Cal winced. “Jeezus, Heather. You really can be a bitch sometimes. You know that?”
“And you can be so blind.” She shook her head. “I really hate to say this, Cal, but I think maybe there’s a whole lot more of your mother in you than you’d care to believe.”
“Shut your mouth—”
“Open your eyes!” Heather almost shouted at him.
She took a deep breath and closed her own eyes for a moment. When she looked at him again, he was shocked by just how much love for him he could still see, filling her gaze. It didn’t make any sense, but he was starting to figure out that “sense” and “love” had very little to do with each other in his world. A wave of bitterness at the absolute, utter unfairness of his situation crashed over him.
“What’s happened to you, Aristarchos?” Heather asked, a note of pleading in her voice. “Really. I’m trying to understand.”
“I don’t know how you could,” Cal said. “We’re not the same. We never have been.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged. “Maybe that’s why I couldn’t ever really love you, Heather. It’s not your fault. You’re only human.”
He hadn’t really meant to say it like that. Like an insult. But that’s how it sounded—even to his own ears—and from the look on Heather’s face, he knew that’s how it had sounded to her, too. She blinked and took a step back from him and her gaze became suddenly shuttered. Instead of crying or yelling or even looking at him with hurt in her eyes, Heather Palmerston just laughed at him.
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess I am. Thank god—or gods, I guess—for small favors.” Then she turned and walked past him through the door, tossing her hair over her proudly squared shoulders and leaving Cal standing there feeling like he was the lesser being.
VI
“Fennrys?”
No. No no no . . . not Fennrys.
Not this. This wasn’t him.
This is not . . . I am not . . .
“Fenn?”
The pain was excruciating. A bonfire lit from within. He could feel the thready fibers of every single muscle in his body searing as if flooded with a virulent toxin. His blood wasn’t blood; it was flame. It burned him as it coursed through his veins. The were-transformation had triggered something, awoken something deep inside him, and Fennrys didn’t know what it was. All he knew was that it was hungry.
The great holes torn in his chest by Calum’s trident throbbed with distant, detached hurt, already healing, flesh and lung and heart all knitting themselves back together. But the deep bite wounds on the sides of his throat were like constellations of agony—each puncture a miniature starburst of searing pain—and he could feel the strange, dark, transformative magick of the ancient Death god’s bite flowing outward from those points. Taking him. Stripping him of his humanity. Struggling against his other nature. But what that other nature was, Fennrys himself didn’t even fully comprehend in that moment. He was dead—had died—and he could feel those shades and shadows starkly now with a wolf’s heightened senses wrapping around him like the heavy, gold-furred pelt he now wore as his skin. And he feared that his previous death had somehow warped Anubis’s were-curse. Tainted it and twisted it, shaping it in a way that it was never meant to be shaped.
He could smell the fear clinging to the other members of Rafe’s pack. It was intoxicating. It fueled his hunger and he lunged, longing to tear the fear from them with his teeth and swallow it in great raw chunks. But the slender silver chain Maddox had looped around his throat kept him from doing that. The silver burned like acid. In spite of the pain he still struggled, thrashing and scrabbling with long claws at the stone floor, and the sweat that dripped from Maddox’s brow onto Fennrys’s muzzle as the Janus Guard fought to keep him leashed would, he thought, taste so much better if it was blood.
No. No no no . . . not my thoughts.
Maddox was his friend. The pack was there to help.
He was not a killer.
Yes you are.
And so much more than that.
In the back of his throat, Fennrys could suddenly taste . . . the sea? Salt spray, ocean tang. Cold and ice-fog sharp. Beneath him, he could feel waves rolling, as if he lay on the deck of a ship. He could hear the snapping of sails in the frigid north wind. He could taste it in his mouth, and deeper than that—in his heart.
Like a memory.
Or a premonition.
What in all the hells in all the worlds is happening to me? he wondered. And the answer came back to him: You’re becoming the monster you always knew you were.
Yes, he was. A monster. A beast. And now he was—could be—a faster, stronger, thousand-times-more-dangerous one. A brutal, four-legged weapon. Mindless bloodlust fogged his mind with gray and black and red. His flanks heaved, shoveling breath in and out of his lungs like a forge bellows, hot air surging through his quivering nostrils. He felt the human heart that was still beating in his chest—the one that Ammit the Soul Eater had, in her blindness, decided to let him keep—swell and transform, its shape, and its purpose, altered.
“Fennrys?”
That voice again. His heart lurched, twisted. Changed back . . . remembered its real purpose. Remembered the things it had been filled with before the trident had pierced it. Before the love that had filled it had flowed out onto the ground in a pool of his blood. Before the white feather had turned red.
He remembered.
And his body began shifting in the other direction.
Smells dulled, sights dimmed.
Hands. Not paws. Not claws . . .
His wolf’s eyes looked down and saw the flesh of his arms rippling beneath his fair human skin. His wolf’s voice cried out against it. So close. The chains of his frail, mortal, human shell were stretched to breaking. Waves of yearning slammed through his mind like the pounding of a riptide.
So close.
To what?
The sensations were slipping away. The prize, the goal . . .
What goal?
. . . it had been there. In his grasp. Within reach of his snapping teeth.
I don’t understand.
“Fenn.” That voice. “It’s me. It’s Mason.”
Wolf-song choked into an aching sob, deep in his throat. And Fennrys collapsed back into a golden-furred heap on the cold marble floor.
“I’m here . . .”
He wondered if he should be comforted by that. He was weak. Wounded.
Vulnerable.
“You’re going to be fine. You’ll be okay.”
Anything but, really . . .
And that, he realized, was his new reality. Because of her.
“Stop!” Mason shouted at Maddox as he hauled on a chain, struggling to keep a massive, golden-furred wolf under control. “Stop it! You’re hurting him!”
She squeezed past the milling dark shapes of the other lupines, ignoring the snapping jaws, and shouldered her way past Rafe. He reached out and grabbed her by the arm, yanking her back as the beast suddenly lunged for Mason, howling and snarling, teeth like long, white knives dripping saliva. There was a profound, savage hurt burning in the creature’s eyes. Pain and madness and a self-awareness that no animal should possess. Mason drew back in confusion. She turned to look up into the face of the ancient Egyptian werewolf god.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
“You are joking, right?” Rafe said in a voice tight with anger.
“No!”
Mason twisted out of his grip and looked back at the Fennrys Wolf where he hunched in the corner, muscles coiled and ready to spring if she came within reach again. She read in the beast’s eyes then that, given a chance, it would rip her throat out. Maddox tightened his grip on the chain, but his eyes were focused on her.
“Why is he like that?” Mason asked Rafe. “You’re not like that! They aren’t. . . .”
She gestured to the other wolves, who moved with almost one mind, constantly shifting and flanking the yellow
wolf, keeping it at bay and surrounded. The air around Fennrys rippled with enchantment and it was as if, for a moment, she was seeing double. The wolf and the man occupying the same space at the same time. Then there was another rippling and the wolf was alone again, howling and writhing.
“It’s different every time,” Rafe said quietly. “Although . . . it’s never quite like this.”
Mason knew that he was angry with her. She could hear it in his voice.
She didn’t care. She had forced Rafe to turn Fennrys into a creature like the rest of his pack. A werewolf. A monster. But alive. Strong. Strong enough to heal from the terrible, mortal wounds that Cal had inflicted with—of all things—a trident.
“Damn near unkillable” was how the ancient Egyptian god of the dead had once described his pack to Mason. And she had remembered those words when Fennrys had been damn near dead. She’d done what she’d done because Fenn had needed her to do it.
No.
That wasn’t what Fenn had needed, a voice in her head corrected her.
That was what you needed.
Mason flinched at the flat accusatory tone of her own conscience. But she couldn’t deny that what that voice in her head said was true. Fennrys? He’d been okay. She’d seen it in his eyes as he gazed up into her face. She’d seen there in that moment the peace that had been missing ever since she had first met him. The contentment. The willingness to let it all go and move on, finally. At last.
He’d looked at her with love and she . . . she hadn’t been able to do it.
She hadn’t been able to let him go.
His dying heart, his fading spirit, the strange, lovely smile that framed what would have been his last breath . . . those weren’t things she was prepared to live without.
Suddenly, there was another twisting of the air all around him and Fennrys was Fennrys again—human and furious and fighting mad—and then, just as suddenly, he was a wolf. His shape was morphing and fluid and he looked almost as though he was trapped at the heart of a thundercloud. The air in the room where it touched him roiled and twisted with dark energy.
“What’s happening?” Mason asked Rafe.
“He’s fighting it.”
“Can he do that?”
“I’ve never seen anyone who has.” The ancient god frowned deeply. “Not like this. I just made that boy the next nearest thing to a demigod and I don’t want to blow my own horn, but what I did—what you asked me to do—is serious magick. It’s not the kind of thing you sort of shrug off.”
Fennrys heaved his shoulders in what looked, indeed, like a furious shrug and the shadows on the wall behind him rippled out like smoke. The chain rattled and the muscles under Fenn’s T-shirt and jeans—which kept disappearing and reappearing, mirage-like—bunched and stretched taut.
“You know,” Rafe said. “Like that.”
“He’s not taking this lying down!” Maddox shouted as Fennrys lunged again, almost tearing the silver chain from the Janus Guard’s hands. “Can’t we hit him on the head or something?”
“With what?” Rafe snapped, shoving Mason back out of the way as Fennrys lunged for her. “Another werewolf? That’s the only thing that might hurt him, but I don’t think that’s gonna help.”
“Can’t you get in there and do something?” Mason asked frantically. “Aren’t you, like, the alpha of the pack or whatever?”
“Yeah—I tried that! All I did was make things worse. Look at him.” Rafe waved his hand at the great golden beast. “It doesn’t get any more alpha than that, and right now? I’m probably his second-least favorite person around.”
Mason glanced back at the werewolf god, wondering exactly what he’d meant by that. Second-least favorite? Fennrys shifted again and started yelling in his human voice—a litany of swear words that impressed even Toby, from the look on his face—and then, with another shift, the Wolf was back.
Somebody had to do something . . .
Mason shouldered past Rafe and knelt on the floor just past the reach of the chained wolf’s snapping jaws. “Fennrys?” she called softly.
The great, golden-furred wolf’s ears flicked toward her. His nose lifted in her direction, quivering, and he bared his teeth. The marble floor vibrated with the sound of his deep growl.
“Mason!” Rafe hissed. “Don’t be stupid. Please—”
“Just tell the pack to back off,” Mason said, keeping her voice low and even. “He can’t hurt me. You know that.”
Rafe shook his head. “I don’t know that at all.”
Truthfully, neither did she. But it was worth a shot. Fennrys was either going to tear himself apart, or tear somebody else apart if she didn’t help him. Mason closed her eyes and became very still for a moment. It was hard, now that she was back to being Mason. Hard to reach for the sword sheathed at her hip. But she did, and the blade slid loose from the sheath and morphed into a long, lethal spear. Somewhere, a raven shrieked. There was a cascade of shimmering light, and when Mason looked down, she saw that she was once again clothed in the shining armor of one of Odin’s shield maidens.
It’s not so very different from suiting up for a fencing competition, she told herself.
She could almost imagine that the silvery chain mail tunic was actually her lamé—the conductive overjacket—she wore in a bout, and the winged helm felt almost like the protective headgear she’d worn almost every day of her life for the past several years.
She heard Maddox draw a tense breath and tried to smile at him in a way that would make her Valkyrie manifestation less . . . scary. For everyone, herself included. Judging from the uniform facial expressions all around the room, she was utterly unsuccessful in the attempt.
Less “encouraging smile” and probably more “battle grimace,” she guessed.
At the sight of her in full Valkyrie raiment, the Wolf that had been Fennrys began snapping and snarling again, teeth bared, ears back. Mason huffed in frustration and clamped down as best as she could on her own feelings of rising, red rage. She leaned the Odin spear against a wall and reached up to lift the winged helmet off her head. Then she stripped off her armored gloves and, not knowing what else to do, held out her hand, knuckles forward, as if she was approaching a strange dog tied up outside a coffee shop.
Maddox managed to crack a half smile as Fennrys tilted his wolf’s head at her, and she felt a bit ridiculous. In the deep depths of his gaze, she could see that Fennrys did, too. Knowing him as well as she did, and seeing his all-too-human expression radiating from the eyes of an animal, was almost comical. It would have been—if she could get beyond the tragedy of the moment when she realized what she’d just done. Fenn whined at her and lifted one huge front paw in her direction.
Mason felt a shaky sob bubble up in her chest, and she sank to her knees and threw her arms around his neck, burying her face in the fur of his ruff. She felt Maddox loosen the chain around the wolf’s neck and she reached over to pull the thing off of him, tossing it to the floor and hugging Fennrys, trying to soothe the panting, terrified animal he’d suddenly become.
Behind her, she heard Rafe quietly tell his pack to back off.
She sensed Maddox standing and moving cautiously away from Fenn, and she stayed as still as she could, wrapped in her armor, Fennrys wrapped in her arms, and willed them all to leave the two of them alone. When finally she could sense that the curtained alcove was empty, she loosened her grip on the thick gold fur, and did her best to help the Fennrys Wolf come back home.
Back to himself . . . and back to her.
VII
When Mason Starling was a child, she’d died.
The experience had left her with a few . . . issues. Catastrophic claustrophobia, for one. Several years of therapy had done little before she’d packed it in and decided that she would cope in her own way, without hypnosis or drugs or those interminable couch sessions where one kindly old gent—very old school—had told Mason that, whenever she felt the walls closing in, all she had to do was shut her eyes and, in
her mind, go to her “Safe Harbor.” She’d thought, at the time, it was the most idiotic thing anyone had ever said to her.
My Safe Harbor . . .
She wondered if Fenn had a Safe Harbor—if such a thing was even remotely possible for someone like him—but she decided to try and find out. Of course, she didn’t have any pharmaceuticals or any idea how to hypnotize him, and she was pretty sure he wouldn’t go lie down on one of the Weather Room’s white leather couches.
But she had his medallion. She had magick.
Mason retrieved the spear and, now that she and Fenn were alone, willed it and herself back into “civvies.” She sheathed the spear-turned-sword and, reaching into the pocket of her jeans, pulled out Fennrys’s Janus medallion. She unraveled the braided leather cord and stretched it out as long as it would go, so that she could tie it around the thick yellow ruff of fur that circled Fennrys’s wolf neck. Then she shoved aside any trace of her roiling, raging, recently manifested Valkyrie in order to concentrate on what Fennrys had told her about the magick.
Make it happen in your mind.
Find your Safe Harbor, Fenn, she urged silently, pushing her will into the medallion. “Find it,” she whispered, even as she tried to find her own. Find your Safe Harbor . . .
The sudden lack of rain sounds was the first thing Mason noticed.
And the faint smell of dust.
Old wood . . . and metal . . . the distant sound of traffic and a feeling of space, even though she sensed she was indoors. She opened her eyes and felt everything just . . . fall away. Her mouth stretched wide in a smile of pure joy and she turned in a slow circle, the flirty skirt she wore whispering around her thighs as she moved and the heels of her shoes tapping lightly on the bare concrete floor. The dim, empty warehouse she stood in stretched off into shadowy corners, cobwebby and deserted, and Mason thought she had never seen a place so beautiful in her life.
Without hesitation, she walked over to the ancient-looking freight elevator in the corner of the derelict space and stepped inside. She pulled the door grating shut with a screech and flipped the lever on the antiquated brass operator panel. As the mechanism began to groan and the cab started to chug upward, Mason smiled and lifted a finger to the dust-covered glass plate on the wall that held the elevator’s mechanical certificate. She drew a heart in the gray dust. And her initials and Fenn’s inside the heart.
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