Descendant

“You can’t be dead,” she whispered, her voice gone parched and dust dry. “I’m going home. I’m going home to be with you again. . . .”

The touch of the spear would send her home.

She would leave this place . . . and never see the Fennrys Wolf again.

Behind her, the raven on the throne cried out in a harsh, urgent voice. Mason turned and saw that the spear was glowing so brightly it looked as if it would burst into flame. The image of it began to waver, like a mirage before her eyes, and Mason sensed that she was facing a “now or never” scenario.

“Mase!” Fennrys called out, his voice shredded.

No. She couldn’t bear to turn and seen him mangled by whatever death stroke had sent him there and so, instead, she turned away and reached for the spear in front of her. The music of it screamed at her. Still, she hesitated.

You could stay, whispered a voice in her head.

Stay there, in Valhalla, and be with him . . .

Watch Fennrys engage, day after day, in endless, mindless battle. See him turn into one of the Einherjar . . . A thing of senseless brutality, hacked to pieces again and again and put back together time after time but each time losing a little more of his humanity . . . Fennrys had told her that, growing up in the Otherworld, this was what he’d wanted all his life. This hall, this place. An honorable fate, a destiny. A glorious death that would guarantee him a place in Odin’s Hall in Asgard, where he would battle and feast and it would go on and on until the End of Days. This was a Viking prince’s reward for a life of violence lived. It was horrible.

It was Fennrys’s.

“Mason!” he cried out again, closer now. “Stop!”

As she stood there, torn, a horrible image flashed through her mind—Fenn reaching her, taking her in his arms, winding her in a blood-soaked embrace as he clutched her to his ruined chest. . . .

She could almost feel the sticky-wet press of his wounds against her skin. . . .

“Mason!” He was running now, she could hear. Running toward her.

Mason didn’t know what else to do. The pace of Fennrys’s heavy, weary footsteps increased behind her, and a surge of panic crawled up her throat. She wasn’t brave enough. She couldn’t see him like that. It would kill her. . . .

Take the spear!

I can’t . . .

“Mason! Don’t touch the spear!”

I can’t see him like that. . . .

Take the spear!

Mason squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. She thrust her hand once more toward the spear, fingers hooked like the talons of the raven above her, reaching to grip it. She heard the raven’s triumphant hiss—

A last ragged cry of “Mase!”

—and her fist slammed closed.

On warm, solid flesh.

Mason felt long, strong fingers closing around her own, and then she found herself pulled sharply back, away from the throne and the spear and the screeching black bird . . . and into Fenn’s arms. He wrapped her in a fierce embrace and whispered her name over and over into her hair, and she clung to him.

She was sobbing into the torn material of his T-shirt. “Why are you here?” she cried. “Why are you dead? Oh god . . .” She could barely make out the sense of her own words through the thickness of the grief that clogged her throat. “I’m sorry, Fenn . . . I’m so sorry. . . .”

But he was shushing her. Rocking her back and forth, held tightly against the warmth of his chest. He was real and solid and there. And she felt no blood on his shirt, nothing sticky and congealing that bound them together.

“Mason,” Fenn said, “I’m not dead. Not again. I promise.”

A roaring silence filled her ears with those words.

Slowly, barely daring to hope, she opened her eyes and tilted her face up so that she could look into his eyes. They were red-rimmed with grief, or maybe it was fatigue, but they were Fenn’s eyes, full of life. And—in that very moment—full of something that might just have been love.

“I’m not dead,” he said again.

He dipped his head, and as if to prove to her just how very much alive he was, he kissed her. Mason’s whole body melted, and she felt as though she might collapse, but he held her upright. Her lips opened beneath his, and she inhaled the breath from Fennrys’s lungs, deep into her own. The warmth of his kiss felt like it was jump-starting her own heart back to life, and without even thinking, she reached up to wrap her arms tightly around his neck as he crushed her gently to him once again in a warm, real, living embrace. Mason could feel a flood of wetness on her cheeks, but she couldn’t tell whose tears they were. She suspected that they were hers.

Fenn confirmed as much when he loosened his grip on her and reached up to brush them gently from under her eyes with his thumbs. He was smiling—that strange, rare, beautiful smile—and his frost-blue eyes gleamed brightly down at her.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he whispered. “I missed you.”

“How . . . ?”

He silenced her question with a kiss. And then another. Then, reluctantly, he pulled away from her and took her face in his hands.

“We can talk later, okay?” he said. “Now? We need to go.”

She put a hand over his beating heart—just to make sure—and nodded. He was alive all right. Even though the T-shirt he wore was so torn up it looked as though he’d just walked through a giant bread slicer. Aside from the shirt’s decimation, though, Fennrys himself appeared to be unharmed. Breathing hard and disheveled, but unharmed.

“Yeah . . .” He covered her hand with his and pressed it to his chest. “There were a couple of draugr on the way in. And you know what a pain in the ass those guys are. But I had a little help. It’s weird, but there’s this guy out there in a letterman jacket—”

“You saw Tag?” Mason blinked up at him in surprise.

“Yeah. Friend of yours, right?”

“Friend of Rory’s,” Mason said, and watched as Fennrys’s expression darkened. “Fenn . . . what the hell happened? And how did I wind up here?”

He hesitated for a moment. “I know some of it. But here—especially here—isn’t the place to talk about it, Mase. Trust me. First we need to get somewhere safe.”

She nodded, and exhausted and elated both, she let Fennrys wrap an arm around her shoulders and lead her down the dais steps. Questions could wait. As they walked down the long hall, a shadow swept over them. Mason flinched, ducking as the raven flew past, out the open archway, where it disappeared in the light streaming over the threshold of Odin’s Valhalla.

As they approached the door themselves, Mason plucked at the material of Fennrys’s shirt. It was hanging off the collar band in shredded pieces that flapped when he walked, and she noticed that it sported the remains of a Blue Moon beer logo on it. For some reason, she found that faintly hilarious.

“This is a truly unfortunate fashion statement, y’know,” she said, grinning.

“My lifestyle is hell on a wardrobe.”

“I think you should go Abercrombie. The boys in those ads never have to worry about ruining shirts,” Mason said, not actually expecting that without missing a beat, Fennrys would reach up to the collar of what was left of his shirt and tear the thing effortlessly from around his neck.

He dropped the wrecked rag at the threshold of the hall and said, “Better?”

Mason felt herself smiling broadly for the first time in what seemed like forever. She stopped him before he could leave Odin’s mighty feast hall and slowly ran her hands up his bare, scarred, beautiful chest. She felt him