Descendant

“I’m sorry.” Toby’s eyes never left her face. “And I’m still proud of you.”

Mason felt a corner of her lip curl. “Are you sure you’re really Toby Fortier?”

“Let’s see . . . you ever even think of performing that badly again, Starling, and I will bench your lame ass for life.” He grinned and then reached over and patted her reassuringly on the knee.

“Okay, Coach.” Mason blinked back a sudden sting of tears.

Fennrys sat back, letting the two of them share the moment. Then he leaned forward slightly and cleared his throat. “So, you work for Gunnar Starling? And we just got in a boat with you?”

As he asked the questions, Mason saw Fenn’s fingers twitch in the direction of the long dagger he carried. Toby saw it, too, but he didn’t flinch.

“That’s right,” he said, nodding. “What Gunnar doesn’t know—at least, I sincerely hope he doesn’t know—is that he’s not the only one I work for.”

“Don’t tell me,” Rafe said with sour mirth from where he still sat hunched on the bow bench seat. “Daria Aristarchos?”

“No.” Toby grimaced in distaste. “Not directly. I can’t stand the woman, to be honest. But her ends and mine are sometimes . . . in agreement. Much as yours are, I would imagine, lord. I just don’t necessarily approve of her methods. Look, my primary goal is the safety of my charges. The students at the academy. That’s what I signed on to do. Keep them—keep you—safe. For a while, working for Gunnar Starling on the side seemed like a good way to help make that happen.”

“Know thine enemy?” Mason said drily. She felt a twinge in her heart at those words.

“Until recently, I wasn’t entirely convinced that he was,” Toby said quietly. “Gunnar seemed like he’d pretty much abandoned the whole idea of a Norse apocalypse after your mother died, and I saw that as being a step forward for him. In some ways, Mason, I actually believe in the same things as your father. At least Gunnar believes in free will. More so than Daria and her ilk. He believes that humanity has done what it’s done to itself, without much in the way of interference from the gods—for better or worse—and that we get what we deserve. The other Gosforth families—some of them—actually want to not only keep the memory of their gods alive, but bring them back into the world. So that humanity could one day worship them again.”

“You know that Cal’s dead, right?” Mason said quietly.

Toby, pale in the scattered moonlight, went even paler. He swore softly under his breath and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “No. I didn’t know.”

Fennrys put an arm around Mason’s shoulders and did her the kindness of telling Toby for her what had happened. Mason could feel her muscles shivering beneath his arm as she struggled not to cry for Cal again.

The shadow of the Triborough Bridge cast them into a deeper darkness as they passed beneath it. Mason could hear the honking of car horns and the distant murmur of raised voices. There seemed to be a traffic backup of some kind, but she couldn’t bring herself to care about something so mundane as that just in that moment.

Toby angled the craft around the southernmost point of Wards Island and aimed it toward the shores of Manhattan, revving the engine so the rubber boat surged forward.

“There’s a ferry terminal and an industrial shipping jetty around East Ninetieth Street,” he said. “I can tie up the boat and we can flag a cab to take you somewhere safe from there.”

“You know,” Mason said, trying hard to reconcile her suddenly radically expanded view of her coach, “I never would have thought you were the kind of guy to give all that much credence to gods and goddesses, Toby.”

“My views on gods and goddesses are . . . complicated, Mase.” The fencing master’s placid expression shifted, his gaze clouding. “That’s kind of what happens when you actually fall in love with one— and they fall in love back.”

Mason blinked at him, speechless.

Toby shook his head and twisted the throttle on the outboard. “It’s a really long story, kiddo, and it’ll have to wait.” He grunted and torqued the steering handle, gunning the engine. “It seems we’re going to have a bit of a fight on our hands making landfall. . . .”

Toby had the nose of the inflatable boat pointed toward the city, but even though he was running the outboard motor now at top speed, it seemed as though they were making little to no headway—almost as if some invisible force was pushing them back. The current began to carry them rapidly downstream. Mason noticed that it was getting harder and harder to discern individual buildings on the Upper East Side.

The fog they’d seen earlier, gathering near North Brother Island, seemed to have moved off westward, as if drawn there by some kind of magnet. On the eastern bank of the river, the lights of Queens still shone brightly, unobscured, but all around Manhattan, a shimmering, silver-gray fog barrier was rising up from the surface of the water to hang like the fifty-foot-high battlements of a medieval fortress.

An impassable barrier between the boat and the city.

“I’m starting to understand what you meant when you said you didn’t trust fog, Rafe . . . ,” Mason said.

She eyed the fog bank piling up around Manhattan with suspicion. But then she noticed something even more worrying. A pale shape—no, shapes—moving just below the surface of the dark water, alongside the Zodiac.

Mason opened her mouth to warn her companions, but suddenly, in spite of all Toby’s best efforts to steer, the boat began rotating in a slow circle, as if caught in an unseen whirlpool.

The little craft heaved up out of the water as something huge and heavy hit one of the float chambers from below. Toby was thrown backward, and the engine sputtered and threatened to stall as he clutched the rope handholds on the side of the boat, managing somehow not to tumble into the water.

A good thing, too, Mason thought, frantically grabbing for her own rope. Because not far off the port side of the boat, one of Cal’s mer-girls rose up out of the water in a plume of spray. Her mouth was open wide in savage song, showing her teeth, which were like long white knives. In a flash, the vicious sea maid had closed the distance to the Zodiac and was trying to scrabble her way up over the side with her grasping, talon-tipped webbed hands. Without a second thought, Mason hauled off and kicked the creature in the head as hard as she could. The heel of her boot connected with a loud crack, and the nymph squealed in pain and rage and disappeared back down below the surface.

Suddenly, she surged back out of the water, snarling and thrashing, blood running from the side of her mouth, and this time Mason scrambled out of the way as Fennrys shouted for her to move. Wielding an oar like a club, he bashed the creature repeatedly over her green-haired head, punctuating his blows with angry words that echoed Mason’s sentiment: “Why . . . does everything . . . that lives . . . in these rivers . . . have fangs?”

On the other side of the boat, Rafe picked up a gas can and smashed it down on another of the things trying to scrabble over the pontoon and into the boat. “People keep flushing expired meds down the toilet,” he said, grunting with exertion. “All that stuff was bound to have adverse effects on the marine life, eventually.”

“You’re a god!” Mason called to Rafe as the surface of the river boiled with thrashing movement. “Can’t you do something?”

“I’m a desert god!” he called back. “Water-based magick is a little beyond me!”

Still, he had a pretty good swing, and between Mason’s boot heel, Fenn’s devastating oar wielding, and Rafe’s gas-can smashing, their assailants seemed wary about approaching again. For a long moment, everything went still. The little rubber boat still spun in a lazy circle, but the river seemed suddenly calm and empty. As silently as she could, Mason loosened her rapier in its sheath and prepared to draw.

Fennrys noticed and shook his head. “It’s too close quarters for a long blade,” he said in a whisper. “If you puncture the boat, we’ll wind up in the river.”

“That would suck,” she whispered back.

“It really would.” Fennrys grinned. “Take this.”

He handed over the oar and drew his short sword. But when several long minutes ticked by and all was silent, she started to think that maybe she wouldn’t need to use the oar, either. Toby eased himself back onto the bench seat in the stern and gripped the motor handle. He twisted the throttle, the engine revved, the boat plowed forward a few precious feet . . .