Descendant

Roth had been tall for his age, serious, with dark eyes and long-fingered hands. Hands that, in Mason’s vision, he pressed tightly over his baby sister’s face, sealing up her mouth and nose so that she couldn’t breathe. Mason couldn’t see her own young face. She didn’t know if the little girl with the long, dark braids had ever even awoken from the exhausted and hungry sleep she’d fallen into after being trapped for days in the abandoned shed. She couldn’t remember.

She couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t change the past.

Roth . . . No . . .

In the vision, her brother’s eyes were dark, empty. Lightless, except for the flickering threads of silvery-gray light twisting in their depths. He had no idea what he was doing in that moment—that much was clear—and Mason understood suddenly that somehow, the wolf tooth Gwen had made a present of had given Daria power over Roth. And she had used that power to make him murder his own sister.

Mason Starling had died that day.

That Roth hadn’t been acting under his own power—hadn’t even known he’d done the horrid deed—did not alter that reality. Neither did the fact that Mason had somehow come back from the dead. From that moment on, Roth was blood cursed.

And now all of Manhattan would feel the effects of that curse.

Daria Aristarchos would see to that.

Mason heard herself howl with rage, and the vision shattered.

Cal stood there, shocked and unsure of what was going on. One moment, Mason had gone rigid and still— almost as if she was being electrocuted—and the next she was screaming with anguish. Behind Mason, Cal saw Fennrys lunge forward to get to her, loosening the long dagger he carried in a sheath at his hip. Cal knew perfectly well that Fennrys would use it without hesitation if the situation went any further south than it already had. Fenn gripped Mason around her upper arm, but she shrugged him off violently and advanced on Daria.

Cal’s mother had kicked one hell of a hornet’s nest.

Oh god . . . What has she done?

“How could you?” The sound of Mason’s voice was the sound of a heart tearing to pieces. Her face was pale and twisted with anguish, and her hand had dropped to the sword hilt at her side.

Cal’s blood turned to ice as he suddenly remembered something Rafe had said on the night they crossed the Hell Gate. Roth . . . your sister died, the ancient god had said. But Roth had been just as shocked as any of them. Only, if Mason’s brother was the one on the altar, then—

“You . . . vicious . . . bitch!”

Mason took another lurching step toward Cal’s mother.

“We were children.”

Cal felt those words like a punch in the stomach. He’d always understood that his mother had a cold, calculating streak. That she could be ruthless when it came to getting what she wanted. But he’d never imagined that she could have done something like what Mason was clearly accusing her of. And yet he knew, in that instant, that she had.

Mason yanked the swept-hilt rapier half out its sheath, and the air of the terrace suddenly blazed with crimson light. Mason’s face, contorted with rage, seemed lit from within.

“Mase!” Fennrys cried out.

Cal realized that the angry, deep crimson glow surrounding Mason didn’t seem to be shining on her, but emanating from her.

“Mase—no!”

She drew her sword the rest of the way, and suddenly bloodred light flared on the terrace like the blaze of a funeral pyre. Forks of lightning arced overhead, and in that flash of stark illumination, Cal saw Fennrys surge forward, drawing the long dagger from its sheath and slashing the blade through the air. Slashing at Mason.

Before he could think, Cal reacted instinctively to protect her.

The water from the nearest fountain suddenly leaped through the air into his outstretched hand. He felt the water hit his skin as if it was electrified, and the power that had coursed, untapped, through his blood since the day he was born shaped it to his will. A sea god’s will. The formless liquid solidified in his hand, turning hard and shining as forged steel. And as sharp.

In front of him Fennrys’s blade flashed in the red light.

Cal reacted.

And it was only after, when the moment of confusion passed, that Cal understood exactly what had happened. That Fennrys wasn’t trying to hurt Mason. He wasn’t trying to kill her.

He was trying to save her.

Fennrys would have let her do it.

He saw what had been done to Mason’s brother, and he understood in that moment exactly what Daria Aristarchos was responsible for. And he simply couldn’t bring himself to intervene on her behalf. What would happen next would be Mason’s call. It was her right.

But something . . . the light . . . it was terribly wrong.

“Mase!” he cried out, alarm bells going off in his head.

As she drew the blade of her sword, Fennrys caught a sudden, clear glimpse of the jewel at the center of the baldric she wore. The one he’d had custom made, set with a blue stone that he’d chosen specifically to match the color of her eyes . . .

The stone was bloodred.

It glowed violently as if it was on fire . . . an angry shade of crimson exactly the same color as the iron head of the spear of Odin had glowed. Fennrys cursed himself a thousand times for being so fatally stupid. No wonder Heimdall had been so quick to let them leave Valhalla without the Odin spear. No wonder he’d waited outside the hall of Asgard—where Mason had left her sword in the weapons pile at the doors of the feast hall. Whether she’d taken the spear from inside the hall or not, the real spear—cast with a shape-shifting glamour to look like Mason’s rapier—would go home with her as well when she retrieved it from the pile. And the first time she drew the weapon, it would transform her into a Valkyrie.

Heimdall had planned the whole thing from the beginning.

How could Fennrys have been so blind?

“Mase—no!”

His brain screaming denial, Fenn lunged and drew his own blade, sweeping it in a downward arc, aiming to shatter the rapier while it was still in its sheath. Before Mason sealed her fate, and the fate of the world. Before she became a chooser of the slain.

But the weapon flew from his hand in a wild, off-kilter trajectory.

His entire body arced backward in sudden, shocked rigidity. Immobile . . .

The Fennrys Wolf looked down to see two elegantly tapered razor-sharp points of a trident protruding from the muscles of his chest and shoulder. It was the same shoulder he’d already been both stabbed and shot in.

I guess third time’s the charm, he thought, with shocked detachment.

The third tine of Cal’s trident had missed piercing his flesh and just sliced along the outside of his rib cage, but two was enough. Especially when Fennrys knew—could feel—that one prong had pierced his lung, and maybe, just maybe, the other had grazed his heart. The heart that belonged to the girl who stood before him clothed suddenly, head to toe, in shimmering silver armor. A winged helmet shadowed her brow above her sapphire-blue eyes. And there was a coal-black raven perched upon the blade of the Odin spear held tightly in her hand.

Fennrys felt his legs give out beneath him and suddenly Rafe was there, catching him, easing him down onto the cool, hard surface of the terrace. Mason watched from above, her expression detached, remote. Goddesslike. But then a tiny shadow of a frown ticked between her brows.

“This is not right,” she murmured softly as she sank to her knees beside him.

The breath bubbling in his lungs was warm and wet with blood.

“I am the chooser of the slain. . . .”

She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“I did not choose this.”