Descendant

The blade was a last resort.

She looked around for a way to get to the head of the ritual without having to actually fight her way through anyone and saw that, where the long white panels of silky fabric hung from the ceiling to give the room its exotic, tentlike feel, there were colored spotlights placed on the floor behind the panels. The lights pointed upward, drenching the shimmering cloth in cycling swaths of purple and red and blue. Blood colors. Bruise colors. The decorative arrangement left a narrow gap between the Weather Room’s walls and the cloth, and it provided an unobstructed causeway, bypassing the crowd of Eleusinians and ending right at the doors that led out onto the terrace at the far end of the reception space.

Mason tugged on Fennrys’s arm and pointed at the passage. He nodded and turned to Rafe, who indicated he would circle around and do the same thing on the other side of the room. And then Mason looked at Cal. Their eyes locked. She gestured for him to follow her. But he just smiled grimly, and then turned and headed straight for the crowd of his mother’s devotees.

XXII

Calum ignored the shocked look on Mason’s face as he turned and stalked purposefully through the curtains and down toward the end of the room. As the white-clad people turned to see who had disrupted the proceedings, they all recognized him and stepped back out of his way, clearing a path to the main event. In his peripheral vision he could see shadows moving behind the cloth walls and knew it was his companions racing to flank him. That was fine. They could do an end run if they wanted. Cal was tired of avoiding. He was tired of negotiating.

“Mother!” he shouted, and his voice rang off the marble columns and high ceiling of the room. “You have to stop this. Now!”

Out on the terrace, Cal saw the tall, elegant figure of his mother stiffen and turn. Her high, sculpted cheekbones were suffused with a hectic flush of color, and her eyes were dilated to black, glittering pits. She looked as if she was caught in the throes of stark madness, and she held a bloody, sickle-shaped blade in her hand. Cal shuddered inwardly, and his steps faltered.

Then he saw where the blood on the blade had come from.

Mason’s brother.

Roth Starling lay sprawled on top of a black stone altar. There were long, shallow gashes on both his arms and chest, and his face was covered in a sheen of sweat and—more likely than not—tears, fallen from the eyes of the thin, pale, purple-haired girl who stood hovering over him. It took a moment for Cal to recognize Gwen Littlefield, her face distorted in a horrifying, silent scream, and tears ran in rivers down her face as she stood frozen between two marble fountains, carved in the shapes of goddesses, that wept along with her. Indeed, the only sound on the terrace in the silence after Cal’s cry was the musical splashing of the fountains . . . and the ragged weeping of the girl.

Then he heard a gasp.

Cal scanned the terrace and saw Heather Palmerston on her knees in the corner of the terrace, hands tied together with a torn strip of white cloth, her pretty eyes wide and staring at him. He saw disbelief in them and realized that Heather had probably spent the last few days thinking he was dead. He saw the spark of hope flaring in the depths of her gaze and felt a searing stab of guilt in his chest. He had felt so damned sorry for Heather ever since she’d broken up with him. But none of this was his fault. . . . He shoved all thoughts of the reason why Heather had left him from his mind. He knew what he had to do, and he knew who he was doing it for.

“Mother!” Cal shouted again, turning back to where Daria Aristarchos stood frozen.

“What kind of trick is this?” she hissed, her eyes wide and rolling.

“It’s not a trick. I’m not dead. I know you thought I was, but I’m not. Mom . . . please. Listen to me.” He took a step forward, and his mother’s fingers tightened on the hilt of the knife. “You have to stop what you’re doing. I’m okay. I’m alive and everything’s going to be okay. There’s not going to be any Ragnarok. The world’s not going to end. All right? I promise. But you have to—”

“Roth!”

The sudden cry tore from Mason’s throat as she reached the terrace. Cal turned to see her staring, aghast, at her beloved older brother, and then saw her gaze ricochet from Roth to his mother. He thought he saw Mason’s eyes flash red.

“What have you done to him?” she cried.

Mason sucked in a breath as a cold grin appeared on Daria Aristarchos’s face. The answer to her question became suddenly, horrifyingly obvious. Daria wanted to take down Gunnar Starling. She’d wanted to do that for a very long time. And she wanted to use his son to do it.

But how . . .

The muscles on either side of Roth’s neck stood out, taut, like steel cables as he lay on the altar, limbs thrashing heavily, and his head lolling from side to side. His booted feet kicked at the stone beneath them and his T-shirt was soaked with sweat. Crimson flowed from long, shallow cuts on the insides of both his arms, seeping down into channels cut in the black stone altar, which seemed as if it was generating the sickly gray, shimmering mist that drift out from the terrace, flowing like a ghost waterfall down the sides of the building and into the streets of the unsuspecting city, far below. The Miasma.

I don’t understand. . . .

A slender, pale girl, her eyes red and weeping beneath a shock of purple hair, stood above Mason’s brother, her face frozen in a mask of horror and the palms of her hands pressed flat into the blood that pooled on the altar surface.

Roth’s blood.

“Roth . . . ?” Mason whispered, aghast.

His head rolled on the granite slab, and his gaze met hers. His pupils were so dilated that there was no color to his eyes. They looked as black as the polished stone beneath him. “Mase . . .” His voice broke on her name. “I’m so sorry. . . .”

And in that moment, Mason felt herself falling into the abyss of that gaze.

She saw what had happened, so long ago, that led to this moment.

She saw everything.

Caught in the circle of Roth’s black, unblinking stare, Mason went instantly numb, head to foot. His gaze bored into her, and it was as if a floodgate opened from his mind to hers. The vision crashed over her, a memory of the past. Mason suddenly saw young Roth Starling—very young, ten or eleven years old maybe—the Roth she remembered from her childhood, standing in dappled sunlight beneath an old oak tree.

He’d been her big, strong, handsome brother, and she had loved him.

And so had the awkward, shy little girl who had sometimes joined them when they’d played in the quad at Gosforth. The daughter of a cook, one of Daria Aristarchos’s household staff. Not a privileged, super-rich kid like all the others at Gos. Just a regular girl . . .

A girl named Gwen.

Mason had liked Gwen. So had Roth, she remembered.

In the vision, Mason saw him wearing a gift Gwen had given him—a childish, homemade charm—made out of a carved wolf’s tooth strung on a braided piece of ratty purple yarn. Mason remembered the day Gwen had shyly tied it around his neck. She’d been given it, Gwen had told Roth, by the nice lady her mom worked for. The one who’d taken care of Gwen when she’d been so sick with seizures and fevered hallucinations. . . . The lady who’d gotten her a scholarship at Gosforth. Daria Aristarchos.

In the vision, the scene shifted, but Mason could still clearly make out the cross-hatched pattern carved on the wolf tooth charm—it looked like the braided seed heads of the barley stalks hanging all around her on the Weather Room’s marble pillars. The markings on the tooth were glowing faintly, flickering with the same silvery- gray light that filled young Roth’s gaze as he stepped through a cramped, darkened doorway . . . into a shadowed and cobwebby old garden shed, where a tiny, dark-haired figure lay curled up on a bench.