Transcendent (11 page)

“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.

T
he 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?”

“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 . . .