Descendant

her hair. “Sounds . . . nice?”

Fennrys snorted.

“Oh, come on,” Mason said. “How bad can this place be? I mean, I like islands. Y’know: Coney . . . Hawaii . . .”

“Rikers . . . Devil’s . . .” Fennrys rolled an eye at her.

“Here we are!” Rafe sang out. “Last stop, all exits, no waiting, people!”

The god surged forward, and the swirling dimness that pressed in upon the trio suddenly split, spilling brilliant crimson light into the Between. Rafe hauled Mason and Fennrys in his wake through a kinetic surge of storm-cloud energy that wrapped around them and snapped at their limbs and hair and hands. Together, they tumbled through from the Between, to land sprawling in a place that resembled a moss-thick, leaf-strewn clearing on the edge of a forest in a fairy tale. The kind of forest that small children and comely maidens of virtue true were always being told to avoid entering at all costs.

Fennrys shrugged out of Rafe’s grip and pushed himself to his knees, gazing all around. Opposite the trees, a ragged little cove and a refuse-strewn, rocky beach gave way to a view of the East River. The sun was close to setting, and streamers of bloody-red clouds unfurled against the burnished gold backdrop of the sky. Behind them, beneath the trees, the shadows were deep purple, and the twilight contrast clarified every little detail of leaf and twig, picking them out in sharp, stark focus.

“Did it work?” Mason asked, rolling over and pushing the hair from her face. “Are we there?”

“Yeah. It did. We are.” Fennrys hauled himself to his feet and held out a hand to help Mason to hers. “Welcome to North Brother Island, Mase. The place I died.”

Mason’s eyes went wide, and her mouth drifted open. Her hand tightened convulsively on his, and he could see her gaze fill with concern for him. Fennrys wasn’t quite sure how he felt in that moment, revisiting the place where he’d sacrificed himself and gone to Valhalla so that another man could live. He’d thought it might have been hard to take—that it might’ve hurt coming back. But in fact, all he felt was a kind of hollowness. Echoes. It felt like that life had belonged to someone else. The only thing that mattered to him was who he was now. And who he was with.

He reached out a hand and smoothed Mason’s hair, the strands slipping through his fingers like spun silk, midnight-hued and shining. Her eyes never left his face as he did so, and the warmth and compassion in that sapphire gaze made everything Fennrys had gone through to be there, in that moment, completely, totally worth it.

He felt himself smiling as he reluctantly turned his gaze from her face to their surroundings. In the distance, he could make out the contours of several buildings, their outlines softened by the massive overgrowth of vegetation that had taken over the island since it had been abandoned. The island had once been home to a quarantine hospital and had seen more than its fair share of tragedies, but now the whole place looked as though it was being consumed by nature. It was eerie. As were the strange, will-o’-the-wisp-ish lights that sparkled and danced in the deep shadows under the trees.

“As islands go,” Mason murmured, “this place is less resort-y than I generally prefer.” She shivered and hugged her elbows. “It feels kind of . . . haunted.”

“It is haunted,” Fennrys said.

In the west, the glass-and-stone towers of Manhattan lay glittering far beyond the restless gray stretch of the Hell Gate strait like some fairy-tale kingdom. The sun was sinking swiftly behind the artificial horizon of the city line, and a deep indigo blue tinted the vault of the sky in its wake.

“I wonder what time it is,” Mason said.

“Yeah? I wonder what day it is,” Rafe muttered, then shrugged when Mason glanced questioningly at him. “Time passes a little differently in the Beyond Realms. Until I see a calendar, even I can’t be sure how much of it passed here, while we were there.” He turned to the water and scanned up and down the shore, a frown creasing his forehead.

Mason sighed. “This isn’t going to be one of those ‘hapless mortal returns home after a night of revels to discover a hundred years have passed and everyone she knows is long dead’ folktale things, is it?” she asked drily. “Because that would suck more than all the other weird things that have gone on in the last few hours of my life.”

“Hey, there are worse fates,” Fennrys said, striving for lightness.

But Mason had obviously heard the edge in his voice, and he mentally kicked himself. It wasn’t her fault that what she’d just described was, fundamentally, almost exactly what had happened to him.

“Oh god.” She winced. “I’m so sorry, Fenn . . . I didn’t mean—I wasn’t thinking—”

“Forget it, Mase.” He shook his head and forced the smile back onto his face. “It’s okay. Really. I’m okay. Hell . . . if I’d lived and died when I was supposed to, I never would have met you, right?”

“I’m starting to think that’s maybe not such a bad thing.”

“Stop.” He gripped her by the shoulders—hard enough to make her blink up at him. “Don’t ever say that. Nothing about this is your fault, and you are not the guilty party here. We will figure out how to make all of this right and then, when all this is done, we will go back to the Boat Basin Cafe and we will sit at that pain-in-the-ass waiter’s table again and we will finish those beers and order those burgers like we were supposed to. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Damned ferryman,” Rafe muttered, still scanning the boatless river. “I’m going to go see if I can spot our transport farther down. You two find somewhere safe to hunker down and wait until I get back. With darkness falling, I don’t want Mason wandering around out in the open in this place.”

Fennrys agreed, even though he could feel Mason bristle a bit at his side. But then, in the near distance, something horrible-sounding yowled, yelped, and went crashing through the shadow-bound underbrush. Mason’s hand flew convulsively to the hilt of her sword, but Fennrys just smiled at her and shook his head, covering her hand with his own.

“Don’t give them a reason,” he said. “This is the kind of place where the best offense is strictly defensive. Flight first,” he said. “Fight only when you have to, remember?”

“Right.” Of course she remembered. It was the same thing he’d said to her in both real life and real scary dreams. “Run.”

“If you have to.”

She nodded and relaxed her grip, flashing him a brief smile and taking a breath to calm herself. Fennrys looked around and spotted the shell of one of the island’s old service buildings looming up through the trees like a medieval castle.

“We’ll hole up in there until you give us the word,” he said to Rafe.

Rafe nodded. Then, in the blink of an eye, his form blurred and a sleek black wolf took off at a run down the ragged beach, disappearing around a weedy promontory.

When he was gone from view, Fennrys took Mason by the hand and led her along a barely discernible path and through a gaping hole in the brick wall of the outbuilding—the actual door was impassable, blocked by a stand of saplings—and into a blue-shadowed, vaulting room. Half the roof had collapsed, and the floor was carpeted with fallen leaves that gathered in knee-deep drifts in the corners. In the gloom, Mason and Fenn could barely make out each other’s faces, so Fennrys gathered up a small pile of fallen twigs and branches and cleared a space in a crumbling alcove that could serve nicely as a makeshift fireplace.

“Here . . .” He fished in his pocket for the lighter he carried. “Why don’t you start a fire for us?”

Mason blinked up at him. “Really?”

Fennrys reached out and tapped the iron medallion hanging on the leather cord around Mason’s throat. “Do you remember that night back in my loft?”

Mason nodded, the hint of a wicked grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Only every second of it, yeah . . .” She reached up to trace her finger lightly along the line of the scar she’d given him.

Fennrys smiled, his eyes gleaming in the dimness. “Okay. Good. No stabbing this time, all right? I just want to see if you can conjure a little fire. Like I taught you in the boat basin—use your mind to shape the magick.”

“I’m not like you, Fenn. I’m not trained for this stuff. Should I really be doing this?”