Transcendent

  This estate must be huge, he thought as they ran, wondering how on earth they would ever find Yelena there.

  The manicured grounds around the back of the house—a series of terraced, putting-green-perfect lawns bordered by flower-laden rock gardens—gave way gradually to wilder, less structured landscapes. A waving sweep of wildflower meadow rolled away to a rocky streambed that twisted through the property and, beyond that, there was actual forest. Not just trees, but forest—dark and deep. Mason leaped like a deer down the garden path, flat-out running through the meadow.

  Eventually, Fennrys stopped shouting after her, asking where the hell she was going, and saved his breath so he could just run and keep up. The farther away they got from the house, the more apparent it became that the outer grounds of the estate weren’t something that Gunnar Starling cared for with the same sort of meticulous attention as the ordered spaces closest to the house. An ornamental rustic footbridge spanning the tumbling stream near the forest had partially collapsed, the middle arch having rotted and fallen into the water.

  It’s like Bifrost in miniature, Fenn thought as he leaped from one bank to the other in Mason’s wake.

  She didn’t even pause, just hurdled the stream and kept on running straight into the dense trees soaring up ahead of her, and Fennrys knew that, whatever instinct was driving her, there was a rightness to her actions. He could feel it himself and excitement surged in his chest. Suddenly, he realized that they were following an overgrown path, and Mason’s feet pounded along the moss and leaves as if she knew every twisting inch of it blindfolded. In her wake, Fennrys saw the branches of trees along the path suddenly grow heavy with pale purple blossoms, as if caught in a wash of accelerated spring fever. The air grew perfumed and heady, like the scented breeze in the dream-vision he’d shared with Mason. When the track hair-pinned around a stand of elm, Fennrys lost sight of her and, after a moment, he heard a small, startled cry.

  “Mason!” he called and poured on a burst of speed.

  He rounded the trees and virtually screeched to a halt as the path suddenly widened into a small clearing ringed by blooming apple trees laden with drifts of lavender flowers and open to the sky above. Mason had stopped short too, and Fennrys almost ran right into her. She stood at the edge of the clearing, which boasted a small, squat structure at its center. Like something out of a fairy tale, it looked like a witch’s cottage, windows shuttered from the inside and massively overgrown with ivy now. The roof, Fennrys saw, was made of glass panels in iron frames, like an old greenhouse. The glass was dark with years of grime, and some of the panels had shattered, allowing the ivy to creep inside. It reminded him uncomfortably of some of the decaying buildings on North Brother Island. There were wine-barrel tubs full of dirt and dead weeds on either side of the door, which was painted green, only faded and peeling.

  And there was a slide-bar lock on the door.

  “Mase,” Fennrys whispered. “Is this . . . ?”

  “Where I died,” Mason said. She nodded silently and took a step forward.

  Inside, she knew, there would be a wooden bench.

  Once upon a time, it had been painted bright blue, decorated with red roses.

  Her mother had painted it that way. Mason didn’t know how she knew that; she just did. When Rory had locked her in the shed on that day of the hide-and-seek game, Mason had fallen asleep on that bench. The paint had faded, the blue washed to gray, green leaves pale and dull, but the roses had remained bright. Mason had counted the petals over and over in her loneliness and fear over the next three days. Roses. Her mother’s maiden name had been Rose.

  And this had been her place.

  Mason walked toward the door of the little potting cottage as if she were walking through a dream. She’d never gone back there after they’d found her. Never even thought to. Never dared cross again over the stream that ran before the forest. There was a newer lock on the door—a chain and padlock that Gunnar had obviously put there after the hide-and-seek game—but Mason wondered why her father had never had the old rotting little shack just torn down after that.

  Because she’s still here.

  Her mom. This had been her place. Her orchard. Her garden shed. Her bench.

  And she was still there. In more than just spirit.

  Mason drew the knife that Fennrys had given her from her belt and struck off the padlock with a single blow of the hilt. The door swung soundlessly open and a dull red-gold flickering shaft of light spilled out through the gap. Which was strange, because the place was so clearly deserted.

  “What the hell . . . ?” Fennrys murmured as he ducked inside after her.

  No . . . Hel, Mason mentally corrected him. But she couldn’t speak.

  Inside the shed there was no glass-paneled roof, no wooden shelves or rusting garden tools. The bench was there in the middle of an otherwise empty dirt floor, surrounded by rough-hewn walls of stone. Rust-coated chains ending in manacles hung from iron rings pounded into those walls and the only light, the source of the wavering glow, was a single guttering torch set in a sconce. On one side, the wall wasn’t a wall at all, but floor-to-ceiling bars. A prison cell. A cage.

  And Fennrys knew it well. Mason knew that, too.

  Because, before he could stop himself, his left hand was circling his right wrist in the place where the scars marked him as having been a prisoner here. And suddenly Mason could see him falling back into that place, the darkness and the stench of decay, wondering frantically if it had all been a delusion. Thinking that maybe he’d never left this place at all and was still there, chained to the wall, naked, alone . . .

  “Fennrys?”

  His head jerked back as her voice cut through his moment of panic.

  “Fenn?”

  She gently pried his fingers away from his own wrist and looked up at him, his eyes were so silver-blue bright they almost outshone the torch on the wall.

  “Come on,” she said.

  Fennrys took her hand as she started to lead him toward the barred door.

  A noise stopped them both in their tracks. They turned and looked back as slowly, tortuously, a shadow—like a clot of ink-black darkness—coalesced, draped across the bench. At first, it looked like a bundle of black rags, but as they watched, it resolved into a figure—a woman—who lifted her head and pushed back the deep, ragged cowl of the cloak she wore. Her face was carved thin and wasted, blue eyes sunken in her head. But she smiled gently when she looked on Mason’s face.

  “Mom!” Mason cried and lurched back toward the bench, folding herself around Yelena Starling’s frail form and hugging her tight. “I found you! I told you I’d find you . . .”

  “My baby,” Yelena murmured into Mason’s hair. “I never doubted that you would.”

  Fennrys knew, instinctively, what had happened.

  When Roth, as a young child, had unwittingly caused the death of his little sister—and Yelena, by then a powerful death goddess in her own right, had intervened and sent her baby girl back into the world—a doorway into Helheim had been opened in that shed. And it had stayed open, if only a crack. Not big enough for anyone but Mason Starling herself to force a way through. But she had, and now they could bring her mother back out into the world. Heimdall had imprisoned Yelena in the very same cell that Fennrys himself had been locked away in when the Valkyrie Olrun had tried to take him across the Rainbow Bridge as a hero of Valhalla.

  Only, there had been no blue bench in the cell when Fenn had been there.

  None that he had been able to see. But Yelena had been his way out, just as he and Mason were now hers. He knelt down beside Mason and her mother and said, “Hello, Lady. It’s nice to finally see you again.”

  Yelena looked down into Fennrys’s face and smiled. She lifted her hand and placed it gently on his cheek. Her wrist was circled with one of the manacles from the wall. Fennrys recognized it. It was still stained with his blood.

  “I knew I was right about you,” she said. “I knew you would t
ake care of my daughter.” Her shoulders sagged in weariness and her hand went limp as her eyes fluttered closed.

  “We take care of each other, ma’am,” Fenn said in a gentle voice. His eyes locked with Mason’s over her mother’s dark head. “And we’ll take care of you, too. Let’s just get this fancy bracelet off and we’ll be out of here in no time. . . .”

  Yelena shook her head. “Heimdall has the only key. He stole it from me. The shackle is one of those things that the dwarves fashioned to keep ‘monsters’ like Loki and his offspring bound. Made of strange metals and impossible things . . . Without the key, it’s hopeless. It would take Thor’s hammer.”

  Fennrys grinned and looked up at Mason. “How about a ‘mace’ instead of a hammer?”

  She blinked at him. “Did you just pun?”

  “Horribly. Yes. I thought the situation could use a little levity. Y’know, chained mom and all, here.” He waved a hand at the sword hilt at her side. “C’mon, Mase. What’s made of more powerful magick than Odin’s spear? Use it to break the chain.”

  Mason hesitated.

  “It’s just for a moment,” he said. “If a battle looms, you can shift right back.”

  Easier said than done and he knew it, but Yelena had gone limp on the bench between them and seemed to be getting weaker with each passing second. Her eyes fluttered open briefly when her daughter drew the Odin spear sword and transformed into her Valkyrie self, bringing the head of the spear crashing down on the manacle with a furious cry. There was a flash of storm lightning and the sound of rolling thunder . . . and then darkness.

  Mason muttered, “I’m getting really tired of the meteorological sound track that follows me around wherever I go. . . .”

  She willed herself back out of her Valkyrie guise as Fennrys chuckled and threw the shattered manacle into the corner of the cell. He lifted Yelena up off the bench and cradled her to his chest as he stood. Mason led the way back out of the now-dark shed into the clearing, where the ground was frosted with twilight-hued petals that had fallen from the trees like confetti.

  It felt like walking out of the prison cell all over again for Fennrys. Only this time he was wearing pants and had his memories intact. And Mason Starling was at his side. He could do this. This whole stop-the-Ragnarok-train-before-it’s-too-late thing. They could.

  As he carried Mason’s mother in his arms out into the clearing in front of the shed, he felt her lift his medallion in her hand. “Loki . . . ,” she murmured. “He has touched this with his magick. I can tell.”

  Fennrys looked down at Yelena. “Yeah,” he said. “It sort of acts like one of those electroshock dog-control collars now. . . .” He saw her expression turn quizzical out of the corner of his eye and tried to explain. “He did it to help me keep control after Mason sort of, uh, accidentally turned me into the actual personification of the Fenris Wolf. Which is why Ragnarok is on its way, which is why we’re trying to stop it, which is why we’re here to find you and maybe get some help with that . . .”

  He realized he was kind of babbling when Mason’s mother began to squirm a bit in his arms and asked him politely to stop and put her down. He did as she asked. She stood and wavered a bit and both Mason and Fennrys put out hands to steady her.

  “I’m fine.” Yelena shrugged them away and pulled herself up to her full height. “My strength returns. I just needed a moment out of that shackle and away from that cell. But . . .”

  She turned and pegged Fenn with the same fierce sapphire stare that Mason always used when she was challenging him on something.

  “I think you’d better tell me just what on earth you’ve been up to with my daughter since I set you free!”

  XXI

  Truthfully, before that moment, Mason and Fennrys had figured that Yelena—with her powers as Hel—already knew everything that had gone down between them and that was why she’d appeared to Mason in her dream-vision. But apparently that was not the case. In fact, Yelena told them, ever since she’d been captured and imprisoned by Heimdall, she’d been ignorant of everything that had happened in the mortal realm. And her awareness of all that had transpired there since the time of Mason’s birth and her own death had always been inconsistent and incomplete. She’d known that her daughter would need the Fennrys Wolf, and so she’d sent him to her. But she hadn’t, necessarily, known exactly why she would need him. Not that it mattered.

  All that mattered to Mason was that her mother was there and she was alive.

  “No . . . I’m not,” Yelena explained hesitantly, disabusing her of that joyful notion. “Mason, honey, that’s something you’ll have to understand. When all this is over, I’m not going to be able to stay here. My place is in Helheim now.”

  “We can talk about this later,” Mason had said, not really willing to entertain the thought that, having just found her mother, she would have to let her go again once they averted the apocalypse.

  That’s if we avert the apocalypse . . .

  In the end, she and Fennrys told Mason’s mother everything that happened between the two of them, just as she had demanded. Well, everything relevant to the situation, leaving out the fact that the two of them were desperately in love. Neither of them was sure how Yelena would take the fact that the bodyguard she had sent to take care of her daughter was inclined to do more with her body—and the rest of her—than simply guard it.

  As they talked, they walked slowly toward the boat dock, and that was where Toby and Rafe found them. Now . . . they were waiting. Mason really wasn’t entirely sure what they were waiting for. But she was getting impatient. She’d thought about keeping her Valkyrie armor on—in case what they had to face next was something that warranted intimidating—but, really, it probably would have been overkill under the circumstances.

  After all, the lake dock was placid and peaceful. And it was currently populated with no less than a centuries-old superwarrior, an ancient Egyptian werewolf god, a Norse—or, rather, the Norse—werewolf, and the goddess of Hel.

  And, in the less than half an hour since they’d rescued her from Heimdall’s prison cell, Yelena seemed to have regained her full, fearsome composure as queen of an underworld kingdom. But every now and then, she would tuck a stray strand of Mason’s hair back over her shoulder or give her arm a squeeze. Or Mason would catch her mother just staring at her. She could see herself reflected in those eyes that were so very like her own and the overwhelming love in that gaze told Mason that everything Yelena had done, she’d done without regret.

  And she’d done it for her. The daughter she’d never even held in her arms.

  It made Mason want to never leave that place. Even though she knew that wasn’t a possibility. She sighed and turned to look out over the water. She was about to ask—again—what the holdup was when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the flash of something stirring out in the middle of the lake. She took a step forward, squinting, and saw pale, pearly hair streaming out behind familiar shapes beneath the surface; nine lithe bodies with long, bright blue limbs and swirling, iridescent gowns that bubbled like sea foam. She reached over and gripped Fennrys by the arm, pointing to the darting, shadowed forms.

  “Huh,” he said. “The Wave Maidens. I was almost starting to wonder when they’d show up again. Should have known it would be here. Now.”

  “Why?” Mason asked.

  “Because they’re Heimdall’s creatures,” Yelena said, answering for him. “Some say the Bridgekeeper is the child of nine mothers. Others say that he is the father of nine daughters. The Maidens don’t seem inclined to set the matter straight, calling themselves one or the other at a whim.”

  “Another Norse myth open to interpretation,” Mason muttered. “You know, that’s weirdly encouraging.”

  “Yeah,” Fennrys grunted, glancing sideways at her. “Less so is the fact that Heimdall is the one dude who, in any version, really seems particularly hot on getting the whole Ragnarok ball rolling. I mean, other than the Norns and your dad, and maybe my dad?
??although I got the impression he’d rather hit the Meatpacking District and go club-hopping than hit the battlefield. Also, there’s the worrying detail that, y’know, you made those ladies a promise a while back.” He nodded his chin at the water, where one of the Maidens had surfaced, and was gazing at Mason with a smile on her face and an excited gleam in her bright eyes.

  Yelena raised an eyebrow at her daughter, who reddened a bit under the scrutiny. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I didn’t know!” Mason sputtered a bit. “I mean, I forgot that part, and at the time, nobody had bothered to tell me what a bad idea that was.”

  “What was it you promised them again?” Fenn asked dryly.

  Mason thought he was treating the whole matter a bit lightly, considering the fact that he knew perfectly well that she’d essentially bartered his life for that earlier rescue. How on earth was she to have known that Fennrys would turn out to be the actual mythical monster prophesied to devour Odin who, it turned out, was her very own father? All she’d wanted at that time was just not to drown. Not die. She would have promised the same thing, even if she’d known then what she knew now.

  “Mason?” her mother prodded.

  “I told them that when the time came and I knew the Devourer, that I would make an end of him.”

  “So there’s that,” Fennrys said and shrugged in a kind of resignation.

  It infuriated Mason. “Stop that!” she said. “I’m not going to ‘end’ you.”

  Yelena raised a hand, a look of intense contemplation on her lovely face. “Is that exactly what you promised them?”

  “Um . . . something like that,” Mason said warily. “I might not have the exact sentence structure, but I’m pretty sure that’s the gist of it, yeah.”