Then again, he thought, Toby seems pretty up-to-the-minute on his ancient curses and the insane cults who use them. . . .
He also recognized the possibility that should they fail, there would be a need for someone outside the city to try to find help from other sources. And if the curse spread outward from the city, Douglas had his boat and could get away. If it came to that.
“I’m worried about him.”
Mason’s voice nudged Fennrys from his grim contemplation. He followed her gaze back to where Cal was saying good-bye and knew it wasn’t Douglas she was talking about. Like Mason, he, too, had his reservations about Calum, and about bringing him along into the city. Fennrys would’ve cheerfully left the kid behind to catch up on old times with his pop if he’d thought there was even half a chance Cal would agree to it. But even with his earlier protestations, it was apparent that Cal wasn’t about to let Mason out of his sight. She turned to see Fennrys frowning and reached up to smooth the crease between his eyebrows. Her fingertips were cool, and he leaned into the caress.
“I’m just worried,” she said. “Nothing more. Fenn . . . remember what I said to you back on North Brother Island? I don’t feel that way about Cal.”
“Mase . . .” He smiled and reached up to cup her face in his hands. “I do remember. And I’m not bothered by what you feel about Cal. I’m not bothered about how you feel about me. It’s okay. And you sure as hell don’t have to worry about how I feel about you. That isn’t going to change. Whatever else happens.”
Truthfully, the only thing Fennrys was worried about was what Cal was feeling in that moment. Fenn knew that Mason had been overjoyed when she’d first seen him alive, and he couldn’t blame her. Her reaction was perfectly normal for anyone who’d just experienced the return of a dear friend she’d thought was dead. But that spontaneous expression of joy had translated very differently for Cal. In that moment, Fennrys had seen something spark back to life in the other boy’s eyes. Something frightening. Covetous. Ruthless.
Mason, Fennrys knew, hadn’t seen it. Not the way he had.
She was still staring up at him, and he knew he’d been silent too long. Her eyes gleamed in the darkness, sapphire blue and brimming with emotion.
“Fennrys,” she said quietly, “I—”
“Shh.”
He pressed a finger gently to her lips and smiled when she kissed it in response. He could tell, by the look in her eyes and by the tone of her voice, exactly what she was about to say to him. He could feel it. And his heart longed to hear her say the words. But instead, he just traced his finger over her lips, memorizing their shape, reveling in their softness, the smooth warmth of her mouth. . . .
“Tell me when this is over,” he said. “I want you to tell me when it’s just you and me. No monsters and no gods . . . No peril. Nothing but us. Okay?”
“Okay,” she whispered. “No monsters, no gods. Nothing but us. I like the sound of that, Fennrys Wolf.”
So did he.
But for the moment, they were headed straight into the heart of peril.
Following Toby’s lead, they made their way unchallenged into the tram station and onto one of the cable cars. Pretty much everyone else on Roosevelt Island was somewhere indoors, glued to a TV and the news broadcasts, or was already making plans to get farther away from Manhattan. Crouched down on the floor of one of the Roosevelt Island tram cars, they bided their time silently as it swung through the night sky on its way into the city that lay under a spell.
When the tram car was almost over the west bank of the river, Mason pulled herself up onto her knees so that she could peek through the window. Fennrys joined her, and together they looked down onto the Queensboro Bridge, where the cars were jammed almost all the way back to Queens, and police and soldiers in heavy gear with very large guns were swarming between the vehicles. They milled about, only a few yards away from the wispy leading edge of the barrier, looking helpless and frustrated.
Fennrys held his breath as the underside of the tram carriage only just cleared the upper reaches of the fog battlement. Down below, inside the swirling, shimmering whiteness, he caught a glimpse of a handful of shadowy figures moving erratically within—probably some of the National Guard who’d tried to rush through and been caught in the throes of a waking nightmare, trapped inside the Miasma’s outer wall. Over the grinding of the cable car’s gears, the occupants of the tram heard the tortured screams that issued from more than one throat. And then sporadic bursts of gunfire.
The men and women standing around on the Queensboro all hit the deck. Pulling Mason with him, Fennrys ducked back down onto the floor of the tram. A few more moments and they were past the barrier, and the Tramway Plaza station port yawned like a gaping mouth before them.
“We did it,” Mason said, with a whispered sigh of relief. “We’re in.”
Down on the street, Mason almost turned and climbed the stairs back up to the station to take the next cable car back to Roosevelt Island. As she stepped out of the station doors alongside Fennrys, with Cal and Toby close behind, she felt like she’d suddenly been thrust into a horror movie. The clouds overhead were a thick, oppressive ceiling, blotting out the moon and the stars, leaving the streetlights and neon signs to illuminate the weird landscape of a city under a spell. Inside the fog barrier’s enclosure, only a thin haze of mist hung in the streets between the buildings. It sparkled and danced, swirling in eddies, obscuring and then revealing the limp, sprawled shapes of Manhattanites that lay strewn everywhere. “Nightmare” was really the only word that even came close to describing the scene that stretched out in front of them.
Mason was familiar enough with New York to be able to find her way around just about anywhere without a problem. But as she stood at the corner of Second Avenue and East Sixtieth Street, the relative silence and the stillness turned the streets into unfamiliar, forbidding canyons. Suddenly she felt as if she was back in Helheim.
She glanced around at Fennrys and Cal, and Toby and Rafe. None of them spoke. They just turned down Second Avenue and headed south. Before they’d left Roosevelt Island, Douglas had suggested that the first place they look for Daria should be Rockefeller Plaza. That was where she had her offices, and where she’d been known to stage lavish “parties” that Douglas said were actually ceremonies—gatherings of her Eleusinian followers, where they would perform their strange and mysterious rites.
They walked a few blocks before they found an SUV that was idling at the side of the road with the window down and the driver sitting, head back and mouth open, in the driver’s seat. Toby opened the door and eased the man out onto the sidewalk, then got back into the SUV behind the wheel, motioning for the others to pile in.
As they drove, Fennrys and Cal had to jump out a couple of times and clear the way of sleepers who had dropped in their tracks in the middle of intersections. Toby took side streets and alleyways to avoid log jams and more than once drove through a parkette or up onto the sidewalk, but thanks to his creative navigation, they made surprisingly swift progress. Mason saw more than a few cars that had run up on the sidewalk or smashed into bus stop shelters or other cars. Most were just stopped at odd angles in the street, drivers draped over steering wheels or slumped in their seats in dull slumber, like the people on the sidewalks who lay crumpled every few feet, senseless.
Not everyone was completely unconscious. There were those who were still awake, but they were hardly alert. Mason saw one woman dressed in head-to-toe Chanel who had obviously been hit with the stupor while reapplying a bright-red lipstick—only half of her top lip was filled in, and there was a bright streak of color in a line down her chin—but she still wandered, shuffling from shop window to shop window, pausing to gaze vacantly at the displays. It was like watching a shadow play of people’s lives.
It was creepy as hell.
They also passed no less than four fires, burning out of control with no fire department there to douse the blazes. And Mason knew that among the unconscious,
there were bodies. People who had hit their heads, or been struck by cars, or fallen down stairs . . . There was blood in the streets. And they couldn’t stop for any of it.
But there was one thing they did stop for. Rafe’s wolves.
A few blocks away from Rockefeller Plaza, Rafe instructed Toby to turn left. They drove until they arrived in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library, where Mason recognized the sleek black shapes of Rafe’s pack, sitting and standing, a few of them pacing back and forth, on the steps of the terrace. Slumped in their midst, elbows braced on his knees and head hanging, sat a young man.
“Maddox!” Fennrys shouted.
He was out of the SUV before Toby had rolled to a stop. Mason watched as the young man rose to his feet and he and Fennrys embraced. Curious, she hopped out of the SUV and followed after him. She wasn’t used to seeing Fennrys with . . . well, with anyone, and the sight of him sharing a moment with a friend brought a smile to her face in the midst of all the grimness.
“Seven hells, Madd!” Fennrys cried. “You made it.”
“Told you I would.” Maddox shrugged, grinning. “What’s a couple of flame-throwing monkeys to a fully equipped Janus Guard?” He turned when he noticed Mason standing there, and his eyebrows lifted. He looked from her to Fennrys and back again. “Hello,” he said, and Mason got the sense that he already knew something about her.
“Mason Starling, this is Maddox. He’s a Janus Guard—the same as I used to be. We spent Halloweens together killing monsters.”
“Good times!” Maddox said brightly.
“He’s also a bit of an idiot, but he’s damn useful in a scrap.” Fennrys punched him on the shoulder. “He helped me and Rafe run a bit of a gauntlet so we could get to you in Asgard. I owe him.”
Mason smiled up at Maddox’s handsome, boyish face, and held out her hand. “Sounds like I might owe him one too,” she said, even though she remembered what Rafe had said about owing those who might one day come to collect. If Maddox had helped Fenn rescue her, she was willing to risk it. “Thank you, Maddox.”
Maddox took her hand and bowed like a courtier over it. “Anything for a lovely lass,” he said. “Especially one who can hold her own against this great lout. We need more of your kind in the world—”
“That’s enough of that.” Fennrys elbowed him sharply in the ribs. “What happened after I last saw you?”
Maddox straightened up and waved a hand in the direction of the library. He looked, Mason thought, a bit like he’d been through a flaming wood chipper. His shirt and jeans were ripped in some places and scorched in others. There was a swatch of sandy hair on one side of his head that looked crispy, and there were smudges of soot on his forehead and one cheek.
“Walk in the park,” he said. “By which I mean a walk in Central Park, and you know how those walks always turned out.” He turned to Mason and explained. “That’s to say, I almost died.”
“Okay, hero.” Fennrys rolled his eyes. “Sure you did.”
“Nah. Not really.” He grinned.
Mason couldn’t help but appreciate his casual approach to epic danger. She felt her heartbeat quicken with excitement at the thought and grinned back.
“So. All of this”—Maddox circled one finger in the air, indicating the state of the city—“some kind of curse, yeah?”
“Yeah.” Fennrys nodded. “We’re gonna go stop it. You in?”
Maddox gave him a look. “You have to ask?”
They turned to head back to the SUV, just in time to see a pair of centaurs, flourishing crossbows, leap over a taxi with all the grace of a couple of thoroughbred show jumpers.
“Oh, not these guys again . . .” Fennrys groaned.
“Okay,” Maddox said. “That’s not something you see every day. Even in Manhattan.”
Mason felt herself staring, mouth open, in astonishment. One of the muscle-bound, bare-chested half-man horse monsters kicked a Smart Car out of the way with a casual flick of one hind leg, and the other one punched through the hood—and the engine block—of the SUV with its front hooves. The vehicle vented a cloud of steam from its shattered radiator, and Toby and Cal dove out the doors and headed up the library steps at a run.
Rafe was running too.
Mason and Fennrys and Maddox joined the sprint across the terrace. They pounded down the shallow steps onto the lower level and, one by one, vaulted the broad stone balustrade, landing on the sidewalk on Forty-Second Street.
“Keep running,” Rafe shouted. “Those boys are Daria’s hired muscle, and this is just a distraction. Something to keep us from getting to her. Obviously, we’re getting close—”
A crossbow bolt sang past his ear and he snarled viciously, barking what sounded like an order to his pack in a language Mason didn’t know. She didn’t dare turn around, but heard a cacophony of yelps and growling from behind them. And then angry shouts and curses.
“Things like centaurs are the reason I wanted to pick up the pack,” Rafe told her, grabbing her by the wrist and yanking her out of the way of a rogue clothing rack that was rolling down the street, a chorus line of cocktail dresses swaying limply as they passed. “They’re good at this kind of business. Let them do their work.”
“Hey, Rafe,” Mason panted as they crouched behind a still-steaming pretzel cart while crossbow bolts flew overhead. “Your pack . . . Are they ever, y’know, not wolves? Jackals? Whatever you call them?”
“Sure. See that one there—with the white blaze on her forehead?” He pointed at one of the dangerously graceful animals slinking along the sidewalk in a move to flank the centaur who had stopped to reload. “She’s an investment banker down on Wall Street. But we don’t need an investment banker at the moment. We need a hundred and eighty pounds of muscle with big, sharp teeth. So that is what Honora there has so generously provided us.”
Mason tried to picture the wolf in a pinstripe skirt suit. Having seen Rafe enough times in his transitional man-wolf state, she could almost do it.
“Now,” Rafe said, “your job is to just keep running. Get to the Rockefeller Center. Go!”
Mason shot to her feet and started running again. She risked a glance over her shoulder and saw the wolves surge toward where the centaurs were weaving through the stalled cars. The pack attacked as if with one mind, dodging the massive hooves as they came within range of the horse-men and their deadly kicks.
As a second pair of centaurs came thundering out from between two buildings, Cal made a belated half lunge for Mason. But Fennrys had already grabbed her, and he pulled her out of the way, narrowly avoiding a crossbow bolt—which would have punched straight through her sternum if she’d still been standing in that spot. For a split second, he held her against his chest. She could feel his heart beating, and she could see the sparkle dancing deep in his blue eyes as he gazed into hers and said, “I’ve got you.”
He thrives on this, she thought. Danger. It’s like caffeine to him.
But she also felt herself grinning in response. Her heart was pounding, too, and her skin tingled where he touched her. She could get used to this—to the danger, the rush. . . . Especially if he was there beside her to share it with.
Maddox sprinted out from between two parked cars, swinging a length of chain around his head like a lasso. He snared the arm of one of the centaurs, jerking the bow out of the creature’s hand. On the other side of the street, Mason saw Toby, crouched and running, dart out behind their other attacker with a black-bladed knife in his hand. With scarily exacting precision, he hamstrung the centaur, who screamed in pain and fell crashing to the ground.
“That way.” Rafe pointed to a clear bit of road.
“Come on!” Fennrys took Mason by the hand. “Toby and Maddox will cover us.”
“Come on, Cal!” Mason called.
And then the three of them were off running again. She could sense, without even turning around, the frosted hostility coming off Cal as he pounded down the street beside her, but there wasn’t much s
he could do about it. The wolves and the others kept the centaurs off their tails. All Mason and Cal had to do was make it to the Plaza. So they ran. Past Bryant Park and turning up a car-snarled Avenue of the Americas, dodging the strafing runs the centaurs would make every time they managed to evade the others. At the next corner, though, the avenue became completely impassable, with stalled cars and a crashed tour bus.
Cal turned and shouted, “This way!” and took the lead.
He led them up West Forty-Ninth Street and through the promenade in front of the Plaza’s Channel Gardens, with its statues of sea gods perched on the backs of dolphins, fountaining water into the long step-pools that flowed prettily through the narrow urban park. They pounded past the statue of Prometheus and kept running until they made it back out onto Fiftieth Street, heading toward 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Once inside, Cal led them through the halls and down to the entrance of the Top of the Rock attraction—a circular lobby that showcased a hanging art installation made up of hundreds of suspended Swarovski crystals that shattered the light into thousands of tiny rainbows and reminded Mason uncomfortably of the bridge to Asgard. Her footsteps faltered as she stared up at it, and suddenly, the crystals began to sway and bounce, tinkling against one another in a musical protest as the floor beneath Mason’s feet shuddered and rumbled.
She exchanged a glance with Fennrys and Cal.
“Tremors? Like we weren’t having enough fun already?” she said.
“Sure. What’s a Ragnarok without a few good old-fashioned earthquakes?” Fennrys muttered.
“No. No Ragnarok.”
Mason stomped a foot on the floor, only half jokingly. The shuddering stopped, and she shot Fennrys a look. Then she turned and headed toward the security checkpoint. There were several uniformed guides slumped over the ticket desk or collapsed in heaps on the floor. One guy was pacing in a slow circle, a look of dull confusion on his face.