Muir somehow.”

“I guess,” Mason agreed, her eyes still scanning the text message. “There's more . . .”

Just off Wards Island I think??

Going there to sow dragons teeth. Yah.

Daria's idea. I'm all WTF??

Where r U??

“Dragon's teeth?” Mason asked.

“Well, at least Daria's not about to break her perfect track record of invoking insanely dangerous curses,” Toby enthused with brittle cheerfulness. “Because that would be a bummer.”

“Seriously.
Dragon's
teeth?” Mason asked. “Real ones?”

Because, at this point in her life, that would in no way be surprising.

While she waited for Toby to answer, she texted:

Close. Also on boat
.

Heading same direction
.

B there soon. Stay SAFE
.

There was no immediate answer back, so she turned again to Toby.

He sighed wearily. “In the Greek myth of the origins of the warriors of Sparta, they were said to have sprung from the teeth of a great serpent—a dragon—sown in the earth like seeds.”

“Daria's gathering an army,” Fennrys said. “Or . . .
growing
one.”

“It would seem so.” Toby nodded.

“But why?” Mason asked. “There's no one for them to fight.”

“Yet.” Fennrys's brow was creased in a frown.

And there won't be
, Mason reassured herself adamantly.
There will be no choosing. Therefore, no third Odin son. Therefore, no one to lead the Einherjar out of Asgard
.

She had to find her father and tell him that. In the strongest possible terms. She was the chooser of the slain and
this
was her choice.

I will
. Not.
Choose
.

He couldn't make her.

Apocalypse averted. End of story
.

Driven by the Otherworldly winds,
Naglfar
was approaching the place where the Bronx River widened and spilled out into the East River. At Yelena's command, the ghost sailors of
Naglfar
steered the ship to the west, rounding a point of land and skirting north of Rikers Island penitentiary. The ship sailed silently giving them a clear view to North Brother Island on the right, South Brother Island on the left, and the head of the Hell Gate Strait, dead ahead. In between the three points of land, Mason noticed that the water, black glass on the surface, looked almost as though it was boiling deep down, shot through with twisting currents and glowing, acid-green streaks of wild magick.

In the distance to the west, the sky over Manhattan was dark and angry, lit from below with a dull orangey-red glow from the many fires—Central Park included—that burned throughout the city. It was also full of helicopters, made tiny by the distance, like a cloud of gnats, hovering over the tops of skyscrapers. Even from this far, they could hear the thumping
of rotor blades and the wail of sirens. With the dissipation of the fog wall, the military had flooded back into the city.

In sharp contrast to all that frenzied activity, the hump of land directly in front of them—the northernmost end of Wards/Randalls Island—had a silent, deserted feeling. Directly in front of
Naglfar
, a large expanse of ground had been turned into a multitude of baseball diamonds arranged like scattered four-leaf clovers: nothing but flat, unimpeded grass fields and sand that stretched out for acres. Perfect staging grounds for friendly sports contests . . . or unfriendly battle.

The eerie desolation was only heightened by the spirit-white shape of Douglas Muir's boat, moored at a jetty just south of the fields, sails furled and silent. And beyond that, the stark skeleton of the Hell Gate ruin.
Naglfar
, with its shallow-draft keel designed to sail up rivers and beach on shores, needed no place to moor. The ghost sailors just hauled on the oars until the dragon prow scraped up the pebbled strip of beach on the eastern point of Randalls and came to a stop, half out of the water.

For a moment, everything was silent.

Time stopped, balanced on the edge of a blade.

Mason held her breath and knew that, somewhere on that island, her father did the same.

“Y
ou should stay here,” Cal had said to Heather as Roth leaped over the side of the yacht to secure the moorings. He didn't wait for Heather's answer but just followed Roth onto the concrete dock and held out his hand to help his mother ashore.

Heather didn't even have it in her to put up a fight. Not anymore.

She had a terrible feeling about the whole endeavor. Daria had promised that the Dragon Warriors were a last resort—simply a safeguard line of defense in case things went horribly south—and until such time, the bag full of teeth she
was toting around would remain firmly sealed. Of course, Daria was also the only one of them who had any kind of foreknowledge of just what they might have to face.

Heather had asked Roth if Gwen had ever given
him
any kind of insight into how this night might play out, and he said she hadn't. She believed him, if only because of the fleeting shadow of dull hurt in his eyes when he'd told her—as if he'd felt somehow betrayed by Gwen for that—and she didn't press him. Roth was one big walking open wound and Heather could feel the cut threads of his love bond with the dead girl, like strings of barbed wire waving in an ugly wind.

Love
, she thought.
Sucks
.

As Roth and Cal set off with Daria on their reconnaissance, Heather leaned on the railing and watched them go. She hadn't even realized that she'd reached into her purse and pulled out the miniature crossbow she'd been carrying until she looked down and saw that she held it in her hands. She toyed with the weird little weapon and was suddenly glad that Cal wasn't there to see the blush of shame creeping up her cheeks.

She could do it. With the leaden bolt tucked in her purse, she could twist his feelings for Mason Starling in the exact opposite direction. She could make him un-love Mason. But at what price?

“That one hurts like every hell there is,”
Valen had said on the train when he'd given her the crossbow.

It was funny but, there had been a moment, driving
through the chaotic streets of Manhattan in Cal's Maserati, when Heather had thought—for a fleeting instant—that she'd seen the heartbreaker god, perched on an overturned street vendor cart, eating an ice-cream cone. She'd recognized the dark sunglasses and the carelessly super-sexy attitude. But when she did a double take, there was no one even near the wrecked cart and Heather chalked it up to imagination.

Only . . . she thought she might have seen others, too.

People that didn't look quite like
people
. Like the way you could spot tourists in the middle of a crowd, the beings Heather had glimpsed in the darkened, storm-drenched city under supernatural siege had given off different vibes than the plain vanilla mortals.

That's what the city is going to be like
, she thought.
If it survives, it'll be full of gods and monsters, hidden in plain sight
.

Fantastical, equivocal, dangerous . . .

Better than the alternative
.

At least there would still be a world.

Even if it's a world full of weirdos
.

Weirdos like Cal. Her Greek god ex-boyfriend. She almost envied Roth—at least he'd
known
that Gwen had loved him as much as he'd loved her—and she almost hated Mason. Except that wasn't fair. Starling hadn't asked for Cal's insane, undying love. It wasn't like she'd set out to intentionally steal Cal's heart away, either. And Heather knew that Mason would never abuse that affection.

I mean, she just wouldn't
, Heather thought.
Mason's not
that kind of girl. But what if—

Her train of thought was interrupted by Douglas Muir, politely clearing his throat from right behind her. Startled, Heather spun around and fumbled the crossbow, almost dropping it. Douglas's hand shot out and he grabbed the thing before it disappeared over the side of the boat. He opened his fingers and gazed down at the elegantly ornamented little weapon. Then his eyes flicked up at Heather.

“Now, what's a nice young girl like you doing playing with a nasty old thing like this?” he asked. His tone was gentle, but there was a sharpness beneath the words.

“I thought it might come in handy.” Heather shrugged nonchalantly and snatched the bow back, shoving it into the depths of her bag. She hoped Cal's father couldn't tell from her face just how she'd thought it might come in handy.

Especially the golden arrow . . .