Transcendent

  “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 into 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.

  “You know, you might have a point, Mrs. A,” Heather interrupted, able to stand the bickering no more. “Maybe Cal would be better off without the freaky-cool fish fork and superstrength. Who knows? But you know what? It’s not going to matter in a few hours and we’ll never know one way or another if we don’t use every advantage we have—including Cal—because there will be nobody left to have the argument.”

  “She’s right,” Roth said. “Next to Fennrys, and probably Mason—and, quite honestly, with what’s happened to the two of them, I’m not even sure we can trust what side they’ll end up on when this all hits the fan—Cal’s the strongest one of all of us.” He turned to Daria and Douglas. “Whether you meant for him to be that way or not, he is. We’re going to need that strength. And while I know it’s almost unheard of for such a thing to happen in a Gosforth founding house, maybe you should put aside all the family crap and work toward a common goal. For once. Maybe we all should. Maybe, if we do that, we can actually achieve something worthwhile and stop the world from ending.”

  XX

  The train pulled into Valhalla station and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. There was a side rail that was reserved for Gunnar Starling’s private use, and that’s where Toby guided Sleipner to come to rest. Mason wondered fleetingly if, after they were gone, the fabulous transformed beast wouldn’t just vanish into thin air. Or take to the skies. Or whatever it was that mythical, monstrous horses did in their off-duty hours.

  Together, she, Fennrys, Toby, and Rafe crossed the small, mostly empty parking lot. Like the dedicated side rail, there was also a small carport near the quaint little station that was reserved for the black town car that was always there, parked and ready to shuttle Starling family members to and from the estate a few miles away. Normally, Toby would have had a set of car keys—news to Mason but not surprising, considering what she now knew of him—but he hadn’t thought to bring them along.

  “Not a problem,” Rafe said, stepping past them.

  “Right. You’ve got some kind of magick trick.” Mason nodded.

  She assumed that’s how a god would normally circumvent locks and keys, and was a bit shocked when, instead, he shattered the driver’s-side window with a sharp blow from his elbow, reached in to open the door, and snaked under the dashboard so he could hotwire the ignition in under a minute.

  Toby took the wheel and drove with Rafe in the front passenger seat. Mason and Fennrys sat in the dark, plushly upholstered back, both of them silently staring out their respective windows, watching the dark shapes of trees slide past. Mason had never been a party girl in high school. She wasn’t much of a drinker and she didn’t smoke pot like some of the other kids did, so she really didn’t have much of a frame of reference when it came to the idea of intoxication. But that was really the only way she could describe how she was feeling in that moment. The inside of her skull felt as though there were currents of electricity firing across its surface—tiny spears of lightning forking through her brain and flaring behind her eyes. Her pulse was deep and steady and swift—and louder than she had ever felt—like a hammer pounding on stone. Her skin was ice and fire. A good six inches separated Mason’s knee from Fennrys’s, but it felt like sparks arced between them.

  She knew, just by the way she felt, that she was right about where they were headed. The Valkyrie soul in her knew, and that’s why she felt almost drunk with bottled excitement. They were on the right track. She just didn’t know if they were doing the right thing. The Estate was where Mason would find her mother—she was sure of it—and she knew, beyond any doubt, that was something she had to do.

  If only to say good-bye before the end.

  Ragnarok. The end . . . and a fresh beginning.

  Her father’s dearest wish.

  Mason wondered then, if her mother hadn’t died, would her father still have rushed headlong toward the fulfillment of the prophecy? If Yelena hadn’t sacrificed herself, for Mason’s sake, maybe she would have been the thing in Gunnar’s life that kept him wanting to live. But she had made her choice thinking it was the right one to make. Now Mason was doing the same thing.

  And maybe it’s all for nothing, but the choice is mine . . .

  She closed her eyes, and felt Fennrys’s hand wrap around hers.

  When she looked over at him, she saw that his eyes were gleaming, silvery-blue in the darkness. The Wolf inside him was just as keyed up as the raven inside her. There wasn’t any way for them to turn back now.

  “We will finish this together,” Fenn whispered, lifting their joined hands between them. “To whatever end . . . we’ll get there together.”

  He wrapped his other hand around hers and she kissed his fingers.

  When she turned back to look out the window, it was to see that they were driving through the gates of the Starling family estate. Looming up in front of them, at the end of the long winding drive was the manor house, like a castle that needed storming. Only, Mason knew that the house itself wasn’t why she was there. There was nothing in that grand, empty echoing monument to loneliness that she needed. The manor’s many darkened windows glared down at her like the hollowed eye sockets of moon-bleached skulls, stacked for offering to a battle god.

  She would find nothing there.

  That was her father’s place.

  His study, full of secrets and locked boxes and books, with its cavernous fireplace hearth like a yawning maw, the applewood fire unlit within . . . that was where she could go if she wanted to find him. All of the pieces of him. The runegold, the regrets, the words in his diary and the picture of her mother on the mantelpiece that Mason wasn’t even sure he looked at anymore . . .

  In her head, there was another picture, suddenly: the image of three women, wild-eyed with wanton looks, lounging draped over the leather furniture in the study, surrounded by all that oak paneling, and Mason knew, w
ith certainty, that the Norns had visited her father in that house. The house that, even with all of the windows open, had always felt to Mason like a prison cell. And she wondered for the first time if it was truly the incident in the garden shed, with Rory and the game of hide and seek, that had been solely responsible for her claustrophobia. . . .

  “Oh!” she gasped suddenly, and opened the car door, lurching out before Toby had even fully braked to a stop in front of the sweeping stone steps of the house.

  “Mase!”

  Fennrys dove out of the other side of the still-moving car. She could hear him running up behind her, his boots crunching on the stone walkway, and she turned when she felt his hand on her wrist, but she didn’t stop.

  “Hey . . . are you okay?” he asked.

  “I know!” she said, almost breathless with excitement. “Oh, Fenn—I know where she is!”

  “Find me,” her mother had said.

  At least, that’s what Mason had told Fennrys about her version of the dream-vision. Initially, he’d been skeptical about the possibility, even if he’d kept it to himself. When they’d left Asgard, Fennrys had promised Mason that, when all the craziness was over, they would go back and look for Yelena—the real Yelena—and rescue her from wherever Heimdall had imprisoned her. But truthfully, he’d suspected that might be a hard promise to keep. Because, short of crossing back over Bifrost—which Mason’s brother Roth had so very helpfully blown to kingdom come anyway—Fenn hadn’t had the foggiest idea how they were going to do that. Not really.

  When Mason had puzzled out the message in their shared visions—that they would find the answers they were looking for at her home back in Westchester—he was still skeptical. But with New York City falling to pieces all around them, nowhere to go, and nothing he’d managed to figure out to help fix the whole bloody mess, Fenn had been willing to go with her when she’d called Sleipner in the tunnel. Largely because, really, who wouldn’t? The sudden appearance of the mythic equine juggernaut, standing there docile as a petting zoo pony and willing to do Mason’s bidding, was, in itself, a pretty persuasive argument. And once onboard the train and moving, Fenn had felt the pull of destiny. He felt it now as he ran along behind Mason, leaving Toby and Rafe still clambering out of the car in front of the house.