Descendant

shiver at her touch, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled his head down to hers.

“Definitely better,” she murmured against his lips. And when he kissed her back, for a long, lovely moment, she let herself forget about everything else that was waiting for them beyond the doors of Valhalla.

XII

Outside the hall, the ground was littered with lank gray body parts and splashes of thick black blood. The field was ringed with Einherjar who stood like sentinels, weapons lowered, but still ready at hand. And Rafe was cleaning the edge of his bronze-bladed sword with a tattered rag that must have come from the tunic of one of the dead zombie warriors. Deader zombie warriors.

“Wow,” Fennrys said drily. “What did I miss?” “You mean, aside from your shirt?” Rafe raised an eyebrow at Fennrys’s lack of apparel. “I gave you that shirt.” “Fine. I owe you a shirt.”

Rafe turned and winked at Mason. “Mason. Nice to see you again.”

“You too. I think I owe you—”

“Unh!” Rafe held up a hand. “Never say that to someone who might just collect one day. Do you hear me? Never say ‘owe.’”

He smiled to soften the admonishment, but Mason remembered that she’d done something similar with a bunch of river goddesses. They had yet to make good on their claim, but hearing Rafe say that gave her a fleeting rush of worry, nevertheless.

Rafe glanced back at Fennrys. “The shirt-owing thing, I’ll probably just let slide. It was just a promotional item anyway.”

The coppery blade wiped free of gore, Rafe held it out in front of him and, with a flick of his wrist, made it disappear. Mason wondered fleetingly why he would need to clean a blade that was made of magick anyway, but she appreciated the gesture. She’d certainly never left a fencing practice without oiling and checking her weapon, filing it for stray burrs, making sure the hilt was properly tightened. . . .

At the thought of swords, Mason turned suddenly and ran for the stacks of weapons piled up outside the doors of Valhalla. She sighed in relief to see that her sword was still there where she’d left it, resting on top of a heap of old rusted weapons. She plucked it from the pile and slung the black leather strap over her head so that it hung properly across her torso. The weight of the sword hanging at her side made Mason feel instantly, infinitely better.

Until she turned back and saw the tall, black-cloaked figure of Hel gliding through the ranks of the Einherjar, who shifted uneasily to make way.

“Daughter.” Hel’s eyes flicked over Mason, her glance taking in the sword at her hip and the obvious lack of Odin spear in her hands.

Mason lifted her chin and steeled herself for whatever wrath was about to fall upon her, but before Hel could say anything, Fennrys stepped forward, almost—but not quite—interposing himself between mother and daughter.

“Hello there,” he said. “Again.” There was a wary edge to his voice.

Mason looked up at him and then back at her mother. From the corner of her eye, she saw that Rafe had quietly circled around so that he was standing on Mason’s other side. She suddenly felt like she was flanked by bodyguards.

“You two know each other?” she asked Fennrys.

Fennrys nodded, his eyes never leaving Mason’s mother. “This . . . lady looks an awful lot like the one who busted me out of Asgard the first time.”

“She’s my mother,” Mason said to Rafe. “Can you believe that?”

“Huh,” Rafe murmured. His gaze, too, was fastened firmly on the slender, dark-haired woman. “I really can’t. . . .”

Hel turned a bleak, frosty glare on Rafe. It was fairly clear to Mason that she knew she was in the presence of a fellow deity. And wasn’t very happy about it.

“I dunno. I can see the family resemblance,” Fennrys said. “The eyes . . . the hair. Can’t believe I didn’t put two and two together, but it’s all starting to make a bit more sense now. Listen . . . I never got the chance to say thanks for the jailbreak last time.” His posture belied the casual tone of his voice. “So, y’know . . . Thanks. And now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to go.”

Mason was a little startled by his reaction. For one thing, it was her mother he was talking to, and even if Mason herself didn’t exactly harbor warm, sentimental feelings toward the woman, she would have thought that Fennrys would have exhibited his usual gruff charm. Especially if, as he’d said, she was the one who’d helped him escape from the torturous dungeon he’d been confined to. Just knowing that, in fact, went a long way toward softening Mason’s feelings toward Hel.

“Of course you must leave.” Hel inclined her head. “For the good of all. But my daughter still needs the spear of Odin to return to the mortal realm.”

“Yeah . . . I’m a little bit fuzzy on something here,” Fennrys said.

He didn’t sound the least bit fuzzy on anything, Mason thought. Instead, he just sounded a little bit dangerous.

His voice lowered to a warning growl. “I didn’t need a spear.”

Hel’s expression suddenly turned from hard and cold to blazing with ill-repressed fury. Mason could see it smoldering in her eyes.

“All I needed,” Fennrys continued, “was your rainbow pal.”

“My rainbow pal,” Rafe interjected.

Fennrys ignored him. “I’m not sure why you wouldn’t just call her up again to get your daughter home, if that’s what you wanted.”

“Iris is a goddess in her own right.” Hel shrugged. “She does not always come at my bidding. Nor should she.”

“But she did. For me. Because you asked her to,” Fennrys said. “Didn’t you? I find it hard to believe that getting me out of Hel was more important to you than getting Mason home.”

“Fenn . . .” Mason put a hand on his arm. Where is he going with this? she wondered.

“You were needed to protect her,” Hel said. “Time was of the essence.”

“Right,” Fennrys said. “But I recently got to thinking . . . I mean . . . here’s Bifrost, the rainbow bridge between the mortal realm and Asgard, and it comes out right smack in the middle of Manhattan. So then I got to thinking that maybe you—maybe Hel, that is—had some kind of beef with the bridgekeeper of the Aesir. What’s his name again? Heimdall?”

On the other side of her, Mason heard Rafe draw in a sharp breath.

Fennrys ignored that, too, and continued on. “I remember him from the stories. Grumpy sort, I seem to recall. Didn’t really get on with some of the other gods, like . . . Loki. But this Heimdall guy is a bit of a slippery character too. Isn’t he?”

Mason was listening very carefully to what Fennrys was saying, even though she still wasn’t entirely certain what his point was. But then he glanced sideways at her, and his meaning became crystal clear with the next words out of his mouth.

“A couple of the Aesir are kind of like Rafe, here. They’re shape-shifters. Heimdall is one of them. Could turn himself into a seal, among other things, which never sounded particularly useful to me, but there you go.” Fennrys’s voice was hard and blunt, his gaze flinty as he turned it back on the Asgardian standing before him. “The thing is, Heimdall always had this horn that he carted around with him everywhere, so no matter what shape he wore, you could always tell it was him. Dead giveaway . . .”

Mason’s gaze went to her mother’s belt, where a polished, gold-chased horn hung at her side . . . right beside the silvery-furred sealskin pouch. She felt the blood draining from her face.

That’s not my mother.