Descendant

  But Heather was bored. Bored with being cooped up, bored with studying. Not that she’d been studying for school—she hadn’t been to class since she’d gotten back to the academy—more like she’d been trying to find out as much as she could about the differences between the Greek and Roman gods . . . while trying to decide whether she believed she’d actually met one of them three days earlier on a subway ride from Queens to Manhattan.

  So she’d retrieved the crossbow from where she’d hidden it in her underwear drawer and started messing around with it.

  “Yeah,” she muttered. “Because in the last couple of days, I’ve either crossed over a very scary line . . . or I’ve just completely lost my mind.” She stood up and struck a gunslinger pose, pointing the strange little weapon at a picture of Cal that hung on her wall beside her door. The one she still said good night to every night when she turned out her light. Even after he’d broken up with her. Even after he’d . . .

  I wish I could get you out of my head, she thought.

  “What do you think, Cal?” she murmured, closing one eye and sighting down the crossbow at his smiling face. “Am I crazy? If I am, it’s probably your fau—”

  Suddenly Heather’s door slammed open, crashing against the wall, and a slender, wild-eyed, purple-haired girl burst through. Heather’s finger squeezed the trigger, and the leaden bolt shot from the crossbow and buried itself in Cal’s picture—right in the middle of his chest.

  “Holy—” Gwen Littlefield flinched violently away from the projectile that had hit its mark less than six inches from her aubergine-dyed locks. She froze, pressed up against the open door frame, her eyes white-rimmed with shock.

  “Oh, hell no!” Heather exclaimed, just as shocked as Gwen was. “I don’t believe this!”

  After a moment, she recovered herself enough to throw the crossbow onto the stack of mythology texts that lay open on her bed and cross the room to yank the other girl out of the way of the door. She glanced up and down the hallway to make sure there weren’t any other students around and slammed the door closed, breathing heavily. Then she stalked back into the middle of her room and rounded angrily on the other girl.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she snapped.

  “Looking for you,” Gwen gasped, the breath heaving in her lungs. It looked as though she’d been running, and her hands and the front of her shirt were stained with dirt. And . . . blood. “I need help.”

  Heather could feel her own eyes growing wide at the sight, and she edged back toward the door. “With what? Dumping a body?”

  “Relax . . . it’s only dinner,” Gwen panted, following Heather’s gaze to the deep red stains marring her pale skin, almost to the elbows. “They’re serving liver in the dining hall tonight. I needed to do a reading, so I stole some before they could cook it.”

  “Well, thanks for the heads-up,” Heather said. “Guess it’s Pizza Eatsa for me tonight. Again.” She edged farther toward the door. “I’d invite you along, but you’re probably not that hungry—”

  She made a break for it, but Gwen was faster and got to the door first, jamming her shoulder up against it and holding the solid oak closed with surprising strength.

  “Out of my way, Littlefield!” Heather yanked hard on the brass doorknob to no avail, mentally kicking herself for having forgotten to lock it after her last stealth trip to the girls’ bathroom down the hall. She’d just been so preoccupied with trying not to be seen by any of her fellow dorm mates while she holed up in her room.

  The thing was, she didn’t actually need to go out for a slice. The only other living person Heather had seen in the last three days had been the Pizza Eatsa delivery guy, two nights in a row, and there were undoubtedly leftovers in at least one of the boxes sitting on her desk. Since the incident on the train, Heather had locked herself in her room, only gone out after hours, ignored the calls and texts to her cell phone, and kept the curtains drawn.

  Toby Fortier had said to get back to the school. He’d said it was safe. Protected. Heather knew that it was a huge risk. That coming back to Gosforth—where Gunnar Starling was actually the head of the board of directors—was essentially hiding in plain sight. But she just didn’t know what else to do.

  And Toby had promised.

  It was easier than she’d thought it would be to stay in the dorm undetected. Quite a few students had been called home by their parents because of the strange fact that over the last day or two, New York—a place that wasn’t exactly known for its earthquakes—had been experiencing a series of mild to worrisome tremors. Add to that the Hell Gate Bridge exploding, and most people seemed to think that the city was under some kind of siege, either natural or man-made. Heather suspected that they were right about the siege, but wrong about the origins.

  Most of the faculty still seemed to be hanging tight on the campus, though—at least as far as Heather’s furtive glances out bedroom and bathroom windows told her—but even at the risk of announcing her presence back at Gosforth, Heather desperately needed an excuse to flee her room just then. She just needed to get away from Gwen Littlefield.

  “Damn it, let go!” She put a foot against the wall and heaved at the door.

  “Heather, you have got to listen to me—”

  “No! I do not!” Heather let go of the handle in frustration and turned on Gwen, suddenly furious. “The last time I listened to you”—she stuck a pointing finger right in Gwen’s face—“I got kidnapped, threatened, lost one of the only real friends I’ve ever made in my whole sorry tenure at this prison camp they call a school, and watched my ex-boyfriend die! I don’t listen to you anymore. There is nothing you can say that I have any interest in hearing whatso—”

  “She’s gonna kill Roth.”

  “I—what?”

  Gwen bit her lower lip, and her hands clenched into fists under her chin. “I know how you felt about Cal. How you . . . still feel. I feel the same way about Roth Starling.”

  Heather blinked at the other girl dumbly.

  “And Cal’s mom is gonna kill him.”

  “Cal’s . . .”

  Heather backed off, her brow knotting in confusion. Just like the last time she and Gwen had spoken, the weirdo pixieish eggplant-hued Gosforth outcast was virtually incomprehensible at first. When Gwen had first tracked her down, days earlier, to tell her that Mason was in some kind of trouble—or at least, about to be—it had taken Heather the better part of an hour to figure out what the haruspex was trying to say. That was before Heather had even known what the hell a haruspex was, or that Gwen Littlefield was particularly gifted—or rather, burdened—with that unique skill set.

  But once Heather had figured it all out and, more to the point, decided to believe it . . . enough time had been wasted and events had slotted into place anyway. The very same events that Gwen had come to get Heather’s help to stop from happening. The whole exercise had turned into a colossal fail of majestic proportions. And Heather couldn’t bring herself to go through something like that again. Even if it had something to do with Cal or his mom or . . .

  No. She wouldn’t listen to another word Littlefield had to say. That was that. As she glared at the other girl, Heather watched two of the biggest teardrops she’d ever seen gather on the bottom lids of Gwen’s storm-gray eyes. They grew, finally spilling down her flushed cheeks to drop onto her shirt, where they left two perfect round spots beneath her collarbones.

  Heather rolled her eyes and let out a heavy sigh. “Shit. . . .”

  “Please, Heather. I didn’t know who else to go to.”

  “Right. Because I was so damned helpful last time,” she muttered.

  Heather wilted down onto her bed and dropped her head into her hands. Her hair, she could feel as she ran her hands through it, was an unruly mess. She knew from the single time she’d bothered to glance at herself in the mirror that there were dark circles under her eyes.

  “Fine. Tell me. What did you see this time?”

  As Gwen began to s
peak, Heather reached over to snag a long-sleeved T-shirt from the back of her chair and yanked it on over her head. Then she raked her fingers through her hair, pulling it back into a messy bun. By the time she’d slipped into her runners and collected her jacket, and shoved her keys and cell phone into her shoulder bag, Gwen had spilled most of the, admittedly somewhat vague, details of what she’d “seen” in the liver.

  “You stare at animal guts and can see the future.” Heather shuddered in revulsion. “That’s seriously messed up.”

  “Why do you think I’m a vegan?”

  Heather did a double take and then burst out laughing at the rueful expression on the other girl’s face. After a moment, Gwen started to laugh too.

  “So, does any old viscera do for your little party trick?” Heather asked. “Or does it have to be, like, grade A guts?”

  Gwen rolled an eye at her. “Ritually sacrificed on a marble altar is ideal.”

  “Are there a lot of those kicking around Manhattan?”

  Gwen snorted. “I used to get deliveries from a butcher in the East Village—and yeah. He had an entire sacrificial altar setup in a locked room in the back of the shop devoted to the goddess Demeter. Marble altar, pure silver knives, statues . . . the works.”

  Demeter, Heather remembered from a class on the subject, was the goddess of agriculture and civilization. She frowned and glanced at the textbooks on the bed, remembering the things she’d read about the ancient secretive worshippers of Demeter at a place called Eleusis. They were fanatics, cultish, strange.

  “He supplied me with the good stuff,” Gwen said with equal parts revulsion and longing. “See . . . if the offering isn’t pure . . . prepared under strict conditions and, uh, really fresh . . . I get—um—interference. Static. Sometimes it’s hard to tune into just exactly what’s happening.”

  “So you could, theoretically, be wrong about all of this,” Heather said.

  “Yup.” Gwen shrugged. “But I’m kind of a ‘better safe than—’”

  She broke off as the air in the room became suddenly, electrically charged.

  Heather felt a moment of queasy disorientation before she realized that the walls were trembling and the floor felt as if she was standing on the deck of a ship. Another earthquake. That made eight—or was it nine?—tremors in the last twenty-four hours. Heather reached out a hand to steady herself against the wall as the overhead light began to sway and a framed picture—this one of her and Cal together, sitting waterside at his place on Long Island Sound—toppled off its perch on her bookshelf, the glass in the frame shattering as it hit the floor.

  Heather glanced at Gwen, who was frowning fiercely, two deep parallel lines forming between her brows, beneath the fringe of amethyst hair.

  “Yeah,” she said. She didn’t bother to reach out to steady herself, but just flexed her knees and rode the trembling floor like a surfboard. “It’s worse in the catacombs. You can really feel it down there. And one of the older tunnels caved in yesterday, but I think it was just a dead end.”

  “What catacombs?” Heather asked.

  “The ones under the school.”

  Gwen shot out a hand to grab one of Heather’s trophies, which had tipped off the shelf, before it, too, smashed on the floor. Heather snatched it out of her hands before Gwen had a chance to read the plaque and see that it was for winning second place in some grade eight nerd-o-rama science fair.

  “Some of the tunnels go pretty deep,” Gwen continued, her eye line following the swift progress of a crack that suddenly zigzagged up the plaster wall, shedding flakes and dust that floated down between the two girls.

  Heather walked unsteadily to the window and twitched the curtain aside an inch or two. The afternoon sky outside looked angry and unsettled. It had been like that all day, churning with storm clouds and flashes of lightning, but had yet to shed any rain on the city, and the heat and humidity was becoming oppressive.

  “I’ve only checked out a few of the easier ones to access,” Gwen said, still talking, for some reason, about catacombs. “And some of the chambers that don’t have warning sigils or curse runes carved above them.”

  “What the hell is a ‘sigil’?”

  “An arcane symbol,” Gwen huffed impatiently. “Magick. This is Gosforth. Don’t you pay attention in class?”

  Heather’s glare, when she turned back from the window, was so flat it was probably comical. She was beginning to weary of this bizarre little person using words like “catacombs” and “sigils” and “runes” and “chambers” and talking about the academy like it was frickin’ Hogwarts.

  “What exactly were you doing crawling around a bunch of creepy old—”

  “I’m living there.”

  Again Heather was reduced to just standing and blinking.

  Gwen shrugged and brushed self-consciously at a dirt stain on her shirt. “Only for the last little while. It was Roth’s idea when he knew I had to go into hiding. Things got hot, so I went underground. Literally.”

  “Hot . . . how, exactly?”

  “Remember how I mentioned Cal’s mom?”

  “Yeah,” Heather said. “What does Daria Aristarchos have to do with any of this?”

  “I used to work for her,” Gwen said. “The butcher I told you about is one of Daria Aristarchos’s people. Devotees, really. Your ex-boyfriend’s mom is, like, the high priestess of the Eleusinian mysteries cult.”

  And—wow—did that ever totally make sense all of a sudden.

  Heather had always suspected that Cal’s mom was one of those ravenously power-hungry types. She was a control freak to end all control freaks. And what better way to control the people around you than by claiming that you were the conduit to their gods?

  Secret, mysterious, ancient gods . . .

  “When I prophesied what was going to happen to Mason, Roth freaked,” Gwen said. “And not just about his dad, but about all of it. All of them. All the heads of the Gosforth families. He thought it was too dangerous for me to work for her anymore.”

  “I think Roth might have been onto something there,” Heather said drily, and gave Gwen a rundown of what she’d gleaned from her encounter on Gunnar’s train.

  “Look. All I know is that I saw Roth confronting Daria about something. I don’t know what—the visions don’t always come with audio tracks—and the next thing I see is her freaking out. Then there’s static . . . and when the vision comes back online, Roth’s unconscious.” Gwen squeezed her eyes shut, as if she was seeing the vision replay in her mind’s eye. “I get, like, a time lag . . . and then the vision changes and she’s taken him somewhere. Someplace where I just know she’s going to kill him.”

  “Do you have any idea where?” Heather asked.

  “Somewhere . . . high up.” Gwen opened her eyes and shook her head. “In the vision, I could feel it when another tremor hits—it’s bigger than any of the ones we’ve had so far—and I felt as if I was surrounded by glass walls and marble columns, almost like a palace or a temple, and everything was swaying. And I was afraid that I’d fall right through the glass and out into the sky. But . . . I don’t know exactly where I was. I think I could see the park—I mean, there were a lot of trees in the far distance, beyond tall buildings. . . .”

  “Right.” Heather thought for a moment.

  Fall into the sky . . .

  The park . . .

  She knew where Roth was.

  Reaching up, Heather suddenly yanked the leaden bolt out of Cal’s picture. She felt a corresponding twisting in her own heart at the sight of the hole it left behind. She turned and saw that Gwen was staring at the stubby little arrow in her hand.

  “Is that—”

  “I don’t know what it is. Not exactly.” She still wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  “Who—”

  “I don’t exactly know who gave it to me, either.” She moved back over to the bed and picked up the weapon, stuffing both bolts and the crossbow into her shoulder bag. It was the only thing she had
that resembled a weapon of any kind, and so she took it. Just in case. “I have some ideas.”

  “You should be careful with that,” Gwen said in a hollow, quiet voice. “Really, really careful.”

  “Yeah.” Heather offered up a brittle smile. “That’s one of my ideas. Now let’s go. I know where Daria has taken Roth Starling.”

  XVII

  The sound of a boat engine drifted over the surface of the water. The moon had disappeared behind a cloud, casting the island into darkness. A rumble of thunder drowned out the engine sounds for a moment, but when it faded, they could clearly hear the growl of an outboard. And it seemed to be coming closer.

  “Are you expecting someone?” Fennrys asked Rafe quietly. “Besides Aken?”

  The god shook his head. “No. But clearly someone was expecting us.”

  Someones, Mason thought. First Cal’s mer-girl, and now this.

  She took another step forward, her head cocked to one side as she listened intently. She heard it again. A voice . . . calling softly, as if its owner didn’t want to be overheard by the wrong party.

  The voice was calling Mason’s name.

  “Mase,” Fennrys hissed, grabbing her hand and drawing her back behind a scraggly stand of trees as the narrow beam of a small searchlight clicked on from somewhere out on the surface of the water and began to sweep the margins of the beach. Rafe ducked behind a rock and motioned for them to stay hidden.

  “Mason?” the voice called out again, and the sweep of the beam swung up and down the shore. The call was quiet, the voice deep, the tone hovering somewhere between wary and hopeful. “Are you there?”