Descendant

Fennrys shot a glare at Rafe, who pinched the bridge of his nose and scowled fiercely, muttering to himself.

“I was going to tell you all of this when we got home,” Fenn said as he turned toward her.

“Why don’t you tell me now,” Mason replied, clearly in no mood to be coddled.

He turned and cast a pleading glance at the Egyptian god. “Rafe?”

Rafe huffed a sigh. “Okay. I’ll try to explain this so it makes sense, but then we have to go.” He gestured at Fennrys. “You already know his story.”

“Yup.” Mason clasped her hands together and nodded. “Viking prince. Raised by Faeries. Saved me from monsters.”

Rafe nodded. “And you accept that.”

“I don’t have much choice. It happened,” Mason said. “It was real.”

“Yeah? Well, so’s this.” Rafe said, waving a hand at the fantastical landscape of Asgard. “I know it seems like a dream—or maybe a nightmare—but it’s not. It’s not an out-of-body experience, or a hallucination. It’s not a trick. You just managed to walk into Asgard, the home of the ancient Norse gods, Mason Starling . . . and we’re here to make sure you walk right back out again.”

Mason felt a cold knot of apprehension twisting in her guts. “And why exactly did I do that? I mean . . . how?”

“Well, the how is that you crossed Bifrost,” Rafe explained.

“You mean the Hell Gate.” Mason nodded. “On the train.”

“That’s right. The magick of the Asgardian’s rainbow bridge was woven into the Hell Gate way back in the early 1900s by the men who built it. Men who were the descendants of families who served the Norse gods. Men with ulterior motives and long-range goals, who hoped that one day, such a thing might come in handy.”

“The why,” Fennrys continued, “is that . . . someone else who currently shares those long-range goals thought you could come in handy, too.”

Mason blinked at the two of them, utterly mystified. “Handy for what?”

“Do you know what a Valkyrie is, Mason?” Rafe asked quietly.

Mason snorted in grim amusement and gestured to the surrounding mythic environs. “Of course I know what a Valkyrie is. Although I haven’t seen any around here, and I’m actually a bit disappointed by that. Winged warrior girls with swords?” She tapped the hilt of her rapier with a fingertip. “I think I might have imprinted on that when I was little. They were the only fun part of the stories my father read to me and my brothers before bedtime. The rest of it bored me—it’s all so grim and apocalyptic—but Rory would freak if he didn’t get his nightly dose of Nordic doom. If he knew this stuff was actually real? I can only imagine what he . . . uh . . .”

Her amusement faded as a creeping realization insinuated itself into her thoughts. A cold understanding and an even colder dread flooded her from top to bottom. The horror of the truth.

“Rory . . .” Mason felt like a hand was squeezing her throat. “He . . .”

“He wasn’t just pulling some asinine stunt gone horribly wrong on you when you were on that train, Mase,” Fennrys said quietly. “Your brother has an agenda. He’s not the only one.”

Mason was starting to feel a bit light-headed. Whether with apprehension or a slow-building rage, she wasn’t sure. “Who?” she asked, her voice a dry whisper. “Who else . . .”

Rafe’s dark, timeless gaze filled with compassion. “To some people, Mason, the old tales aren’t just bedtime stories.”

Her gaze swung back and forth between Rafe’s and Fennrys’s faces, reading the things there that neither of them could bring themselves to say.

“You mean to say . . . Rory and my father . . . ?”

Rafe nodded. “Remember those long-range goals I was talking about?”

Rory she could believe. But Gunnar Starling?

Her father . . . No.

“I’m sorry, Mason. Your dad’s kind of a . . .” Rafe’s dark brows knit in a deep frown. “Let’s just say he’s well-respected among the more arcane social circles of the power elite. And by ‘well-respected,’ I mean, ‘greatly feared.’ Rory, on the other hand, hasn’t actually pinged anyone’s radar where this kind of thing is concerned. He’s just an opportunistic little rat, I guess.”

“You’re saying that my father is like some kind of supernatural mob boss.”

“That’s actually a pretty accurate description.”

“And Roth?” Mason asked. “Did he have anything to do with this . . . this . . . ?”

Fennrys shook his head. “No. Roth was trying to find you. To warn you. In fact, he told me that he’d been sent by your father to find me, but he was worried about Rory getting to you first before he could warn us both. I do know that it was never in your father’s plans for you to be the one to cross over, Mason. It was a mistake.”

He leaned forward, forearms on his knees and hands clasped loosely in front of him. Mason couldn’t help but notice the scars on his wrists. The ones he’d gotten when he’d been chained in a cell somewhere in this awful place that her father—and his father before him—thought was so great.

“They thought that I was the only one who could travel into Asgard,” Fennrys continued, “and then be able to travel back out again. On account of the whole ‘I’m kind of dead’ thing and seem to be prone to doing that as a result. The plan, as I understand it from Roth, is that they were going to coerce me into crossing the Hell Gate. You were only on that train because you were supposed to be the . . . uh . . .”

“What?” Mason voice was tight. “I was only supposed to be the what?”

Fennrys turned his head, and his blue gaze was bleak. “The bait.”

Rage—yes, it was definitely rage now, hot, liquid, incandescent—coursed through Mason’s veins. Bait. Now that . . . that sounded like Rory. But the thing that cut Mason like the blade of the sharpest knife was that her father—her father—had known. More than known. He’d actually—what—sanctioned it? Approved of Rory stuffing her in a bag . . . locking her in the trunk of his car . . . He’d almost killed her. He’d shot Fennrys.

That, in itself, was enough to blind Mason with hideous anger.

But the fact that her father, who she’d loved all her life more than anyone else, who she’d always known would protect her from hurt, was somehow involved in all of this . . . More than involved, it seemed . . . The rage evaporated and something worse—cold grief—washed over her in its place.

“The spear wouldn’t have sent me home.” Mason hugged her elbows to keep from shivering with the sudden chill that suffused her body. “Would it?”

“No.” Rafe’s pencil-thin dreadlocks swung as he shook his head. “That’s not its purpose. Not exclusively, anyway—although I’m pretty sure it would have given you the power to go between realms all on your own. It would have given you the power to do an awful lot of things. That’s why they were trying to get Fennrys to retrieve it. So that then they could have given it to you.”

She’d known. Somehow, Mason had known. She’d felt it. Heard it in the crashing music in her head when she’d been so close—so very close—to wrapping her fingers around that ancient, terrible weapon.

“You’re telling me that if I had picked up that spear, it would have turned me into a Valkyrie?” she asked, needing to be sure.

“According to a very old prophecy.” Fennrys nodded. “Yeah .”

“An old prophecy that my father knows about.”

“Not really his fault, that.” Rafe’s gaze turned darkly inward, as if he was examining a memory. An unpleasant one. “A trio of delightful ladies called the Norns made damned sure he knew about it.”

The way Rafe said “delightful” made them sound anything but.

Mason had read about the Norns—agents of fate, or destiny, or whatever you wanted to call it—and she’d read about Valkyries. Odin’s shield maidens. His choosers of the slain, who would fly over battlefields and decide which of the most valiant warriors would die a glorious death in order to be admitted to the halls of Valhalla as