Descendant

beginning to weary of this bizarre little person using words like “catacombs” and “sigils” and “runes” and “chambers” and talking about the academy like it was frickin’ Hogwarts.

“What exactly were you doing crawling around a bunch of creepy old—”

“I’m living there.”

Again Heather was reduced to just standing and blinking.

Gwen shrugged and brushed self-consciously at a dirt stain on her shirt. “Only for the last little while. It was Roth’s idea when he knew I had to go into hiding. Things got hot, so I went underground. Literally.”

“Hot . . . how, exactly?”

“Remember how I mentioned Cal’s mom?”

“Yeah,” Heather said. “What does Daria Aristarchos have to do with any of this?”

“I used to work for her,” Gwen said. “The butcher I told you about is one of Daria Aristarchos’s people. Devotees, really. Your ex-boyfriend’s mom is, like, the high priestess of the Eleusinian mysteries cult.”

And—wow—did that ever totally make sense all of a sudden.

Heather had always suspected that Cal’s mom was one of those ravenously power-hungry types. She was a control freak to end all control freaks. And what better way to control the people around you than by claiming that you were the conduit to their gods?

Secret, mysterious, ancient gods . . .

“When I prophesied what was going to happen to Mason, Roth freaked,” Gwen said. “And not just about his dad, but about all of it. All of them. All the heads of the Gosforth families. He thought it was too dangerous for me to work for her anymore.”

“I think Roth might have been onto something there,” Heather said drily, and gave Gwen a rundown of what she’d gleaned from her encounter on Gunnar’s train.

“Look. All I know is that I saw Roth confronting Daria about something. I don’t know what—the visions don’t always come with audio tracks—and the next thing I see is her freaking out. Then there’s static . . . and when the vision comes back online, Roth’s unconscious.” Gwen squeezed her eyes shut, as if she was seeing the vision replay in her mind’s eye. “I get, like, a time lag . . . and then the vision changes and she’s taken him somewhere. Someplace where I just know she’s going to kill him.”

“Do you have any idea where?” Heather asked.

“Somewhere . . . high up.” Gwen opened her eyes and shook her head. “In the vision, I could feel it when another tremor hits—it’s bigger than any of the ones we’ve had so far—and I felt as if I was surrounded by glass walls and marble columns, almost like a palace or a temple, and everything was swaying. And I was afraid that I’d fall right through the glass and out into the sky. But . . . I don’t know exactly where I was. I think I could see the park—I mean, there were a lot of trees in the far distance, beyond tall buildings. . . .”

“Right.” Heather thought for a moment.

Fall into the sky . . .

The park . . .

She knew where Roth was.

Reaching up, Heather suddenly yanked the leaden bolt out of Cal’s picture. She felt a corresponding twisting in her own heart at the sight of the hole it left behind. She turned and saw that Gwen was staring at the stubby little arrow in her hand.

“Is that—”

“I don’t know what it is. Not exactly.” She still wasn’t sure she wanted to.

“Who—”

“I don’t exactly know who gave it to me, either.” She moved back over to the bed and picked up the weapon, stuffing both bolts and the crossbow into her shoulder bag. It was the only thing she had that resembled a weapon of any kind, and so she took it. Just in case. “I have some ideas.”

“You should be careful with that,” Gwen said in a hollow, quiet voice. “Really, really careful.”

“Yeah.” Heather offered up a brittle smile. “That’s one of my ideas. Now let’s go. I know where Daria has taken Roth Starling.”

XVII

The sound of a boat engine drifted over the surface of the water. The moon had disappeared behind a cloud, casting the island into darkness. A rumble of thunder drowned out the engine sounds for a moment, but when it faded, they could clearly hear the growl of an outboard. And it seemed to be coming closer.

“Are you expecting someone?” Fennrys asked Rafe quietly. “Besides Aken?”

The god shook his head. “No. But clearly someone was expecting us.”

Someones, Mason thought. First Cal’s mer-girl, and now this.

She took another step forward, her head cocked to one side as she listened intently. She heard it again. A voice . . . calling softly, as if its owner didn’t want to be overheard by the wrong party.

The voice was calling Mason’s name.

“Mase,” Fennrys hissed, grabbing her hand and drawing her back behind a scraggly stand of trees as the narrow beam of a small searchlight clicked on from somewhere out on the surface of the water and began to sweep the margins of the beach. Rafe ducked behind a rock and motioned for them to stay hidden.

“Mason?” the voice called out again, and the sweep of the beam swung up and down the shore. The call was quiet, the voice deep, the tone hovering somewhere between wary and hopeful. “Are you there?”

Mason opened her mouth to answer, then paused. She recognized the voice now beyond a shadow of a doubt. But while she trusted her ears to identify the source, she didn’t necessarily trust the source itself. Heimdall masquerading as her mother had seen to that. But she definitely recognized those gruff tones. She’d spent far too many hours getting barked at by them on the fencing piste not to.

“It’s Toby,” she mouthed to Fennrys silently.

“Maybe,” he mouthed back, equally wary.

“Mason . . . ,” the voice called out again. “It’s Toby Fortier. If you can hear me, I’m here to help.”

Mason drew a deep breath and glanced back over her shoulder at Fennrys. It was clear he had no more idea than she did what her fencing instructor was doing out in a boat in the middle of the East River at night, off the shores of North Brother Island, looking for her. Fennrys narrowed his eyes and stared hard into the darkness. Mason followed his gaze, and then she saw it: an inflatable type of boat gliding across the water’s surface. She vaguely recalled from a documentary she’d once seen that the boat was called a Zodiac, and it was a preferred mode of transport for marine researchers and Navy SEALs. Then she remembered something that she wasn’t really supposed to know. Toby Fortier used to be a SEAL.

The matte-black rubber craft was almost invisible in the darkness, and so was its pilot—Mason could only just make out a figure behind the handheld search lamp, clothed in black and wearing a black watch cap. She opened her mouth to call out to him, but Fennrys put a hand on her arm and a finger to his lips, gesturing for her to remain silent. Then he stepped around her and walked out toward the water, his boots crunching loudly on the gravel as he strolled casually, not attempting to hide his presence.

“Mason?” Toby called, and the beam of light swept up from Fennrys’s feet to his face.

Fennrys put a hand up in front of his face to shadow his eyes and squinted into the spotlight. “Evening, Coach,” he said.

“Well,” Toby said, idling the motor. “You are not the first person I expected to find here, I gotta say.”

Fennrys shrugged. “The feeling is strangely mutual.”

Toby cocked his head to one side, and Mason could see the glint of his dark eyes as the moon made a sudden, brief appearance through a hole in the racing clouds. “I thought you were out of commission. What are you doing out here, son?” Toby asked.