Descendant

worse.

“What happened?” he asked Rafe.

Rafe lifted a shoulder, not taking his eyes off Scylla as she circled around to block their path. “I don’t know. He lost control. Not sure why. Bike pitched him into one of the girders like he’d been shot from a catapult, and he dropped like a stone into the river. Then the bridge blew all to hell.”

Scylla tsk-tsked and shook a taloned finger at them.

“Naughty,” she said again, and licked her lips. “I’ve been sent to make you pay. Blood for blood.”

“I said back off, Scylla,” Rafe snarled. “Or this won’t end well.”

Scylla hissed. “You may be a god, Dead Dog, but this one is merely mortal. I see how he bleeds. I can smell it. And I will taste his flesh.”

“Only when I punch you in the mouth,” Fennrys said.

Scylla’s hideous grin stretched wide in anticipation.

The dog-sharks snapped viciously and strained at their spiked collars, teeth gnashing. Through a haze of pain and anger, Fennrys decided enough was enough. He stepped forward and bashed one of the slavering things over the head with Cal’s helmet. He seized another by the throat and, wrapping his good arm around its head, snapped its thick, ugly neck. Scylla howled in fury as the second dog-shark dropped to the ground.

“Really not one for diplomacy, are you?” Rafe muttered. “You’re gonna have to fight a sea monster now. You know that, right?”

“I was counting on it.”

Enraged, Scylla dug her taloned fingers into the rock-strewn ground and dragged herself farther up the shore. She was gnashing her teeth now so violently that she drew blood from her own lips, and foaming crimson spit flew in a circle as she furiously shook her head.

Fennrys felt a familiar, savage joy welling up inside of him.

This is what I was born for.

The fight, the kill . . . this was his destiny. He realized that now, beyond the shadows of unknowing that had clouded his mind for weeks. Ever since he’d returned to the mortal realm without his memories. But now that he had those back, and understood where—and from what—he had come, he felt no hesitation giving in to the red, ravaging surge of terrible, storm-bright battle madness that boiled deep within him. As he faced the monster, Fennrys’s rage rose to sweep every other sensation aside except the driving need to kill.

The pain of his wounds, the pain of losing Mason Starling—the girl who had become so very precious to him in such a short time—only served to feed his fury.

“The only thing that’s going to make this day any better is ridding the world of something as ugly as you,” he snarled at Scylla, and lunged for the last of her hideous pets.

He seized the thing’s jaws, top and bottom, and wrenched them apart with a sickening, tearing sound. But Fennrys wasn’t quite so lucky this time. The venomous spines of the thing’s dorsal fins whipped around as it writhed in its death throes and slashed him across the rib cage, tearing his shirt into bloody strips. He barely felt the toxin’s searing kiss. The acid-sweet seduction of his Viking rage lowered like a thick, crimson fog and he reached around to the small of his back, to where he kept a large, keenly honed dagger concealed in a sheath beneath his shirt.

He darted and feinted, but with the bullet lodged in his left shoulder, Fenn had only one fully functioning arm. His thrusts were slow and off target. Scylla’s long, ropy limbs scythed through the air, and her serpent’s tails carried her with ungainly swiftness. One misstep and Scylla could wrap him in her coils and pull him in tight.

Well, Fennrys thought, why not?

He ducked in low, darting past her grasping, claw-tipped hands . . . and stopped. Instantly, the monstrous tails whipped up and wrapped around him, drawing him close in a deadly embrace. The vise of her serpentine limbs constricted and she smiled her ghastly smile, jaws opened wide. As she did, Fennrys lunged, and—as he’d promised—punched Scylla right in the mouth, with the fist that held his dagger.

Fennrys drove the knife blade straight past her teeth, smashed through the roof of her mouth, and buried it to the hilt in the creature’s vile brain. In her final convulsions, Scylla’s teeth clamped down on Fenn’s arm. The monster went stiff and toppled over backward, taking Fennrys with her, and the two combatants collapsed on the ground in a tangle of blood and body parts. Fennrys lay there gasping, his fist still firmly wedged inside the sea monster’s mouth. After Scylla finally stopped twitching, Rafe walked over to stand by Fennrys’s head, looking down.

“You killed a sea monster,” Rafe said. “Now that . . . is fairly damn impressive.”

Fennrys turned his head so he could look up at the ancient Egyptian werewolf death god. “Something good had to come out of this night,” he said in a voice scraped thin by exhaustion.

“It was also disgusting,” Rafe continued. “And brave . . . and kinda stupid.”

“Uh-huh,” Fenn grunted, his chest heaving.

“And you’re stuck.” Rafe gestured at where Fenn’s limb was trapped. Scylla’s teeth were angled backward like barbs. If Fennrys tried to pull his arm free, he would shred every inch of flesh from his bones. “What, exactly, are you gonna do now?”

“Dunno. Little help, maybe?”

Fenn’s vision was beginning to tunnel. He hadn’t, he supposed, really thought this one through completely. Rafe smiled grimly and flicked his wrist, conjuring a long, coppery-colored blade out of thin air, and raised it over Fennrys’s arm.

“Right,” he said, a gleam in his eye. “I guess that’s gotta come off.”

The blade slashed down and Fennrys shouted a ragged protest, bracing himself for the searing explosion of pain that would come as Rafe hacked through his arm. But the blade hit its mark less than a quarter of an inch below Fenn’s trapped limb, slicing neatly through the dead Scylla’s neck. Her spinal column severed, Rafe reached around behind her head and jammed his fingers into a divot beneath the skull. The creature’s jaws popped open like the trunk of a car and Fennrys pulled his arm free, leaving his blade buried deep in Scylla’s brain.

He staggered to his feet, right arm stinging, left arm utterly useless from the bullet wound. Funny. He’d been so busy fighting an immortal sea monster of ancient legend, he’d almost forgotten about the mere mortal who’d tried to kill him earlier that evening. He glared at the horrifying creature who now lay dead at his feet, knowing that Rory Starling was still alive.

“Immortality isn’t what it used to be,” Fenn muttered as his legs threatened to give out.

“It really isn’t,” Rafe agreed, propping Fennrys up.

In the distance, Fennrys heard the quiet coughing of a small outboard motor. He looked up to see an old, aluminum-sided fishing boat gliding out of the darkness, piloted by a spare, hunched man with coffee-brown skin and a long silver goatee, dressed in a tattered gray rain slicker. The ember on his cigarette glowed like a tiny red beacon in the gloom. The boat bumped and grated to a halt on the rocky shingle of the beach, and with Rafe’s help, Fennrys dragged himself out knee-deep into the cold, oily water.

“He’s not quite dead yet,” said the sailor as Fenn half fell into the boat.

“No, he’s not dead—at least not this time—and he’s not going to die, either,” Rafe said irritably. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“Goin’ soft, boss?” the man asked, taking a drag on his smoke.

“Shut up, Aken.” Rafe grabbed onto the prow of the little craft and heaved it back toward deeper water before throwing a leg over the side and climbing in. “This is just a cab ride tonight. Not a final journey.”

“Highly irregular.” The boatman shook his head, regarding Fennrys skeptically. “Can he pay?”

“This one’s on me.” Rafe grinned coldly. “Get us to where we’re going before he dies and I’ll knock a week’s worth off your bar tab.”

Aken brightened considerably at the offer and revved the little engine.

His bar tab, Fenn thought distantly, must have been significant.

Wonder what I’ll wind up owing when all this is over. . . .

“Where to, boss?” Aken asked.

And then a dense, shimmering fog descended, and Fennrys’s last coherent thought was a memory—the