Descendant

wasn’t exactly known for its earthquakes—had been experiencing a series of mild to worrisome tremors. Add to that the Hell Gate Bridge exploding, and most people seemed to think that the city was under some kind of siege, either natural or man-made. Heather suspected that they were right about the siege, but wrong about the origins.

Most of the faculty still seemed to be hanging tight on the campus, though—at least as far as Heather’s furtive glances out bedroom and bathroom windows told her—but even at the risk of announcing her presence back at Gosforth, Heather desperately needed an excuse to flee her room just then. She just needed to get away from Gwen Littlefield.

“Damn it, let go!” She put a foot against the wall and heaved at the door.

“Heather, you have got to listen to me—”

“No! I do not!” Heather let go of the handle in frustration and turned on Gwen, suddenly furious. “The last time I listened to you”—she stuck a pointing finger right in Gwen’s face—“I got kidnapped, threatened, lost one of the only real friends I’ve ever made in my whole sorry tenure at this prison camp they call a school, and watched my ex-boyfriend die! I don’t listen to you anymore. There is nothing you can say that I have any interest in hearing whatso—”

“She’s gonna kill Roth.”

“I—what?”

Gwen bit her lower lip, and her hands clenched into fists under her chin. “I know how you felt about Cal. How you . . . still feel. I feel the same way about Roth Starling.”

Heather blinked at the other girl dumbly.

“And Cal’s mom is gonna kill him.”

“Cal’s . . .”

Heather backed off, her brow knotting in confusion. Just like the last time she and Gwen had spoken, the weirdo pixieish eggplant-hued Gosforth outcast was virtually incomprehensible at first. When Gwen had first tracked her down, days earlier, to tell her that Mason was in some kind of trouble—or at least, about to be—it had taken Heather the better part of an hour to figure out what the haruspex was trying to say. That was before Heather had even known what the hell a haruspex was, or that Gwen Littlefield was particularly gifted—or rather, burdened—with that unique skill set.

But once Heather had figured it all out and, more to the point, decided to believe it . . . enough time had been wasted and events had slotted into place anyway. The very same events that Gwen had come to get Heather’s help to stop from happening. The whole exercise had turned into a colossal fail of majestic proportions. And Heather couldn’t bring herself to go through something like that again. Even if it had something to do with Cal or his mom or . . .

No. She wouldn’t listen to another word Littlefield had to say. That was that. As she glared at the other girl, Heather watched two of the biggest teardrops she’d ever seen gather on the bottom lids of Gwen’s storm-gray eyes. They grew, finally spilling down her flushed cheeks to drop onto her shirt, where they left two perfect round spots beneath her collarbones.

Heather rolled her eyes and let out a heavy sigh. “Shit. . . .”

“Please, Heather. I didn’t know who else to go to.”

“Right. Because I was so damned helpful last time,” she muttered.

Heather wilted down onto her bed and dropped her head into her hands. Her hair, she could feel as she ran her hands through it, was an unruly mess. She knew from the single time she’d bothered to glance at herself in the mirror that there were dark circles under her eyes.

“Fine. Tell me. What did you see this time?”

As Gwen began to speak, Heather reached over to snag a long-sleeved T-shirt from the back of her chair and yanked it on over her head. Then she raked her fingers through her hair, pulling it back into a messy bun. By the time she’d slipped into her runners and collected her jacket, and shoved her keys and cell phone into her shoulder bag, Gwen had spilled most of the, admittedly somewhat vague, details of what she’d “seen” in the liver.

“You stare at animal guts and can see the future.” Heather shuddered in revulsion. “That’s seriously messed up.”

“Why do you think I’m a vegan?”

Heather did a double take and then burst out laughing at the rueful expression on the other girl’s face. After a moment, Gwen started to laugh too.

“So, does any old viscera do for your little party trick?” Heather asked. “Or does it have to be, like, grade A guts?”

Gwen rolled an eye at her. “Ritually sacrificed on a marble altar is ideal.”

“Are there a lot of those kicking around Manhattan?”

Gwen snorted. “I used to get deliveries from a butcher in the East Village—and yeah. He had an entire sacrificial altar setup in a locked room in the back of the shop devoted to the goddess Demeter. Marble altar, pure silver knives, statues . . . the works.”

Demeter, Heather remembered from a class on the subject, was the goddess of agriculture and civilization. She frowned and glanced at the textbooks on the bed, remembering the things she’d read about the ancient secretive worshippers of Demeter at a place called Eleusis. They were fanatics, cultish, strange.

“He supplied me with the good stuff,” Gwen said with equal parts revulsion and longing. “See . . . if the offering isn’t pure . . . prepared under strict conditions and, uh, really fresh . . . I get—um—interference. Static. Sometimes it’s hard to tune into just exactly what’s happening.”

“So you could, theoretically, be wrong about all of this,” Heather said.

“Yup.” Gwen shrugged. “But I’m kind of a ‘better safe than—’”

She broke off as the air in the room became suddenly, electrically charged.

Heather felt a moment of queasy disorientation before she realized that the walls were trembling and the floor felt as if she was standing on the deck of a ship. Another earthquake. That made eight—or was it nine?— tremors in the last twenty-four hours. Heather reached out a hand to steady herself against the wall as the overhead light began to sway and a framed picture—this one of her and Cal together, sitting waterside at his place on Long Island Sound—toppled off its perch on her bookshelf, the glass in the frame shattering as it hit the floor.

Heather glanced at Gwen, who was frowning fiercely, two deep parallel lines forming between her brows, beneath the fringe of amethyst hair.

“Yeah,” she said. She didn’t bother to reach out to steady herself, but just flexed her knees and rode the trembling floor like a surfboard. “It’s worse in the catacombs. You can really feel it down there. And one of the older tunnels caved in yesterday, but I think it was just a dead end.”

“What catacombs?” Heather asked.

“The ones under the school.”

Gwen shot out a hand to grab one of Heather’s trophies, which had tipped off the shelf, before it, too, smashed on the floor. Heather snatched it out of her hands before Gwen had a chance to read the plaque and see that it was for winning second place in some grade eight nerd-o-rama science fair.

“Some of the tunnels go pretty deep,” Gwen continued, her eye line following the swift progress of a crack that suddenly zigzagged up the plaster wall, shedding flakes and dust that floated down between the two girls.

Heather walked unsteadily to the window and twitched the curtain aside an inch or two. The afternoon sky outside looked angry and unsettled. It had been like that all day, churning with storm clouds and flashes of lightning, but had yet to shed any rain on the city, and the heat and humidity was becoming oppressive.

“I’ve only checked out a few of the easier ones to access,” Gwen said, still talking, for some reason, about catacombs. “And some of the chambers that don’t have warning sigils or curse runes carved above them.”

“What the hell is a ‘sigil’?”

“An arcane symbol,” Gwen huffed impatiently. “Magick. This is Gosforth. Don’t you pay attention in class?”

Heather’s glare, when she turned back from the window, was so flat it was probably comical. She was