“Mase?” Rafe said, stepping forward. Having recently extracted another promise from Mason, he was, perhaps more than anyone, qualified to offer up his thoughts on the matter. “I want you to really think about this one. Your father misinterpreted the punctuation in the prophecy of the Norns and it changed the whole meaning of the thing.”
“How is that possible?” Mason asked. “I mean . . . this prophecy has been kicking around for so long, I can’t imagine it was even written in English originally.”
But Toby seemed to be onboard too, with whatever the others were thinking. “No . . . no. They’re right, Mase.” A thread of excited tension tightened his voice. “It’s all in how it was communicated to him, but even more so, how Gunnar chose to decipher it. Interpretation is everything. Think. What—exactly—did you hear the Maidens say to you in the Hudson River?”
Mason closed her eyes and thought hard.
Too hard.
It wasn’t coming to her. Especially not now, with the constant drone of leashed-in Valkyrie blood lust humming in the back of her mind that she had to try so hard to shut out after every time she armored up.
“Relax,” Fennrys murmured in her ear, his voice gently lulling like a hypnotist’s, which was both helpful and distracting. “Just put yourself back there, cast your memory back to that moment. We were under the water. There were creatures below us and fire above, and I was with you. We thought we were going to drown . . . and then the Wave Maidens saved us and they spoke. They spoke to you . . .”
Mason pictured the beautiful water girls, with their long pale hair and their bright blue skin and glittering emerald eyes. She remembered their excitement as they chased away the dark, savage shapes of the Nixxie that had attacked them in the depth of the river. She could hear their voices, musical and liquid, like the water in her ears. They’d spoken directly into her mind. And they had said . . .
“You will know of the Devourer . . . ,” she whispered, remembering.
There was an answering keen from the Maidens in the lake.
And then what?
“You will make an end of him—”
No. That wasn’t it, exactly.
“You will make of him an end!” Mason said, her eyes snapping open, heartbeat fluttering excitedly in her throat. “That’s what it was. You will make of him . . . an end.”
Fenn let his breath out in a controlled exhale.
“Okay,” he said, his brow furrowing. “Okay . . . that’s good.”
“It is?”
“I think so. I think it means you don’t have to kill me to satisfy your promise.” He grinned. “Not unless you want to, that is.”
Working through the semantics, the technicalities of her promise, Mason felt a surge of hope. As if the sun had suddenly come out from behind a dark cloud to warm her face.
“So it just means I have to . . .”
“Use me . . . to bring about the end.” Fenn’s jaw muscle spasmed as he ground his teeth together. “Right. That’s not so good.”
But Mason refused to let her hopeful sun disappear back behind that cloud.
“Wait!” she exclaimed, grabbing at Fennrys’s shirt front. “I didn’t promise them what end. Did I?”
Yelena glanced back and forth between the two of them. “Did you?”
Mason slowly shook her head.
“No,” she said with certainty. She was sure now. Absolutely positive. “I promised an end. Not the end. Not their end . . .” Mason pulled Fennrys toward her, looking up at him, until her nose almost touched his chin. “And one way or another, Fennrys Wolf . . . we will end this.”
His smile was a slow blooming thing of wild beauty. It split his face as he lifted Mason off the ground. “Now, that is definitely my girl talking,” he said, kissing her hungrily on the mouth.
Mason didn’t even care that Toby and her mother and Rafe were standing there, pretending like she wasn’t on the verge of totally making out with Fennrys. Her hopeful sun was still in the sky over her head and all was—at least, all would be—right with the world.
We will make it right.
The actual dark and storm-tossed sky above her head did nothing to dispel her sudden, fierce surge of optimism as she stepped reluctantly out of Fenn’s embrace and turned to face the waters of the Kensico Reservoir.
Now, she thought. How to fulfill my promise to the Maidens? How to use Fennrys to bring about an end?
She cast her gaze out over the flat, pewter-gray glassy mirror of the lake, where the circle of goddesses waited and suddenly, she knew. She hadn’t just come back to the estate to find her mother. She had also come back to find his. Before any of the others had a chance to question her, Mason drew the Odin spear, her Valkyrie mantle fell upon her once more, and she called out a name.
“Sigyn!” she cried. “Your son needs you!”
“Mase?” Fennrys exclaimed. “What the hell are you—”
His cry was drowned out as the surface of the lake began to seethe and boil, waves rippling out, silver rings crisscrossing as the Wave Maidens darted and dived, flitting with a single guiding impulse through the shadowy depths like a school of fish, flashing like lightning as they circled around and around, hair streaming, limbs knifing through the water. Mason could feel the waves of power gathering, flowing outward, as the Norse goddesses helped her call forth the impossible.
“What are they doing?” Toby asked in an almost whisper.
“Naglfar,” Yelena whispered.
It was a word—a name—that Mason didn’t instantly recognize. But even the sound of it stirred great fear, and even greater excitement in her.
“The Ship of the Dead,” Rafe said, his deep voice hushed.
“The ship of my birth,” Fennrys countered quietly.
The fleeting vision Mason had experienced of the cloaked figure sitting on a wooden bench in a sea-scented fog, holding a wrapped bundle, played over in her mind. Out in the lake, the Maidens keened an eerie song and slowly a dark leviathan stirred somewhere deep beneath the surface of the water. Beside Mason, Fennrys was holding his breath. Something she’d never known him to do before. And yet, she completely understood the reaction. The tension of the moment was almost unbearable. The clouds in the sky above seemed to pause, and there wasn’t even a hint of breeze or birdsong.
The middle of Kensico Reservoir erupted in a mighty geyser, exploding upward in a diamond and rainbow shower of water. And a dragon-prowed ship of legend thrust high into the air. Like some kind of great ancient sea monster heaving itself up out of a watery slumber, Naglfar, the great, ghostly fabled Norse Ship of the Dead, climbed skyward and hung suspended for a moment before slamming back down onto the surface of the lake, sending a circular wall of water blooming out in a white froth. Then the low-sided, elegant long ship began to float gently, silently toward the shore where they stood waiting.
The bare skeletal finger of a single mast thrust up from the center of the ship, and the crossbeam, without a sail, was a stark black slash across the sky. A row of round shields, battered and battle-worn, hung from the ship’s sides above the rows of oars that stuck out into the water, moving in unison, like the limbs of some prehistoric, many-legged creature. And pulling at those oars were the ghosts of the men who had rowed an extraordinary woman across an ocean so that she could give birth to a prophecy.
The Fenris Wolf. The Devourer. The Harbinger of Ragnarok.
The love of Mason Starling’s young life.
Standing in the prow, her long, pale hair lifted by a ghost breeze, the tall, broad-shouldered woman in a green gown and cloak was not beautiful but, rather, handsome, with strong, angular features, and eyes that held the wealth of her will and strength and determination to shape her life according to her own desires and not the tenants of some apocalyptic foretelling.
Mason could see instantly why Loki had loved her.
She turned and glanced at Fennrys and was startled by the unaccustomed softness of his expression. He gazed out at his mother as the ship drew close, and Ma
son saw in him a rare moment of, if not pure happiness, peace, at least.
Fenn’s past had always been a thorny issue for him—even when he hadn’t been able to remember any of it—and to see him like that made Mason more determined than ever that they would forge their future according to their terms. She felt her own mother’s arm lightly drop across her shoulders and, for a moment, she leaned against her, feeling the warmth that had been absent when Heimdall had impersonated Hel in her infernal realm.
The ship’s keel scraped on the rocky beach and four of the gray, ghostly warrior sailors leaped over the sides, hauling frayed and weed-wrapped ropes with them as they pulled the shallow-draft warship up the strand. The tall woman nimbly hurdled the side wall of the boat and waded ashore, the hems of her tunic and cloak dragging with the weight of the water they soaked up past her knees as she walked with long strides toward Fennrys, who stood at Mason’s side. She felt his hand tighten briefly in hers. Then he let go to step forward to greet his mother’s ghost.
At Mason’s other side, Hel also stepped forward.
Sigyn embraced her son—a brief, vigorous, heartfelt hug—and then turned to Mason’s mother and bowed deeply from the waist. Mason got the impression that, had it been anyone but this woman, the occasion would have warranted a curtsy. But then the two women—or, really, the ghost and the goddess of death, if one was going to get technical—clasped hands like old friends.
“It has begun then?” Sigyn asked them.
No time for small talk or introductions, I guess, Mason thought. But she barely even heard herself over the inner clamoring of her Valkyrie spirit.
Rafe nodded. “We’d like it to end. But not The End, if you get my meaning.”
“Whatever the outcome, whatever the end, you must meet the enemy on the final battlefield of Valgrind.” Sigyn glanced back at the Wave Maidens. “They will demand it of you.”
“I’m guessing we’re nowhere near that at the moment.” Toby grunted, glancing around. “We’re nowhere near anything.”
Sigyn smiled. “When I came here—when we came here—we crossed an ocean that we had been told was uncrossable. Endless until it fell off the edge of the world. But then we found this place. This land, untouched, unknown, and we sailed this ship up a river as far as we could until we reached this valley. When it used to be a valley and the river was navigable. We will make it so again. And we will ride that river to the end. To Valgrind.”
The Wave Maidens began to keen with excitement and a shiver went up Mason’s spine. The Odin spear almost seemed to quiver in response.
“I think I can help with that.” Mason’s mother stepped forward and, raising her arms, sent forth a thick cloud of ash-black shadow that flowed like liquid through the air toward Naglfar. Weaving and writhing, it crawled up the mast and clung to the crossbeam, unfurling like inky canvas. The Wave Maidens leaped and danced in the water and a ghost wind sprang up to fill the shadow sail.
Fennrys glanced at Mason. She nodded, and he stepped toward Naglfar, stopping before the gap in the line of shields hanging on the ship’s side and, with a sweeping gesture, said, “All aboard who’s going aboard.”
“Am I the only one who sees the dam?” Rafe inquired casually.
The ship raced southward across the glass-smooth surface of the reservoir.
“The massive, solid, impassable dam?”
On either side of Naglfar’s dragon prow, the Maidens leaped and frolicked in the frothy wake, like dolphins cavorting. Thirty feet in front of them, the Kensico Dam loomed. Mason strode forward to the prow of the ship and hurled the Odin spear. A huge chunk of concrete exploded from the lip of the massive concrete wall.
“We’re still not gonna clear that.” Rafe shook his dreadlocked head as the spear returned to Mason’s armored fist.
But then the Maidens sang, and the waters of the Reservoir surged forward in a huge wave, pouring through the gap in a gushing waterfall, taking Naglfar with it. They sailed over the gap in the dam wall—a crescent-shaped bite large enough to let the ship pass through without emptying the entire Reservoir and wiping out the valley to the south of them. Instead, borne on the wave that the Maidens had called up, the ghost ship rode the bucking froth down through the flood plain and into the winding path of the Bronx River, once a much larger waterway, now flooding with that single surge, like a tidal bore racing to the ocean and taking the long ship with it.
The path of the Bronx River snaked through the middle of a series of heavily industrialized and populated areas, almost entirely hidden in a rich green seam that no one knew was there, covered over at intervals by bridges and freeway overpasses. None of which proved an impediment to Naglfar. As they traveled abreast on a magickal wave on a river that had long since diminished to a stream, the smoke sail passed—insubstantial—through all obstacles, billowing and snapping in the phantom wind.
After she’d thrown the spear at the dam, Mason had sheathed the weapon, shaken by the surge of power that had flooded through her. Now she sat near the back of the ship on a bench empty of ghostly rowers, picking at a stray thread on the seam of her jeans, feeling shaky and uncertain, and just a little alone, in the ebb of her display of Valkyrie might. Fennrys was heads-down with Toby, discussing battle strategies—not that it was going to come to that—and Rafe had engaged Mason’s mom in Underworld deity chat. Mason thought he might have developed a bit of an instant crush on her. Not surprising, they had a lot in common.
Mason sat there, lost in thought, when the bench beside her creaked and she looked over to see that she’d been joined by Sigyn. The striking blond woman smiled at her but didn’t force conversation. After a while, when Mason felt like talking, she said, “You know my mom?”
Sigyn nodded.
“How did that happen?”
“I had been long dead, a shade wandering Helheim for a long time before your mother and I met,” she said in a language that, while Mason’s ears heard as foreign and unknown, her brain interpreted in lilting English. “When I found Loki there, bound and tortured by the serpent, I did my best to keep the poison from falling onto his face.”
“You still loved him, after he left you like that?”
Sigyn simply nodded.
“He told me about you,” Mason said.
Fennrys’s mother smiled sadly. “After a long time, he begged me to leave him. He said that watching me suffer as he suffered was worse than the torment itself. Eventually I came to believe him. And so, as much as I loved him, I left him.”
“Loki made my mother a goddess,” Mason said. “Why?”
“Because I asked him to,” Sigyn said. “I met your mother first when she was a new shade in the Beyond. The first Lady Hel had long since departed, like so many of the others, shedding the mantle of her power. Power that Loki, as the only god left in Helheim, gathered with his will and kept safe until such time as he could bestow it upon another. In much the same way that the Norns gathered Odin’s power and the power of Thor after the gods themselves departed.”
“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?”