Descendant

world.

No way.

Her hand tightened reflexively on the grip of her sword.

“Look,” she said, the crackle of barely leashed anger suffusing her words. “The Odin spear is back in Asgard. I’m not. Even if I was, knowing what I know now, do you think I’d actually go within a mile of that thing? So if there’s no chance of me becoming a Valkyrie, then there’s no reason for your crazy ex-wife to keep up with this blood magick Miasma crap. I say we find a way to get that message across to her. In the most forceful way possible. And then . . . we do the same with my dad.”

“She’s got a point,” Douglas said to the others. He smoothed his beard, thoughtful, and turned to his son. “Mason might also be the only person who can stop her father. And I think that you are definitely the only one who can stop your mother.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Cal frowned. “Even if we could somehow get to her, she’s not going to listen to me —”

“Cal . . . you’re the reason she’s doing this.” Douglas leaned forward in his wheelchair. “Don’t you get that? The reason she’s finally gone to this extreme. There have been other times in the past when she could have made a move against Gunnar—broken the Gosforth pact—but she held the peace. Now she thinks she’s got nothing to lose because she thinks you’re dead.”

Cal snorted, but there was a moment of genuine pain that flashed across his face as he said, “Like she cares.”

Douglas shook his head and looked away. “More than you know. Clearly. I wish . . .” He trailed away into a silence that stretched out between father and son. “Look. I know Daria. It’s only when she’s lost something that matters to her that she goes off the rails. And you’re the thing that matters to her most. But if you can get to her . . . If she actually sees with her own eyes that you’re all right . . . you might be able to talk some sense into her.”

“Except that we’re out here, she’s in there,” Toby pointed out.

Mason frowned, thinking for a moment of everything that had just been discussed. It was a lot to take in, and she still wasn’t entirely certain that she understood half of it. But the thing she knew was that she needed to get into the city to stop Daria, and she needed to see her father. Even if she didn’t have the faintest idea what she was going to happen when she saw him.

“Okay,” she said to Cal’s father. “Explain to me this whole Miasma thing. What, exactly, does it do?”

“The Miasma is also called the Death Sleep,” he said. “In the Middle Ages, a watered-down version of the concept found its way into fairy tales like ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ where a whole kingdom is isolated by an impenetrable barrier and cast into a magickal slumber. In more modern times, the word ‘miasma’ came to mean an airborne sickness or plague. Again—something that would require isolation.” Douglas had a storyteller’s voice, and it was easy to think that the tale he was telling was just that. A story. A fairy tale. “In reality, it’s an ancient magick that was traditionally dished out by the gods, through their mortal agents—their priestesses and priests: a punishment that would afflict an entire tribe or a kingdom—turn them into sleepers—most often as a consequence of the wrongdoings of its kings and queens, when one of them had committed an unforgivable crime. A blood crime usually. The murder of a relative was one thing that drew down the Miasma.”

“Okay . . . so that would be the whole ‘kin killer’ thing you mentioned,” Mason said, holding up a hand, concentrating hard on following the logic of the magick. “Are you saying that Cal’s mom killed a family member?”

Cal was frowning deeply, and Mason knew he was probably wondering the exact same thing.

What a horrible thing to think about someone that you love, she thought.

But Douglas shook his head. “No,” he said. “Daria isn’t the one being cursed— she’s doing the cursing—using some poor wretch who has murdered kin as the engine of her curse. New York City is a big place full of a lot of people, and some of them, I’m sure, have done some very bad things. She’d found one who’s done the worst thing.”

“What do you mean ‘poor wretch’?” Mason scoffed. “Someone murders a family member, I say they deserve whatever’s coming to them.”

“Maybe.” Douglas shrugged. “Maybe not. I prefer not to judge unless I know all the facts.”

Mason felt her cheeks grow warm at the subtle rebuke. Okay, sure. That had been pretty judgmental. Still, she wondered if she could be forgiving under circumstances like that. . . .

“Whatever the circumstances, as Toby said, this is blood magick, and blood magick is the most powerful there is. What Daria is doing is using a kin killer as a focus for the curse, her haruspex as the instrument to implement it, and the raging magick spill in the waters around Manhattan to fuel it,” Rafe explained.

Mason shuddered. “That’s horrible.”

“That’s Mom.”

Mason looked over at Cal. The water from the glass now hovered in front of him like a crystal globe, rotating slowly.

“The circumstances are stacked up pretty overwhelmingly in Daria’s favor at the moment—it’s like a mystical ‘perfect storm’—and I don’t doubt she’ll be able to keep the damned thing going as long as she keeps her kin killer alive. She’ll have Gunnar trapped like a rat on the island for as long as she needs to find him and take him down. And you can bet he’ll put up a hell of a fight, especially now that he’s had the means to bring about Ragnarok just beyond the tips of his fingers. Whatever forces he has mustered and hers will tear the city to shreds before they’re done if we don’t stop them.”

“So, all we have to do is keep your mom from wrecking the city, and my dad from wrecking . . . everything else,” Mason said. “We have some truly screwed-up parents.” She rolled an eye at Douglas. “Present company excluded. I guess.”

Cal’s father nodded graciously in reply.

“What would happen to us?” she asked him, waving a hand in the general direction of the fog-shrouded city on the island. “In there? Would we be just as useless as all the rest of those . . . sleepers?”

Douglas smiled at her. “Well . . . as I said. It’s called the Death Sleep. But together in this room, we have a god of death, a couple of kids who’ve already proven they can walk beyond the walls of death, my son—whose blood makes him an immortal, so no death there—and . . . well, and then there’s Toby. Who can handle himself better than most, even under conditions such as these, I would think.”

Mason turned and stared at Toby, who avoided making eye contact. He just shrugged and muttered something about “Yeah . . . perfectly able to take care of myself in a Miasma . . . been there, done that,” and Mason decided that, when time allowed, she was going to have to make a point of sitting down and having a long, informative chat with her fencing instructor. Whoever—or whatever—he really was.

“The Miasma was created by gods, and they’re not stupid,” Douglas continued. “The Death Sleep was designed to act on human physiology, human weakness. It doesn’t affect the divine, or the semidivine. But the real problem would be getting past the Miasma’s outer wall. Passing through the barrier, even for you lot, would still be like walking through your worst nightmare. It would probably render you all temporarily psychotic, which is why I didn’t recommend it.” He shrugged. “But . . . if you could somehow get past that, then no, I don’t think you’d have too much of a problem with the Miasma itself. The only things still sentient in Manhattan will be anything with magickal protection . . . or magickal blood.”

“So at least we’d have a bit of backup with my jackals,” Rafe said.

“Jackals? You mean those wolves you were hanging around with in the park?” Mason asked.

“A jackal is a wolf,” Rafe said drily. “My pack have the added benefit of also being werewolves, thanks to me. They come in pretty handy in a fight.”

“And the Miasma doesn’t affect them, either?” Fennrys asked Rafe.

“Werewolf physiology is supernaturally enhanced.” The god shrugged. “My magick makes those kids the next best thing to unkillable—you know . . . like werewolves.”

“What’s the downside?” Mason asked warily.

“They’re werewolves, Mason.” Rafe turned a flat glare on her. “Monsters.”