Descendant

A crushing weight of disappointment descended on her. All this time, Mason had thought she’d found her mother, when really, she’d just been played for a fool. The idea of her mother slipping away from her again was almost too much, and she felt a tightness in her throat that threatened to become a flood of tears.

Hang on, the voice in her head interrupted what was about to become a full- fledged bout of self-pity. All this time you thought this was your mother. And all that time you thought your mother was kind of a jerk. She took a step toward the imposter god. Anger instead of regret boiling in her chest.

“Take it off,” she snapped. “Now.”

“Speakest thou so to—”

“Don’t ,” Mason snapped, “give me any of that wrathful god-speak thee-and-thou bull crap. Take off my mother’s face before I take it off for you.”

She loosened the silver rapier in its sheath.

Not-Hel’s eyes glittered wildly, glancing back and forth from Mason’s face to her fist, wrapped around the hilt of the silver sword, and Mason drew the sword an inch or two from the scabbard. As she did so, a wild wave of energy pounded like a riptide, surging up her muscles from her fingertips all the way to her shoulder.

“Whoa there,” Rafe murmured in Mason’s ear as he stepped forward and gently drew her hand away from the sword. “Best not brandish a weapon on the steps of Odin’s house unless you absolutely have no choice in the matter. Even if Odin’s not here.”

There was a moment of tense standoff, and then suddenly Yelena Starling’s features blurred and shifted. The light of the day seemed to bend and reshape itself around her, and when it settled and coalesced, Hel was gone, and a tall, regally handsome man with burnished-copper hair and a sharply trimmed beard stood in the place where the image of Mason’s mother had been only a moment before. His eyes—now a deep shade of amber—still glittered fiercely, but he had schooled his features to blankness.

“I knew it.” Fennrys shook his head in disgust.

“Well, well,” Rafe drawled. “Heimdall Bridgekeeper. You must be pretty pissed about the whole Hell Gate kaboom thing, yeah?”

“Mind your own matters, Dead Dog,” Heimdall snarled at the Egyptian god of the dead through clenched teeth. Then he turned on Fennrys. “Had it been my decision, you would rot still in your dungeon cell. Hel deemed otherwise, and for that, there will be a reckoning, doubtless.”

Fennrys’s knuckles went white as he clenched his fist, but other than that, he gave no indication that he’d even heard the insult.

“And as for you, Mason Starling, I sought to grant you a boon. To return you to the world of men. The Bifrost bridge is broken.” There was a note of barely suppressed rage in Heimdall’s voice as he said those words. “How will you get home now without my help? Without the magick of the spear?”

Mason frowned, but Rafe just laughed.

“Don’t worry about that, friend. The Aesir and their toys aren’t the only game in town. Folk seem to be getting in and out of Asgard just fine without crossing over your precious bridge. C’mon, you two,” he said to Fennrys and Mason. “We don’t need the spear, and you sure as hell don’t need to stand here talking to this jackass anymore.”

As they turned and started toward the ring of Einherjar who’d stood by during the whole exchange, Mason heard Heimdall say, “This is not the end. ’Tis but the beginning of the end.”

Mason snorted in disgust and spun back around.

“Thank you, Mr. Cryptic,” she said. “Man. I’m so glad you’re really not my mother. But if you ever try to pull something like that again? I’ll definitely make you wish you were someone else.” She took a step forward. “Fennrys said your name is Heimdall?”

The god nodded once.

“Fine. Heimdall. You just made the list.”

With that, Mason turned on her heel and, grabbing Fennrys by the hand, stalked toward the wall of warriors, Rafe trailing in their wake.

“There’s a list?” Fennrys said, increasing the length of his stride to keep up.

“There is now.”

One last glance over her shoulder showed Mason that Rafe was stifling an amused grin and Heimdall had vanished completely. Which was probably a good thing, because it was getting hard for her to maintain a furiously dignified demeanor as they went. Mostly because she found that she kept stumbling over draugr bits.

“Seriously.” She gestured at the carnage underfoot, which was extensive and more than even a guy like Fennrys could have accomplished on an average day, fighting his way into Valhalla to rescue her from a fate, she now suspected, might very well have been worse than death. “What happened?”

Rafe kicked a rubbery, ashen-hued arm out of his way and explained. “After Fennrys fought his way through into the hall to get you, a whole bunch more of those gray-skinned freaks showed up.” He pointed to where a familiar figure stood among the Norse warriors. “But then your buddy Tag there, sort of . . . rallied the troops. The Einherjar banded together and kept the draugr from storming the doors of Valhalla.”

Mason stared at the erstwhile football hero in open astonishment. Tag Overlea was apparently much cooler in death than he’d ever been in life.

“These boys haven’t had anything to fight except each other for so long that this was kind of like a holiday for them,” Rafe said. “Once he convinced them that they should take on the draugr, they . . . well. I mean, look around you. They had a little fun and made short work of your zombie pals. The kid’s kind of a homecoming hero to these boys.”

“Hey, Starling.” Tag waved at Mason a bit shyly.

“Hi, Tag,” she said. “Nice, um, work.”

“Thanks.” He hooked a thumb at the warriors standing behind him. “They did most of it. I just kinda pointed ’em in the right direction. Kinda like quarterbacking.”

Mason glanced around at the ring of Einherjar and noticed that—even though they were all still a bunch of great, grim hulking lumps of muscle and menace—a couple of the glory warriors were actually smiling. And on the whole, there was a kind of . . . spark about them, a liveliness that hadn’t been there when she’d crossed the field with her mother—no, not her mother, some liar god disguised as her mother—and it made Mason glad to see it. At least, it seemed, something good had come to the Einherjar because of their interloping presence there.

“Okay. So.” Fennrys slapped his hands together briskly and turned to Rafe. “I told Mason that you could get us out of here. How do we do that?”

Rafe raised an eyebrow and pointed over Fennrys’s shoulder. Mason looked and saw a strange, miragelike distortion that was just shimmering into view. Snaking tendrils of arcane energy, writhing up out of the battlefield carnage, began to coalesce . . . twisting together to form something that looked like a glowing, jagged-edged rip in the air. Beyond it, there was darkness, and flickering weird flashes of light.

“What is that?” Mason asked.

“The rift that’s been growing between the worlds ever since Fennrys crossed over into Asgard the first time,” Rafe explained. “The thing has a fixed point in the mortal world, but now, for some time, it’s been randomly manifesting in the Beyond Realms, providing doorways for entities that have long been absent from the world of men to sneak back in, and compromising the integrity of the entire fabric of reality. It’s like a crack in a car windshield: it starts with one tiny flaw . . . and then it spiderwebs out in all these different directions.”

“Wait. That’s how you were planning on getting us home?” Fennrys shook his head in disbelief. “A random manifestation? And you’re just telling me that now?”

Rafe lifted a shoulder. “I didn’t want to burden you with uncertainty. I grant you it was a bit of a long shot— the rift’s incredibly unstable—but it seems to draw energy from death and chaos”—Rafe glanced around—“and I figured there might be some of that once we got here. At any rate, it worked. I was right. Let’s go.”

“I don’t understand any of this.” Mason shook her head. “Why did Hel—or Heimdall or whoever—tell me the spear was the only thing that could get me back home? What would it really have done? Why am I even here in the first place?”

Rafe and Fennrys exchanged a laden glance.

“What?” Mason said flatly.