Transcendent (5 page)

“I didn't mean to.”

“Yes you did, Cal.”

“Okay. Yeah.” Cal shook his head and huffed in frustration. “I did. I thought he was going to hurt Mason.”

“So you . . . manifested, conjured, what
ever
you did and however you did it . . . you made the biggest, sharpest pitchfork I've ever seen—out of
water
, with your
mind
—and then you stabbed Fennrys
through the heart
with it. That's not stopping someone. That's ending someone.”

Inside the Weather Room, another piteous howl shivered in the air like a warning siren. Cal wondered if Mason realized now, for
real
, who was the monster and who was the man. The scars on his face tingled and he winced. Heather was still staring at him. He couldn't tell if it was with pity or hate.

I don't care. It doesn't matter. I don't need her
.

He had everything he needed in the next room. In Mason. And once she realized that—and that she and Fennrys could never be together now—she'd come to him. Standing between Cal and the doorway to that potential future, Heather smiled sadly, as if she'd read his thoughts.

“Never gonna happen, sweetie,” she said. “Frankly, I'll be surprised if she doesn't put that spear she has right through your chest when she gets back. Just to show you what it felt like when you did the same thing to the guy she loves.”

Cal winced. “Jeezus, Heather. You really can be a bitch sometimes. You know that?”

“And you can be so blind.” She shook her head. “I really hate to say this, Cal, but I think maybe there's a whole lot more of your mother in you than you'd care to believe.”

“Shut your mouth—”

“Open your eyes!” Heather almost shouted at him.

She took a deep breath and closed her own eyes for a moment. When she looked at him again, he was shocked by just how much love for him he could still see, filling her gaze. It didn't make any sense, but he was starting to figure out that “sense” and “love” had very little to do with each other in his world. A wave of bitterness at the absolute, utter unfairness of his situation crashed over him.

“What's
happened
to you, Aristarchos?” Heather asked, a note of pleading in her voice. “Really. I'm trying to understand.”

“I don't know how you could,” Cal said. “We're not the same. We never have been.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

He shrugged. “Maybe that's why I couldn't ever really love you, Heather. It's not your fault. You're only human.”

He hadn't really meant to say it like that. Like an insult. But that's how it sounded—even to his own ears—and from the look on Heather's face, he knew that's how it had sounded to her, too. She blinked and took a step back from him and her gaze became suddenly shuttered. Instead of crying or yelling or even looking at him with hurt in her eyes, Heather Palmerston just laughed at him.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess I am. Thank god—or
gods
, I guess—for small favors.” Then she turned and walked past him through the door, tossing her hair over her proudly squared shoulders and leaving Cal standing there feeling like
he
was the lesser being.

“F
ennrys?”

No. No no no . . . not Fennrys
.

Not this. This wasn't him.

This is not . . . I am not . . .

“Fenn?”

The pain was excruciating. A bonfire lit from within. He could feel the thready fibers of every single muscle in his body searing as if flooded with a virulent toxin. His blood wasn't blood; it was flame. It burned him as it coursed through his veins. The were-transformation had triggered something, awoken something deep inside him, and Fennrys didn't know what it was. All he knew was that it was hungry.

The great holes torn in his chest by Calum's trident throbbed with distant, detached hurt, already healing, flesh and lung and heart all knitting themselves back together. But the deep bite wounds on the sides of his throat were like constellations of agony—each puncture a miniature starburst of searing pain—and he could feel the strange, dark, transformative magick of the ancient Death god's bite flowing outward from those points. Taking him. Stripping him of his humanity. Struggling against his other nature. But what that other nature was, Fennrys himself didn't even fully comprehend in that moment. He was dead—had died—and he could feel those shades and shadows starkly now with a wolf's heightened senses wrapping around him like the heavy, gold-furred pelt he now wore as his skin. And he feared that his previous death had somehow warped Anubis's were-curse. Tainted it and twisted it, shaping it in a way that it was never meant to be shaped.

He could smell the fear clinging to the other members of Rafe's pack. It was intoxicating. It fueled his hunger and he lunged, longing to tear the fear from them with his teeth and swallow it in great raw chunks. But the slender silver chain Maddox had looped around his throat kept him from doing that. The silver burned like acid. In spite of the pain he still struggled, thrashing and scrabbling with long claws at the stone floor, and the sweat that dripped from Maddox's brow onto Fennrys's muzzle as the Janus Guard fought to keep him leashed would, he thought, taste so much better if it was blood.

No. No no no . . . not my thoughts
.

Maddox was his friend. The pack was there to help.

He was not a killer.

Yes you are
.

And so much more than that.

In the back of his throat, Fennrys could suddenly taste . . .
the sea?
Salt spray, ocean tang. Cold and ice-fog sharp. Beneath him, he could feel waves rolling, as if he lay on the deck of a ship. He could hear the snapping of sails in the frigid north wind. He could taste it in his mouth, and deeper than that—in his heart.

Like a memory
.

Or a premonition.

What in all the hells in all the worlds is happening to me?
he wondered. And the answer came back to him:
You're becoming the monster you always knew you were
.

Yes, he was. A monster. A beast. And now he was—could
be—a faster, stronger, thousand-times-more-dangerous one. A brutal, four-legged weapon. Mindless bloodlust fogged his mind with gray and black and red. His flanks heaved, shoveling breath in and out of his lungs like a forge bellows, hot air surging through his quivering nostrils. He felt the human heart that was still beating in his chest—the one that Ammit the Soul Eater had, in her blindness, decided to let him keep—swell and transform, its shape, and its purpose, altered.

“Fennrys?”

That voice again. His heart lurched, twisted. Changed back . . . remembered its
real
purpose. Remembered the things it had been filled with before the trident had pierced it. Before the love that had filled it had flowed out onto the ground in a pool of his blood. Before the white feather had turned red.

He remembered.

And his body began shifting in the other direction.

Smells dulled, sights dimmed.

Hands. Not paws. Not claws . . .

His wolf's eyes looked down and saw the flesh of his arms rippling beneath his fair human skin. His wolf's voice cried out against it. So close. The chains of his frail, mortal, human shell were stretched to breaking. Waves of yearning slammed through his mind like the pounding of a riptide.

So close.

To what?

The sensations were slipping away. The prize, the goal . . .

What goal?

. . . it had been there. In his grasp. Within reach of his snapping teeth.

I don't understand
.

“Fenn.” That voice. “It's me. It's Mason.”

Wolf-song choked into an aching sob, deep in his throat. And Fennrys collapsed back into a golden-furred heap on the cold marble floor.

“I'm here . . .”

He wondered if he should be comforted by that. He was weak. Wounded.

Vulnerable
.

“You're going to be fine. You'll be okay.”

Anything but, really . . .

And
that
, he realized, was his new reality. Because of her.

“Stop!” Mason shouted at Maddox as he hauled on a chain, struggling to keep a massive, golden-furred wolf under control. “Stop it! You're hurting him!”

She squeezed past the milling dark shapes of the other lupines, ignoring the snapping jaws, and shouldered her way past Rafe. He reached out and grabbed her by the arm, yanking her back as the beast suddenly lunged for Mason, howling and snarling, teeth like long, white knives dripping saliva. There was a profound, savage hurt burning in the creature's eyes. Pain and madness and a self-awareness that no animal should possess. Mason drew back in confusion. She turned to look up into the face of the ancient Egyptian werewolf god.

“What's wrong with him?” she asked.

“You are joking, right?” Rafe said in a voice tight with anger.

“No!”

Mason twisted out of his grip and looked back at the Fennrys Wolf where he hunched in the corner, muscles coiled and ready to spring if she came within reach again. She read in the beast's eyes then that, given a chance, it would rip her throat out. Maddox tightened his grip on the chain, but his eyes were focused on her.

“Why is he like that?” Mason asked Rafe. “
You're
not like that! They aren't. . . .”

She gestured to the other wolves, who moved with almost one mind, constantly shifting and flanking the yellow wolf, keeping it at bay and surrounded. The air around Fennrys rippled with enchantment and it was as if, for a moment, she was seeing double. The wolf and the man occupying the same space at the same time. Then there was another rippling and the wolf was alone again, howling and writhing.

“It's different every time,” Rafe said quietly. “Although . . . it's never quite like this.”

Mason knew that he was angry with her. She could hear it in his voice.

She didn't care. She had forced Rafe to turn Fennrys into a creature like the rest of his pack. A werewolf. A monster. But
alive
. Strong. Strong enough to heal from the terrible, mortal wounds that Cal had inflicted with—of all things—a trident.

“Damn near unkillable” was how the ancient Egyptian god of the dead had once described his pack to Mason. And she
had remembered those words when Fennrys had been damn near dead. She'd done what she'd done because Fenn had needed her to do it.

No
.

That wasn't what Fenn had needed
, a voice in her head corrected her.

That was what
you
needed
.

Mason flinched at the flat accusatory tone of her own conscience. But she couldn't deny that what that voice in her head said was true. Fennrys? He'd been okay. She'd seen it in his eyes as he gazed up into her face. She'd seen there in that moment the peace that had been missing ever since she had first met him. The contentment. The willingness to let it all go and move on, finally. At last.

He'd looked at her with love and she . . .
she
hadn't been able to do it.

She hadn't been able to let him go.

His dying heart, his fading spirit, the strange, lovely smile that framed what would have been his last breath . . . those weren't things she was prepared to live without.

Suddenly, there was another twisting of the air all around him and Fennrys was Fennrys again—human and furious and fighting mad—and then, just as suddenly, he was a wolf. His shape was morphing and fluid and he looked almost as though he was trapped at the heart of a thundercloud. The air in the room where it touched him roiled and twisted with dark energy.

“What's happening?” Mason asked Rafe.

“He's fighting it.”

“Can he
do
that?”

“I've never seen anyone who has.” The ancient god frowned deeply. “Not like this. I just made that boy the next nearest thing to a demigod and I don't want to blow my own horn, but what I did—what
you
asked me to do—is serious magick. It's not the kind of thing you sort of shrug off.”

Fennrys heaved his shoulders in what looked, indeed, like a furious shrug and the shadows on the wall behind him rippled out like smoke. The chain rattled and the muscles under Fenn's T-shirt and jeans—which kept disappearing and reappearing, mirage-like—bunched and stretched taut.

“You know,” Rafe said. “Like
that
.”

“He's not taking this lying down!” Maddox shouted as Fennrys lunged again, almost tearing the silver chain from the Janus Guard's hands. “Can't we hit him on the head or something?”

“With what?” Rafe snapped, shoving Mason back out of the way as Fennrys lunged for her. “Another werewolf? That's the only thing that might hurt him, but I don't think that's gonna help.”

“Can't you get in there and do something?” Mason asked frantically. “Aren't you, like, the alpha of the pack or whatever?”

“Yeah—I
tried
that! All I did was make things worse. Look at him.” Rafe waved his hand at the great golden beast. “It doesn't get any more alpha than
that
, and right now? I'm probably his second-least favorite person around.”

Mason glanced back at the werewolf god, wondering exactly what he'd meant by that.
Second
-least favorite? Fennrys shifted again and started yelling in his human voice—a litany of swear words that impressed even Toby, from the look on his face—and then, with another shift, the Wolf was back.

Somebody had to do
something
. . .

Mason shouldered past Rafe and knelt on the floor just past the reach of the chained wolf's snapping jaws. “Fennrys?” she called softly.

The great, golden-furred wolf's ears flicked toward her. His nose lifted in her direction, quivering, and he bared his teeth. The marble floor vibrated with the sound of his deep growl.