Descendant

Not since I upgraded.” He reached into another pocket of his jacket and withdrew what looked like some kind of souped-up remote control for a high-tech video gaming system, with two short, spiky metallic nodes on the front end of it. He pulled a trigger, and bright golden sparks arced between the nodes. Then he adjusted a control and pulled the trigger again, and sullen purple sparks arced. “I have you to thank for this, Heather. I just wanted to return the favor.” He glanced over and smiled his dazzling smile at her.

Heather felt herself grow almost dizzy in response.

He wasn’t handsome. He was beautiful.

“Take care of yourself,” he said. “For me.”

And then the doors of the train opened. They’d reached the station at Lexington and Fifty-Ninth Street, and before she could stop him—before she could even open her mouth to ask him the thousand questions that were tumbling through her brain—he stood and stepped off onto the platform, and the doors slid shut behind him.

As the train pulled away, Heather saw that on the back of the leather jacket he wore, there was a cracked and faded image of a bleeding heart, shot through with an arrow and sporting a pair of fluffy, white-feathered wings. She wasn’t sure whether it was meant to represent agony or ecstasy. Or maybe both.

She glanced back down at the little weapon in her hand and, after a moment, tucked it into the pocket of her jacket with a sigh.

As the train rumbled on, Heather recognized that she was probably in a state of shock. Inside, she was still numb with horror—with fear and exhaustion and hollowed out from the sudden loss of Cal—but somehow, with her hands shoved in her pockets, one curled around the compact crossbow stock, finger resting lightly on the trigger . . . the other wrapped around the little golden acorn, she felt stronger than she ever had before.

All her life, Heather had always been acutely aware that her family wasn’t one of the power-broker families in their circle. They were rich, certainly. But not influential. Her father had sat on the board at Gosforth, but he’d never had any real say in how the affairs of the academy were run. He’d just sort of been a yes-man to Calum Aristarchos’s mother (who’d hated Heather with an almost pathological fervor the entire time she and Cal had dated). So even when Heather had hit the top of the popularity charts at the academy, she’d always known it had been mostly due to Cal. And the fact that she’d been blessed with pretty phenomenal good looks. Looks that, if she was honest with herself, had never kept her from feeling massively insecure. Especially when she’d realized—a gut-deep feeling—that Cal was never going to be in love with her. It had made her feel weak. Exposed. Vulnerable.

But in that moment, sitting on an empty subway train winding its way through the middle of late-night Manhattan, she felt strong. And if Gunnar Starling, or Daria Aristarchos, or Toby, or even that psycho little rat bastard Rory came looking for her . . . well, let them come. She was going back to Gosforth, just like the fencing master had told her to. And if they came looking for her, they’d be the ones who’d wish they hadn’t.

VIII

“Don’t get me wrong,” Maddox was saying, as he grabbed a bit desperately for his seat belt and yanked it across his body. “It’s a nice car! I just thought you would have gone for something a little flashier, what with being a god an’ all. . . .”

“I try to fly under the radar and remain stylish all at the same time.” Rafe cranked the wheel of the vintage Jaguar, narrowly avoiding a police car that drifted across two lanes of Columbus Avenue traffic so it could slow to a stop curbside just above West Sixtieth Street. The tires screamed, and Rafe flung an obscene gesture out the window at the cops.

“And I’d rather not get arrested on the way to hell,” Fennrys muttered grimly, trying not to clutch too obviously at the door handle as the car’s momentum slung him from one side of the backseat to the other.

“Relax. There’s not a cop car in existence that could catch me, and those flatfoots didn’t even see us go past.” He grinned rakishly.

Fennrys stifled his impatience as best he could and followed Maddox’s lead, reaching for his own seatbelt. He needed Rafe. And he needed Madd, although he was reluctant to drag the other Janus Guard into a situation that had nothing to do with his gate-guarding duties. Not that it would have made much difference. Back in the Obelisk, once the tremors had stopped and power had flickered back on and everything had returned to normal— with the help of a free round of drinks on the house, courtesy of Rafe—Fennrys had reiterated his intention to find Mason. And Maddox had offered to ride shotgun on the venture and then preempted any objection Fenn might have made by saying that if Manhattan sank into the Atlantic as a result of whatever the hell was going on with Mason Starling, then guarding a gate in the middle of it became something of a moot point. So wherever Fennrys had in mind to go rescue his girl, Maddox was going to help him get there.

End of discussion.

Fennrys had wisely shut up, and just accepted the backup he knew he’d probably need anyway once they got to where they were going. Wherever that was. He hadn’t had a clue. For that, he’d needed Rafe.

“Relax,” the ancient god said, glancing over to look at his two passengers as he cornered so sharply the Jag was almost riding on two wheels. “You’re gonna need to be nice and loose once we get to the library.”

“The what?”

“New York Public Library. Main branch on Forty-Second Street.”

Fennrys huffed in frustration and ran a hand through his hair. “I thought you said you knew where we were going.”

“I do.”

“They why do you need a bunch of books?”

“I don’t.” Rafe leaned on the horn as they passed a city bus. “We don’t have a Bifrost anymore, so the direct approach is out of the question. The rift on North Brother Island is unstable on the other end—no telling where it’ll come out—so that’s not an option. We’re going to need to take the scenic route into Valhalla.”

“And how do we do that?”

“The borders between the Beyond Realms are blurring—have been for ages now—and in places they overlap. That’s how you were able to get out of Asgard in the first place. Through a back door from Helheim into Hades, and out across the River Lethe.”

Fennrys shuddered, remembering the dark woman who’d led him to the banks of that river. The river that had then stolen his memories—up until the moment when the ghost of a dead Janus Guard nicknamed, appropriately enough, “Ghost” had helped restore them. Painfully.

“Personally,” Rafe continued, “I’m not willing to risk catastrophic amnesia—and I sincerely doubt you want to go through that again. We need another way, another underworld. My underworld.”

“Which is?” Maddox asked.

“At the library,” Rafe grunted. When Fennrys and Maddox exchanged a confused glance, the ancient god sighed. “Oh, come on. You’re Janus Guards, aren’t you? And you’ve both been kicking around this town long enough to know that it’s nothing but layers built on top of other layers.”

Rafe’s black eyes glittered, reflecting back at Fennrys from the car’s rearview mirror. Okay, Fennrys thought. So they needed to go not just to the library but to . . . whatever was underneath it.

What’s the library built on top of?

He cast back through his memories, sifting through all the years he’d made an annual pilgrimage to the great gray mortal city at the behest of the Faerie King in order to guard a gate that opened once a year in fall.

“The reservoir,” he murmured.

Rafe just raised an eyebrow at him in the mirror as he turned left on West Fortieth Street.

“The old Croton Distributing Reservoir,” Fennrys said to Maddox, who was still frowning with some puzzlement. “It used to stand on the same ground as the library, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Maddox nodded. “Yeah . . . I remember now. Took up that whole block and most of the one that’s