Her amusement faded as a creeping realization insinuated itself into her thoughts. A cold understanding and an even colder dread flooded her from top to bottom. The horror of the truth.
“Rory …” Mason felt like a hand was squeezing her throat. “He …”
“He wasn’t just pulling some asinine stunt gone horribly wrong on you when you were on that train, Mase,” Fennrys said quietly. “Your brother has an agenda. He’s not the only one.”
Mason was starting to feel a bit light-headed. Whether with apprehension or a slow-building rage, she wasn’t sure. “Who?” she asked, her voice a dry whisper. “Who else …”
Rafe’s dark, timeless gaze filled with compassion. “To some people, Mason, the old tales aren’t just bedtime stories.”
Her gaze swung back and forth between Rafe’s and Fennrys’s faces, reading the things there that neither of them could bring themselves to say.
“You mean to say … Rory and my father … ?”
Rafe nodded. “Remember those long-range goals I was talking about?”
Rory she could believe. But Gunnar Starling?
Her father … No.
“I’m sorry, Mason. Your dad’s kind of a …” Rafe’s dark brows knit in a deep frown. “Let’s just say he’s well-respected among the more arcane social circles of the power elite. And by ‘well-respected,’ I mean, ‘greatly feared.’ Rory, on the other hand, hasn’t actually pinged anyone’s radar where this kind of thing is concerned. He’s just an opportunistic little rat, I guess.”
“You’re saying that my father is like some kind of supernatural mob boss.”
“That’s actually a pretty accurate description.”
“And Roth?” Mason asked. “Did he have anything to do with this … this … ?”
Fennrys shook his head. “No. Roth was trying to find you. To warn you. In fact, he told me that he’d been sent by your father to find me, but he was worried about Rory getting to you first before he could warn us both. I do know that it was never in your father’s plans for you to be the one to cross over, Mason. It was a mistake.”
He leaned forward, forearms on his knees and hands clasped loosely in front of him. Mason couldn’t help but notice the scars on his wrists. The ones he’d gotten when he’d been chained in a cell somewhere in this awful place that her father—and his father before him—thought was so great.
“They thought that I was the only one who could travel into Asgard,” Fennrys continued, “and then be able to travel back out again. On account of the whole ‘I’m kind of dead’ thing and seem to be prone to doing that as a result. The plan, as I understand it from Roth, is that they were going to coerce me into crossing the Hell Gate. You were only on that train because you were supposed to be the … uh …”
“What?” Mason voice was tight. “I was only supposed to be the what?”
Fennrys turned his head, and his blue gaze was bleak. “The bait.”
Rage—yes, it was definitely rage now, hot, liquid, incandescent—coursed through Mason’s veins. Bait. Now that … that sounded like Rory. But the thing that cut Mason like the blade of the sharpest knife was that her father—her father—had known. More than known. He’d actually—what—sanctioned it? Approved of Rory stuffing her in a bag … locking her in the trunk of his car … He’d almost killed her. He’d shot Fennrys.
That, in itself, was enough to blind Mason with hideous anger.
But the fact that her father, who she’d loved all her life more than anyone else, who she’d always known would protect her from hurt, was somehow involved in all of this … More than involved, it seemed … The rage evaporated and something worse—cold grief—washed over her in its place.
“The spear wouldn’t have sent me home.” Mason hugged her elbows to keep from shivering with the sudden chill that suffused her body. “Would it?”
“No.” Rafe’s pencil-thin dreadlocks swung as he shook his head. “That’s not its purpose. Not exclusively, anyway—although I’m pretty sure it would have given you the power to go between realms all on your own. It would have given you the power to do an awful lot of things. That’s why they were trying to get Fennrys to retrieve it. So that then they could have given it to you.”
She’d known. Somehow, Mason had known. She’d felt it. Heard it in the crashing music in her head when she’d been so close—so very close—to wrapping her fingers around that ancient, terrible weapon.
“You’re telling me that if I had picked up that spear, it would have turned me into a Valkyrie?” she asked, needing to be sure.
“According to a very old prophecy.” Fennrys nodded. “Yeah .”
“An old prophecy that my father knows about.”
“Not really his fault, that.” Rafe’s gaze turned darkly inward, as if he was examining a memory. An unpleasant one. “A trio of delightful ladies called the Norns made damned sure he knew about it.”
The way Rafe said “delightful” made them sound anything but.
Mason had read about the Norns—agents of fate, or destiny, or whatever you wanted to call it—and she’d read about Valkyries. Odin’s shield maidens. His choosers of the slain, who would fly over battlefields and decide which of the most valiant warriors would die a glorious death in order to be admitted to the halls of Valhalla as Einherjar.
“Are there others? Other Valkyries, I mean?”
“As far as I know, the Valkyries are no more. Over the millennia they began, one by one, to abandon the All-Father of the Aesir. Some were sickened by the unending bloodlust, some probably just got bored. Some met their ends, and some rebelled against the gods and their pointless petty bickering and selfishness and rush toward a fated doom that the Valkyries began to see as less and less glorious and more and more a stupid, blind waste. Those that rebelled were banished to the mortal realm. I only ever met one who managed to tough it out and make something of a life for herself there.”
“Who was that?” Mason asked.
“Her name was Olrun,” Rafe said, and there was an uncommon hint of respect in his voice as he said the name. “She became a carriage driver in Central Park and vowed never to return to the halls of Asgard. But sometimes, one’s calling is simply overwhelming. And when a real hero was on the verge of death, his spirit called to Olrun. She appeared to take him into the Beyond Realms. Something got in her way.”
Fennrys lowered his gaze, and his shoulders sagged. “Me,” he said.
“Yeah. You,” Rafe said. “And in an act of selfless bravery—I usually like to call those kinds of things by their proper names: ‘act of monumental stupidity’—you offered to go in his place. That, and the fact that you returned again, made you a harbinger of a prophecy and opened up a whole new can of magickal worms for the mortal realm.”
Over Rafe’s shoulder, Mason saw that the dark, glittering rift—the tear in the fabric of reality—had grown large enough so that it dwarfed the doors of Valhalla, stretching from the ground to the vault of the sky. A strange and surreal portal. But it was crackling and flickering wildly now.
“We should probably go.” She nodded at the rift. “Looks like it’s getting temperamental. That thing I said about telling me everything now? I retract that. You can tell me all about why my father thinks it’s such a good idea to turn his only daughter into a chooser of the slain once we’re home.”
Her voice caught, hitching a bit on the word “father,” and she drove her nails into the palms of her hands to keep it from turning into a sob. Fennrys nodded and he, Rafe, and Mason stood and walked toward the dark, sparkling rift where it undulated and writhed, ominous and beckoning at the same time. Mason thought she could see things moving in whatever it was that lay on the other side of the tear.
“That’s what we call the Between. We’re going to have to travel through that to get back to the mortal realm.” Rafe rolled an eye at Fennrys. “And, yes, this time you are going to have to hold my hand. I’m not happy about it, either. But I strongly suggest you not let go. The th
ings that exist in the Between aren’t things you want to tangle with.”
Before they stepped through, Mason stopped for a moment, turning back to Tag Overlea, who still stood there with a sword in his hand.
“Hey,” she called. “You coming with?”
“Naw,” Tag said. “Mr. Rafe kind of explained it to me. Far as I understand it, I’m here for good. I leave this place and I’m a ghost. But it’s cool.” He shrugged and blinked at her. Mason noticed that the redness was fading from the whites of his eyes and, with it, the dullness of his wits. He actually looked more like a normal person than he ever had. He grinned lopsidedly at her. “At least I can get these chowderheads doing something interesting for a change. And then maybe if we fight good enough, we can get some of that awesome grub and booze they’re all on about.” Tag started to turn away, back to where the other warriors seemed to be waiting for him. But then a shadow of a frown crossed his brow. He turned to Mason. “Hey … uh, seriously, Starling. I’m real sorry about, y’know, all that stuff. Tell Palmerston for me when you see her again, ’kay?”
“Sure.” Mason smiled at him.
“And honestly? I know I said he was okay … but your brother really is kinda a douche. Don’t turn your back on him, all right?”
“Trust me. I won’t.”
With that, Tag Overlea turned back to the Einherjar, who were waiting for him. Mason shook her head as she turned to follow Rafe, who’d shifted into his transitional man-jackal form, probably just in case anything in the Between decided to question his godly identity. A few yards from the rift, he stopped. Mason reached out to take the ancient deity’s offered hand. Paw. Whatever.
“This whole thing,” she muttered, “is incredibly weird.”
On Rafe’s other side, Fenn grimaced sourly and took the god’s other hand. “It really is,” he said. “Sadly, I don’t think it’s going to get any less weird.”
XIII
Rory lay in a dull fog of painkiller-induced numbness, listening to the voices outside his door. When he’d first regained consciousness, he’d been disoriented and confused. Now he knew at least he was in the guest bedroom of the posh penthouse condo his father kept in midtown Manhattan—and he knew that whatever they’d pumped him full of, it wasn’t anything even remotely over-the-counter. Only something magick-infused could make him feel that good. Especially considering the beating he’d taken …
Rory Starling had never had a very high pain threshold.
And so when Fennrys had attacked him and shattered his arm in an attempt to make Rory drop the gun he was pointing at Mason, the pain of that injury might have clouded his judgment. After all … shooting the one guy they needed, the only known, readily available soul who’d crossed the barrier into the Beyond Realms and walked back out again whole and realive … well, that might have been a little hasty. Because if the Fennrys Wolf was dead, then their one shot at retrieving the Odin spear from Valhalla was gone.
Or maybe not …
Rory couldn’t remember exactly how he’d gotten to the penthouse. The last clear memory he had was watching his father destroy the rune gold that Rory had been using to augment Taggert Overlea’s strength and speed. Of course, Rory had pumped so much rune magick into Tag—hoping to use him as a point man for building his own personal warrior band—that destroying the acorn had also destroyed Tag.
But Rory, more to the point, had destroyed the Fennrys Wolf first.
I put a bullet in that son of a bitch, Rory thought. If that didn’t kill him, the bridge exploding must have. I mean … there’s gotta be a limit as to how many times a guy can die before it sticks, right?
And even though a dead Fennrys would probably nullify any chance of setting Ragnarok in motion, Rory felt a small, grim sense of satisfaction at the thought of the Wolf’s demise. But as he struggled to concentrate on the voices in the hall, it became increasingly apparent that the situation was a lot more complicated than Rory had stopped to consider.
“I would dearly love to know who, exactly, is responsible for the destruction of the Hell Gate,” Gunnar said in a tight, angry voice. “And I want to know where your sister is!”
“Don’t you think I do, too?” Roth snapped. “Why don’t you ask Rory what really happened on top of that train? He was there—he should know, damn it!”
Whoa, Rory thought blearily. Roth’s pissed.
That didn’t happen. Ever.
“I already asked him,” Gunnar snapped back. “He said he couldn’t see for the brightness as the train passed over the Hell Gate. And then, once it reached the other side, she was simply … gone. He has no other explanation—”
“He’s useless,” Roth snarled.
“—and I can come up with no viable scenarios either. At least not ones that don’t involve the death of your sister, Roth.” Gunnar said those words carefully. Quietly. “It’s a possibility that we’re going to have to consider—”
“NO!”
Rory flinched at Roth’s roar of outraged denial and a sound like a fist punching through plaster. The wall of the room he was in shuddered, and he felt a sympathetic pain in his own hand. He tried to turn his head to look at the limb he vaguely remembered having injured… . But it was just too hard to move, and his head rolled back on the pillow, his eyelids sinking shut. He thought he heard noises in his room—chittering and scrabbling sounds, like insects, and the clink and hiss of metal—but he couldn’t make himself seek them out.
Stupid Roth, he thought, drifting on a soporific tide, throwing a stupid tantrum … serve him right if something terrible had happened to his precious Mason …
Rory felt a distant twinge of envy, followed by an even more distant twinge of guilt. He seemed to be the only one who knew just how much of a screwup his sister was. She’d proved it in spades at the fencing competition when she’d gone down in flames. He also happened to know that Cal Aristarchos blamed her for the damage he took the night of the storm. She was a phobic mental case. And she’d spent the last couple of weeks sneaking around with that muscle-bound creeper with the ridiculous biker-gang name.
What the hell’s wrong with her?
When he’d first found out about it, Rory could barely believe that it was his sister’s destiny to become a Valkyrie. That was way too cool for Mason. As far as he could see, she didn’t have it in her, and it galled him intensely that she was the linchpin to his own damn destiny. Especially now that she’d gone and royally screwed up his and Top Gunn’s grand plans for Ragnarok by simply vanishing into thin air as they’d crossed the Bifrost. Maybe she’d fallen off the train into the river below. Maybe she really was dead.
“Roth … Rothgar!” Out in the hall, Gunnar was trying to shout down Roth’s stream of furious invective. “I know how you feel about your sister. Mason is more precious to me than gold. You know I never ever want to see her hurt—and we have no evidence to say that she is. All we have to do now … is find her.”
“What about the Odin spear?” Roth asked, seeming to have calmed down somewhat, but there was still a hard edge to his voice. “We can’t even begin to fulfill the prophecy without it. To get that, we still need him. And a way to get him into Valhalla—which would seem to me to be something of an impossibility now that the bridge has been destroyed.”
Surprisingly, Gunnar actually chuckled.
“Roth,” he said, “you disappoint me. Think for a moment. The Hell Gate hasn’t always been here … but there was always travel between the Beyond Realms and the world of men. It just hasn’t always been easy. And harder still for us ‘mere mortals.’ That’s why this so-called Fennrys character was such a godsend, as it were. Wherever he came from, whatever his story, whoever named that lad after the Great Devourer was courting Fate.”
“Like we’re doing now,” Roth said.
There was a pause. When Roth spoke again, he sounded calmer.
“What if we can’t find him?” he asked Gunnar. “Do we leave it at that?”
What? Rory thought. No! Sh
ut up, Roth… .
“If the prophecy is meant to be, it’s meant to be,” Gunnar answered.
Rory could almost hear his father shrug, and the sheer passivity of that statement made him want to scream.
“I believe it will happen,” Gunnar continued. “If it does not … then we simply weren’t fit to accomplish so monumental a task.”
If Rory could have raised his voice in hollering protest, he would have. But whatever they’d given him was utterly paralyzing. The room noises were getting louder… .
“You’re giving up?” Roth asked.
“How likely do you think that is, son?”
Roth was silent in response.
“Now,” Gunnar continued, “our first priority is finding Mason and this Fennrys Wolf. And we’d best do it before the situation in the East River becomes untenable.”
What? What situation? Rory struggled desperately to concentrate.
“What have you heard?” Roth asked.
Gunnar sighed gustily. “The destruction of the bridge seems to have made an unstable situation even more dangerous. The rift between the realms is widening, and if we cannot harness the power that is flowing through that mystical spillway before our rivals do, then all could very well be lost for us.”
“Rivals. You mean Daria Aristarchos.”
“Yes.” Rory heard the bitterness in his father’s voice. “There are others, of course, but they are weak and scattered. I respect Daria’s strength and her determination. She’s the most dedicated high priestess the Eleusinians have ever had. And she is a worthy adversary. But if she gets in my way, I will crush her.”
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