Starling

  Mason’s jaw drifted open. “F-F—”

  “Faerie. Yeah.” Rafe shot her a look. “At least, I assume that’s what you were about to say.”

  “Right. Yeah.” Mason swallowed nervously. “Hey, uh, I don’t mean to be rude, Mister … Rafe. But what’s an Egyptian god doing telling an ancient Viking his life story?” she asked, having a hard time reconciling the whole situation.

  “Because I’m the only one kicking around these parts that knows anything about it.” He shrugged. “I have connections, you see. And as for the Egyptian thing, well, there’s a lot more crossover in the Beyond Realms—the realms of the gods—than you’d think. Over the millennia, the boundaries between the various regions have begun to blur. The edges between where one world ends and another begins now overlap, and it’s not so very unlikely for, say, an Olympian to come into contact with an Aesir—which, I have a sneaking suspicion, is how you got your ass back to this realm in the first place.” He glanced back at Fennrys. “I think a couple of goddesses I know are in cahoots, although I can’t say for sure.”

  “And you?” Mason asked, wondering just how many questions she could get away with asking. “How did you get here if it’s so hard to cross back and forth?”

  “Me?” Rafe grinned sourly. “I was turfed out of my own underworld long before any of this happened by a brother god of mine who had the ambition—and the ego—to make it happen. I’ve made my home here in the mortal realm ever since. But I still get regular news updates, you know?”

  “What happened to me here?” Fennrys asked abruptly, a tremor in his voice. “In the park?”

  Rafe turned to look directly at him. “Last year there was a rebellion in the Faerie Realm. It almost resulted in a major Otherworld incursion into this realm that, if it hadn’t been stopped when it was, would have ended up in a big old faerie picnic in the middle of Manhattan.” Rafe’s mouth quirked in a mirthless grin. “And by picnic I mean death, destruction, and general Fair Folk mayhem.”

  Mason understood now. She’d seen Fennrys stand up against unearthly horrors and drive them back. She nodded. “So these creatures were going to invade, and Fennrys helped stop it.”

  Rafe turned a dark gaze on her. “Stop it? He was one of the ones who helped cause it.”

  “What?” Fennrys shook his head sharply.

  Mason looked back and forth between him and Rafe. She must have heard that wrong. Fennrys wouldn’t have done something like that. He was one of the good guys.

  Wasn’t he?

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Fennrys asked, suddenly angry.

  “You don’t have to take my word for it,” Rafe said.

  He gestured at the fog that had coalesced all around them, unnoticed, while they sat on the park bench talking about impossible things. Swirling pearlescent drifts rolled aside like drawn curtains, revealing a slight young man of medium height with blue-pale skin and dark hair that fell over his forehead, partly obscuring his eyes—so dark and empty-open, Mason felt that gazing into them would be like teetering on the edge of a bottomless abyss. The young man stepped forward, hands in the pocket of his skinny black jeans. He wore a black zippered jacket with cuffs that were frayed slightly at the wrists and a black-and-gray striped scarf. He looked as though someone had built him out of smoke and ash and gray overcast days where the sun never truly shone through the clouds.

  “Etienne,” Fennrys murmured in a shocked whisper. “Ghost …”

  “He’s a … ghost?” Mason asked, her voice strained.

  “No,” Fennrys murmured. He shook his head.

  Mason saw the fear and recognition crashing down on him. She could almost feel the cracks opening in Fenn’s mind—cracks through which the memories poured in a flood. She could see them filling his gaze as he stared at the pale young man. “That’s his name—I mean, not really. His name’s Etienne. We just used to call him Ghost.”

  “Actually”—the pale young man’s thin mouth curved in a wan smile—“you’re right on both counts.”

  “Because you’re dead,” Fenn whispered in the voice of a drowning man.

  Etienne nodded. “You watched me die.”

  “I didn’t kill you....”

  “No.” The gray young man shrugged. “You didn’t. And in truth I probably deserved it anyway.”

  “Why? What makes you say that?” Fennrys snarled. “Is it because, at the time, you were trying to kill me?”

  Etienne’s dark, fathomless eyes flicked up, focusing on Fennrys’s face. “I was wrong to do that.”

  “Damn straight!”

  Ghost smiled at him, a little sadly. “We were both on the wrong side of things, Fennrys. You just managed to live long enough to have the opportunity to reexamine your choices.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you say that.”

  Ghost shrugged, his black eyes glittering. “Death tends to give one a unique perspective on things.” He raised a hand, and the fog bank started to shape itself into the image of another place, another time. “But then … you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Fennrys?”

  XXIX

  Dead. I’m dead....

  Fennrys had died. He had sacrificed his life to save another’s—to make amends for his betrayal—and, in doing so, had hoped to find glory in the beyond, in the halls of his ancestors. A welcome home to Valhalla for the weary warrior.

  It hadn’t quite worked out as he’d hoped.

  As Ghost conjured a vision of his last moments on earth, the memories came crashing down on him, and Fennrys clutched at the sides of his head in an agony of remembering and dropped hard to his knees on the paving stones. It couldn’t be true. But it was.

  He remembered with shockingly painful clarity the moment when he offered to take the place of another man in the carriage of a Valkyrie. He knew that he would be forsaking the mortal realm. He would, for all intents and purposes, die. Still, he’d done it. And he’d done it largely for the sake of the red-haired, green-eyed girl who, in his memories, he could see standing there, at the edge of the Jackie Onassis Reservoir. So that, in her eyes, he could redeem himself. Regain some measure of honor in her esteem, knowing full well, by then, that he could never have anything else with her.

  Fennrys heard himself cry out—a sound that was half sob torn from deep in his chest—and he squeezed his eyes shut in pain. If the damned Faerie had never stolen him, he would have lived and died as a warrior prince among his people. He would have been a hero and he would have gone to Valhalla after his death in a glorious battle. But they had. And Fennrys had grown up, full of anger and a simmering resentment at having been denied his destiny.

  When he’d climbed into the carriage of the Valkyrie, Fennrys had expected that once he arrived in Valhalla—in the realm of the gods of Asgard—there would be feasting and glorious battles to be fought over and over again. Olrun, the Valkyrie, had assured him that was what it would be like. Of course she hadn’t been back to Asgard in some time. Things had changed.

  And someone didn’t want Fennrys there.

  “What are you doing? Stop!” Mason cried.

  Rafe held her tightly by the wrist, his expression grim.

  Fennrys was on his hands and knees in front of them, eyes wide and mouth gaping in silent screams of protest. Etienne stood before him, rigid with the effort of conjuring the vision. Etienne’s black eyes tracked back and forth, watching the images of the memories he’d helped draw forth, a transparent veneer of regret washing his features. All around Fennrys, Mason could make out shapes and shadows, scenes playing out—phantom projections of the memories flooding back into the hollow places in Fenn’s mind.

  “What’s happening to him?”

  “Etienne is conjuring a vision of what happened to Fennrys in Valhalla. Because it’s one of the realms of the dead—and Ghost is, himself, a charter member of those ranks—he can do that. That’s what Fennrys is seeing right now.”

  “That doesn’t look anything like the Valhalla in any of the s
tories I’ve ever read!” Mason said, pointing violently at the chamber of horrors Fenn had found himself in.

  Rafe’s gaze snapped to her, and his dark eyes went wide. “You can see that?” he asked in a voice like the crack of a whip.

  “Of course I can. It’s right in front of me.” Mason turned back to where Fennrys writhed in pain. There were shadowy things attacking him. Nightmares with teeth and claws slashing open his flesh, serpentine darkness winding around him as he lay helpless, chained and bound on the earthen floor of a cell. “That’s enough!” Mason snarled. “Make. It. Stop.”

  She rounded on the god-man, her hands knotted into fists.

  Rafe drew back a few inches in the face of her anger, and he stared at her for a moment. Then he called, “Etienne. Enough.”

  Ghost brought his hands together with a sound like a thunderclap, and the vision vanished. Fennrys collapsed on the paving stones, his chest heaving. “I thought …,” he gasped, “I thought Valhalla would have better accommodations....”

  “It does,” Rafe said grimly. “Looks like your reservation got switched. You wound up in the basement suite in Hel.”

  Hel—or Helheim—Mason knew, was the Norse mythological equivalent of the place that it sounded like. Hell. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that Fennrys belonged in such a place. But if someone had set him free … maybe he hadn’t.

  She went and knelt down beside him, helping him sit up. He was shaking like a leaf, and she wrapped her arms around him as he sagged against her. One of the wolves that had sat, silently watching, whined piteously, and Rafe walked slowly over and crouched on his haunches in front of them. Mason shifted her body protectively in front of Fennrys.

  “Listen,” Rafe said in a voice that was almost gentle. “I know what it’s like to be thrown out of the one place in all the worlds you think you belong. You thought you were being some kind of a hero. The Aesir obviously didn’t see it that way. The problem now is, hero or villain, you are the most dangerous thing to happen to this realm in a long, long time.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can walk between the worlds. You can go there … and come back again. And there’s a very nasty prophecy floating around about that very thing,” Rafe explained.

  As if something that cryptic could actually be called an explanation, Mason thought. “What about him?” she asked, nodding at Ghost, who had moved to stand just behind Rafe. “Isn’t that what he does?”

  “Him?” Rafe turned to the specter of the pale young man and waved a hand right through him. Etienne’s expression soured, but other than that, it didn’t seem to affect him. He was utterly incorporeal. “Not really much of a threat, see? The thing about Fennrys is that he stayed alive when he died.” Rafe shook his head in wonder. “And because he exists, there are those who think it makes him a harbinger. And there are those who would seek to use him as a means to an end.”

  “What end?”

  “The end,” Rafe said. “Ragnarok. The apocalypse. The end of the world.”

  Mason and Fennrys exchanged an uncertain glance. As hard to believe as everything else had been up to that point, the idea of a supernatural apocalypse was just too far beyond the pale. Mason couldn’t wrap her head around it.

  “The business with the Faerie caused a rift to open between this realm and the ones beyond it,” Rafe said. “These days, most of the ancient gods from the various pantheons—you know, Greek, Roman, Celtic, what have you—want about as much to do with you mortal folk as you do with them. The Aesir, the Norse gods—well, some of them view things a little differently. They dig the idea of ending the world, and most everyone in it, and starting fresh.” Rafe’s expression turned fierce. “I’m not cool with that. I have a very sweet apartment in SoHo. I have a wardrobe that the editor of GQ would kill for. I have the top-rated jazz flute soloist in the world flying in from Prague next month to perform exclusively at my club. She is twenty-one, she is a redhead, and she can whisper sweet nothings in my ear in eight different languages. I don’t want the world to end. I like the world.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?” Fennrys asked quietly. “How are you going to stop the Aesir from getting what they want? Kill me? Again?”

  Mason tensed. She wasn’t about to let that happen.

  “I’d love to.” Rafe shrugged. “But I’m not really allowed to do that. I’m actually not really allowed to do much of anything. I was thrown out of my very own underworld almost five thousand years ago, and I’ve been wandering around the mortal realm ever since. Just between you and me? A god in exile is about as useful as a gun with no bullets. I’m simply giving you information that I think could be useful to you. I’d like to see you solve this one on your own.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Mason said. “Do you? You could just as easily hand Fenn over to someone who could do something about him. Couldn’t you?”

  “Yeah. I could. As a matter of fact, there are those who think I’m going to do exactly that, as soon I find you.” Rafe sighed gustily. “But I think you are stuck in a tough spot through no fault of your own. I think you”—he looked at Fennrys—“deserve a second chance. I’d like to help you out. Despite what everyone says, in my experience, 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.” He grinned, appropriately enough, wolfishly and said, “To hell with destiny.”

  A couple of Rafe’s wolf companions started to pace restlessly, sniffing at the air as if they sensed the coming dawn. Rafe glanced at them and stood. When he turned back toward Mason and Fennrys, his eyes glinted in the light from the park lamp, full of ancient wisdom.

  “Go on,” he said in a surprisingly gentle voice. “Live your lives. Be careful, and be strong. But understand something. Really understand it. If this all starts to go south … I mean, badly, then I’m going to have no choice but to let others take care of things their way.” The gleam in his eyes turned hard and sharp. “Don’t let it get to that point.”

  He turned on his heel and stalked past them, the wolf pack following like silent wraiths in his wake. Ghost—Etienne—hesitated a moment. His dark, fathomless gaze was fixed, not on Fennrys, but on Mason. His look chilled her to the marrow. Then he too drifted off into the night, following in the footsteps of the god of the dead.

  Fennrys climbed shakily to his feet and held out a hand to help Mason stand. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I crashed into the middle of your normal life and have done nothing but make things hell for you. Apparently quite literally.”

  “Don’t say that.” Mason was determined, for his sake—and, truthfully, for hers too—to not just put on a brave face, but to actually be brave. “I’m not going to let this … thing … this impending doom, this cosmic conflict that’s nothing more than a stupid game of gods and monsters and mayhem, interfere with my life.” She took him by the hand and led him toward the steps that would lead back down to the park path. “You heard what Rafe said. I’m not going to run and I’m not going to hide. I’m going to live my life. And so are you.”

  It isn’t every day that second chances like that come along, right? she thought. And even an ancient god of the dead had just said Fennrys deserved it.

  Walking beside her, his head down and his features drawn tight with anguish, Fennrys said in a ragged voice, “I don’t deserve—”

  Mason turned suddenly and reached up to pull Fenn’s head violently down toward her. She stopped him with a kiss that tore the words from his mouth before he could say them.

  Startled, Fennrys hesitated a moment. But Mason’s arms wound tightly around his neck, and he was suddenly kissing her back hungrily, lifting her off the ground and crushing her to him in a fierce embrace. Mason clung to him, her fingers gripping the back of his head.

  “Don’t ever say that, Fennrys,” she said. “I don’t ever want to hear you say that you don’t deserve or you aren’t worthy. You d
o. You are.” Her forehead pressed against his, and they stayed locked in that embrace for a long moment until Mason said, with regret, “But you have to let me go now.”

  Fennrys looked stricken for an instant, until Mason started to quiver with laughter.

  “No,” she said, gasping. “I just meant put me down! I can’t breathe....”

  “Oh! Sorry …” He immediately loosened his rib-breaking hold on her, putting her gently down on the ground. Stepping back, he brushed the hair from her face and smiled that awkward, beautiful smile of his. And, for the first time that night since the dogs had attacked them on the High Line—for the first time, really, since the attack at the school—Mason felt as if everything was going to turn out just fine.

  “Now walk me the rest of the way home,” she said. “I have a major competition to win tomorrow. You’ve put a lot of time and effort into helping me prepare for this, and I don’t intend to let you down. Looming apocalypse or no looming apocalypse.”

  Fennrys threw back his head and laughed. “That’s the spirit, sweetheart.”

  “Yup.” Mason grinned up at him. “Screw Ragnarok. We’ve got more important things to do.”

  XXX

  Mason reached up and tightened the elastic band on her thick ponytail. Her right shoulder made a cracking pop as she did so, and she groaned a bit and swung her arm in circles, testing her range of motion. She was fine, it seemed, in spite of everything she’d gone through over the last few days. Banged up but not broken. She reached down into her bag and pulled out her white padded jacket and the fine gray metal mesh lamé that went over top. Because she fought saber, the lamé covered her torso and arms. It was attached to a wire that registered hits from the electrified saber blade during bouts. As sore as she was from her recent encounters, Mason knew that any residual aches and pains would be left behind, forgotten, once she was connected to the electronic scorekeeper and facing off against her opponent, ready to compete. She half turned and reached for where she’d left her gauntlet and metal overglove on the bench beside her, but they weren’t there. She turned all the way around and saw Calum, leaning against the wall, holding the protective gear out to her.