Transcendent

  “Ragnarok.”

  “So what am I supposed to do? Sit here and wait for Rory to finish pulverizing Fennrys?” she demanded. “He’s one of yours now, Rafe. Don’t you care?”

  Her eyes filled with hot tears of frustration. The circle of Frost Giants made certain that none of the wolves could reach the newest member of their pack. Cal was looking dangerously tapped out, and Toby and Maddox were woefully outmatched by Rory’s ice thugs.

  Her friends, all fighting gamely, were going to lose.

  And Fennrys was going to die if they didn’t do something.

  He leaped again and Rory swung his fist in a roundhouse blow that caught the Wolf on the shoulder and sent him tumbling out of control across the unforgiving concrete. He smashed into another shuttered outdoor servery, and again the metal slats crumpled jaggedly inward on impact. Mason felt a hand on her shoulder and turned.

  “Listen to me,” Daria said. “I can get us out of here if I can call forth the Firebringer . . .” She paused, gasping for breath. “But I need . . . a spark.”

  “What are you talking about?” Roth demanded.

  “You Vikings weren’t the only ones weaving magicks into city landmarks back in the day,” she said, referring, no doubt, to the Hell Gate Bridge.

  Mason followed her gaze and looked up at the golden Promethean effigy above the Rockefeller Plaza fountain. It was big, impressive, and carrying fire. It might just be what they needed to fight all that rampaging ice. . . .

  “Do it,” she said.

  “I told you . . . I need a spark.” Daria’s shoulders slumped and Mason saw that she was pale and shaking.

  “She’s tapped out from the Miasma.” Rafe frowned. “She needs a power source to act like a pilot light. A talisman or something—anybody got anything like that kicking around?”

  “The medallion around Fennrys’s neck would probably work,” Mason said, “except it’s around Fennrys’s neck.”

  Roth grunted in frustration. “If I had any of Dad’s stash of runegold on me, that would probably work,” he said. “But I don’t.”

  “Stash of what?” Mason looked at him.

  “Acorns—golden ones—carved with runes,” Roth explained. “The Norns gave them to Gunnar and they channel magick. I only just found out that Rory was peddling runegold magick like drugs to some of the meathead jocks at Columbia—”

  “Wait,” Heather said. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small golden orb. “You mean this thing?” The acorn in the palm of her hand glowed with a warm, gentle light in the darkness.

  “Uh . . . yeah.” Roth blinked at it. “That’s exactly what I mean. That’s got a protection rune on it.” He glanced at her sharply. “Is that what’s been shielding you? Where did you get it?”

  “In a Cracker Jack box,” Heather snapped. “None of your business. Will it work as a spark?”

  Roth hesitated. “Yeah, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I’d have to carve off this rune and replace it with another. You’ll be vulnerable. To all of this.” He circled a hand in the air. “The Frost Giants, the Miasma. It’s still powerful enough that it’ll probably turn you into one of them.” He nodded his chin at the Sleepers strewn about the courtyard.

  “Do it.” Heather thrust out the acorn.

  “Heather—no.” Cal shook his head, reaching out to grab for her wrist. “It’s too risky. You need that to keep you safe.”

  “Tell you what,” Heather countered. “How about you keep me safe.”

  At the far end of the plaza, the Frost Giants were roaming mindlessly, committing random acts of wanton destruction. The courtyard looked like a war zone. The Fennrys Wolf was cornered, hemmed in by Rory, who stood there hurling taunts and waiting for the golden-furred beast to charge at him again.

  Rafe’s other wolves were nowhere to be seen and Mason knew the ancient god wasn’t about to call them back, just so he could sacrifice his pack on their behalf. She could hardly blame him. She’d already asked an awful lot of a being who, for all intents and purposes, had very little to do with the burgeoning mess her family had conjured. Well, hers . . . and Calum’s. She glanced over to where Cal was crouched beside his mother and saw that the fire had returned to Daria’s eyes. They were fixed on the younger of the Starling boys and there was hate in Daria’s gaze. Pure and potent. Mason looked back at Rory and realized, in that instant, just how much he looked like pictures she’d seen of their father when he was young.

  Heather offered up the acorn once more. “Mrs. A, can you use this?”

  Daria nodded.

  “Then do it.”

  Cal’s mother looked at Roth, who looked at Mason, who nodded curtly. He reached over and carefully plucked the little gleaming nut from Heather’s palm. He used the razor-sharp edge of his hunting knife to pare off the marking on the acorn, replacing it with another. To Mason’s untrained eye, the runes just looked like random scratches. But they were obviously much more. The moment the protective rune was gone, before Roth was even done carving the second mark in its place, Heather’s eyes had rolled up into her head and she’d slumped over, unconscious in Cal’s arms.

  Daria barely glanced at her. “We’ll have to leave the girl now. She’ll only slow us down.”

  “Mom?” Cal said tightly. “The ‘girl’ has a name. It’s Heather. You know that, because I dated her for about two years. She just gave us a fighting chance to get out of this mess alive and we are not leaving her behind. I’ll carry her the whole way if I have to.”

  “You’re not back together, are you?” Cal’s mother frowned at him in displeasure.

  “Heather is a friend,” Cal said. His jaw muscles tightened and his scars twitched a bit. “You don’t leave friends behind and you don’t forget them. At least, you try not to.”

  It was, Mason thought, a sentiment very close to something she herself had said to Cal back on Roosevelt Island to get him to come back into Manhattan with her.

  “I never thought that girl was right for you,” Daria muttered.

  “Again. Her name is Heather. And I don’t care what you think.” He stood there, holding Heather cradled in his strong arms like she weighed the same as an empty set of clothes would have.

  Daria lost the staring contest and her gaze slid away. “Fine,” she said, shaking back her disheveled hair. “Do what you have to do. Just . . .” She held out her hand to Roth. “Give me the runegold. And give me some room.”

  She closed her eyes and spoke a handful of low, passionately voiced words. Then she gestured to her head and heart and down to the earth with the acorn . . . and the others suddenly felt compelled to give her the room she’d asked for—because all of the breathable oxygen in a ten-foot radius vanished—sucked into the incantation Daria cast with the runegold spark, leaving them all breathless—and a pressure wave bloomed out an instant later. When she opened her eyes, they were black.

  “Take it.” She held out the acorn, the rune pulsing red on its golden surface, to Cal. “Give the Spark to the Firebringer and bid him wake!”

  Mason watched as Cal gently put Heather on the ground, vaulted over the concrete barrier, and sprinted toward the fountain. Without stopping, he ran out over the surface of the water—which turned suddenly solid beneath him, rising up like a series of glassy steps in a sweeping curve—toward the statue’s hand that held the ball of gilded flame. Cal sprinted up the steps and dropped the carved acorn in among that frozen-in-time burst of sun fire and shouted, “Prometheus! Wake up, brother!”

  Then he got the hell out of the way.

  “Well now, there’s something you don’t see every day,” Mason said.

  Her mouth went dry with fear, as the flame in the golden god’s hand suddenly flared like rocket fuel set alight and Prometheus’s massive feet splashed into the fountain as the statue’s muscles rippled and the ancient Greek Titan stood tall and cast a searchlight gaze around at the courtyard.

  Toby and Maddox came pounding back to joi
n the rest of the group when the cluster of Frost Giants they’d been staving off seemed to suddenly realize that they had company on a similar scale. When a ball of blue-gold fire slammed into the ground at one of the Giant’s icy feet, roaring up to flash melt the creature into a column of water that held its shape in the blast of heat for only a moment before turning incorporeal and drenching the ground in a tidal surge. The creature’s companions roared, howling like the bitterest north winds, and rushed toward the golden colossus.

  “Hey!” Rory shouted, outraged that his glacial brutes were suddenly on the defensive. He turned from Fennrys and stalked toward the Firebringer, picking up scattered debris and hurling it with his magically enhanced hand.

  “Right . . . ,” Rafe said, backing away from the clashing, elemental goliaths. “I think that’s our cue to exit . . .”

  “Not without Fennrys,” Mason said.

  “Mase!” Roth hissed at her, but she ignored him, crouching low and using the courtyard dividers and columns for cover. “Dammit!” Roth swore and sprinted after her. Rory saw her coming and launched a wild, roundhouse punch at her head, but Mason was smaller, faster. She ducked and wove around him without breaking stride.

  And Rory didn’t get a chance to follow, because suddenly Roth was on him. He took Rory out in a devastating football tackle that sent them both sprawling, and Mason kept right on running—straight for the column Fennrys leaned against, panting with pain, his wolf’s tongue lolling out, and his yellow flanks heaving like bellows. His head drooped in exhaustion and there was blood on his fur—deep cuts along his back and left hip from where Rory had slammed him against the servery shutters and the buckled metal had cut into his hide. But even as Mason skidded to a stop and knelt down to try to help him, she saw that the injuries were already beginning to heal. And after a few moments, his breathing normalized and his head lifted.

  The Wolf looked at her, wary, his lips lifting away from long white fangs in a warning snarl. Mason swallowed her fear and held out a hand. The great beast’s nose snuffled at her knuckles, wet and quivering, and she reached past his muzzle to wrap her fingers around the Janus medallion hanging around his muscled neck. For a brief moment, Mason felt as if she was somewhere else. There was pale, pearly light reflecting off water, the slap of waves, and a sharp tang on the wind . . . and the Wolf sitting beside her on a long, empty bench . . . she could feel the thick fur of his pelt beneath her hand. But when she turned, she saw that her hand rested on the shoulder of someone wearing a heavy woolen cloak, damp with rain or mist, face obscured by a deep hood and clutching a bundle in rag-wrapped hands.

  “Fennrys . . . ?” Mason said, her voice muted by sudden fog.

  The shoulder under her hand heaved and Mason felt as if the bench beneath her bucked and shuddered. She snapped sharply back out of the moment of dream-vision and found herself kneeling once more on the cold concrete of the Rockefeller Plaza café courtyard. Fennrys—human again, pale and tense, but seemingly unhurt—was crouched there in front of her, his eyes still the gleaming, silvery blue of his Wolf self. Mason only had a moment to spare, she knew, but she took the time to rest her hand against Fenn’s cheek and wait while he closed his eyes and fought, visibly, to shut the cage door on the beast inside himself once more.

  When he opened his eyes again, she said, “We have to go.”

  He nodded, wordlessly, and together they stood. Fennrys had one arm wrapped tightly around his torso and his breathing was labored. Mason wondered how many ribs he’d broken in the fight, and whether they’d heal in time for the next round. She moved to get an arm underneath him, but he backed away from her, holding up a hand.

  “Mase . . . no,” he said through gritted teeth. “I can manage.”

  “Okay,” she said, backing up and letting him stand on his own. “Follow me.”

  Fenn nodded, and she led him toward a corner staircase at a run. Before they ascended, Mason risked a brief glance over her shoulder and saw Rory on the ground with Roth standing over him. Roth had his broad-bladed hunting knife gripped tightly in his fist, raised and ready to strike. From somewhere high above, Mason thought she heard the harsh cry of a raven. Roth seemed to hear it too. He hesitated and glanced skyward. Then he lifted the knife again . . . and swore venomously. The hand that held the blade wavered and dropped and, instead, Roth delivered a single swift kick from his heavy motorcycle boot to the side of Rory’s head.

  His face twisted in an angry glower, Roth took off running. As he headed back toward the others, he signaled Mason to meet up with them topside. She waved one hand in understanding and, without a second look back at Rory, screaming in pain and fury on the ground, took the stairs three at a time, Fennrys following close behind.

  Rory scrambled up the shallow steps that led through the channel gardens and out toward Fifth Avenue. He never made it so far as the street. The figure in the black, billowing coat and wide-brimmed hat striding toward him stopped him in his tracks and made him want to turn and run back in the other direction, regardless of the mayhem being wrought there by two opposing literal forces of nature.

  But he knew that would be the absolute worst thing he could do.

  Even beneath the shadow cast by the brim of his black fedora, Rory could see the serpentine golden gleam twisting in the depths of his father’s left eye. For the first time in his life, Rory couldn’t lie with his usual glib ease and get away with it. Not now that his father had drunk from the Well of Mimir. Silently, Rory cursed the Norns and held his ground. He stood there waiting so his father could ream him out.

  God, he thought. It’s like report card day in sixth grade all over again.

  “What part of ‘do not engage the Fennrys Wolf’ did I not make absolutely clear to you?” Gunnar said by way of greeting, his monocular glance raking over the sleeve of Rory’s leather coat, in the same way that Fennrys’s teeth and claws had, shredding the sleeve, but not Rory’s arm.

  Rory barely kept from rolling his eyes. What did his father not get about that guy? About the fact that he was going down and it was going to be Rory who would be responsible for making that happen?

  “I know, I know.” He tried his best to sound contrite and went for the pity play. “It’s just . . . that son of a bitch took my hand, Dad.”

  “And I gave you a new one,” Gunnar snapped. “Please, tell me. Exactly what is it that displeases you about that gift? Because I’ll be more than happy to take it back.”

  “No!” Rory had to stop himself from hiding his fist behind his back. “No. It won’t happen again. I promise.”

  “I take promises very seriously,” Gunnar said.

  “Yeah. No kidding.”

  Gunnar raised an eyebrow and stalked past Rory to lean on the railing overlooking the courtyard where Prometheus was slamming one Frost Giant over the head with the arm of another Frost Giant. Rory still hadn’t quite figured out exactly how his father had summoned the glacial creatures, but he knew that, ever since Gunnar had drunk the water of Mimir, the spirit of Odin was growing ever stronger within him. Rory wondered what, if anything, could actually defeat his father now. The thought of Fennrys accomplishing that prophesied task filled him with vague stirrings of envy.

  But then, Fennrys wouldn’t live much past that accomplishment, would he? And that thought, above all, put a spring in Rory’s step as he joined his father to watch the Giant bout going on below for a moment before he continued on in his quest to turn his beloved little sister into a weapon of mass destruction.

  XI

  The weather was worsening. The sky overhead was a sickly, yellow-tinged pewter, hazed over from the Miasma and smoke from scattered fires, and dulled by dark, angry clouds. It was impossible to tell that the sun was even up, let alone where it was in the sky, but Mason judged that it must have been mid to late morning by the time they’d finally made it up the clogged and chaotic yellow cab wasteland of the Avenue of the Americas to West Fifty-Seventh Street. They were soaked and shivering, and the wind buffeted the
group with a special malevolence, the fierce gusts having little effect on the Miasma mist that still swirled in dark, sparkling eddies.

  Every half block or so, the group would stumble out of a bank of mist and into one of the walking Sleepers—those who had not fully succumbed to the death sleep, or someone who was beginning to wake up—and the farther north they went, the more somnambulists they encountered. The curse, it seemed, was dissipating. If too slowly. And there were bodies—ones on the ground that would not wake up. Not even when the mist was gone for good.

  A gust of ice pellets peppered Mason’s face and she threw a hand up to block them as she hunched her shoulders forward, wishing she was wearing something a bit more weather appropriate. She was almost tempted to draw the Odin spear again from its glamoured sheath at her hip, just so that she would have the protection of all that armor and leather against the elements.

  Sure. That’s the only reason, she chastised herself silently, frighteningly aware of the seductive call of the spear, and how it beckoned her in seething whispers, even as she walked through the jumbled mess of the streets of her broken city.

  As they passed the hulking, dark red sandstone edifice of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, Mason noticed that Roth silently kept pace beside her. He looked straight ahead until she finally asked him a question.

  “Roth . . .” Mason kept her voice lower so that the others wouldn’t hear them as they walked. “What did Cal’s mother mean back on the terrace? About not trusting you? About her wolfhounds?”

  Roth’s head dropped a little and for a moment, Mason thought that he wasn’t going to tell her. But then he turned to her and said, “It was me.”

  “What was?”

  “The night you were with Fennrys. On the High Line.” His gaze was dark, his eyes full of secrets and shadows.

  Under other circumstances, Mason probably would have blushed furiously to know that her brother was aware of her after-hours trysts with Fennrys. Instead, she just said, “Which time?”