Loki didn’t say anything to refute that.
“Really?” Mason sighed and looked at him sideways when he remained silent. “Ya got nothin’?”
“If you already think I’m a liar and you ask me if it’s the truth, are you going to believe me when I say no?” He smiled sadly. “Better to say nothing than to speak a truth that will never be believed.”
There was a sudden sound, like loose pebbles rattling in the moments before a rock slide. It came from somewhere above Mason’s head, and she glanced up just in time to see the cold, gleaming eyes of the snake glaring like twin spotlights down on her. And on the helpless figure of Loki, whose expression wavered between resignation and fear.
Suddenly, a surge of rage washed over Mason. The same kind of red fog that had taken hold of her when she and Fennrys had fought the draugr in a riverside café in Manhattan. Without stopping to think, she drew her rapier from its sheath and vaulted up onto the stone slab beside Loki. She shouted angrily, incoherently, at the vile creature and—attacking in the way that Fennrys had taught her to—lunged for the serpent, burying the tip of her sword in one of its hideous eyes. The snake made a furious squealing shriek—a sound like claws dragging down a chalkboard—and snapped its head back, thrashed madly as it retreated into its crevasse.
When Mason stopped screaming at the top of her lungs, she realized that Loki was laughing, the rich, delighted rolling sound that made her smile through her own blind panic and rage. She jumped back down and leaned shakily on the edge of the stone bed. Her rapier blade was sticky with greenish blood, and she used the tattered edge of Loki’s cloak to carefully wipe it clean. As his laughter subsided, she shook her head, pushing the black hair from her face with one arm, and gazed down at the bound god.
“Sorry,” she said, ruefully. “You’ll probably have to pay for that.”
“Don’t apologize. That?” He nodded in the direction of the snake’s hasty retreat. “That was worth the extra drop of venom she will bestow upon me next time around.”
“You know … you’re wrong about being the only one here.”
“Really? Have you been making the social rounds since you arrived?”
“I met a woman.”
“That sounds promising. I like women,” Loki said with a lazy grin.
“She said she was my mother. Yelena Starling.”
“Ah.” The grin faded. “Did you believe her?”
“She also said … she was a queen here.”
“Well. Yelena Starling is both those things. She is your mother by nature … and she is Hel, dark and terrible goddess, queen of Helheim, also called Hel, by my hand. She is very dear to me.” His voice was soft and his gaze gentle as he looked at Mason. Then he looked away and said, “You have her eyes and her beauty.”
“I don’t understand. The myth says that Hel is your daughter.”
“I told you. I haven’t read the stories. Mostly because they tend to get everything wrong.” He sighed, and it was a frustrated sound. “I transformed Yelena, granting her the power of Hel not long after she first came to this place. So in a way, I suppose, she is my creation. A daughter in spirit, if you will.” He turned his grin on her. “Don’t worry, Mason. I’m not your grandfather.”
Mason didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. She wondered what it would be like to have the blood of a god running through her veins and was suddenly filled with questions. And with a longing to know just what Loki was talking about when he spoke of her mother. The woman he’d described … that sounded like the mother she would’ve wanted to meet. She craved to know what had transpired between them.
But suddenly, the ground began to shudder again, like it had in the moments before the crevasse had opened up and swallowed her. Loki turned his full gaze on her again, crystalline and bright blue and full of urgency. “You’ll have to go now, pretty Starling. Remember everything that I have said to you.”
Mason gripped the edges of the rock ledge as it heaved. “You know you haven’t really said all that much, right?”
“Then it shouldn’t be that hard to remember, should it?” he snapped, suddenly brusque.
Mason blinked at him, but then a lightning-like fissure appeared in the rock face opposite them—a jagged, branching crack that split the stone open and sent sharp, flinty shards flying. The stone blew apart and a gaping hole appeared. And the tall, dark-haired woman stepped through.
“Mason!” She thrust out her hand, a frantic look of panic turning the planes of her face sharp. “Daughter—come to me! You are in terrible danger!”
“Are you referring to me?” Loki drawled. “You wound me—”
“Be silent, deceiver!”
Mason glanced wildly back and forth between the two of them. She couldn’t wrap her head around the situation—not after what Loki had just said about how much he cared for Yelena. Clearly, if the feeling had ever been mutual, it certainly wasn’t now.
“Mason,” her mother said again. “He is a liar. Whatever he has told you, do not believe him. He cannot help you. I can take you home. Together we can make everything right again.”
“Well, if you put it that way …” Loki’s voice was rich with casual disdain. “Looks like you might want to do what she says, pretty Starling.”
Mason frowned down at the so-called trickster god and took a step back. She couldn’t be at all certain, but she thought that Loki had added a strange, pointed inflection to the words “looks” and “she” that made her think he was trying to say something to her. Something else. Of course … did it really matter what he said to her? After all was said and done, Loki was a liar. Wasn’t he?
And he wanted to destroy the world. Didn’t he?
The woman lifted her hand, beckoning urgently to Mason.
No. Not “the woman,” Mason chastised herself. She’s your mother… .
She is Hel.
Mason glanced over her shoulder at the bound god one last time as she made her way toward where her mother stood at the foot of a path that led up into a narrow, dark-shadowed canyon. Mason hadn’t even noticed the path when she’d been sitting talking to Loki—even though she’d probably been staring right at it. She got the distinct impression that nothing in this place revealed itself willingly or without reason.
The trickster god’s gaze was unblinking, placid, and laser-beam focused on Mason’s mother. Like a blazing blue searchlight, it raked over her from head to toe. Loki opened his mouth and looked as if he was on the verge of saying something. Mason hesitated, wondering if she should stay and hear what it was.
Yelena—Hel—saw her hesitate, and in a low voice murmured, “He lies. I’m your mother, and he lies.”
Loki’s gaze sharpened, and Mason knew he’d heard. But his mouth drifted closed and he lay his head back down on the stone slab, turning his face away.
Better to say nothing than to speak a truth that will never be believed.
Mason felt a sympathetic twinge, but she still turned away, back to where her mother stood, waiting. The dark stuff of Hel’s cloak draped from her outstretched arm like a raven’s wing, and Mason saw that beneath it she wore a long gown of sapphire blue, the color of her eyes. Hers—and her daughter’s. A pouch hung from the broad, ornate belt that girdled her slender waist, and it looked as though it was made of silvery-furred sealskin. She also wore a heavy golden rope crossways over her torso, and from it a curved horn, bone-pale and chased with more gold—ornately wrought, gleaming golden filigree—hung at her hip. She looked like a queen.
And she was waiting for her only daughter to step forward into an embrace that Mason had dreamed about, but known all her life she would never experience. Her mother Yelena, beloved wife of Gunnar Starling, had died giving birth to Mason, and she’d always carried that small, secret guilt deep in her heart. She’d yearned to know the woman that her father had spoken of with such tenderness and devotion. And now, here she was, waiting for Mason to step into the circle of her arms. And so Mason left Loki be
hind and walked forward, determined not to look back as her mother stepped toward her and wrapped her cloak around Mason’s shoulders.
She turned her back on the chained god and, following in her mother’s footsteps, left him lying there alone.
V
“How long do you think he’s gonna lie there feeling sorry for himself?” a voice in the darkness asked. The familiar voice was male, full of candor and a wry amusement that held hints of both concern and exasperation.
Fennrys tried to ignore it, except he couldn’t. Music, coming from another room, kept him awake. Singing—a throaty, smoke-and-whiskey kind of voice—curled around Fennrys’s mind and beckoned him back from the edge of the abyss. He struggled against the lure of that sound, wanting nothing more than to sink back into nothingness, where every molecule of his body didn’t pulse with the kind of dull, fiery ache that seemed to eat away at his very core. More than that, he wanted to escape the pain in his head—and in his heart—that was born from the knowledge that he had failed, again. Failed to protect Mason. Failed to save her.
His facial muscles must have twitched, because the voice spoke again.
“Right, then,” it said. “C’mon, Sleeping Ugly. Wakey wakey …”
Fennrys could feel someone nudging his foot. And he suddenly placed both of the voices he’d heard. The singer was a girl—a Siren, actually—named Chloe. The other voice, the one irritating Fennrys out from his blissful insensibility, belonged to an ex-coworker, for lack of a better term. Fennrys cracked open one eye and gazed blearily up at the young man, whose name was Maddox Whytehall, and who used to be one of Fenn’s fellow Janus Guards. There had been thirteen of them once, guardians of the gateway between the mortal realm and the Kingdoms of Faerie. Fennrys saw that Maddox still wore the iron medallion—the Janus Guard badge of office, similar to Fenn’s own but with symbols unique to him—around his neck.
Fennrys’s medallion had disappeared along with Mason Starling when he’d lost her on the Bifrost. He heard himself groan in pain at the thought.
“There he is!” Maddox said cheerfully. “Just in time for the finale …”
He waved a hand, and Fennrys opened his other eye to see someone else standing beside him where he lay, shirtless, on what seemed to be a banquet table in a low-lit room—apparently the unused back room of a club or a restaurant or something, judging from the stacked chairs and table linens and shelves lined with red glass candleholders and columns of dinner plates. The person standing there, tall and rather homely featured, was one of the Fair Folk. Fennrys recognized him instantly.
Webber was one of the Ghillie Dhu, a race of Fae with certain uncanny abilities. “Webber” wasn’t his real name. Rather, he was nicknamed for the iridescent membranes that stretched between the long fingers of his hands. Hands that, at that very moment, he had pressed to the wound on Fennrys’s shoulder. The blood flow had slowed to a dark, sullen trickle thanks to Webber’s healing magick.
Fennrys rolled his head to the side and watched with detached fascination, as a small crumpled ball of dull gray metal rose up out of his shoulder, with a small, sucking pop sound. It passed between the tips of Webber’s fingers, hovered in the air for a moment, and then, with a disdainful glance from him, it vaporized with a flash and a tiny puff of acrid smoke.
“Ta-da!” Maddox enthused with a grin.
“Humans and their nasty little toys,” Webber muttered, his goatish face drawn with disgust. “Barbaric. That’s the last of the damage taken care of. Couldn’t do much about Scylla’s sea-dog venom, but that’ll probably just give him a taste like cilantro in his mouth for a few hours. Horrible, sure, but no real danger of expiring from it.”
He glanced down at Fennrys and smiled. Fenn noticed that there was a hint of wariness—or perhaps, worry—in the expression. But the healer-Fae just nodded briskly, and with another pass of those long, webbed hands, a wave of numbness washed over Fennrys’s wounds, dulling the pain enough for him to try to sit up.
“Oh, good,” Rafe said drily from where he stood over by a red velvet curtain that hung in a doorway. “I’d hate for you to be the first person to ever actually expire in my club.”
Fennrys glanced around the room. “This is your place?” he asked.
Rafe nodded. “Welcome to the Obelisk.” He raised an eyebrow and looked over at the healer Fae. “You sure he’s not going to die? He sure looks like he is.”
“No, no,” Webber said, dusting his palms together. “Everything should be right as rain now. Or near enough, at least, for him to go out and try to get himself killed again …”
“What happened?” Fennrys sat up slowly and swung his legs over the side of the table he’d been lying on. He ran a hand over his face. His brain felt cottony, his thoughts unfocused. And, yeah—his mouth tasted like he’d been eating at a cheap Mexican restaurant.
“You got shot and fell off a train,” Maddox cheerfully enlightened him as he held out a hand to help Fennrys stand. “Then the bridge you were on exploded. Then you fought a sea monster. As far as I understand it, that is.”
“Right …” Fennrys nodded stiffly. That account seemed to correlate with his own impressions of the night’s events. And with his various aches and pains. He groaned and rolled his uninjured shoulder. He still wore his jeans and boots, but they’d obviously had to cut the shirt off him so that Webber could do his work.
“Where’s Roth Starling?” he asked, remembering suddenly that he hadn’t seen Mason’s older brother since the moments before the bridge explosion. He wondered what had happened to him—whether he was okay, or had suffered a fate similar to Cal Aristarchos. He hoped it was the former. He knew how dearly Mason loved Roth.
Rafe put his glass back down on the bar. “After the Hell Gate exploded, he took off to go see if he could find his father and do damage control. The old man is going to be wanting to know just exactly what happened to his little girl, and why his bridge to Asgard suddenly vaporized.”
“So I’m guessing we have no idea who would’ve wanted the bridge destroyed.”
“Not a clue.” The ancient god shook his head. “Well … aside from everyone who knew that it was actually a secret gateway to another realm—and who didn’t necessarily want anyone else using it to go there. I guess.”
“Wouldn’t it have made more sense, in that case, to blow it up before anyone decided to use it as Bifrost?”
Maddox and Rafe exchanged shrugs.
“Right.” Fennrys eased himself off the edge of the table and stood.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to find Mason.”
Rafe just raised an eyebrow at him as he wavered a bit on his feet.
“Wait …” Maddox reached behind him and retrieved something from a sideboard that he handed to Fennrys. It was a knife. More like a short sword, really. The hilt was plain but with a good strong grip and, knowing Maddox, the blade was doubtless sharp enough to shave with. It was housed in a sturdy leather sheath that the wearer could attach to a belt and tie down to their leg for ease of movement if necessary—which Fennrys proceeded to do. “Thought you might need a loaner. Rafe told me you left your standby buried hilt-deep in monster brains.”
“Yeah. I did,” Fennrys grunted as he tied the thong securely above his knee. “I liked that knife, too.” He checked the hang of the sheath, making sure the knife was secure but ready to draw. “What are you doing here, Maddox?”
“Kind of a lucky coincidence, really.” The other Janus Guard shrugged. “Chloe’s been singing in the club, and I come to listen. When Rafe dragged your sorry carcass in tonight, he asked if I could find someone to get you fixed up. So I went down to the reservoir—the Faerie sanctuary in the park—and found Webber.”
“Thanks.” Fennrys nodded, grateful and a little surprised. He and Maddox had never been close. But then, Fennrys had never been close with any of the Janus Guards. “Nice to see you again, Madd.”
“Yeah … you, too.” The tall, sandy-haired young man
with the open, trustworthy face grinned. “Um. Surprising, y’know … what with you being dead an’ all. But nice.”
Fennrys noticed that Maddox was staring at the rapidly healing, but still bright-pink scar that marked the bullet’s point of entry into Fenn’s shoulder. He stood still as Madd’s professionally appraising gaze traveled over the puncture marks from Scylla’s teeth. Then over the bruises and various abrasions mapping Fenn’s torso, most acquired from his fall off the train car. Maddox winced a bit with the noting of each injury, but his eyes narrowed and his brows drew together when he noticed the scars, both reasonably fresh and time-worn, that circled his wrists.
“So, boyo …” The Janus Guard shook his head. “Had a few adventures in your time away, I see.”
“Could say that, I suppose,” Fennrys muttered.
“You’ve never done anything by half measures, have you?”
Fennrys sighed and offered up a weary, watery grin. “If I’d ever been given the opportunity to? I might have. But I sort of doubt it.”
“True enough.” Maddox laughed.
A moment of silence stretched out between the two, and then Fennrys asked, “How is … everyone?”
Maddox gazed at him steadily and said, “Everyone is fine. Happy. Busy. Most of them are back in the Otherworld at the moment. Strengthening defenses.”
Fennrys frowned. “Why would they need to do that?”
“Because of the rift that’s opened up between the realms. There’ve been … incursions.” Maddox shrugged. “Remember North Brother Island?”
How could Fennrys forget? It was the place he’d died. A forsaken lump of rock that had once jutted out of the East River—in plain sight of the Hell Gate Bridge, in fact—but had been transformed into a portal, a gateway between realms, by a mad Faerie king. A king Fennrys had helped … and then helped kill. “I thought we left a hole where that island used to be.”
“We did,” Maddox said drily. “It grew back. And it’s proving to be a nexus of dangerous magick.”
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