Fennrys backed up a few steps and looked up at the building. It was stout and nondescript and stood beside the High Line elevated railway, with a pull-down iron fire escape clinging to its face like a spindly deformity. It was two tall stories high with large, small-paned windows, most of which looked as if they had been either painted or bricked over from the inside. The loading door looked as if it hadn’t been used in years. There was no way to see inside—not that such a thing was encouraged: there was a small, neatly lettered, black-and-white NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY sign tacked up beside the door. The bricks on the facade of the building were painted a drab medium beige. All in all, it was exactly the kind of building that any normal person in New York City wouldn’t have thought twice about when passing by.
Fennrys cautiously approached the door. It was thick and made of steel, and the padlock looked like something found on a medieval dungeon. Fenn reached out with a steady hand and pressed his fingers against the surface of the lock. Mason watched, holding her breath as he closed his eyes and the lines of his face went taut with concentration. A faint shadow of a frown appeared on his brow, and his mouth twitched. He tilted his head slightly as if listening to some voice only he could hear, and then he began to murmur under his breath.
Mason strained forward, trying to understand what he was saying. Only, as before, with Calum, she couldn’t catch the sounds of the words. But this time, he was brief. The padlock body fell away from the U-shaped shackle with a loud clank. And Mason felt her mouth drop open. She started forward, but Fennrys thrust out a hand, warning her back. He moved his hand from the lock to the door itself, and Mason thought she felt a faint crackle of energy as he did so. The air in front of them seemed to waver slightly, as though his fingers had disrupted a heat mirage. Another murmured phrase, and suddenly the tension in the air in front of them loosened and dissipated. Fenn turned to look at Mason and raised an eyebrow at her expression. Then he shrugged and, stepping forward, shouldered the door open.
The inside of the building was murky. And empty. At least that was how it appeared at first glance. Deep gray shadows gathered in the corners of a huge, dusty space populated only by thick brick support pillars and, in the far corner, a slat-sided, ancient-looking freight elevator with a massive sliding grate instead of doors.
Neither of them called out “hello.” It was, Mason thought, as if they both already sensed there was no one there to answer back. Fennrys rolled his shoulders, as if loosening up before a fight, and stalked across the concrete floor, Mason following in his wake. Fenn heaved up the grate—it screeched like a warning bell, and Mason wondered if they shouldn’t heed it—and stepped inside. There was a big brass operating panel to one side with a lever instead of buttons and a large black toggle switch that, when Fennrys flipped it, caused an overhead incandescent bulb in a wire cage to slowly glow to reddish life. Mason swallowed nervously and, taking Fennrys’s offered hand, stepped into the boxy conveyance. Instantly her claustrophobia started tearing at the edges of her self-control. She took a deep breath and squeezed Fenn’s hand spasmodically as he threw the lever into the up position and the elevator cab lurched and began a slow ascent to the second floor.
What they found there was nothing short of astonishing.
As the elevator rose and the floor before them came into view, Fennrys heard Mason draw an astonished breath. For his part, he was way too freaked out to actually breathe in that moment. The lift cab shuddered to a stop, and soft, silvery-gold lighting from hidden sources grew to illuminate a sleek, stylish loftlike apartment. Hesitantly Fennrys stepped out onto the gleaming hardwood floor of a wide vestibule that sported a hall table and a large mirror in a polished ebony-wood frame that reflected his astonished expression back at him.
Mason’s face bore an almost identical look as she drifted out into the main room, her fingers trailing along table edges and the back of a long leather couch.
“You live here,” she said, winding her way from living to dining room.
“Your guess is as good as mine, Mase,” he answered, turning in circles to take everything in.
“No.” She shook her head. “I mean—you live here.”
She stared at Fennrys from across the room, sapphire eyes gleaming in the artful illumination and a slight hectic flush to her cheeks.
He sighed gustily and said, “Okay. I live here. And apparently I have good taste. Maybe I’m a nineteen-year-old interior design wunderkind.”
Mason grinned. “Maybe you are. So let’s see if we can’t find a business card or something here at La Maison Wolf that can confirm it.”
For the better part of half an hour, they went through drawers and cupboards and cabinets. Mason even started lifting the carefully hung abstracts away from the walls to see if she couldn’t find a hidden safe or something. There was nothing.
Where were the photographs? Mementos? Personal effects? There was absolutely zilch. Clothes in the wardrobe, boots and jackets in the front hall closet. Expensive furniture with a slightly European flair. Rich, but not extravagant. All very cool and classy and utterly lacking any clues as to the person who lived there. Even the paintings that Mason was nosing around were just bleak landscapes splashed with crimson in a series of large canvases that marched across one long brick wall.
What kind of a person was he? Who had he been? There were no personal papers. No filing cabinets or bookshelves. No mail, not even a Chinese takeout flyer, and no wallet on the front hall table. No prescriptions in the bathroom cabinet. He was almost surprised when he found a toothbrush.
Fennrys closed the mirrored cabinet door and stared at his reflection.
Who are you?
What the hell was a nineteen/twenty/however-many-year-old doing with an apartment like this in downtown Manhattan? Maybe he was some kind of computer genius entrepreneur. Which might have made sense if there had been a computer anywhere in the place. He couldn’t even find a phone. In fact, there was a minimum of electronics—no TV or stereo, not even a microwave in the kitchen. And while Fennrys had the sense that he knew of such things, he also suspected that he was perfectly comfortable not having them in his home. And Mason was right. This was, he knew instinctively and beyond a shadow of a doubt, his home.
Or at least, a home.
He wandered back out into the main living space and stood between two brick support pillars. There was a metal bar suspended between them a foot and a half above head height. He reached up and wrapped his hands around it, and the metal felt cool and familiar against the palms of his hands and he knew what it was there for. A chin-up bar.
Fenn pulled up his feet and swung his legs back and forth, launching himself into a leap and landing in a casual crouch in front of the cold, dead fireplace. Something caught at his gaze, and his eyes narrowed. There was a spot, no more than a hand’s-breadth wide, on the wooden mantel where the sheen of the varnish was slightly dulled. He wouldn’t have noticed from any other angle. Fenn stood up and walked over to the mantel. He placed his hand on the worn patch and pushed.
There was a whisper of sound from over his shoulder, and Fenn turned to see what he’d thought had been a decorative black-glass wall turn suddenly transparent as lights on the other side began to glow. He sucked in a breath as one panel shifted and rolled aside on a hidden track, revealing a shallow floor-to-ceiling storage cabinet that was full of … something really quite unexpected.
“Well. It all makes sense now,” Fennrys murmured to himself, stunned by what he’d found. “I’m a ninja.”
XVII
Calum Aristarchos stood in the back corner of the Rockefeller Center elevator cab as it ascended swiftly to his destination floor, high above the streets of Manhattan. When the doors slid open, there was a lovely young woman there to meet him. She wore a curve-hugging white tunic dress with a draped neckline that scooped low in both back and front, and her hair was piled in an artful cascade of ringlets on top of her head. She didn’t speak, just led him down a corridor decorated wi
th an impressive collection of paintings that any museum in the world would have killed for. Cal had been there often enough to no longer be impressed.
At the end of the corridor, a set of glass doors opened up into an expansive boardroom that offered a staggering view of the Empire State Building and a large swath of downtown Manhattan. Sitting in a thronelike leather executive chair, behind a desk carved from a single slab of giant redwood, sat Daria Aristarchos, Cal’s mother. She regarded him coolly over the tops of her steepled, immaculately manicured fingers for a brief moment before her face broke into a maternal smile.
“Come in, darling,” she said in a low, musical voice, rising to walk around from behind her fortresslike desk. Cal stood patiently as his elegant mother embraced him. And then as she pushed him to arm’s length and examined his face. He tried not to flinch as her gaze narrowed, raking over the scars on his face. It felt almost as if his flesh was being sliced open all over again. His mother’s lips disappeared in a tight line, and he saw a fierce swell of emotion gathering behind her eyes. She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, the sound of biker boots rang out over the granite floor behind him.
Cal turned to see the same young woman who’d escorted him down the hall leading the way for—of all people—Roth Starling. He was flanked by two burly guys in full bike leathers, who stopped just inside the entrance to the office and took up sentrylike positions as Roth continued on, stopping once he had reached the center of the room.
“Calum,” Daria said, glancing in Roth’s direction, “sit down, dear. We have a great deal to talk about.”
“With him?” Cal gestured at Mason’s brother. “I don’t even know him.”
“You know my sister,” Roth said in a deep voice that sounded almost like the warning growl of an animal. “You were with her in the gym during the storm.”
His gaze flicked to Cal’s scars, and Cal struggled against a sudden surge of temper. He didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on. But he knew he didn’t like it.
“So?” Cal glanced nervously back and forth between his mother and Roth Starling. His first fear was that someone had spilled the actual details about what had really happened that night. Probably that little weasel Rory. And now Cal was about to get the third degree about the state of his mental health or the inappropriateness of such a ridiculous prank. Probably a tiresome lecture about not tarnishing the reputation of good old Gosforth Academy. That was what Cal was expecting. He certainly wasn’t expecting them to believe such a wild story.
And he sure as hell wasn’t expecting an even wilder one in return.
For a moment, though, as Roth Starling approached Cal’s mother, it seemed as if they had forgotten Cal was even there. Unspoken tension crackled between them, and Cal’s mother, who was tall to begin with, pulled herself up to her full height.
“The peace has been broken,” Daria said finally, her tone accusatory and weirdly formal. “Gunnar Starling has broken it.”
Roth shook his head. “You don’t know that—”
“The draugr are certainly not in the demesne of my house.” Daria scoffed.
“My father didn’t send draugr to attack his own daughter,” Roth countered.
“Gunnar’s daughter seems to have come through the attack remarkably unscathed.” Daria pointed at Cal with one sharp, polished nail. “The same cannot be said of my son.”
Cal stepped forward. “Mom—”
“Be quiet, Calum!”
“We are on the same side, Daria,” Roth said. “We want the same things.”
“Look. I really hate to be a bother,” Cal interjected in a sharply sarcastic voice. “But what the hell is going on here?”
“Calum—”
“No, Mom. Don’t tell me to shut up again. I want to know what’s happening, and obviously you want me to know. Otherwise you wouldn’t have brought me here.” Cal turned to Roth. “I was in the gym, yeah, and I know what went on. Obviously you do too, and so I guess that means we’re all perfectly aware of the fact that the ‘storm’ was about as far from normal as a storm can get.” He looked back and forth between his mother and Roth. “So can we just cut out all this cryptic BS, bring me up to speed, and deal with whatever the hell is the problem?”
Daria Aristarchos blinked at her son, looking at him for a long moment, as if seeing him for the very first time. Her hand drifted up slowly to rest on the damaged side of his face. He let her keep it there for a moment and then brushed it aside and turned to Roth.
“Well?”
“What does he know?” Roth asked Cal’s mother.
“Nothing. Not the way he needs to now.” She turned away, walking back to her desk, and said, “I thought it might help if I asked a mutual friend to explain the situation to him.”
“Rafe?” Roth asked.
Daria nodded. “I had him wait in the boardroom.” She pressed a button on an intercom. “Send in our other guest, please, Lia.”
Cal stood there, waiting, trying not to lose his temper. In a few moments, a lean figure in a designer suit appeared at the far end of the hall, walking toward them with animal grace. Before the man reached the office, Roth turned to Cal.
“Do you know what Ragnarok is, Cal?” he asked in a low voice.
“No,” Cal answered drily. “But I’m sure there’s a cream or some pills you could get for it that would clear it right up.”
The two guys who’d accompanied Roth glared at Cal balefully, as if he’d just offered up a grievous insult.
“Calum,” his mom snapped. “If you can’t manage to act like an adult, please at least try not to embarrass me entirely.”
“I’m sorry.” Cal clenched a fist so hard his knuckles popped. He turned back to Roth. “Yeah, I know what it is. It’s the mythical end of the world, as foretold in Norse mythology. A kind of Viking apocalypse. They haven’t changed the curriculum at Gosforth since you were there, and Comparative World Religions and Ancient Belief Systems is still a required course.”
Roth’s mouth quirked in a half smile. “And there’s a good reason,” he said. “You should know that, as far as the Gosforth founding families are concerned—of which yours is one—certain of those beliefs aren’t really considered ancient.”
“Why, thank you,” said the man who’d just stepped in from the hall with a wide, warm grin on his handsome face. He had a dark, honeyed complexion and wore his hair in a helmet of thin dreadlocks. To Cal, he looked a little like he might be some kind of rock star or something. “I like to think some of us have weathered the years rather well....” He extended his hand to Cal. “You must be Calum. I met your father once. You look just like him.”
“Lord Rafe.” Daria smoothly intercepted the newcomer before he and Cal could shake hands. “Do come sit down. Can I offer you a drink?”
“Lord”? thought Cal. What is this guy, royalty or something?
His mother led the strange man to a chair by the window and then went to a side bar to pour him a drink from a crystal decanter. She handed it to him with a slight, graceful inclination of her head.
“You’re a queen among women, Daria Aristarchos,” he said, taking the glass with a smile. “Such a pity the world’s about to end. Otherwise I’d be inclined to take you to dinner sometime.”
Cal couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Apparently his mother couldn’t either.
“You really think we are in grave danger this time?” she asked in a voice devoid of her usual icy control.
Rafe countered her question with one of his own. “You’ve always seemed to keep yourself well-informed, Daria. What do your sources tell you?”
The shadow of a worried frown darkened Cal’s mother’s brow, but she said nothing. It seemed to Cal that she was holding back, unwilling maybe to offer up any more information than she had to. It was typical of his mother—she was the kind of woman who clung tightly to every possible advantage in any given situation where she stood to gain something. The silence stretched out until finally
Roth huffed in frustration and turned to Rafe.
“Why now?” he asked.
“You know that last year there was an … incident.” Rafe raised an eyebrow at Mason’s brother.
“With the Gate.” Roth nodded. “Yes.”
“I thought that was remedied by the Fair Folk themselves,” Daria said.
“It was.” Rafe sipped his drink. “But it’s caused a lot of … for lack of a better way to put it … structural integrity issues. Take, for example, that storm the other night.”
Cal felt as though he was standing in a room where everyone had suddenly started speaking a foreign language.
The man named Rafe seemed to recognize that, suddenly. He sighed and, in a tone that sounded almost apologetic, said to Cal, “Okay, young man. Here’s the CliffsNotes version: gods and goddesses are real, realms beyond this one exist. And very few of the good citizens of New York City realize that their beloved Central Park is not, in fact, just a park. It’s a gateway to another realm, the Faerie Realm—a very dangerous place also known as the Otherworld. About half a year ago, that gate was in very real danger of being blown right off its proverbial hinges. You follow me so far?”
Cal nodded, dazed. No …
“Right. Of course you don’t. Anyway. Cracks have appeared in the walls between the worlds. Big ones. Big enough to let things through from the realms beyond the Faerie kingdoms.”
“Beyond?”
“The Faerie Realm is closest to the mortal world. Beyond that lie the various realms of the gods. Olympus, Asgard, Tir Na Nog …”
“Oz?” Calum murmured weakly. Sarcasm was really the only mental defense he had left. His mother turned an angry glare on him, but Rafe put up a hand and laughed.
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