Transcendent (18 page)

He could have just taken the Janus medallion from her, but he'd said “please.” Twice. And “thank you.” That was more than she could say for any of the other major players on the whole insane chessboard. And she still wasn't convinced that he was evil. But she also didn't really want to head back up to the dining hall where the others waited, just so she could tell Toby and Rafe that she'd left Fenn alone for a little father-son time with Loki, his dad.

Mason stood outside the ruined gymnasium and felt utterly powerless.

Her gaze drifted toward the dormitory wing and she saw that, behind a drawn curtain, Cal's third-floor room had a light on. She knew he'd taken Heather there and her thoughts turned to how the other girl really
was
powerless. Alone among all of them, Heather was the one who had made it that far with no magick, no blood curse, no elixirs or transformative powers or parental demigods. And she'd been brave
enough to give up the protective runegold to save her friends. Mason wondered if there was something she could do for her in return.

And then she had an idea.

She ran across the rain-drenched quad and in through the closest door to the dorms. There was a staircase right inside the door and Mason took the steps two at a time, then ran down the hall to the third-floor dorm room that belonged to her brother Rory as fast as her feet could carry her. The empty corridor echoed hollowly, but she could sense that there were still one or two scattered students in some of the rooms. It didn't matter. She didn't have time to stop and gather up lost lambs. Toby and Carrie could take care of that.

Of course, once she got to Rory's door, she realized that the first challenge she faced was actually just getting into the damn room. To be honest, Mason couldn't remember with any certainty the last time she'd even had her own room key. And she was certain that Rory would never have left his door unlocked. She was right. The heavy antique door was shut tight, secured with both knob lock and deadbolt.

“Great . . .”

A surge of frustration filled her head for a moment with that increasingly familiar red rage. Mason backed off a few steps and then, before she'd even consciously thought about what she was doing, she took a run, and kicked the solid oak slab off its brass hinges. She heard herself yelp in astonishment and hopped around gingerly, expecting that her foot would be broken—or at the very least spectacularly sprained—but
when she put her full weight on it, it felt surprisingly good.
She
felt surprisingly good. Mason grinned and flexed her hands into fists, reining in the urge to randomly punch holes in the plaster—just because she could—and instead, searched around for the thing she'd come to find.

The thing she knew Rory would have hidden somewhere.

His desk was a mess, littered with glossy men's lifestyle magazines and expensive gadgetry and empty beer cans. His phone was sitting there and, without thinking, Mason picked it up and shoved it into her pocket. Like her keys, she had no idea where her own phone had gotten to over the last few days. Chances were that it was sitting on the bottom of the East River, a shiny useless trinket for a Nereid to play with. Rory's laptop was there too, half hidden under a draft of an unfinished English paper for the very same class she'd told Toby about in the carriage on the way to Gosforth. The assignment was technically due in less than a week. Mason picked up the sheaf of paper, fanning through the pages. At a glance, it seemed Rory was defending Iago as the misunderstood hero of
Othello
. She shook her head.

You would think that, wouldn't you, Rory?

She tossed the pages back on his desk and tried to remember, fleetingly, what her own thesis had been. At the time, it had seemed so important. Now . . . she couldn't even remember when she'd started writing it.

This?
she thought.
This is how my life has changed
.

A storm. Monsters in a storm. A naked hot guy in a storm . . . that was how it had all started. And while it had
seemed a little bizarre at the time, it paled in comparison to what had happened since. Mason Starling had been to hell and back. Literally.

Also? That night wasn't when all this started. It all started before I was even born
.

She searched through Rory's desk drawers and found a huge wad of cash rolled up and circled with a rubber band, three bottles of brandy from Gunnar's private reserve (one of them empty), and a pair of leather driving gloves that still had the store security tag attached. Mason rolled her eyes and shoved them back where she'd found them. On the shelf above his desk there were books. Textbooks for class, a couple of paperbacks, a box set of
The Lord of the Rings
DVDs, and a book with no title, just an embossed leather spine decorated with the intertwined branches of a tree. Mason plucked that one off the shelf and opened the front cover. The book was a fake with a hollowed-out core and it contained two things. The first was a folded sheaf of photocopied pages. The second was a golden acorn.

Mason unfolded the pages and immediately recognized the handwriting as her father's. In the middle of the top page was what looked like a bit of poetry:

One tree. A rainbow. Bird wings among the branches
.

Three seeds of the apple tree grown tall
.

As Odin's spear is gripped in the hand of the Valkyrie,
they shall awaken Odin Sons
.

When the Devourer returns, the hammer will fall down on
the earth, to be reborn
.

She frowned at the odd stanza and, folding the papers back up, shoved them into her pocket. Then she plucked the runegold acorn out of its hiding place and snapped the cover shut. She went to replace it on the shelf, but something at the back, something reflective hidden behind the row of books, caught her eye. She pulled the rest of the books off the shelf. It was—surprisingly—a framed picture of the whole Starling clan. Mason and her father, and her two brothers mugging for the camera. Mason couldn't remember who'd snapped the picture, but she knew it had been at one of the parties her father had thrown for his insanely rich friends, taken on the waterside dock at the Starling family estate, the summer before, on the shores of Lake Kensico, with the water glinting like diamonds spilled on blue velvet behind them.

Mason's grinning face sported a smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks, Gunnar's mane of silver hair was blown back in the breeze off the water, and Roth was actually smiling at the camera, although the dark sunglasses he wore hid his piercing gaze from the camera. Even Rory, tanned and handsome, had actually looked happy. As happy as he ever looked, at least.

And it was all a lie
.

How could she have gone through life so blind?

There wouldn't be any more summer parties, she thought. And all of her dad's wealthy pals, if Gunnar had his way,
would be dust and bone lying scattered in the long grass gone to seed when nature reclaimed the Earth from man. She thought of all the bodies—living still, and dead—that littered Manhattan's streets outside the confines of Gosforth. Spilled blood. A fine red mist lowered in front of her eyes and she spun and hurled the framed photo across the room. It shattered on the wall beside the open window, the sound of breaking glass louder even than the machine-gun rattle of ice pellets lashing the slate roof of the dorm.

It must have been good weather when Rory had last left his room, otherwise he would have shut the window. Not Mason. When she was little, after the hide-and-seek incident, Mason had demanded that her bedroom window always be left open. It was the first manifestation of her devastating claustrophobia, but Gunnar had accommodated her wishes. He'd never complained about rain-soaked curtains or warped wooden sills, nor had he ever chastised her for being foolish or frightened. And on nights at the estate up in Westchester, he would come and sit with her during thunderstorms and read her stories of gods and heroes. The stories had never mattered to Mason—and she'd certainly never suspected that she'd one day become a part of them—but having her father there to take care of her had.

She realized then that she still loved him.

But she would destroy him, if she had to.

With that thought, the red rage suddenly ebbed, washed away by a feeling of clarity that Mason had been lacking ever since she'd first drawn the Odin spear. Her hand dropped to
the hilt of the sword at her side and she made sure it was pushed firmly down into its scabbard. She walked over to the window and picked up the shattered picture frame, shaking the shards of glass into a wastebasket. The picture inside was creased, and the glass had sliced through the paper, severing off the upper left corner with surgical precision. The empty space in the photograph where, if she'd still been alive, Mason could picture her mother's face. One big, happy family.

If only . . .

She laid the picture down on the windowsill, careful to avoid a puddle of rainwater that had pooled there, and then she reached up . . . and slammed the window closed. For a long moment she stood there, feeling the closeness of the room without the ever-present breath of wind that she was used to. She stared out into the darkness of the storm and thought about the missing element in the picture.

Mom . . .

Suddenly, a massive spear of lightning stabbed down from the sky and Mason closed her eyes against the blinding brightness.

With her eyes closed, she felt a hand on her cheek.

She'd felt that touch before—firm and graceful—but that had been an imposter. And when Heimdall had worn Yelena Starling's shape, her hands had been ice-cold. The hand Mason felt now was warm. Soft. Strong . . .

“Mom?” she whispered.

“Mason . . .”

She honestly wasn't sure if the voice was just in her head. Then she opened her eyes . . . and she
still
wasn't sure. Because her mother—her real mother—was standing there, right in front of her. But the Gosforth dorm room was gone. Instead, it seemed almost as if Mason had fallen into the photograph. She found herself standing on the wide expanse of a sun-bleached deck, perched on the shore of Lake Kensico, with the lake and trees and the Starling manor house in the far distance.

And her mother, wrapped in cool shadows, standing right beside her.

Mason blinked and looked around. Everything had a kind of oversaturated quality to it. A patina of memory, laid like a filter over the scene, sparkling and gauzy and just a touch surreal. Only, this was no memory that Mason had ever had.

If only
, she thought again, turning back to the woman beside her.

As their eyes met—sapphire and sapphire, identical—Mason recognized her mother as
truly
that. And she could barely believe that she'd been so thoroughly duped by Heimdall's impersonation of her. The features were identical, certainly, but
this
Yelena Starling looked out of those same deep blue eyes with a fierce, shining love and wit and wisdom. And an obvious sense of humor that had been completely lacking in her doppelgänger.
This
Yelena's mouth seemed as if it quivered perpetually on the edge of a big, broad grin or unbridled laughter.

In that moment though, she just smiled gently and said,
“Hi, honey.”

Mason fell into her arms.

“Mom!” she exclaimed, and knew that this time, she really was.

Father . . .

The word was strange and alien in his wolf mind.

But there was also a rightness to the sound as the man the Fennrys Wolf had heard Mason call Loki placed his hands—wide, strong, long-fingered, and warm—on either side of the wolf's head and began to speak in a low tone. Ancient words that Fennrys could feel wrapping around the human mind buried in his beastly form. When the transformation had first taken him, Fenn had been almost dead. Lying in a pool of blood, wondering what it would be like for him once he'd finally, for the last time, crossed over the threshold into death. There was no fear, no pain, and only one regret. That he would be leaving Mason Starling behind.

Mason, of course, had had other ideas.

And when Fennrys had regained consciousness, it had been as if waking inside a nightmare. For the first few minutes, he'd tried to convince himself that
that
was what was happening. That he was still asleep. Dreaming. Or delusional. Or already dead and gone and experiencing the afterlife in a markedly unexpected way. But then the scents and sensations had flooded him, and suddenly every nerve ending in his body—his four-legged, fur-covered body—had screamed at him to get up. Get away. And claw or chew through anything
that stood in his way. He had felt the wolfen instincts redrawing pathways in his brain in ways that had made his wolf body feel more his own.

But now, with Loki's help, he could feel his buried humanity begin to resurface.

He could feel his way back out through the transformative enchantment that Anubis's wolf bite had bestowed on him as he lay dying. He watched, through his wolf's eyes, as his black-clawed front feet stretched out, the shape of them blurring, twisting, reforming as hands, fingers splayed wide on the cold stone floor.

In the blink of those eyes, he was human again. On his hands and knees, dressed in the same jeans and T-shirt and boots as before. The weight of his iron medallion hanging from his neck.

“Hello, pup.”

Loki's voice, Fennrys realized, was the whispered one he'd heard when he'd been imprisoned in the dungeons of Hel. The one that had sounded like lies. Or maybe it had been more like promises. Strange, subtle ones.

Fenn regarded the god warily, and with a mess of tangled emotions. It was disconcerting to see so much of himself reflected in the face of the other man. Loki's mouth was thinner, more apt to twist into a sardonic grin, and the planes of his face were sharper, more angular, but they had the same cheekbones and the same nose. The eyes, though, was where the similarities ended. Fennrys knew that his own were the shade of the glacial north; his gaze guarded, remote. Loki's
were like cauldrons into which the fates had poured the gleam of the Northern Lights and the mysteries of the twilight skies above the ice sheets and mountains and hidden secret valley fjords of his mythical home.