Descendant

to meekly follow this stern, dark woman up a mountain without knowing what was waiting for her once they got to the top. Her mother’s cloak fell from her shoulders as she kept moving past Mason up the path.

“Tell me where we’re going,” Mason said.

Her mother turned and cast her an unblinking stare.

“Asgard,” Hel said finally, after a long pause. “To the great hall of Valhalla. There we will find the spear of Odin.”

“Why?”

“Because the Bifrost has been shattered, and you need a way to get home.”

“And . . . a spear can do that?”

“A magick spear, yes,” Hel answered drily in the face of Mason’s skepticism. “The Odin spear can do a lot of things. Traveling between the realms is one of them. Now. Do you want to go home?”

More than anything, Mason thought, and was almost shocked by how desperately she wanted to leave the dark woman at her side behind. What was wrong with her? She’d wanted all her life to meet her mother. So why did she react to her now as if she was a complete stranger—and a dangerous one at that?

You should be ashamed of yourself, she thought.

Her mother was dead. Because of her. Who knew what kinds of torments she’d endured in this place? Mason took a deep breath and tried to find a spark of compassion somewhere inside herself. After a long moment, she found it. But that was only because she’d thought fleetingly of her father. Suddenly, she could imagine what the look on Gunnar Starling’s face would be if she could somehow manage to find a way to bring his beloved Yelena back to him.

“Will . . . you be coming with me?” Mason asked haltingly, a pang of hopeful longing in her chest. But it was a faint hope—instantly quashed by her mother’s flat response. “I cannot,” she said. “I am Hel. My place is here.” “Right.” Mason turned away, brutally shoving aside thoughts of her father’s happiness. Her mother wasn’t her mother anymore. Her mother was Hel, and a goddess. That was what Loki had said, too. But Mason still didn’t understand it. “And that happened . . . how exactly?”

Hel sighed. “My daughter is full of questions, I see. I was not always as I am now. Not even here. There was a time when I was nothing but a shade in this place. Like all the rest. But I grew stronger.” She turned and placed one cool, long-fingered hand on Mason’s cheek. “Oh, Mason. How can I make you understand this? Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for the best. I only wanted to find a way, somehow, to make you safe in the world.”

“You sound as if you made a choice to leave me there.”

“A choice. A sacrifice . . .” Hel seemed disinclined to elaborate and turned back to the path. She increased her pace up the winding way that led to the steep side of the craggy rock face in front of them. “When Loki offered power, I took it—took up the mantle of the goddess Hel—for you.”

“And why, then, are you in such a rush to get me out of here again?”

“Because you shouldn’t be here. You are a disruption. An imbalance. Anything that introduces an element of chaos into the delicate matrix of the realms of the gods is the province of those like Loki.” She frowned, as if disturbed by the very thought. “You could become an unwitting tool that he could use to bring about a terrible fate. It’s not that I don’t want you here, Mason. It’s that I can’t allow you to stay. Do you understand?”

She did. And she was trying desperately not to take it personally. “Okay . . .” She shrugged. “So we get to Valhalla and find this spear. And then you can get rid of me and carry on being a goddess. That’s great.”

“It’s not like—”

“Whatever.” Mason ignored her mother’s protest. “Look. I’m not stupid, and I’ve read enough to know that it’s never that easy. You don’t just walk into a magickal land and fetch a mystical object and walk back out again unchallenged. There’s always something standing by that wants to eat your face or rip your arms off or turn you into a newt.” Mason’s hand dropped to rest on the hilt of her sword. “So what’s it going to be? Because I’m not going anywhere until I know what’s waiting there to greet me with a big ugly hug.”

Hel’s spine was stiff with disapproval. It was abundantly clear that she wasn’t used to being challenged. Her deep sapphire eyes flashed dangerously for an instant. But then she seemed to pause, to take a breath—although Mason hadn’t been able to discern whether her mother actually did that—and her mouth bent into a soft, gentle smile. The expression changed her, and Mason felt suddenly as if the sun had broken through the bleak, ashen clouds overhead and poured its warmth down upon her. For a moment, she wavered and almost gave in to the desire to follow her mother anywhere. But she wrapped her hand tightly around the hilt of her rapier—so tightly that the coiled silver wire bit into her palm, and the pain brought a fresh welling of tears to her eyes and kept her focused. She saw her mother’s glance flick down to the sword. She stared at the elegant, silvery weapon for a long moment, and then her eyes shifted back up to Mason’s face.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice was actually soothing for the first time. “My dear girl. I know this isn’t easy for you. The truth of the matter is this: You are right. It never is easy. And there was a time when you would have had to fight your way through hordes of draugr just to even set foot on the path that leads to Asgard.”

The word “draugr” sent a cold wave of fear washing over Mason. Those were the gray-skinned monstrosities that had attacked her and Fennrys twice in New York City. And she could wave her bravado flag all she wanted, but if it came to facing down those things again, Mason knew she couldn’t do it.

Her mother must have seen the fear in her eyes. She put a hand on Mason’s shoulder. “That isn’t going to happen. Valhalla is . . . not the same as it once was. The great sadness of it is that it’s just not a place worth fighting to get to anymore. You’ll see what I mean.”

“Oh .”

“I’m sorry to disappoint.”

“That’s okay.” Mason looked down at her tattered fencing whites and then back up at her mother, trying her hardest to muster a smile. “I’m not really dressed for a great hall, anyway. . . .”

Hel reached out with her other hand so that she held Mason by both shoulders. Her grip was firm, but surprisingly gentle, and Mason felt an electric tingling running all over her body. Dark, sparkling energy engulfed her in a wave. After a moment, the sensation faded and her mother lifted away her hands, her fingers combing through Mason’s suddenly shining, tangle-free hair as she did. It fell in a silken curtain that Mason could see in her peripheral vision on either side of her face. In the weird, stormy light, it looked almost as if the dark fall of strands was shot through with indigo highlights. When Mason looked down, she saw that her destroyed fencing whites were gone. Instead, she found herself wearing her favorite pair of dark jeans and boots and the sleek, shimmery top that she’d been wearing the last time she’d gone over to Fennrys’s for an evening of surreptitious swordplay and moonlit strolling through the after-hours High Line park in Manhattan.

Thinking about that moment now, Mason understood why her mother had chosen those clothes. Because what she’d been wearing when Fennrys had looked at her the way he had that night really had made her feel like a princess. “Dressed for a great hall,” like she’d said . . . Her black tooled-leather baldric—the gift Fenn had given her to go with the silver, swept-hilt rapier—still hung across her body, the blue jewel in the silver buckle winking at her. She lifted a hand to the buckle and saw that her hands, torn and bloodied from escaping Rory’s car, were whole again; her long, pale fingers clean and unmarked, her nails unbroken.

Mason felt the tightness in her chest loosen a little.

“Now,” Hel said quietly. “Will you come with me?” She gestured back toward the path.

Mason nodded, and they began to climb once more, up toward Valhalla, the home of her ancestors’ gods.

They reached another bend in the path, and the ground beneath Mason’s feet shuddered—the movement coinciding with another now-familiar distant wail of pain. Loki. Mason remembered reading in her myth classes that the ancient Norse had used the bound god’s convulsions deep below the earth as an explanation for the cause of earthquakes. It didn’t seem like such a far-fetched theory to her anymore.

“Just how often does he get subjected to the snake spit?” she asked her mother as they stepped out of the mouth of the cavern they’d been traveling up through.

The ghost of a frown swept over Hel’s face. Shadows stirred in her deep blue gaze, and Mason tried to read what she was thinking. It was impossible. “I know it’s hard for you to understand what goes on here, Mason. It was hard, at first, for me too. But there is a very good reason that monster is kept in the state he’s in.”