Transcendent

by Lesley Livingston

  “No!” she shouted at him, forcing him back.

  “Get off me, Mase!” he snarled.

  “No . . . Roth,” Mason pleaded. “No more blood!”

  Her Valkyrie strength barely kept him from reaching Daria as he thrashed and lunged. Mason dug her fingers into his flesh and shook him by the shoulders until his teeth rattled to make him look at her. When Roth’s mad-eyed stare finally seemed to focus on her face, Mason’s throat closed tight with sorrow at what she saw there. Her next words rasped from her mouth in a whisper.

  “No more blood,” she said, turning him away from Daria. “Not even hers.”

  “Mase . . .”

  “Please.”

  Roth reached up to grasp the sides of his sister’s face and he leaned his forehead against hers. His skin was slick with sweat. And blood and tears.

  “This has to end,” he whispered.

  “I know.” She nodded her forehead against his. “But not like this. We are not killers, Roth. You’re not a killer. No matter what she made you do . . . no matter what happened in the past. We are not our parents and we are not pawns in this sick stupid game of theirs. Don’t you see? Gwen just proved that beyond every shadow of a doubt. She made a choice, and you have to honor that.” She pulled her head back and looked into his bloodshot eyes. “You have to trust it. And her. And me.”

  Roth blinked at her dully for a moment. Then he laughed. His laughter was the harsh call of a carrion crow and it chilled her to the marrow.

  “Trust you, little sister?” he asked.

  He let go of her and backed off a few lurching steps.

  “I ended you.”

  “Roth—”

  “You’re not supposed to exist!” he howled savagely, waving one arm wildly in her direction. “And yet, here you are. You’re a freaking Valkyrie. That happened. In spite of everything we did.” He stalked back and grabbed her by the back of her head, pulling her face so close to his she could feel his breath hot on her cheeks. “You think you have a say in this?” he hissed. “You don’t. And you want me to trust you? You scare the shit out of me, Mason. How’m I supposed to trust that?”

  He let go of her and Mason took a stumbling step back, away from the rage and pain and hollow-eyed horror in her brother’s face. Roth had always been a rock for Mason. The opposite of her self-absorbed jackass of a brother, Rory.

  Roth protected her. He looked out for her.

  He murdered you . . .

  Maybe he was right. Maybe she shouldn’t exist.

  No.

  She shook her head. That wasn’t Roth talking. And it hadn’t been Roth acting, all those years ago. It had been the will of the woman that Mason had just stopped Roth from attacking. Part of her whispered that she should step aside. Let him do it.

  She’d been about to do it herself only a few moments earlier, hadn’t she?

  “No.” Mason shook her head again, partly to convince herself. “I don’t know, Roth. Maybe we can’t truly trust each other ever again. But if that’s the case, then we might as well just give up and admit it’s all over.”

  Roth’s expression went from savage to stricken. His hands dropped to his sides and his shoulders slumped. In the lull that followed, the glass door to the terrace opened and Honora poked her head out. She didn’t look at Mason, just gestured to Toby and Maddox.

  “We could use some extra muscle,” she said. “Just to keep him from injuring himself.”

  The look in her eyes made Mason think she’d silently added the words “or us” to the end of that sentence. Toby glanced at Mason, hesitating, but she nodded for him to go. Maddox was already through the door and gone and Mason felt better knowing they would be there to help Fenn. She desperately wanted to go to him herself, but Honora’s request for help clearly hadn’t been extended to include her, and the last thing Fennrys needed was for Mason to start stirring things up with the creatures—people, Mase; they’re people—who were trying to help him.

  As the door swung closed behind the wolf-woman, Mason looked down at the shimmering, magickal armor that still clothed her, head to toe. The Odin spear lay on the ground at the foot of the altar, an ancient, brutal weapon. As she stared at it, she felt the wetness of a tear spilling down her face and reached up a hand to wipe it from her cheek. Her fingers came away stained crimson. Mason was weeping blood.

  Huh, she thought, numb with exhaustion. Must be a Valkyrie thing. . . .

  She heard Roth’s sharp breath as he saw the blood on her fingertip.

  “Please,” she said. “I just . . . I can’t. I really can’t handle any more death.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then suddenly he was back across the terrace and she felt his arms go around her.

  “Little sister,” he murmured into her hair. “I’m so sorry. . . .”

  She let him hold her for a moment. Then she pushed away from him.

  “So am I,” she said.

  There would be time to sort out what had happened to them when they were children later. There would be time to deal with Daria and there would be a reckoning and maybe, just maybe, Mason would stand aside and let Roth deal with that however he saw fit. But right then, in that moment, Mason needed to keep it together.

  She shook her head, willing back any more tears and walked over to the Odin spear. Holding her breath, she bent down swiftly to pick it up. It was heavy, but so perfectly balanced that it felt as though she could throw it a mile with barely any effort. She closed her eyes and searched for the small, walled space inside of her that still belonged wholly to Mason Starling, before any of the crazy had happened. It had to still be there, she knew.

  I have to still be there.

  Because if it wasn’t—if she wasn’t—then she really was lost and nothing she did from that point on would matter because the end result would be inevitable. And it would be the end result. The end of everything . . .

  Fenn . . .

  She thought of Fennrys and the night at his loft when he’d first given her the silver, swept-hilt rapier and how good and right and perfect it had felt in her hand. God, how she wanted her sword back. How she wanted everything to go back to the way it was that night. When she was just Mase and he was just Fenn and everything else just fell away. She felt a shiver in the air all around her and when she opened her eyes, the Odin spear was gone, or transformed, its essence and power once more cloaked in the shape of the sword held in her bare hand.

  And suddenly Mason was Mason again. The armor of the Valkyrie was gone. But somewhere deep inside, she could feel the Valkyrie’s rage, like the still-burning coals glowing silently beneath the ashes of a banked fire. Waiting to spark to life again . . .

  So she could burn down the world.

  V

  Mason shook her long black hair back over her shoulders and sheathed the rapier in the scabbard that once again hung from the baldric slung across her torso. She was back in her jeans and boots, the shimmery short-sleeved top she’d worn that night leaving the bare skin of her arms chilly in the wind. She crouched down and picked up Fennrys’s medallion from where it lay at her feet. The clasp on the braided leather cord—the one on which she’d had the medallion restrung especially for him—had been bitten through by Anubis. Mason shook the blood from the iron disk and shoved it in her pocket. Then she turned back to her brother, who stood watching her, his gaze steady and solemn. The fog of grief and drugs had cleared, leaving behind a glinting darkness, like black ice, in his eyes.

  At least he looked like Roth again.

  Quiet. In control. Dangerous . . .

  Good.

  She’d need for him to be all those things, going forward. Of that, she had no doubt.

  “You know this is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better, right?” Mason said.

  Roth shrugged. “If it gets better. Yeah.”

  “I need to know what you know, Roth.” She walked back over to him and stared up into his face. “I need to understand what’s going on and what
Dad and Rory have planned. And I need to know that you aren’t a part of it.”

  “I’m not.”

  They locked eyes for a long moment and Mason saw something in her brother’s gaze that she had never seen before. “Are you afraid, Roth?” she asked in a whisper.

  He nodded.

  “Of me.”

  “Yes.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “You really do scare the hell out of me, Mase. Not gonna lie. But . . . that’s not because of who you are.”

  “It’s because of what I am.”

  He nodded again. “Yeah. Except I’m not stupid; I know that you didn’t want any of this any more than I did. Any more than Gwen did. You’re right. I have no reason not to trust you, Mason. And I guess it’s high time you had a reason to trust me back.”

  Mason tilted her head and regarded him. “I always have trusted you, Roth.”

  “I know.” A deep frown marred his forehead. “You probably shouldn’t have.”

  She stared at her brother, not understanding, until Daria laughed bitterly.

  “No,” Cal’s mother said, her eyes fixed on Roth. “None of us should have.”

  “I did what I had to,” Roth said. “And I never meant harm.”

  “Tell that to my wolfhounds.”

  Wolfhounds? Mason thought. She opened her mouth to ask the question, but Roth just shot Daria a death glare and turned his back on her, gesturing for Mason to follow him toward the glass doors. In front of them, he stopped and turned her to face him.

  “Listen to me,” Roth said. “I might not always have acted in your best interests, Mase—and you need to know that—but you also need to believe me when I tell you now that I am so, so sorry for that.”

  He reached up and tucked a strand of loose hair behind her ear, for all the good it did—the wind just tore it from his fingers again and sent it whirling around her head with the rest of her midnight locks. Roth’s fingers were ice-cold as they brushed the side of her face.

  “And I will tell you everything I know,” Roth continued. “I promise. But only once we’re on the move.”

  “Move?”

  “We can’t stay here. Dad will have seen the lightning strikes. He’ll know. He’ll be coming.”

  The instant he said it, Mason knew he was right. She could almost picture her father’s face as he realized that he’d triumphed—succeeded in turning his only daughter into a Valkyrie. A chooser of the slain. The very thought was something that Mason was struggling to understand. Her father.

  Dad . . .

  Mason willed back more tears. In their stead, she felt the cold spatter of a raindrop on her cheek. She lifted her face to the sky as a rumble of thunder rolled overhead and the heavy black clouds began to weep for her. She glanced over at Cal’s mother where she stood with her white priestess robes flapping wetly like the sails of an abandoned boat. She lifted her chin and strove for defiance, but all Daria’s arrogant elegance—the superior attitude she wore like a suit of armor—had turned brittle and cracked at the seams. Mason could see the woman beneath the facade for the first time and she wondered fleetingly about the girl she might have once been. The one who had so fiercely befriended Mason’s own mother that, when Yelena Starling had died, Daria had begun to plot an unfathomable revenge against Gunnar Starling that had spanned decades.

  Roth followed Mason’s gaze. “That’s another reason we have to get going,” he said. “The Miasma will begin to dissipate before too long. I can feel it. Gwen . . .” His face twisted again. “Gwen’s death was like a lance. The blood curse is emptying out of me. It’ll take a while, but when that happens—when the fog walls surrounding Manhattan fall—they’ll send the military in. Come on, everyone inside.” He walked over to the glass doors and opened them, glaring at Daria with the promise of revenge written in his eyes. “Even you. Much as I’d rather leave you to face whatever fresh hell is coming down, I think we might actually need you before this is all over.”

  As Cal moved toward the open door, he shook his head and spoke for the first time in what seemed like forever to Mason. “It’s going to be an unholy mess down on the streets when the city wakes up. There’ll be widespread panic. And they’ll probably quarantine the whole island and—”

  He was interrupted by the sound of another anguished, ragged howl coming from somewhere inside the Weather Room. Mason felt the small hairs on the back of her neck stand up as the bone-chilling sound—the cry of an animal caught in a trap—distorted only a moment later, twisting into a human wail of agony.

  Fennrys . . .

  The cries subsided into low, guttural groans, and Mason squeezed her eyes shut. But all she could see was Rafe—the way he had looked with Fenn’s blood staining his teeth. Heather came over and put a hand on Mason’s shoulder.

  “You should go to him,” she said. “He sounds . . . not good.”

  Mason hesitated. Honora had told her to stay away. The pack would take care of him, she said. And Toby and Maddox were there. And . . . she was afraid.

  “It’s okay,” Heather said, misinterpreting Mason’s reluctance. She glanced at Cal and his mother, and then at Roth, who looked less likely to pitch forward onto his face than he had a few minutes earlier. “I think we’ve got it covered out here for the time being.” She bent down to pick up the silver sickle that Daria Aristarchos had dropped and handed it to Roth, who gestured Daria through the doorway with it and followed her close behind. “And in spite of whatever that she-wolf in Prada might think? I’m betting that the one thing Fennrys needs right now, more than anything, is you. Go.”

  She gave Mason a brief hug and sent her through the door with a gentle shove. Another cry of rage and pain rent the air, and Mason turned and ran through the deserted hall in the direction of the Fennrys Wolf.

  Calum watched her go to him, and it took everything he had to not run after her and beg her not to. He almost gave in to the urge until he felt Heather’s eyes on him. Her stare was palpable, as if she’d laid a hand on his shoulder—steady, cool, unforgiving . . . but somehow not entirely unsympathetic. Typical, complicated Heather Palmerston. He went over to where she stood by the door, stopping before he walked straight past her and into the room where Mason was with Fennrys.

  “Hey . . . ,” he said.

  Heather nodded silently in response. She stood there, arms crossed, no doubt waiting for him to say something else, but the words just seemed to ball up and stick in his throat.

  Heather sighed. Her eyes were ringed with dark circles. The dried tracks of the tears she’d shed that night marred her cheeks and her gaze raked Cal head to foot. Again he could almost feel it, only this time, it wasn’t cool. More like the heat of a harsh white searchlight.

  “So,” she said eventually, shaking her head when it became painfully obvious that he couldn’t find anything else to say. Her stare flicked from Cal’s face to his fist—the one that had manifested the trident he’d stabbed Fennrys with—and Cal knew what she was thinking. He felt a surge of guilt. “What the hell, Cal?”

  “Yeah . . .” He tried to unclench his fingers, but they seemed cemented. He could still feel the cool, smooth surface of the weapon he’d created with this mind. “I know. It’s . . .” He huffed in frustration. “I’m glad you’re okay, Heather.”

  “I could say the same thing about you, I suppose.” She lifted one shoulder in a shrug, and he noticed that she was shivering. “If I was sure that was actually the case.”

  Trust Heather to give it to you straight, he thought bitterly.

  Like the time she’d flat-out told him they were breaking up—because Cal didn’t love Heather. He’d always thought that he did, but it wasn’t until that very moment that he’d realized that she was right. She was always right.

  “You know you killed a guy, right?” she asked, her voice was low and uninflected. It cut like a sharp-edged knife.

  “He’s not—”

  “He would be. He’d be dead if it wasn’t for . . . what came next.”

  She
closed her eyes for a moment as if seeing again the terrible instant when the dreadlocked young man Cal knew as Rafe had transformed into the huge black-furred wolf and sunk his teeth into Fennrys’s neck. When she opened them again, it was to look back at Cal, a deep wariness in her gaze.

  “I’m still having a bit of an issue mentally framing just what, exactly, it was that that guy did,” she said. “But you . . . I know what you did. Maybe not how, but I’ve got the what part down. I just can’t figure out why, you know?”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Yes you did, Cal.”

  “Okay. Yeah.” Cal shook his head and huffed in frustration. “I did. I thought he was going to hurt Mason.”

  “So you . . . manifested, conjured, whatever you did and however you did it . . . you made the biggest, sharpest pitchfork I’ve ever seen—out of water, with your mind—and then you stabbed Fennrys through the heart with it. That’s not stopping someone. That’s ending someone.”

  Inside the Weather Room, another piteous howl shivered in the air like a warning siren. Cal wondered if Mason realized now, for real, who was the monster and who was the man. The scars on his face tingled and he winced. Heather was still staring at him. He couldn’t tell if it was with pity or hate.

  I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. I don’t need her.

  He had everything he needed in the next room. In Mason. And once she realized that—and that she and Fennrys could never be together now—she’d come to him. Standing between Cal and the doorway to that potential future, Heather smiled sadly, as if she’d read his thoughts.

  “Never gonna happen, sweetie,” she said. “Frankly, I’ll be surprised if she doesn’t put that spear she has right through your chest when she gets back. Just to show you what it felt like when you did the same thing to the guy she loves.”