Transcendent (8 page)

The thing that had slammed out of the sky was so hideous that her brain found it difficult to put into words. A tornado of black, oily-feathered wings, with wildly tangled hair and
gnarled feet ending in talons, the creature uttered an ear-splitting screech as it clutched at the empty space where Mason had been standing only a moment before.

Madly flapping its wings, the monstrous thing launched itself into the air again, generating gusts of rancid air. Mason and the others choked on the stench, reeling back. Roth threw an arm over his face and Cal retched violently. The creature landed on the statue of Prometheus, and perched there on the golden ball of fire in the statue's hand like an overgrown mutant vulture. It glared down at Mason and her companions, black bloodshot eyes staring out of the face of an old woman, only twisted and stretched over bones too sharply angled with a protruding nose that was long and beaky. Mason saw that, beneath the huge, ratty wings, the creature's body was a horrifying hybrid of bird and human, with scrawny arms and legs that sprouted feathers in places. The thing's bony torso was covered in a tattered and filthy tunic that appeared to be stained with blood.

“Wow,” Mason heard Heather mutter nervously. “Midtown's starting to look like one big Halloween party.”

“Harpy,” Toby grunted.

“Thanks, Toby,” she said. “I never would have guessed . . .”

Mason put a hand on the hilt of her sword, loosening it in its sheath, but she didn't draw it. The thought of cloaking herself in her Valkyrie raiment again was terrifying to Mason. Even if, deep down, it was also just the tiniest bit thrilling.

“Dial it down, Starling.” Toby rolled a warning eye at her and then at Fennrys, who had begun to growl low in the back
of his throat. “Let's keep the ravens and wolves out of it for now, yeah? If you've gotta fight, fight human.”

“Right. Yeah.” She glanced at Fennrys. He nodded, and she took her hand off her weapon.

“Good,” Toby said and took a step forward, putting himself in between Mason and the Harpy. “Aello,” he greeted the creature, a note of wary politeness in his voice. “Long time no see.”

Again, Mason found herself blinking in surprise where Toby was concerned. She exchanged a glance with Heather and could see she was feeling the same way.

“Where?” Aello croaked at the fencing master in a voice like ground glass and thumbtacks. “Where is the broken soul? We claim her essence. The suicides are ours—mine and my sisters'.”

“Gwen
wasn't
a suicide.” Roth stepped forward, his voice cracking on the word. “She was a sacrifice.”

“Quibble, mortal,” Aello hawked and spat into the fountain pool beneath her. “We claim her.”

Roth's fists clenched, but Aello had already turned from him and was scanning the faces of the others standing there in a tense knot. Her rheumy gaze sharpened when she spotted Rafe.

“Ah.
You
. . . ,” Aello croaked at the ancient Egyptian god. Then she turned back to address Toby, her head tilting birdlike in Rafe's direction. “Did the death dog take away the broken soul? It is not his to claim. We will have it back.”

“If I'd been of a mind to claim her soul, vulture, there wouldn't be a damned thing on this Earth you could do to stop me,” Rafe snarled back. But then Mason saw him take a breath to calm himself. He rolled a shoulder and tugged the sleeve of his jacket straight. “But it just so happens that I didn't.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Not my fault somebody else in this town was more on the ball than you three pestilential feather dusters. That must sting, yeah? Losing out on claiming a powerhouse essence like that . . . I imagine that little haruspex would have kept you three fed and watered for an age or two.”

Mason remembered from her Gosforth myth classes that the Harpies were tormenters in the netherworld, feeding on the lost souls of those who'd taken their own lives. Which Gwen had
technically
done, even though she'd done it to break a curse and set Mason's brother—not to mention the entire city of Manhattan—free. But Mason also figured that the Greek mythological monstrosity crouched above her really didn't give a crap about the details. While Rafe held the creature's attention, Mason looked up to see two other winged figures hovering high in the night sky. She tugged on Toby's sleeve and pointed upward.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “I see 'em. Stay alert, kiddo—they move pretty fast.”

Mason nodded and shook out her shoulders, rolling her head from side to side like she would if she was getting ready for a competition bout. Toby shifted away from her then, stepping casually a few paces closer to the fountain's edge,
giving himself room to swing a knife if it came to that.

“Are you okay if we have to fight?” Fennrys whispered in her ear, suddenly standing beside her.

Mason hadn't noticed him move, hadn't even heard him, but suddenly he was there. His breath was warm on her neck and all she wanted to do in that moment was turn her head just enough so that she could kiss him.

Probably not the best time
, she thought, and nodded silently, not trusting herself to speak. Her hand dropped to her hip to rest on her sword hilt again, before she remembered that it wasn't her sword anymore. She wondered for a brief moment what would happen if she were to actually use the Odin spear as a weapon . . . and decided that it would probably be a really terrible idea.

Fennrys seemed to think so, too. He dropped his own hand lightly on top of hers, loosening her fingers. She looked up at him over her shoulder. He was pale and the muscles of his neck stood out, taut with tension. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow and his pupils were so large that the pale blue irises of his eyes looked like thin rings of ice surrounding bottomless black pools. She was close enough to count the stubble on his jaw and longed to run her fingers over the roughness of it.

Seriously
. Not
really the time, Mase
.

With his free hand, Fenn reached for his own long-bladed knife—the one he kept in a sheath strapped to his leg—and, wrapping his arm around her back, eased its hilt into Mason's
other palm. “Toby's right. And Rafe was right. Let's not play with our Asgard toys unless we absolutely have to. Okay?”

She nodded and let go of the sword hilt. “Okay.”

Good point. How many times
could
she haul out the Valkyrie before she became that permanently? And Fennrys? What about the monster she'd unleashed inside him? Okay, granted, their mutual visit to Fenn's Safe Harbor seemed to have taken the edge off the uncontrollable rage urges they'd both been experiencing, for the moment, but she wondered how long that would last. She was already starting to feel like she was spoiling for a fight and, if that was the case for her, how much worse would it be for Fenn, who saw fighting as his purpose in life? Especially now, with the added pressure of his lupine instincts? When did the instinct take over completely?

Her fingers closed convulsively around the hilt of the knife Fennrys had handed her, and then she made herself relax them into an easy, ready grip—the way Fenn had taught her to hold a blade—and smiled at him.

“That's my girl,” Fenn murmured with a grin. “Stay loose.”

His fingers squeezed hers briefly and he moved away from her again.

His girl . . .

She desperately hoped he still felt that way and wasn't just saying that.

Mason watched Fennrys move to take up a subtly protective stance in front of Heather, who gave him a look but didn't protest. The knuckles of her hand, clutching a little silver
sickle she'd taken from the Weather Room, were white with tension and she shifted nervously from foot to foot. Mason could totally sympathize. She remembered how she'd felt on that afternoon with Fennrys, at the Boat Basin Café, waiting for a boatload of draugr to attack.

Scared shitless
.

She vividly recalled the suddenly overcast day, thick fog on the Hudson River rolling in, bringing with it fire and steel and chaos. Monsters in boats, monsters in the water, monsters in the sky . . .

Wait a minute
.

Something twigged in the back of Mason's brain.

Right. Now I remember. . . .

The café. That's where she'd seen the Harpies before. Winged, shadowy shapes falling from the sky like meteorites during the chaos of that attack, they had swooped down from out of the roiling storm clouds and torn through the ranks of the undead Norse warriors, helping to even the odds.

“Wait!” Mason strode forward, ignoring Toby as he glanced sideways at her from under a raised eyebrow. She lifted her voice and spoke directly to the Harpy perched on the statue, thinking that maybe there was a way they could talk themselves out of this situation without having to resort to fighting. “You helped us once before—”

“Mason . . .” Rafe's voice held a note of warning.

Heeding that much at least, Mason stopped walking and spoke to the ancient Egyptian werewolf god over her shoulder without taking her eyes off the ancient Greek bird-woman
goddess in front of her. “They killed a bunch of draugr when Fennrys and I were attacked down at the Boat Basin,” she explained. “We might not have made it out of there alive if they hadn't.”

“Huh,” Toby grunted, unconsciously flipping the carbon-bladed knife he handled so expertly over and over in his hand, like a magician's prop. “So
that's
what happened. News reports were pretty confused about that whole thing.”

“Uh. Yeah.” Mason grimaced, remembering. “It was kind of chaos. Mostly screaming and running.
Any
way . . .” She turned back to the Harpy. “You must see that we're not your enemies, then, right? We really haven't stolen anything away from you. And you did help us—”

“
Help
you?” The Harpy threw her head back, shrieking with laughter that sounded like fingernails down a chalkboard. “Little Chooser, we did not help you. We will not help you. We merely understand that wherever
you
go, carrion is sure to follow.”

“What?” Mason backed off a step, startled.

“You fill our bellies nicely.” The creature smirked, oozing cruel sardonic amusement. “For
that
. . . we thank you in abundance!”

The Harpy smacked her thin lips. Suddenly Mason thought she might be physically ill. Was
that
what she was? A walking train wreck? A disaster waiting to happen, leaving a feast for Harpies in her wake?

“Stow it, Aello.” Toby snorted in disdain, pulling Mason out of her horrified mental tailspin. “Mason's not your meal
ticket and this isn't ancient Thrace. Stuff yourselves full of all the draugr you want. Hell, I think we even left a couple of centaur corpses a few blocks over—bon appétit—but heed me. You and your sisters don't get a free pass to belly up to the Manhattan mortal buffet. Not while I'm here to say otherwise.”

He glanced around at the rest of his companions and his eyes momentarily locked with Mason's. His gaze, she suddenly realized, was filled with what seemed like thousands of years of dealing with this kind of situation. She was struck by the fact that she'd never noticed that weight of experience there before. But then he winked at her and turned back to the Harpy.

“Not while
any
of us is,” he said.

“You're a consort of war, old man.” Aello's face twisted into a grotesque sneer. “And a hypocrite. You've spread banquets of human limbs and viscera on more battlefields than we have toes to count upon down through the ages. You're not one to talk.”

Mason stepped up beside him. “Toby . . . what does she mean?”

“Later, Mase.”

“But—”

“I said later,” the fencing master snapped.

His glance flicked back over to her for another brief instant, attention diverted for just long enough, and this time Aello was waiting for it. The Harpy was off her perch and almost on top of them in a flash. The mistake she made, though, was in
going for the one member of their group who appeared to be the most vulnerable. Heather. Only the Harpy found herself brought up short in the most painful way as she slammed unexpectedly up against an invisible barrier almost a foot away from her intended target. As Heather screamed and covered her head, a flash of golden light bloomed out in front of her like ripples on the surface of a lake and the Harpy was thrown back through the air. The look of surprise on Heather's face was almost comical as the other two Harpies circling high overhead suddenly folded in their wings and dropped like stones out of the sky.

Toby spun and whipped his dagger at Aello, but she'd already launched herself higher into the air. The beating of her huge wings slammed rancid gusts of wind at them. Mason staggered back and swept her arm in front of her, slashing with the blade Fennrys had given her. It was a wild move—unplanned and instinctive—but she felt the edge of the blade bite flesh as one of the Harpies dove at her. Mason heard the creature's outraged cry of pain and threw herself out of the way of the grasping talons. She tucked into a shoulder roll, spun on one knee and, lurching to her feet, used her momentum to follow up the slash with a leg-powered thrust.

Again the knife made its mark.

Another scream of frustrated fury and the Harpy veered off, howling at her in what Mason perceived was probably very nasty ancient Greek invective.

Mason flicked her knife to shed some of the thick blood smeared on the blade and turned to see how the others were
doing. Heather was standing tall again, sickle held high and ready to fend off an attacker, but the bird-women seemed to have reconsidered the ease with which the willowy blond girl could be taken down. Instead, Aello's sisters had gone for Rafe's wolf pack—with some success—and two of the werewolves were lying on the ground, bleeding from long parallel gashes. Roth and the ancient god ran to cover them, one with a massive hunting knife in his hand, and the other with a shimmering bronze blade.