After a few token days of lying sprawled in his room, immersed in his wide selection of video games, he finally emerged and, whistling to himself, headed off to the steam room with a pilfered bottle of his dad’s special reserve cognac hidden in the pocket of his plush bathrobe.
Rory knew that Top Gunn wasn’t exactly overjoyed to have him home, but the place was big enough that he’d barely even seen his father, and he was content to keep it like that. Gunnar was in a particularly stormy mood anyway, these days. So Rory could spend all the time he wanted, alone, to try to sort out just exactly what the hell had happened in the gym during the storm.
The others could ignore it or forget it or sweep it under the rug as much as they wanted—Rory was perfectly happy to let them. He knew there was a reason why he’d instinctively encouraged Mason to keep her mouth shut when he’d seen which way the others were leaning. And it wasn’t just because he didn’t want to wind up tabloid fodder.
They didn’t want to tell anyone the truth? Good.
That suited him just fine.
He wanted this all for himself.
He didn’t even know what “this” was … yet. But there were strange, excited voices whispering to him in the back of his head—voices that told him this was what he’d been waiting for all his life. This was that beginning of something … extraordinary. And Rory didn’t want to share it with anyone. Especially Mason.
Padding barefoot and wrapped only in a bath towel down the plushly carpeted, dark-paneled corridor and feeling pleasantly buzzed on steam heat and brandy, Rory contemplated how to spend the rest of the day. Once he’d decided, he changed into jeans and a T-shirt and, after a brief side trip to his father’s unoccupied study, headed down to the enormous cellar beneath the mansion.
Back before Rory was even born, his grandfather Magnus Starling had converted the cavernous room into a space that now housed an enormous, elaborate model train set—one which had a ridiculously accurate miniature New York cityscape, with rail tracks radiating out from Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station, and included all of Manhattan and a good deal of Long Island and the Jersey Shore. It circulated real water around the sculpted islands in the East and Hudson Rivers, down into the harbor, where a little Statue of Liberty poked out of the water.
When he was a kid, Rory would sometimes disappear down there for a whole day and lose himself in the tiny cityscape, running the miniature version of the Starling private train through the secret tunnels under the city—the ones that had been built specifically for Starling family business and were largely unknown even to some of New York’s public figures.
Now, thanks to Gunnar—and Magnus—there were sections of underground track that connected Westchester County and Long Island, giving Gunnar Starling easy access to the far reaches of his empire, as if he were a king.
“He thinks he’s a bloody king,” Rory muttered to himself, crouching down and crawling beneath the huge table that supported the model. There was a device that could remove all of Central Park from the middle of the cityscape so the operator could stand there, surrounded by the city on all sides as he conducted. Rory pulled the lever and the park section dropped down to slide under the table. There was a switch on the operator panel that would activate an elaborate fiber-optic system that would make the entire model glow and twinkle like the city at night. Normally, he would have turned them on, but Rory wanted the darkness. All he needed was just enough light to read by.
He sat down in the middle of the miniature city, switched on a penlight, and pulled Gunnar’s old leather diary out from under his shirt. Almost instantly, something about it felt strange. For years, the diary had remained hidden away in the lockbox in Gunnar’s study, untouched by anyone except Rory. But now, on the page after the last entry there was fresh ink. Rory held his breath as he read the new entry.
The Norns paid me a second visit tonight....
Rory’s blood turned to ice in his veins.
The storm. It was an omen, as I suspected … but more than that. Both a portent, and a portal. The ways are open again.
And my long-dead dream of Ragnarok is revived.
The Fates had seen fit to give me a second chance.
The Norns offered me a cup from which to drink. For a price.
Like mighty Odin, I am now completely bereft of sight in one eye.
But the prophecy is now clear to me, and I see the errors that, in my arrogance, I was blind to before.
Rory felt an unaccustomed stab of sympathy for his father. They’d taken half his eyesight! He wondered, for a moment, what that would be like. But then he shook himself out of the thought and scanned down the page. His father had rewritten the same prophecy the Norns had given him all those years ago in Copenhagen. The words themselves were unaltered. But Rory was shocked to see what a few changes in punctuation had done to the meaning of the phrases. He flipped back to the original entry.
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 onto the earth to be reborn.
The newer version now read:
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.
Perplexed, Rory read his father’s explanation, which suddenly clarified things.
Mason reminds me so much, every day, of her beautiful mother. My precious Yelena. My daughter has been my greatest joy … and my most bitter disappointment. But now she is the key to achieving my dream for the world. I can see to it that she becomes a Valkyrie—a chooser of the slain. With the spear of Odin in her hand, Mason will have the power to create a third Odin Son to stand beside my own two boys. They shall be the harbingers of Ragnarok, they will call forth the Einherjar, the dead warriors—and they shall bring about the end of the world as it exists now. This gray, grieving, tainted realm will be reborn in splendor from its own ashes.
And all I need do is sacrifice my beloved daughter’s soul....
It hit Rory like a lightning bolt. Mason’s gender wasn’t the thwart he’d always thought it had been. She wasn’t the roadblock to the prophecy … she was the key. At that moment, Rory heard voices—coming from the wine cellar on the far side of the train room—and he crouched down under the table and shoved the diary as far into a corner beneath the model as he could. Then he held his breath and listened.
“I can hardly believe it.”
“It’s true. And it’s within our grasp, Rothgar,” his father responded.
Rory strained to hear what they were saying, keeping painfully still so that he wouldn’t make any noise. Even the voices that had been whispering in his head for days now quieted.
“The end of the world,” Roth said in a voice full of wonder. And … fear?
“No.” Gunnar was adamant. “The beginning of it. Help me pick something appropriate to celebrate this occasion. We will toast our good fortune, and then I will tell you what I need you to do.”
“I’ll do the best I can,” Roth said.
“Of course you will. You’ve never failed me yet, Rothgar,” Gunnar said. “You’ve never disappointed me. I wish I could say the same of all my children.”
Screw you, Pops, Rory though bitterly. But Gunnar wasn’t talking about him.
“It’s hardly Mason’s fault she was born a girl, Dad,” Roth said.
“I know. And I wouldn’t trade her for the world. Well. I wouldn’t trade her for this world. But for the chance for us—for humanity—to start over, Roth? I would trade my wealth, my children, my soul itself. It is what we were put here to do. This is our destiny. And
now Mason will be given the chance to redeem the accident of her birth and make us all proud.”
He’s going to do it, Rory thought. He’s really going to try to make this thing happen. And then he thought … I’m going to help. Rory stayed where he was, silent and cramped, listening as Gunnar told Roth what he had learned from the three Norns. All things Rory already knew. Still, he needed to arm himself with enough reasons for Gunnar to let him have a hand in what was to come. Because obviously his father didn’t trust him in the same way as he trusted his brother. The fact that his father was down here discussing his grand schemes with Roth—and Roth alone—was more than proof enough of that. Rory heard the muted pop of a cork and the clinking of glasses.
“Are you going to join us?” Gunnar’s voice floated down to him from very close by. “Or are you going to stay crouched there like a fox in a hole waiting for the hounds to pass by?”
Slowly Rory turned his head and looked up to see his father standing like a god looking down on him. And he was holding out a glass of champagne. Gunnar flipped a switch, and the miniature cityscape all around Rory lit up and began to glow and twinkle. Rory stood like a giant emerging in the middle of the city from the gaping hole where Central Park should be. Swallowing his fear, he reached over to take the offered libation from his father.
Unlike every other feature of the model city, the Hell Gate Bridge was not exactly accurate. Rory had noticed it almost immediately when he was a small boy and had always wondered about it. In reality, the bridge was painted a dark, almost foreboding, deep red color. But in the tiny model city, the bridge was left unpainted, the metal silvery with an iridescent sheen to it. Rory had always wondered about it but, until that moment, it had never occurred to him what that was supposed to represent.
Bifrost.
The rainbow bridge to Asgard, the home of the Norse gods.
“Your ancestors had the guiding hand in building this bridge, my boys,” Gunnar mused quietly, sipping on the last of the celebratory champagne. He’d sat on a tall stool beside the city model, describing his prophetic epiphany to his sons—and the steps they had to take to bring it to fruition.
“This stretch of river was originally called Hellegat. It’s Dutch. A word that could mean one of two things: ‘Bright Passage’ … or ‘Gate to Hel.’ That’s our Hel, boys. The Norse Hell.” Gunnar traced the contours of the arching bridge with one fingertip. “I suppose it’s both, really. And it has stood there all this time, waiting for us to fulfill its purpose. There is deep magick woven into the very core of its construction. The design, the materials … are all very special. It is a wonder, hidden in plain sight. It’s not just a bridge, it is a gateway to Asgard, a path to the realm of the gods. But …” He held up his hand. “That path can only be walked by the dead, and only in one direction. At least, that was the way of things until recently.”
“What changed things?”
“Not what, Rothgar. Who.”
Gunnar absently smoothed a finger over his left eyebrow, his gaze distant. He was silent for a long moment, and Roth and Rory exchanged a glance. Rory recalled the last entry in the diary, suddenly, and wondered if Gunnar had told Roth about his vision loss—the price he’d paid for the knowledge he shared with them now.
“Who, father?” Roth prompted finally.
Gunnar roused himself from his reverie and tossed back the dregs of his drink.
“He calls himself the Fennrys Wolf,” Gunnar said. “And he is a gift to us from the very gods themselves.”
XXII
This time, there was a pebble actually sitting on her windowsill when Mason got back from class that afternoon. It was smooth and sparkly and had a silver string tied around it attached to a note. Mason smiled to herself as she plucked up the pebble and folded open the piece of paper.
My place, tonight, 6:00. TFW.
She had to admit, Fenn’s way of communicating did have a certain charm. It beat the heck out of texting. Mason turned the pebble over in her hand, thinking. She shouldn’t go. She had a mountain of homework, a group tutorial she really couldn’t afford to miss, and later that night an optional fencing practice that she knew perfectly well Toby would not consider optional. Not for her, not this close to the NACs. Also? The last time she’d found herself in proximity to TFW, she’d been attacked and almost killed by monsters. Again.
Really, she should just be a good girl and do what she was supposed to.
But she was feeling uncharacteristically rebellious. And she deserved a night off. Didn’t she?
Regardless of whether she did or didn’t, Mason knew perfectly well, just from the way her heart was beating rapidly in her chest, from the way she was arguing with herself, and from the way her eyes kept straying back to the pebble in her hand and the note, that she was not going to be a good girl.
Not this time.
“I have something for you,” Fennrys said as she stepped out of the freight elevator and into his apartment. When she’d arrived at the warehouse, the front door had been left ajar and the elevator had been waiting with the gate open, ready to take her up to the second floor. Mason was still a little surprised at herself. No one knew where she was, no one knew who she was with or how to find her. She’d known Fenn for a grand total of a couple of days and had almost gotten killed on more than one occasion in his presence. And yet she’d never felt so safe in all her life.
Safe—but a bit on the breathless side, nonetheless. She tried not to fidget with her hair or outfit, half wishing she’d decided against dressing up and just gone with jeans and sneakers, like usual.
As she stepped into his apartment, she noticed that every one of the windows all down the long brick wall were open a few inches, framed by panel drapes that billowed gently, like a chorus line of ghosts.
Mason felt herself smiling. He’d opened the windows for her.
Neither of them had spoken as Fennrys walked her over to the part of the wide-open loft that was furnished as a dining room. There was a long wooden table, and on the table rested a dark leather case, long and narrow, tapering at one end. It was adorned with a wide silver ribbon, tied in a bow. Mason glanced back and forth from the case to Fennrys.
“Go ahead,” he said quietly. “Open it.”
Mason reached out a hesitant hand and tugged on one end of the ribbon. It fell away, and she undid the silver clasps on the long side of the case and flipped open the lid. Inside, resting on a bed of midnight blue velvet, was the breathtakingly elegant, swept-hilt rapier with the silvery blade that Mason had so admired on the day she and Fennrys first discovered the loft apartment. And the hidden weapons cache. Her breath caught in her throat as she saw the tag attached to it. It said:
For Mason. The only girl in my world.
She took a deep, shuddering breath and kept her face turned away from Fennrys, and she blinked at the sudden wetness on her lashes that turned the reflected light from the blade into starry spangles. “You want me to have this?” she asked softly.
She heard him chuckle behind her. “I figured as long as you keep getting yourself into situations you need to fight your way out of, you might as well look good doing it.”
The gleam of light on the wire-wrapped hilt compelled her to reach out and grasp it. The sweeping lines of the guard wrapped around her hand like silver flourishes from a calligrapher’s pen. She lifted the sword from its velvet bed and saw that there was a soft, midnight-black leather fencing glove underneath, alongside a cross-body, baldric-style scabbard—also black, with silver finishings and a blue jewel set in the buckle fastening. It was obviously not something that had been made for Fennrys—it was feminine and sleek and so, so her. She picked it up and slung the belt over her shoulder, so that the scabbard hung at her left hip, and picked up the gauntlet. She sheathed the sword just long enough to slide her right hand into the soft leather that fit her, well, like a glove.
“It’s perfect,” she said, drawing the blade as she walked into the center of the room, where the rug had
been rolled away, and swept the blade from side to side in a circling, figure-eight motion, suddenly, utterly, unself-conscious. Mason was at her best, at her most peaceful, when she had a sword in her hand. All of her shyness and her reticence evaporated, and she was able to feel confident and powerful.
Fennrys was watching her as she moved through a series of fencing exercises. Of course she was used to a much lighter, whip-slender blade, but the principles weren’t too dissimilar. After a few moments of Fenn standing there watching her with his arms crossed over his chest and a smile ticking at one corner of his mouth, he turned and slid the wall aside to reveal the weapons cupboard. He plucked a second rapier—one with a plainer, more masculine hilt—from its hanger on the wall and stalked in a half circle around Mason to stand in front of her in a loose-limbed, careless en garde.
His grin was an invitation, and Mason felt herself smiling in return. She gave him a small salute with her blade. Her breath slowed in her chest even as she felt the rush of blood to her head and the surge of adrenaline as Fennrys made a feinting dart with his blade that she parried easily and swept to the side. Her own exploratory attack, a diagonal cut aimed at his left shoulder, met with an equal lack of success. The two of them circled each other for a moment, and then Mason went in for a low, running sideswipe that got under Fennrys’s guard and very nearly tagged his thigh right above the knee. She thought for an instant that she would have to pull the blow to avoid actually hitting him, but then his blade came down in a lightning-fast, liquid-silver circle and crashed onto hers, with enough force to make her fingers go instantly numb.
The blade flew from her hand and skittered the length of the room.
And she suddenly found herself standing with the point of Fennrys’s rapier kissing the hollow at the base of her throat.
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