Descendant

And then the three of them were off running again. She could sense, without even turning around, the frosted hostility coming off Cal as he pounded down the street beside her, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. The wolves and the others kept the centaurs off their tails. All Mason and Cal had to do was make it to the Plaza. So they ran. Past Bryant Park and turning up a car-snarled Avenue of the Americas, dodging the strafing runs the centaurs would make every time they managed to evade the others. At the next corner, though, the avenue became completely impassable, with stalled cars and a crashed tour bus.

Cal turned and shouted, “This way!” and took the lead.

He led them up West Forty-Ninth Street and through the promenade in front of the Plaza’s Channel Gardens, with its statues of sea gods perched on the backs of dolphins, fountaining water into the long step-pools that flowed prettily through the narrow urban park. They pounded past the statue of Prometheus and kept running until they made it back out onto Fiftieth Street, heading toward 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

Once inside, Cal led them through the halls and down to the entrance of the Top of the Rock attraction—a circular lobby that showcased a hanging art installation made up of hundreds of suspended Swarovski crystals that shattered the light into thousands of tiny rainbows and reminded Mason uncomfortably of the bridge to Asgard. Her footsteps faltered as she stared up at it, and suddenly, the crystals began to sway and bounce, tinkling against one another in a musical protest as the floor beneath Mason’s feet shuddered and rumbled.

She exchanged a glance with Fennrys and Cal.

“Tremors? Like we weren’t having enough fun already?” she said.

“Sure. What’s a Ragnarok without a few good old-fashioned earthquakes?” Fennrys muttered.

“No. No Ragnarok.”

Mason stomped a foot on the floor, only half jokingly. The shuddering stopped, and she shot Fennrys a look. Then she turned and headed toward the security checkpoint. There were several uniformed guides slumped over the ticket desk or collapsed in heaps on the floor. One guy was pacing in a slow circle, a look of dull confusion on his face.

“We’ll need a key card to operate the elevators,” Cal called after her. “He’s probably got one on him.”

Mason walked up to him and reached out gingerly, pulling an elevator key card out of the pocket of his jacket. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Thanks, uh”—Mason read his name tag—“Paulo. I’ll bring this right back.”

I hope.

Paulo murmured and twitched a bit, and a thin line of drool threaded from the corner of his mouth as he mumbled something about “enjoy the ride.” Mason and the others stepped past him and hurried on through the attraction toward the elevators.

She hesitated as the doors slid open. “Should we wait for the others?”

“I don’t think we have the luxury of time,” Cal said quietly. “The sooner my mom knows I’m alive, maybe the faster we can stop this madness.”

Mason looked up at him. The coldness was gone from his gaze, and he just looked sad and resolved. She almost couldn’t imagine what it must feel like for him to know his mother was behind all the chaos and hurt. But then she remembered that her father was equally to blame, and she realized she knew exactly how he felt. She reached out a hand and squeezed his arm, and he flashed her a brief smile before stepping through the doors. Mason and Fennrys followed.

Just as the doors were closing, Rafe’s manicured hand stopped them, and the Egyptian god squeezed through the gap.

“Room for one more?” he asked, panting a little from exertion.

“Sure,” Cal said. “Never know when a god might come in handy.”

“The others?” Fennrys asked.

“Fine,” Rafe said. “Fighting. They’ll follow us up when they can.”

Mason’s stomach lurched as the Top of the Rock light show began in the elevator shaft, shimmering and flashing above the transparent ceiling of the cab as it began its swift ascent up to the sixty-seventh floor. She knew it wasn’t just the motion or the swirling colors that were making her queasy. What they were about to face wasn’t something that she had ever thought was even possible. But then, a few weeks ago, none of the things she had experienced recently had, to her mind, been possible. She felt Fennrys’s hand rest lightly on her back for a moment, between her shoulder blades. Heat radiated out from his palm and seemed to sink through her skin to wrap her heart with comforting warmth. Whatever they were about to face, she could handle it. With Fenn at her side, she could face anything.

“Or maybe not . . . ,” she murmured when the elevator doors opened and they stepped out into the dim-lit corridor to peer carefully around the corner of the marble wall. The reception area that led to the soaring hall of the Weather Room beyond looked as if it had been set-dressed to resemble an ancient Greek temple.

Rafe’s nostrils flared, and he closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, Mason shot him a questioning look and a corner of his mouth lifted in a slightly feral grin.

“I miss this kind of thing,” he said in a whisper. “People once worshipped me the same way. It’s not something you really forget.”

No, Mason supposed, it probably wasn’t. Still, something about the way he’d cast his gaze longingly around the elaborately decorated room with its drapes and couches and displays of putrefied fruit made her uneasy. It obviously made Fennrys nervous, too.

He took a step toward the god and said quietly, “Is this going to be a problem? Because if you think you’re in any danger of . . . falling off the wagon or whatever the godly equivalent of that is, then maybe you should wait downstairs.”

Rafe locked eyes with Fennrys for a long moment.

“We’re here to try and stop the end of the world you’ve become so fond of, remember?” Fenn said with an edge of steel in his voice. “The club, the clothes, the redheaded jazz flute player?”

Rafe blinked rapidly and seemed to shake off the effects of Daria’s temple. His gaze cleared and the sharp, sardonic sparkle returned to his eyes. He nodded. “A moment of nostalgia. Followed by the clarity of our immediate situation. Indulge an old god for that moment.”

“By all means. You good to go now?”

“Hell yes. Let’s put an end to this silliness, shall we?”

In an instant, Rafe’s form blurred, shifted, and transformed into his man-god shape. And that was something Mason was beginning to find surprisingly reassuring—they had a god on their side. Two gods, if you counted Cal’s semidivinity. What did Daria Aristarchos have?

Some kind of lame-ass gut-reading sorceress and a murderer.

The reception room, dimly illuminated by hidden spotlights, was empty, but they heard the murmur of voices, chanting, coming from beyond. Mason carefully drew back the edge of one of the drapes and saw a small sea of white-robed Eleusinian devotees. They all stood with their backs to her, absorbed in whatever was taking place outside on a glass-enclosed terrace at the far end of the room. The hoods on the robes of the celebrants were down, and Mason caught glimpses of the sides of faces. Some of them were familiar.

With a shock, she realized that these were just normal people. She looked over at Cal and saw that he had gone a bit pale. Some of the celebrants were the parents of their schoolmates at Gosforth. Mason vaguely recognized one or two faces from event nights and academy open houses. These weren’t draugr. They weren’t monsters. Mason couldn’t hurt them. She certainly couldn’t kill them. Even though somewhere in that room, if Douglas Muir was to be believed, there was a killer. Someone who’d not just killed, but killed family. A murderer . . . a kin slayer. The ultimate taboo. The root of the most horrific blood curses.

Who? she wondered.

She knew that Fennrys had expected that there would be violence involved in what they had to do. He’d warned her about it before they’d left the island, and she’d readily accepted that fact. She remembered, at the time, that she’d even felt a sharp, electric thrill at the thought of an actual fight. . . .

She’d felt it again a moment ago.

But then she’d recognized faces, and that thrill was doused like a snuffed candle flame. She took her hand from her rapier hilt and left the sword hanging, sheathed at her side. Words first, Mason.

Talking and running always trumped fighting.