Descendant s-2

by Lesley Livingston

  Mason looked up at him. The coldness was gone from his gaze, and he just looked sad and resolved. She almost couldn’t imagine what it must feel like for him to know his mother was behind all the chaos and hurt. But then she remembered that her father was equally to blame, and she realized she knew exactly how he felt. She reached out a hand and squeezed his arm, and he flashed her a brief smile before stepping through the doors. Mason and Fennrys followed.

  Just as the doors were closing, Rafe’s manicured hand stopped them, and the Egyptian god squeezed through the gap.

  “Room for one more?” he asked, panting a little from exertion.

  “Sure,” Cal said. “Never know when a god might come in handy.”

  “The others?” Fennrys asked.

  “Fine,” Rafe said. “Fighting. They’ll follow us up when they can.”

  Mason’s stomach lurched as the Top of the Rock light show began in the elevator shaft, shimmering and flashing above the transparent ceiling of the cab as it began its swift ascent up to the sixty-seventh floor. She knew it wasn’t just the motion or the swirling colors that were making her queasy. What they were about to face wasn’t something that she had ever thought was even possible. But then, a few weeks ago, none of the things she had experienced recently had, to her mind, been possible. She felt Fennrys’s hand rest lightly on her back for a moment, between her shoulder blades. Heat radiated out from his palm and seemed to sink through her skin to wrap her heart with comforting warmth. Whatever they were about to face, she could handle it. With Fenn at her side, she could face anything.

  “Or maybe not … ,” she murmured when the elevator doors opened and they stepped out into the dim-lit corridor to peer carefully around the corner of the marble wall. The reception area that led to the soaring hall of the Weather Room beyond looked as if it had been set-dressed to resemble an ancient Greek temple.

  Rafe’s nostrils flared, and he closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, Mason shot him a questioning look and a corner of his mouth lifted in a slightly feral grin.

  “I miss this kind of thing,” he said in a whisper. “People once worshipped me the same way. It’s not something you really forget.”

  No, Mason supposed, it probably wasn’t. Still, something about the way he’d cast his gaze longingly around the elaborately decorated room with its drapes and couches and displays of putrefied fruit made her uneasy. It obviously made Fennrys nervous, too.

  He took a step toward the god and said quietly, “Is this going to be a problem? Because if you think you’re in any danger of … falling off the wagon or whatever the godly equivalent of that is, then maybe you should wait downstairs.”

  Rafe locked eyes with Fennrys for a long moment.

  “We’re here to try and stop the end of the world you’ve become so fond of, remember?” Fenn said with an edge of steel in his voice. “The club, the clothes, the redheaded jazz flute player?”

  Rafe blinked rapidly and seemed to shake off the effects of Daria’s temple. His gaze cleared and the sharp, sardonic sparkle returned to his eyes. He nodded. “A moment of nostalgia. Followed by the clarity of our immediate situation. Indulge an old god for that moment.”

  “By all means. You good to go now?”

  “Hell yes. Let’s put an end to this silliness, shall we?”

  In an instant, Rafe’s form blurred, shifted, and transformed into his man-god shape. And that was something Mason was beginning to find surprisingly reassuring—they had a god on their side. Two gods, if you counted Cal’s semidivinity. What did Daria Aristarchos have?

  Some kind of lame-ass gut-reading sorceress and a murderer.

  The reception room, dimly illuminated by hidden spotlights, was empty, but they heard the murmur of voices, chanting, coming from beyond. Mason carefully drew back the edge of one of the drapes and saw a small sea of white-robed Eleusinian devotees. They all stood with their backs to her, absorbed in whatever was taking place outside on a glass-enclosed terrace at the far end of the room. The hoods on the robes of the celebrants were down, and Mason caught glimpses of the sides of faces. Some of them were familiar.

  With a shock, she realized that these were just normal people. She looked over at Cal and saw that he had gone a bit pale. Some of the celebrants were the parents of their schoolmates at Gosforth. Mason vaguely recognized one or two faces from event nights and academy open houses. These weren’t draugr. They weren’t monsters. Mason couldn’t hurt them. She certainly couldn’t kill them. Even though somewhere in that room, if Douglas Muir was to be believed, there was a killer. Someone who’d not just killed, but killed family. A murderer … a kin slayer. The ultimate taboo. The root of the most horrific blood curses.

  Who? she wondered.

  She knew that Fennrys had expected that there would be violence involved in what they had to do. He’d warned her about it before they’d left the island, and she’d readily accepted that fact. She remembered, at the time, that she’d even felt a sharp, electric thrill at the thought of an actual fight… .

  She’d felt it again a moment ago.

  But then she’d recognized faces, and that thrill was doused like a snuffed candle flame. She took her hand from her rapier hilt and left the sword hanging, sheathed at her side. Words first, Mason.

  Talking and running always trumped fighting.

  The blade was a last resort.

  She looked around for a way to get to the head of the ritual without having to actually fight her way through anyone and saw that, where the long white panels of silky fabric hung from the ceiling to give the room its exotic, tentlike feel, there were colored spotlights placed on the floor behind the panels. The lights pointed upward, drenching the shimmering cloth in cycling swaths of purple and red and blue. Blood colors. Bruise colors. The decorative arrangement left a narrow gap between the Weather Room’s walls and the cloth, and it provided an unobstructed causeway, bypassing the crowd of Eleusinians and ending right at the doors that led out onto the terrace at the far end of the reception space.

  Mason tugged on Fennrys’s arm and pointed at the passage. He nodded and turned to Rafe, who indicated he would circle around and do the same thing on the other side of the room. And then Mason looked at Cal. Their eyes locked. She gestured for him to follow her. But he just smiled grimly, and then turned and headed straight for the crowd of his mother’s devotees.

  XXII

  Calum ignored the shocked look on Mason’s face as he turned and stalked purposefully through the curtains and down toward the end of the room. As the white-clad people turned to see who had disrupted the proceedings, they all recognized him and stepped back out of his way, clearing a path to the main event. In his peripheral vision he could see shadows moving behind the cloth walls and knew it was his companions racing to flank him. That was fine. They could do an end run if they wanted. Cal was tired of avoiding. He was tired of negotiating.

  “Mother!” he shouted, and his voice rang off the marble columns and high ceiling of the room. “You have to stop this. Now!”

  Out on the terrace, Cal saw the tall, elegant figure of his mother stiffen and turn. Her high, sculpted cheekbones were suffused with a hectic flush of color, and her eyes were dilated to black, glittering pits. She looked as if she was caught in the throes of stark madness, and she held a bloody, sickle-shaped blade in her hand. Cal shuddered inwardly, and his steps faltered.

  Then he saw where the blood on the blade had come from.

  Mason’s brother.

  Roth Starling lay sprawled on top of a black stone altar. There were long, shallow gashes on both his arms and chest, and his face was covered in a sheen of sweat and—more likely than not—tears, fallen from the eyes of the thin, pale, purple-haired girl who stood hovering over him. It took a moment for Cal to recognize Gwen Littlefield, her face distorted in a horrifying, silent scream, and tears ran in rivers down her face as she stood frozen between two marble fountains, carved in the shapes of goddesses, that wept along with her.
Indeed, the only sound on the terrace in the silence after Cal’s cry was the musical splashing of the fountains … and the ragged weeping of the girl.

  Then he heard a gasp.

  Cal scanned the terrace and saw Heather Palmerston on her knees in the corner of the terrace, hands tied together with a torn strip of white cloth, her pretty eyes wide and staring at him. He saw disbelief in them and realized that Heather had probably spent the last few days thinking he was dead. He saw the spark of hope flaring in the depths of her gaze and felt a searing stab of guilt in his chest. He had felt so damned sorry for Heather ever since she’d broken up with him. But none of this was his fault… . He shoved all thoughts of the reason why Heather had left him from his mind. He knew what he had to do, and he knew who he was doing it for.

  “Mother!” Cal shouted again, turning back to where Daria Aristarchos stood frozen.

  “What kind of trick is this?” she hissed, her eyes wide and rolling.

  “It’s not a trick. I’m not dead. I know you thought I was, but I’m not. Mom … please. Listen to me.” He took a step forward, and his mother’s fingers tightened on the hilt of the knife. “You have to stop what you’re doing. I’m okay. I’m alive and everything’s going to be okay. There’s not going to be any Ragnarok. The world’s not going to end. All right? I promise. But you have to—”

  “Roth!”

  The sudden cry tore from Mason’s throat as she reached the terrace. Cal turned to see her staring, aghast, at her beloved older brother, and then saw her gaze ricochet from Roth to his mother. He thought he saw Mason’s eyes flash red.

  “What have you done to him?” she cried.

  Mason sucked in a breath as a cold grin appeared on Daria Aristarchos’s face. The answer to her question became suddenly, horrifyingly obvious. Daria wanted to take down Gunnar Starling. She’d wanted to do that for a very long time. And she wanted to use his son to do it.

  But how …

  The muscles on either side of Roth’s neck stood out, taut, like steel cables as he lay on the altar, limbs thrashing heavily, and his head lolling from side to side. His booted feet kicked at the stone beneath them and his T-shirt was soaked with sweat. Crimson flowed from long, shallow cuts on the insides of both his arms, seeping down into channels cut in the black stone altar, which seemed as if it was generating the sickly gray, shimmering mist that drift out from the terrace, flowing like a ghost waterfall down the sides of the building and into the streets of the unsuspecting city, far below. The Miasma.

  I don’t understand… .

  A slender, pale girl, her eyes red and weeping beneath a shock of purple hair, stood above Mason’s brother, her face frozen in a mask of horror and the palms of her hands pressed flat into the blood that pooled on the altar surface.

  Roth’s blood.

  “Roth … ?” Mason whispered, aghast.

  His head rolled on the granite slab, and his gaze met hers. His pupils were so dilated that there was no color to his eyes. They looked as black as the polished stone beneath him. “Mase …” His voice broke on her name. “I’m so sorry… .”

  And in that moment, Mason felt herself falling into the abyss of that gaze.

  She saw what had happened, so long ago, that led to this moment.

  She saw everything.

  Caught in the circle of Roth’s black, unblinking stare, Mason went instantly numb, head to foot. His gaze bored into her, and it was as if a floodgate opened from his mind to hers. The vision crashed over her, a memory of the past. Mason suddenly saw young Roth Starling—very young, ten or eleven years old maybe—the Roth she remembered from her childhood, standing in dappled sunlight beneath an old oak tree.

  He’d been her big, strong, handsome brother, and she had loved him.

  And so had the awkward, shy little girl who had sometimes joined them when they’d played in the quad at Gosforth. The daughter of a cook, one of Daria Aristarchos’s household staff. Not a privileged, super-rich kid like all the others at Gos. Just a regular girl …

  A girl named Gwen.

  Mason had liked Gwen. So had Roth, she remembered.

  In the vision, Mason saw him wearing a gift Gwen had given him—a childish, homemade charm—made out of a carved wolf’s tooth strung on a braided piece of ratty purple yarn. Mason remembered the day Gwen had shyly tied it around his neck. She’d been given it, Gwen had told Roth, by the nice lady her mom worked for. The one who’d taken care of Gwen when she’d been so sick with seizures and fevered hallucinations… . The lady who’d gotten her a scholarship at Gosforth. Daria Aristarchos.

  In the vision, the scene shifted, but Mason could still clearly make out the cross-hatched pattern carved on the wolf tooth charm—it looked like the braided seed heads of the barley stalks hanging all around her on the Weather Room’s marble pillars. The markings on the tooth were glowing faintly, flickering with the same silvery-gray light that filled young Roth’s gaze as he stepped through a cramped, darkened doorway … into a shadowed and cobwebby old garden shed, where a tiny, dark-haired figure lay curled up on a bench.

  Roth had been tall for his age, serious, with dark eyes and long-fingered hands. Hands that, in Mason’s vision, he pressed tightly over his baby sister’s face, sealing up her mouth and nose so that she couldn’t breathe. Mason couldn’t see her own young face. She didn’t know if the little girl with the long, dark braids had ever even awoken from the exhausted and hungry sleep she’d fallen into after being trapped for days in the abandoned shed. She couldn’t remember.

  She couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t change the past.

  Roth … No …

  In the vision, her brother’s eyes were dark, empty. Lightless, except for the flickering threads of silvery-gray light twisting in their depths. He had no idea what he was doing in that moment—that much was clear—and Mason understood suddenly that somehow, the wolf tooth Gwen had made a present of had given Daria power over Roth. And she had used that power to make him murder his own sister.

  Mason Starling had died that day.

  That Roth hadn’t been acting under his own power—hadn’t even known he’d done the horrid deed—did not alter that reality. Neither did the fact that Mason had somehow come back from the dead. From that moment on, Roth was blood cursed.

  And now all of Manhattan would feel the effects of that curse.

  Daria Aristarchos would see to that.

  Mason heard herself howl with rage, and the vision shattered.

  Cal stood there, shocked and unsure of what was going on. One moment, Mason had gone rigid and still—almost as if she was being electrocuted—and the next she was screaming with anguish. Behind Mason, Cal saw Fennrys lunge forward to get to her, loosening the long dagger he carried in a sheath at his hip. Cal knew perfectly well that Fennrys would use it without hesitation if the situation went any further south than it already had. Fenn gripped Mason around her upper arm, but she shrugged him off violently and advanced on Daria.

  Cal’s mother had kicked one hell of a hornet’s nest.

  Oh god … What has she done?

  “How could you?” The sound of Mason’s voice was the sound of a heart tearing to pieces. Her face was pale and twisted with anguish, and her hand had dropped to the sword hilt at her side.

  Cal’s blood turned to ice as he suddenly remembered something Rafe had said on the night they crossed the Hell Gate. Roth … your sister died, the ancient god had said. But Roth had been just as shocked as any of them. Only, if Mason’s brother was the one on the altar, then—

  “You … vicious … bitch!”

  Mason took another lurching step toward Cal’s mother.

  “We were children.”

  Cal felt those words like a punch in the stomach. He’d always understood that his mother had a cold, calculating streak. That she could be ruthless when it came to getting what she wanted. But he’d never imagined that she could have done something like what Mason was clearly accusing her of. And yet he knew, in that instant,
that she had.

  Mason yanked the swept-hilt rapier half out its sheath, and the air of the terrace suddenly blazed with crimson light. Mason’s face, contorted with rage, seemed lit from within.

  “Mase!” Fennrys cried out.

  Cal realized that the angry, deep crimson glow surrounding Mason didn’t seem to be shining on her, but emanating from her.

  “Mase—no!”

  She drew her sword the rest of the way, and suddenly bloodred light flared on the terrace like the blaze of a funeral pyre. Forks of lightning arced overhead, and in that flash of stark illumination, Cal saw Fennrys surge forward, drawing the long dagger from its sheath and slashing the blade through the air. Slashing at Mason.

  Before he could think, Cal reacted instinctively to protect her.

  The water from the nearest fountain suddenly leaped through the air into his outstretched hand. He felt the water hit his skin as if it was electrified, and the power that had coursed, untapped, through his blood since the day he was born shaped it to his will. A sea god’s will. The formless liquid solidified in his hand, turning hard and shining as forged steel. And as sharp.

  In front of him Fennrys’s blade flashed in the red light.

  Cal reacted.

  And it was only after, when the moment of confusion passed, that Cal understood exactly what had happened. That Fennrys wasn’t trying to hurt Mason. He wasn’t trying to kill her.

  He was trying to save her.

  Fennrys would have let her do it.

  He saw what had been done to Mason’s brother, and he understood in that moment exactly what Daria Aristarchos was responsible for. And he simply couldn’t bring himself to intervene on her behalf. What would happen next would be Mason’s call. It was her right.

  But something … the light … it was terribly wrong.

  “Mase!” he cried out, alarm bells going off in his head.

  As she drew the blade of her sword, Fennrys caught a sudden, clear glimpse of the jewel at the center of the baldric she wore. The one he’d had custom made, set with a blue stone that he’d chosen specifically to match the color of her eyes …