Transcendent

by Lesley Livingston

  Mason unfolded the pages and immediately recognized the handwriting as her father’s. In the middle of the top page was what looked like a bit of poetry:

  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.

  She frowned at the odd stanza and, folding the papers back up, shoved them into her pocket. Then she plucked the runegold acorn out of its hiding place and snapped the cover shut. She went to replace it on the shelf, but something at the back, something reflective hidden behind the row of books, caught her eye. She pulled the rest of the books off the shelf. It was—surprisingly—a framed picture of the whole Starling clan. Mason and her father, and her two brothers mugging for the camera. Mason couldn’t remember who’d snapped the picture, but she knew it had been at one of the parties her father had thrown for his insanely rich friends, taken on the waterside dock at the Starling family estate, the summer before, on the shores of Lake Kensico, with the water glinting like diamonds spilled on blue velvet behind them.

  Mason’s grinning face sported a smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks, Gunnar’s mane of silver hair was blown back in the breeze off the water, and Roth was actually smiling at the camera, although the dark sunglasses he wore hid his piercing gaze from the camera. Even Rory, tanned and handsome, had actually looked happy. As happy as he ever looked, at least.

  And it was all a lie.

  How could she have gone through life so blind?

  There wouldn’t be any more summer parties, she thought. And all of her dad’s wealthy pals, if Gunnar had his way, would be dust and bone lying scattered in the long grass gone to seed when nature reclaimed the Earth from man. She thought of all the bodies—living still, and dead—that littered Manhattan’s streets outside the confines of Gosforth. Spilled blood. A fine red mist lowered in front of her eyes and she spun and hurled the framed photo across the room. It shattered on the wall beside the open window, the sound of breaking glass louder even than the machine-gun rattle of ice pellets lashing the slate roof of the dorm.

  It must have been good weather when Rory had last left his room, otherwise he would have shut the window. Not Mason. When she was little, after the hide-and-seek incident, Mason had demanded that her bedroom window always be left open. It was the first manifestation of her devastating claustrophobia, but Gunnar had accommodated her wishes. He’d never complained about rain-soaked curtains or warped wooden sills, nor had he ever chastised her for being foolish or frightened. And on nights at the estate up in Westchester, he would come and sit with her during thunderstorms and read her stories of gods and heroes. The stories had never mattered to Mason—and she’d certainly never suspected that she’d one day become a part of them—but having her father there to take care of her had.

  She realized then that she still loved him.

  But she would destroy him, if she had to.

  With that thought, the red rage suddenly ebbed, washed away by a feeling of clarity that Mason had been lacking ever since she’d first drawn the Odin spear. Her hand dropped to the hilt of the sword at her side and she made sure it was pushed firmly down into its scabbard. She walked over to the window and picked up the shattered picture frame, shaking the shards of glass into a wastebasket. The picture inside was creased, and the glass had sliced through the paper, severing off the upper left corner with surgical precision. The empty space in the photograph where, if she’d still been alive, Mason could picture her mother’s face. One big, happy family.

  If only . . .

  She laid the picture down on the windowsill, careful to avoid a puddle of rainwater that had pooled there, and then she reached up . . . and slammed the window closed. For a long moment she stood there, feeling the closeness of the room without the ever-present breath of wind that she was used to. She stared out into the darkness of the storm and thought about the missing element in the picture.

  Mom . . .

  Suddenly, a massive spear of lightning stabbed down from the sky and Mason closed her eyes against the blinding brightness.

  With her eyes closed, she felt a hand on her cheek.

  She’d felt that touch before—firm and graceful—but that had been an imposter. And when Heimdall had worn Yelena Starling’s shape, her hands had been ice-cold. The hand Mason felt now was warm. Soft. Strong . . .

  “Mom?” she whispered.

  “Mason . . .”

  She honestly wasn’t sure if the voice was just in her head. Then she opened her eyes . . . and she still wasn’t sure. Because her mother—her real mother—was standing there, right in front of her. But the Gosforth dorm room was gone. Instead, it seemed almost as if Mason had fallen into the photograph. She found herself standing on the wide expanse of a sun-bleached deck, perched on the shore of Lake Kensico, with the lake and trees and the Starling manor house in the far distance.

  And her mother, wrapped in cool shadows, standing right beside her.

  Mason blinked and looked around. Everything had a kind of oversaturated quality to it. A patina of memory, laid like a filter over the scene, sparkling and gauzy and just a touch surreal. Only, this was no memory that Mason had ever had.

  If only, she thought again, turning back to the woman beside her.

  As their eyes met—sapphire and sapphire, identical—Mason recognized her mother as truly that. And she could barely believe that she’d been so thoroughly duped by Heimdall’s impersonation of her. The features were identical, certainly, but this Yelena Starling looked out of those same deep blue eyes with a fierce, shining love and wit and wisdom. And an obvious sense of humor that had been completely lacking in her doppelgänger. This Yelena’s mouth seemed as if it quivered perpetually on the edge of a big, broad grin or unbridled laughter.

  In that moment though, she just smiled gently and said, “Hi, honey.”

  Mason fell into her arms.

  “Mom!” she exclaimed, and knew that this time, she really was.

  Father . . .

  The word was strange and alien in his wolf mind.

  But there was also a rightness to the sound as the man the Fennrys Wolf had heard Mason call Loki placed his hands—wide, strong, long-fingered, and warm—on either side of the wolf’s head and began to speak in a low tone. Ancient words that Fennrys could feel wrapping around the human mind buried in his beastly form. When the transformation had first taken him, Fenn had been almost dead. Lying in a pool of blood, wondering what it would be like for him once he’d finally, for the last time, crossed over the threshold into death. There was no fear, no pain, and only one regret. That he would be leaving Mason Starling behind.

  Mason, of course, had had other ideas.

  And when Fennrys had regained consciousness, it had been as if waking inside a nightmare. For the first few minutes, he’d tried to convince himself that that was what was happening. That he was still asleep. Dreaming. Or delusional. Or already dead and gone and experiencing the afterlife in a markedly unexpected way. But then the scents and sensations had flooded him, and suddenly every nerve ending in his body—his four-legged, fur-covered body—had screamed at him to get up. Get away. And claw or chew through anything that stood in his way. He had felt the wolfen instincts redrawing pathways in his brain in ways that had made his wolf body feel more his own.

  But now, with Loki’s help, he could feel his buried humanity begin to resurface.

  He could feel his way back out through the transformative enchantment that Anubis’s wolf bite had bestowed on him as he lay dying. He watched, through his wolf’s eyes, as his black-clawed front feet stretched out, the shape of them blurring, twisting, reforming as hands, fingers splayed wide on the cold stone floor.

  In the blink of those eyes, he was human again. On his hands and knees, dressed in the same jeans
and T-shirt and boots as before. The weight of his iron medallion hanging from his neck.

  “Hello, pup.”

  Loki’s voice, Fennrys realized, was the whispered one he’d heard when he’d been imprisoned in the dungeons of Hel. The one that had sounded like lies. Or maybe it had been more like promises. Strange, subtle ones.

  Fenn regarded the god warily, and with a mess of tangled emotions. It was disconcerting to see so much of himself reflected in the face of the other man. Loki’s mouth was thinner, more apt to twist into a sardonic grin, and the planes of his face were sharper, more angular, but they had the same cheekbones and the same nose. The eyes, though, was where the similarities ended. Fennrys knew that his own were the shade of the glacial north; his gaze guarded, remote. Loki’s were like cauldrons into which the fates had poured the gleam of the Northern Lights and the mysteries of the twilight skies above the ice sheets and mountains and hidden secret valley fjords of his mythical home.

  Suddenly, for perhaps the first time in his life, Fennrys wondered what his mother had looked like. He’d always assumed that he’d probably somewhat resembled his father. He’d just never expected his father to be a god. Certainly not that god. He wondered what his father saw in him in that moment. He’d been silent for long enough now that Fennrys was starting to think he must surely be some kind of disappointment. And then, in the next breath, he wondered if that wouldn’t be the best possible thing for everyone. In the breath right after that, he wondered why it was upsetting to him.

  And then his father smiled and shook his head.

  “Mason told me when I first met you that you were perfect,” Loki said, an amused grin curling the corner of his mouth beneath the thatch of his dark gold beard. “I think she might have been right.”

  “I . . . uh. Sorry?” Fennrys stammered, startled.

  Loki laughed. “You’re exactly what this conflict needs, pup.”

  “Ah,” Fennrys said. Well, that made sense, he supposed. He was, after all, skilled in the arts of destruction and death. A perfect harbinger for the end of the world. “I guess you probably would think that.”

  “You misunderstand me.” Loki shook his head, hearing Fenn’s thoughts in the tone of his voice. Those extraordinary eyes of his glittered with fierce intelligence and something that looked a lot like . . . fun. Or, at the very least, mischief. He leaned forward, every line of his body quivering with vital, barely contained energy. “I don’t mean that you’re the great doom everyone seems to think you are. Although, of course, there’s every possibility that you are. What I mean is, you are a wild card. Like Mason herself. Did you know that she is the reason I’m now free?”

  “No. I didn’t know that.”

  He chuckled. “She did some fine damage to the serpent that has tormented me through the ages—she’s very good with a sword, by the way, did you know?—and the bloody thing slithered off and finally left me alone long enough for me to be able to turn my mind and talents to the task of freeing myself. I really have to thank her for that.”

  “And now?” Fennrys asked, intrigued in spite of himself, and the fact that he knew he should probably be terrified down to the soles of his boots at the moment. “Now that you’re free? What will you do?”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “Don’t you have an apocalypse to stir up?”

  Loki shrugged. “Seems to be moving along quite nicely without my help. Listen carefully, pup. I told Mason this and I’m going to tell you. The thing is . . . I don’t know how it ends, Fennrys!” He grinned delightedly. “I honestly don’t. I’ve never read the things they’ve written about me, although I can guess at many of them, I don’t doubt. But I’m not the only shape changer in Valhalla and I’m not the only subtle mind. And when I hate? I do it honestly. There are others who, it saddens me to say, cannot claim the same.”

  “Heimdall,” Fennrys said.

  “Ah . . . have you met the great blowhard then?”

  “He impersonated Mason’s mother.”

  “I know. Hel is dear to me.” Loki’s voice took on a dangerous edge. “He will pay for that.”

  Fennrys shrugged. “Yeah, well, Mason might get to him first. She was pretty pissed when she found out he’d taken her for a ride.”

  “Good girl! So she discovered the falsehood then?”

  Fennrys shook his head. “Not until we told her about it. And it didn’t even matter in the end. Son of a bitch still managed to trick her into taking up the Odin spear.”

  Loki’s eyes glittered. “But she has yet to choose, am I right?” he asked sharply. “There is no third Odin son yet.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good. Then there’s still time!” He bounded to his feet and headed for the cavern mouth.

  “Time for what?”

  “To find out what I’ve been missing!” He waved a hand in the direction of the tunnel Fennrys had come through to get to that chamber. “Have you seen what’s up there? That city? It’s fantastic! Wine and women and song . . . well, I’m sure it’s a little more lively when it’s not reeling under a blood curse but, Thor’s beard! It’s an endless feast for the senses. I’d like to sample some of it before it all comes crashing to an end.”

  “Wait. What? It’s Ragnarok and you’re going to play tourist in the Big Apple? I wouldn’t have expected that from you.” From Rafe, maybe, Fennrys thought. But then he realized with a start that Loki reminded him an awful lot of the Egyptian god of the dead.

  Loki laughed at Fennrys’s confusion. “That’s because I’m unexpected!” he said with delight. “Unpredictable. Unstable. Chaotic. Random. Poised on the knife blade’s edge . . . And so are you.”

  “I am not.”

  “Ha!” Loki slapped his palms together. “Look at your track record so far. You, my very dear boy, are choice. And she—that mad, lovely girl you love madly—is the chooser. It’s poetic, really. Go forth. Make beautiful music together. Burn bright. Be brilliant. Defy!”

  “How do I do that?”

  “You know the stories—you’ve read them—so all you have to do now is figure out how to change the plot.” The trickster god laughed. “Tales are told by the victors. Be victorious. Be happy! Write your own ending. Make it a beginning if you want.”

  A beginning, Fennrys thought. Wait . . . there’s something to that. How in the hell did this really all begin in the first place?

  “That’s it . . . you’ll see . . . The clues are all there.” Loki’s voice grew strange and echoey. “They always are. That’s something your mother knew.”

  “My mother?” Fennrys drew back sharply, as if those two words had been a slap that had awakened him from a deep sleep. Or sent him tumbling into a dream . . .

  My mother. If only . . .

  XVI

  The torch on the opposite wall suddenly flared, blindingly bright, and Fennrys put up a hand to shield his eyes. When he lowered it again, a figure stood before him, silhouetted in the glare of the sun’s light. Startled, Fennrys turned to Loki, but the so-called trickster god of the Norse was gone.

  So, for that matter, was the catacomb Fennrys had shared with him only a moment before. In its place, he found himself outside beneath a brilliant blue sky dotted with puffball white clouds. The air shimmered with a kind of dreamy haze and Fennrys wondered for a moment if that was what it was—a dream. But he’d never had a dream so vivid. He could smell the pine sap from the nearby trees and feel the feathery brush of long grasses waving around his knees. He stood near the edge of a precipice that dropped away, falling in a gentle slope toward a vale, cut through by a sparkling river that twisted like a giant blue snake below. Through the trees, Fennrys thought he could see some kind of boat bobbing on the surface of the water, but he wasn’t really concerned with that at the moment.

  What concerned him more was the tall, striking woman who stood before him, smiling. As his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he saw that she wore a long belted tunic woven of green wool and her arms and feet were ba
re. Her hair was long and plaited loosely down her back. And “tall” might have been an understatement. She was well over six feet. But she was slender and her face was pretty, if slightly weathered. There were fine webs of lines at the corners of her eyes and she had a deep tan. Even with that, the skin on the bridge of her nose was peeling and just a little pink. It looked as if she had spent the last year outside without any shelter from the elements. It didn’t look, though, as if such circumstances would be any particular hardship to this woman.

  She looked at him and smiled.

  “You grew up strong,” she murmured in a gentle voice.

  While she spoke in a language Fennrys didn’t know, somehow he understood what she was saying, and he had an immediate sense of déjà vu. He felt as though he might have once heard that same voice singing lullabies in the darkness in that same language. The woman cocked her head and a gleam of wry humor sparkled in her blue eyes.

  “And handsome,” she said. “Like your father.”

  “I’ll tell him you said so,” Fenn said, swallowing the knot that had tied itself in his throat.

  “I used to do that.” She chuckled. “Even though he already knew it. He’s a touch vain, you know.”

  “And completely mad.”

  “Do you think so?” She cocked her head, seriously contemplating that. “I always thought he was the only one of them who wasn’t.”

  “The only one of who?”

  “The Aesir.”

  Fennrys shook his head, wearied by the further confirmation—assuming he wasn’t actually dreaming or delusional in that moment—of his origins, and his impending disastrous destiny. “My father really is a god, then. Really.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “And so I really am the Fenris Wolf.”

  She nodded. “Really. It’s why I sent you away. To live with the Faerie.”