Descendant

cocktail party or something like that, right?”

“Something like that,” Heather agreed.

“Anybody else and management would’ve canceled it along with shutting down the decks, but you know, that lady’s got a lotta pull. I’ll just get the guest list so I can check you off.” He started to move back toward the desk. “The others have all been up there for a while. You ladies are fashionably late.” He frowned faintly, glancing back at Heather’s jeans and sneakers. “And just . . . a little casual?”

“We’re the entertainment, sweetie.” She cocked her head, her smile tight. “They already have our costumes up there.” Heather felt her patience thinning and her nerves dangerously close to showing through. Their names weren’t on any list—guest or otherwise. But then Gwen suddenly stepped forward and pressed a fingernail into Paulo’s chest, keeping him from the desk.

She smiled a lazy, catlike smile and virtually purred, “And if they don’t, then we’ll just have to come back down and entertain you.” She traced a little heart on his chest above his name tag, and a flush suffused his face.

Paulo went a little glassy-eyed and murmured, “Yeah, sure. Of course . . .”

Heather held her breath, hoping he wouldn’t look down and see the stains on Gwen’s hand. But he didn’t. He just turned and escorted them to the elevators, where he activated the call button and, when the doors slid open, stepped aside to let the girls into the elevator cab. Heather blew him a kiss as the doors slid closed, and when the elevator began its ascent, she leaned against the back wall and exhaled the breath she’d been holding.

“I thought we were busted,” she said, and rolled an eye at Gwen. “Way to be, there, sex kitten. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

Gwen, who’d gone so pale she looked like she was either going to hurl or pass out, grinned wanly. “I didn’t either. Please tell me that was the hardest thing we’ll have to face in all of this.”

Heather bit her lip and said nothing. She watched the floor numbers climb swiftly upward and felt the palms of her hands grow slick with cold sweat. She suspected that Gwen had tapped into some kind of magick, even if Gwen herself wasn’t actually aware she’d done so. Heather began to wonder if this wasn’t all some kind of huge mistake. What were they going to do when the elevator doors opened and they suddenly came face-to-face with Daria and who knew who else?

“So . . . yeah. About that. It would be really helpful to know what, exactly, we will be facing once these doors open,” Heather prompted.

“I keep telling you—I don’t know. It’s never that clear.” Gwen frowned in frustration. “There are still things about what’s already happened that I don’t understand, because what I know has happened doesn’t mesh with what I saw happening. But that’s because I never see it all.”

“I don’t get it,” Heather said, not for the first time. “What don’t you see?”

“Well, for one thing, I never see what happens to me.”

Heather snorted. “I think that’s probably for the best. Who wants to know their own future?”

“I just want to know that I have one,” Gwen said almost in a whisper.

Heather winced at the pain in Gwen’s voice. She had an incredible ability. A gift. But more than that, it was a burden. “Have you ever been able to stop something that you saw?” Heather asked gently.

“No.”

“Then why—”

“Does that mean that I should stop trying?” she asked fiercely, and Heather could see tears glimmering on her lashes.

Heather shook her head and looked up through the glass roof of the elevator as they climbed upward toward the sixty-seventh floor. They were almost there—at the Weather Room, an indoor observation gallery with soaring windows and its own separate terraces where New York’s elite held super-swank private events, high above the city. Like the party Daria Aristarchos had thrown there just last year for Calum’s eighteenth birthday.

Gwen was staring at her, waiting for an answer. Instead, Heather asked her a question of her own. “Is that why you didn’t tell me about Cal?” she said quietly. “So that I’d try and help Mason and not him? Because she’s Roth’s sister?”

“No,” Gwen said, reaching out to grip Heather’s hand hard in hers. “I swear. I didn’t tell you about Cal because I didn’t see him die, Heather. I’ve never seen him die—”

“Stop!” Heather pulled her fingers from the other girl’s grasp. “Just . . . don’t do that. Don’t give me false hope.” She switched to a slightly less painful subject. “Can you see Starling?” she asked. “Mason, I mean? Do you know what’s happened to her?”

Gwen shook her head, a frown creasing her brow under the fringe of purple hair. “She’s gone. Not . . . dead. Just gone.”

Heather thought about the blinding flash of light that had swallowed the train as it had thundered across the bridge. Gone where?

“I don’t know where,” Gwen said, as if answering her silent question.

The elevator made a soft ping sound and the doors slid open, admitting a rush of incense-sweet air. Gwen and Heather exchanged glances and stepped hesitantly out into the dim elevator lobby. There was nobody there, and the place was as silent as the grave. Through twenty-five-foot-tall windows, they could see the sweeping vistas of the city lights spilling out into the distance, but all the lights in the Weather Room were turned down low. Most of the illumination came from colored spotlights, artfully hidden behind panels of fabric that hung from the high ceiling. White couches were scattered everywhere, draped with crimson throws, grouped around low tables holding large, shallow silver bowls filled with rotted fruit. The sickly stench of decaying pomegranates and moldy, fermenting bunches of grapes was overwhelming, and Heather wanted to gag. There were razor-sharp silver sickle-shaped blades hanging suspended from the black branches of leafless olive trees scattered around the room in white marble planters. Bunches of barley stalks hung upside down, tied to marble pillars with wide white ribbons like festive garlands. Heather reached out to touch one of the feathery stalks, but Gwen grabbed her hand, pointing to a grayish, sickly-looking growth on the barley that Heather hadn’t noticed.

“Ergot,” Gwen said. “It’s a fungus. And it’s super toxic. In ancient Europe they called it Tooth of the Wolf.”

“What’s it doing here?” Heather asked, drawing back in revulsion.

“It’s also a powerful hallucinogenic. Sometimes the priests or priestesses would give it to sacrificial victims before ritually killing them—to put them into some kind of mystic trance or something, I think.”

“That’s delightful.”

Maybe Gwen wasn’t overestimating the amount of danger Roth was really in, Heather thought. If he was even there. The hall felt deserted. . . .

“It’s also widely thought to have been a key ingredient in kykeon, a concoction specially prepared for rites performed by participants in the Eleusinian mysteries.”

Daria’s little cult, Heather thought, her blood running cold.

“I guess we’re in the right place, then.”

“Sure. We are. But where’s everybody else?” Gwen said, looking around. “The guard downstairs said that a bunch of other guests were already here.”

Heather shrugged and walked cautiously out into the main room. The small hairs on the back of her neck rose, and she felt as though someone was watching them, even though the place was empty and echoing. The only movement came from the billowing of more white draperies at the far end of the room, where a door leading out onto the north-facing private terrace stood wide open. Heather nodded at the door, and the girls moved silently over to the exit and out onto the terrace.

The space was empty and unadorned except for a massive slab of what looked like carved black granite, table-high, supported by two stone plinths and flanked by a pair of freestanding fountains that burbled away in the corners of the terrace, the water falling musically, hypnotically, from the eyes of weeping stone maidens into marble pools.

“Oh no . . .” Gwen went pale. Paler. If that was even possible. “Look at the altar.”