Transcendent

“The time I sent the hounds after you.”

  Mason’s heart sank a little. But she realized she’d known. The minute Daria had brought up the dogs, she’d known. Maybe she’d always known that something between her and Roth had never been quite right. He’d always been so protective of her—even more so, in his own way, than their father—and it occurred to her in that moment that maybe all that overprotectiveness was really just overcompensation. She looked sideways at him as they walked, not really knowing what to say.

  Roth sighed raggedly. “I’ve been working with Daria for years,” he said. “You know that now. I used to ride out to her place on Long Island and stow my Harley in one of the outbuildings on her estate that housed the kennels where she kept her dogs. Purebred wolfhounds. I had a key.”

  “Oh, Roth. You didn’t . . .”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I did. I brought them into Manhattan, augmented their natural tracking skills with rune magick, and sent them out into the city to find you. To find him.”

  “I almost died that night,” she said quietly. “Again.”

  “I know.” Roth grimaced. “That wasn’t my intention. All I wanted was for you to stay away from the Fennrys Wolf.”

  “How did you even know I was with him?” she asked. “How did you know anything about him at all?”

  “It was Gwen.”

  Oh. Right. Mason heard the brittle hurt in Roth’s voice.

  “She’d had visions for a while about what was to come, but they were vague and all tangled up until that night of the storm. Then all of a sudden, boom. Crystal-clear images of you and . . . this guy. Gwen called him a harbinger at the time.” Roth shrugged. “A forerunner to Ragnarok. The thing I’ve been told all my life was the destiny of the Starlings to help bring about . . . and the thing I’ve been actively trying to stop for just as long. From what Gwen had told me, I knew that he could handle pretty much anything I could throw at him.”

  “And so you threw Daria’s wolfhounds at him?”

  “Yeah.” Roth scrubbed a hand over his face. “Hindsight? Probably not the best idea. I just wanted you to stay away from him and I figured the best way to make that happen was to scare the hell out of you. I went on a hunting trip once with Daria and her dogs in the Adirondacks,” Roth continued, somewhat reluctantly, “and I watched those dogs take down a bull moose. They scared the hell out of me. I figured they’d do the same thing to you.”

  “Scare the hell out me?” Mason asked. “Or take me down?”

  “Scare you.” Roth shook his head adamantly. “That’s all. I knew you were with him that night. I just didn’t know where, and I was worried that I was running out of time. When I set them loose, I knew they’d find you eventually.”

  Mason recalled with frightening clarity how the dogs had hunted them in the darkness—baying eerily as they tracked her and Fennrys down on the High Line.

  “Fennrys had to destroy those dogs, Roth,” Mason said, the spark of anger in her chest flaring into a flame. “You knew he would.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Roth frowned. “But even if I had, I still would have done it, knowing what I knew then. Hell. What I know now! I didn’t have any choice. I needed to scare you, Mase. I needed to scare him.”

  And he had, she thought. Very effectively and on both counts.

  She remembered the harshness in Fenn’s voice as he’d yelled at her for not running fast enough—or far enough—away from him as he’d fought the wolfhounds. It wasn’t until after that she’d understood that anger had been born of fear—fear for her safety, and Fennrys’s very real terror that he was the one putting Mason in danger. She thought about how they’d argued, and how she’d turned and walked away from him. Almost for good.

  And what if you had? she thought. None of this would have happened. If that night on the High Line had been your last night with Fennrys, a lot of lives would have been saved. If I’d stayed dead in the first place . . . If the draugr had won . . . If I hadn’t come back from Asgard . . .

  Mason had a sudden flash of insight. “And the Hell Gate?” she asked. “The explosion . . . that was you too. Wasn’t it?”

  Roth looked surprised that she’d drawn that conclusion, but there was a dreadful logic to it.

  Reluctantly, he nodded. “I found out that Fennrys had already found his way to Wards Island after he left Gosforth that night after the draugr attacked.”

  “Gwen tell you that?”

  “Uh, no . . . A troll.”

  Mason blinked up at her big brother.

  “His name is Thrud. He’s lived under the Hell Gate since they finished building it in 1916—I put him on my payroll some time ago and told him to let me know if anything out of the ordinary ever happened in and around the Hell Gate.”

  “Out of the ordinary?”

  “I’d say that a guy in Gosforth sweats and army boots wielding a Viking sword and running from a couple of centaurs trying to plug him full of crossbow bolts definitely qualified.” Roth shrugged. “I’ve known since I was a kid that Bifrost and the Hell Gate were one and the same, and I knew that, if what Thrud told me about had already been drawn that way once, he’d manage to find his way there again. I thought ‘better safe than sorry.’ So I had the troll rig the whole middle span with explosives.”

  “And when you found out I’d crossed over,” Mason said, “you thought the only way to stop Ragnarok was to keep me from coming back.”

  “Yeah. So I blew the bridge.” Roth glanced at his sister, a grim smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “And any chance at an inheritance if Gunnar ever finds out it was me.”

  She shook her head, almost appreciating the bitter humor of the situation. “Wow, big bro,” she said, “is there going to come a time in our lives when you’re going to stop trying to kill me?”

  “Mase . . .”

  His grin crumpled and the expression that replaced it on his face made her wish that she’d not made the joke. She knew Roth loved her and that he always had. With a love so fiercely protective that it might have even been rooted in the events of that terrible day that neither of them had even known about until that night. But he was still willing to sacrifice her—and Fennrys, and probably anybody else he deemed necessary—if he thought that they posed a threat. Okay—Ragnarok was, she had to admit, a pretty huge deal and Roth going against the supposed destiny of the Starling clan to thwart the end of the world was, she also had to admit, pretty admirable.

  She wished she thought she had it in her to do the same.

  But I don’t.

  I’m seventeen. I’ve barely even started my life.

  I might be . . . No. I am in love.

  And if thwarting the end of the world means giving up that life or that love, or—infinitely worse—sacrificing her love’s life?

  Not gonna happen.

  And, once again, Rafe’s words to her and Fennrys from that night in Central Park echoed in her mind. “To hell with destiny,” the ancient god had said. Right after he’d told them, “Prophecies don’t always come true. And even when they do, it’s usually in all the ways you never expected they would. So there’s always hope. Loopholes. A way around destiny.”

  Roth may have been all about trying to thwart destiny, but in doing so . . . it seemed that all he was doing was playing right into its nasty, gnarly, blood-soaked hands. Rafe, on the other hand, was right. You didn’t try to thwart destiny. Or play along with it.

  “To hell with destiny,” Mason muttered.

  Right. It’s a nice sentiment, but I somehow don’t think it’s as easy as that.

  “Roth?” she said. “Back there in the courtyard . . . were you going to kill Rory?”

  He chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment and seemed to be seriously considering that. Then he nodded and said, “Yeah. I was.”

  “I . . . oh.” Mason had half expected him to deny it.

  He glanced at her sideways. “I didn’t.”

  She nodded. “I know. Why not?”

  “Bec
ause . . . I couldn’t.” His brow darkened in a frown. “Because I can’t.” His fingers flexed on the knife he still carried and she knew. As much as he’d wanted to, Roth hadn’t been able to make himself plunge the knife into Rory’s heart—even though that was what every fiber of his being had cried out for.

  Of course you couldn’t, Mason mused silently, hearing the remembered cry of the raven in her head. It had been her raven—her Valkyrie’s raven—and Roth would do no such thing. Three Odin sons. That’s what the prophecy said. Roth could no more kill Rory than he could kill himself.

  Not until I make my choice.

  She shook her head grimly. “You know . . . more and more it just feels to me like we’re heading straight toward Ragnarok without even trying to fight it.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  She rolled an eye at her brother. “Didn’t we just manage to arrange a battle between Fire and Ice Giants back there?” she said. “Isn’t that part of the whole Ragnarok myth?”

  “What were we supposed to do? If Daria hadn’t intervened, we’d be dead now.”

  “Would we?” she asked. “It seems to me that every step we take to avoid this stupid, prophesied fate is like trying to find the way out of Dr. Destiny’s Funhouse Hall of Mirrors. In the end, there’s really only one way we can go. The only choices we make aren’t really choices at all and we’re just deluding ourselves into thinking they are.”

  Roth’s half smile was lacking humor. “Coming from the chooser herself, that’s . . . unencouraging.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder to where Rafe was keeping pace with Fennrys, who still had one arm wrapped around his torso but was walking fully upright now and not as clenched with pain. She remembered again what the ancient god had said about prophecies always coming true—just not ever in the way anyone ever expected.

  “I’m only theorizing.” She sighed. “Doesn’t mean I’m going to lay down and die anytime soon.”

  “Probably couldn’t if you wanted to.”

  Roth elbowed her half jokingly, a shadowy semblance of the big brother she’d always loved so and looked up to. He was trying, she knew, for her. She nodded, swallowing the knot of sadness in her throat and tried, too. For him.

  “Exactly!” she said brightly. “So really? Don’t worry, be happy.”

  “Right.”

  “Hakuna matata.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “Lion King,” she said airily. “When this is over, we’ll go catch the musical on Broadway. You’ll see.”

  He winced. “And Ragnarok is suddenly sounding like an okay choice.”

  Mason smiled up at him for a moment, then looked away before the weight of his grief returned to burden his gaze. The trees of Central Park were in view and Mason somehow found herself breathing a sigh of relief. Shafts of silvered moonlight pierced the low-hanging cloud ceiling over the park, filtering down and lending the urban oasis an almost tranquil appeal. Halfway up the block from Fifty-Eighth, Mason thought she could actually feel a rise in the temperature, and she could smell green and growing things.

  The Miasma hadn’t had any kind of effect on the animals in the city—that much was evident from the number of dogs they’d seen, either wandering freely or tethered to their owner’s wrists by leashes—and so Mason wasn’t entirely surprised to see more than one of the Central Park horse carriages weaving, driverless, through the snarled traffic in front of the park’s southern stone wall. Most of the horses looked spooked and unapproachable, eyes rolling white with fear as they smelled death and discord in the air.

  But there was one carriage, yoked to a silvery-gray dappled beast with a long dark mane and tail, that was still parked neatly on the side of the road. The horse stood patiently, oblivious to the chaos around it. The carriage itself was a dark, lustrous black with silver accents, sapphire-blue velvet upholstery, and no driver to be seen.

  “Fenn . . . Rafe!” Mason called quietly. When they stopped and waited for her to catch up, she said. “Everyone is exhausted. I think we should horse cab it the rest of the way to Gos.”

  Fennrys shrugged, eyeing the carriage warily and probably remembering the last time he’d taken a ride in one, and how well that had turned out. But even Cal, who’d been carrying Heather the whole way without complaint, looked as though he could use a break. And, with the way they’d had to dodge and weave their way through obstacles, there was no way that they would make it to Gosforth on the Upper West Side in anywhere less than two hours. By that time, the Miasma enchantment would have faded and the city would be overrun with military and police.

  “Let’s do it,” Rafe said.

  “You guys should maybe hang back for a second, okay?” Mason said. “You probably . . . um . . .”

  “Smell like wolves?” Fennrys raised an eyebrow.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean—I don’t think so, but . . .”

  She walked slowly over and held out a hand to the horse that nuzzled her palm and gazed at her with a calm, liquid-black stare. The beast whickered softly and it almost sounded to Mason as if it called her by name. She felt an answering swell of emotion in her heart and knew, somehow, this creature belonged with her. She turned and glanced over her shoulder to where Fenn and the others stood waiting, eyeing her warily.

  “Come on,” she said, and pulled herself up into the driver’s seat. She settled herself on the bench and reached for the reins where they were wrapped loosely around a polished silver rail. “We’ll cut through the park. There’ll be a lot less traffic and we might just make it up to Gosforth before the fog wall falls completely and the National Guard comes thundering across the George Washington and down Riverside Drive.”

  Fennrys looked at the horse and buggy skeptically. “You ever drive one of these things before?” he asked.

  “How hard can it be?” Mason grinned.

  “I dunno,” he said. “But the last one I hitched a ride in got blasted out of the skies over Valhalla and I woke up in a dungeon cell in Helheim.”

  “That’s not going to happen this time,” Mason said. She felt the grin on her face turn slightly feral as she gripped the reins. “Now climb in.”

  “That’s my girl,” Fennrys murmured as he pulled himself up.

  She bit the inside of her cheek and, before she could stop herself, said, “You keep saying that.”

  His gaze flared with intensity. “Do I?”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “Mase . . .”

  The sound of her name, the way he said it, made her feel like the breath in her lungs was full of sparks from a crackling fire.

  His ice-blue eyes were dark with twisting emotion. “Of course I—”

  “Stop,” she said abruptly and held up a hand. “Forget I asked that. It wasn’t a fair question and I don’t need an answer. Not now. Just . . . get in.”

  Fennrys did so, throwing himself into the far corner of the front velvet bench seat, turning so that Mason couldn’t see the expression on his face, which, she suspected, had turned stormy. She mentally kicked herself as Toby climbed up and, in a moment of astute observation, decided that he should probably sit between the two of them to provide a bit of a buffer. It eased the tension crackling in the air, and Mason was grateful for that.

  Behind them, the others climbed in and settled themselves with Heather, still unconscious, curled against Cal’s chest. Maddox was the last one in and Mason saw that his keen gaze swept constantly over the park in front of them. He held his silver chain weapon, coiled and ready, loosely in his hand.

  Mason remembered that he and Fennrys were intimately familiar with Central Park. They’d spent their lives guarding the gateway that was woven into the fabric of it, keeping the mortal realm safe from Otherworldly predations. They knew every fold in the earth and every knot in every tree that could conceal menace, and she was glad Maddox had stuck with them. If there had been any way to avoid traversing the park to get to Gosforth, she would have happily
circumnavigated it. Frankly, ever since that evening when she and Fennrys had gone to the park together and had met Rafe for the first time, Mason had really never wanted to go there again. She used to love the place. Until she knew its secrets.

  It seemed to her that the same kind of thing was happening not just with the places in her life, but with the people. She thought about Rory and her father. And she wondered what in hell she could possibly say to them the next time they met. She probably shouldn’t have wondered any such thing. Because, suddenly, at the very thought of her father, it was as if he was inside her head. She could almost see him. Hear his voice.

  Mason . . . Honey . . .

  “Dad?” she blurted the word out loud and Toby’s head snapped around as he turned to look at her.

  “Where?” he asked. “Mase? Where is Gunnar?”

  “I . . . he’s in my mind . . .” She shook her head sharply and slapped the reins, concentrating on the horse’s gait as the animal broke into a trot. The sound of hoofbeats, steady and swift and reassuring, taking her away from there was balm on her rattled nerves. “It’s . . . it feels like he’s trying to find me.”

  “Roth?” Toby swiveled around to address her brother. “Anything we should know about dear ol’ dad?”

  “He drank from the Well of Mimir,” Roth said, his voice tense.

  “Damn.” Rafe’s face creased in a pained expression. “The Well of Sight? Great. He’s got Odin sight. Were you gonna mention that little detail at any point?”

  “Yeah,” Roth said. “I thought I might get around to it when I wasn’t being tortured or watching my girlfriend leap to her death.”

  Rafe glared at him silently and Toby let the matter drop.

  “Mason,” he said quietly. “Just . . . do us all a favor and try really hard not to think of Gunnar, okay? It’ll make it harder for him to find us and maybe—”

  He didn’t get to finish his sentence.

  The gray-skinned monster dropped from the tree above their heads and landed on the back of the carriage horse, digging into the animal’s withers with sharp-taloned fingers and baring long yellow teeth. The horse screamed in pain and fear and the carriage careened wildly as it reared and took off at a bucking gallop.