Descendant

“One of ’em, yeah.” Douglas shifted in the chair. “A lesser one, but still . . .”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I had to do something useful with my life after your mother cut me out of hers. And yours. Meri, at least, still sends the occasional letter. . . .” He shrugged and waved a hand at his blanketed legs. “That’s how this happened, actually. I was doing her a favor.”

“And the rest of the time you just, what? Sail up and down the East River, waiting for your errant offspring to drop from bridges?” Cal tried to lighten his tone, but even to his own ears the words were laced with bitterness and bewilderment.

Douglas, to his credit, seemed prepared to shrug off his son’s not-so-veiled hostility. “No,” he said with a smile. “As a matter of fact, I was diving off the coast of Antigua when the Nereids caught up with me.”

“Antig . . .” Cal felt his jaw drop open. “How long have I been here?”

“About seventy-two hours.”

Cal shook his head, his patience wearing thin. “You just said your boat was docked here. There’s no way you could get here from Antigua in under three days.”

“You mean there’s no way I could get from there to here in under three hours,” his father corrected him. “Because that’s how fast I had to move to get here in time to square things with the hospital administration.”

“Hours . . . ?”

“You’d be surprised how fast a boat can move with fair winds, calm seas, and the help of a dozen sea goddesses motivated by guilty consciences.” Douglas’s green stare was sharp, unblinking. “Let me ask you something, son. What were you doing on that bridge in the middle of the night? Right before it blew up?”

“I was helping a friend—wait . . .” Cal went silent as his father’s words registered, and an ice-cold hand of fear lay its palm across his chest. He tried to keep the tremor from his voice as he asked, “Right before the bridge did what?”

“I guess that part of the night’s festivities occurred after you fell.” Douglas’s mouth hardened into a straight line. “Somebody saw fit to blow the hell out of the Hell Gate.”

Mason . . .

Fear spread across his chest and punched straight through Cal’s rib cage to encircle his heart. What if something had happened to her? Cal wasn’t sure he could live with himself if Mason had been hurt. He still felt the sharp sting of knowing that a large part of the reason she’d even been on that train, crossing that bridge in the first place, was because of him.

Because you were such an ass to her.

“Mase . . .” Cal struggled against the tight-tucked sheets. “I have to get up . . . I have to find her. She has to be okay—”

Douglas reached up and clamped iron fingers around Cal’s arm, keeping him from pulling out his IV needle. “Calm down. Cal! Calm down. Who are you talking about? What’s this all about?”

Cal swung his feet to the floor and stood, shakily, steadying himself against the side of the bed. He glared down at his father and after a long moment, when it seemed like he wasn’t going to pitch forward onto his face, Douglas let go of his arm. Cal yanked off the strip of medical tape holding his IV in and pulled the needle from his hand. He felt the cessation of the hydrating drip like a swiftly ebbing tide, but he also felt strong enough to do without it.

“I was trying to help save a friend. Mason Starling—”

“Gunnar’s little girl?”

“Yeah.” Cal nodded. “She was on a train going over the bridge. There’s this guy who was trying to stop it. . . . Look. I really don’t understand everything that was happening. It’s . . .” He lifted his hand in front of his face and spread his fingers wide. His father had said there would be no scars there, and he was right. But Cal could also vividly picture what his hands would’ve looked like with the webbing between his fingers intact. He could almost feel it. He dropped his hand to his side and looked at his father. “It’s just as weird as all of this. Stuff about gods and other realms and the end of the world as we know it . . .”

“Ragnarok,” his father murmured, his green eyes drifting slowly closed. “Damn you, Gunn.”

“So it’s true then?”

“It’s the reason Gosforth exists,” Douglas said. “The reason you go to school there. A long time ago, the founding—or should I say feuding—families, all of them dedicated in service to one ancient pantheon of gods or another, decided that their children would all grow up together. Sort of a joint hostage exchange program. Because, yes. The gods, the Beyond Realms, the monsters and the magick . . . it’s all real, Calum. All of it. And you’re a part of it now.”

Cal turned and saw that his clothes had been laundered and folded and placed in a pile on a chair in the corner of his room. He walked over to it and started to get dressed.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to find Mason,” he said, stuffing one foot into a leg of his jeans. In the very back of his head, beneath the sounds of waves and water that whispered through his mind, Cal suddenly heard a shriek, almost like the discordant cries of a flock of angry seagulls.

The Nereids.

Cal’s gaze flew to the window. The curtains billowed and he could see, beyond trees and a rolling lawn, the slender stone finger of the old Blackwell Lighthouse that stood at the very northern tip of Roosevelt Island, its lamp lit like a candle to drive back the dark.

He heard the shrieking again—louder—and then . . .

Mason’s faint, startled cry for help.

XIX

The bored-looking security guard shook himself out of his lazy slouch and cut across the lobby of the Top of the Rock. It was full of milling, vaguely disgruntled tourists, who were being turned away from the elevators that accessed the observation deck at the top of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

“Miss Palmerston, isn’t it?” he said. “Welcome back to the Rock. It’s been awhile. We thought you’d abandoned us.”

He just barely managed to keep his eye line from drifting south of Heather’s face. She’d tugged her shirt as low as it would go and did a quick hair and makeup job in the cab on the way over. Hopefully it would prove to be enough of a distraction.

“Oh . . . Paulo,” Heather said, shooting him a sly smile, having already scoped out his name badge from behind her oversize mirrored sunglasses—which she then pushed up on her head so she could turn the full wattage of her gaze on him. “Would I do such a thing? I just didn’t want anyone to suspect we were madly in love, that’s all. People get jealous, you know?”

She shot him a wink, and Paulo actually blushed outright. But then, as Heather breezed past the tourists, heading toward the security checkpoint that led to the elevators, with Gwen following in her wake, the guard hurried to get in front of them. “You know the observation deck is closed for the rest of the day, right?”

Heather tilted her head and gave him a questioning look.

“It’s the tremors,” he explained. “The earthquakes . . . you know. We’ve been getting a lot of sway up there. I mean—it’s nothing to worry about, the building’s not going to come down or anything—but, it’s a little disconcerting. There was a bit of panic last time. And, uh, motion sickness.”

“Ooh,” Heather said. “Barfing tourists. How charming.” She reached out and rested her hand lightly on Paulo’s wrist. “So the deck’s closed to ‘gen pop.’ That’s fine. We’re not here for the view, sweetie.”

She bestowed a knowing glance on him and nodded at Gwen—who was playing the role of bored, sulky hot girl, crossing her arms tightly under her chest to hide the bloodstains on her hands from the cafeteria liver that she hadn’t had time to wash off.

“Right,” Paulo said with a wink. “Ms. Aristarchos is doing one of her exclusives up in the Weather Room. A