Descendant

wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, beyond the fact that she had been kidnapped, along with Mason Starling—a fellow student at Gosforth who had recently become a friend—by Mason’s complete jerk-ass tool of a brother, Rory, and a meathead quarterback from the Columbia U football team named Taggert Overlea.

Heather still had no idea why she and Mason had been kidnapped. At the moment, all she cared about was getting out of the train car alive. Because she’d gotten the distinct impression over the last hour or so that whatever it was that was going on, it went way beyond college fraternity prank territory and had crossed into deadly serious. The danger had been obvious even before Cal had . . . before he . . .

Heather covered her mouth in silent agony.

Cal’s gone.

The thought made her feel like she’d been punched in the stomach. Mason, too, was gone, although whether she was alive or dead, Heather had no clue. She hoped like hell that she was okay at least. Far away from this madness and okay.

She tried to think logically through the series of events as they had happened. Heather hadn’t been competing that night in the Nationals fencing trials and hadn’t really felt like going. She knew Cal would be there to watch Mason compete, and every time she saw Cal those days, the experience invariably left her feeling drained and just plain weary. He seemed to actually get off on torturing himself over Mason, and now that Mason and Heather had become friends, Heather couldn’t stand the drama.

So she’d actually been studying that night in the dorm common lounge, curled up in an easy chair and reading through her biology notes. The academy had felt strangely deserted, but Heather had also felt a kind of electricity in the air—like another thunderstorm was on its way. It had made her restless.

And then Gwen had shown up.

A few years older than Heather, Gwendolyn Littlefield was slight and almost elfin, a girl with spiky purple hair and a startlingly pretty face. She’d stepped furtively into the common room, her eyes wide and her pupils so dilated that Heather had wondered aloud if she was stoned or something.

Gwen assured her she was not.

Then she’d told Heather her name.

Gwen Littlefield was a notorious figure around campus. The first student—the only one—to ever be kicked out of Gosforth. She’d been a few years ahead of Heather, who, even though she’d heard the stories at the time, hadn’t paid much attention and so would have been hard-pressed to pick Gwen out of a police lineup—even without the bright purple dye job.

The academy administration had tried to keep the matter quiet at the time, but it had been a little hard to —especially when the subject in question had run howling like a maniac through the halls of the school one day, frantically predicting the demise of the captain of the rowing team . . . who’d then drowned in an apparent tragic accident.

The very next day.

Last night, Gwen had told Heather that the rowing incident hadn’t been a coincidence. Gwen could actually glimpse into the future. And what she’d seen . . . had been terrible.

“Why are you telling me this?” Heather had asked her. “What does this have to do with me?”

“It has very little to do with you,” Gwen had answered. “It has everything to do with your friend Mason.”

She then proceeded to tell Heather that Mason was in a world of trouble. She had wanted to warn Mason directly, but apparently, Gwen’s precognitive abilities were occasionally a little hazy on details—she had no idea where to even begin to look for her. But Heather did. After a moment, the girls had decided that it would be far better, and require much less explanation as to why Gwen had suddenly reappeared, if Heather was the one to relay the warning to Mason.

And so that’s what she’d done.

Heather had gone to find Mason Starling and warn her that she was in grave, possibly mortal, danger. As a by-product of Gwen Littlefield’s grim prediction, Heather now found herself in that exact same situation. She wondered if Gwen hadn’t just managed to turn her into some kind of instrument of a self- fulfilling prophecy in an attempt to avoid the very same fate: if Heather hadn’t delayed Mason when she was leaving the Columbia U gym, maybe Rory and Tag wouldn’t have caught up with her.

Well, it’s pretty useless to speculate on that now, isn’t it?

Heather had found Mason. She’d delayed Mason’s departure by those precious few moments. And one of the end results was that the next thing Heather knew, she was waking up with a sore jaw in a cargo transport compartment, with Taggert Overlea half carrying her through to the passenger car of an opulent, obviously privately owned train. . . .

And she hadn’t seen Mason again.

She’d gathered, from ensuing events, that somehow Mason had ended up on the top of one of the train cars—presumably in an attempt to escape the cruel trap her horrible brother had snared her in—and then that the guy who called himself the Fennrys Wolf and Calum Aristarchos had appeared out of nowhere on Harleys, doing their damnedest to ride to Mason’s rescue. With, it became apparent, limited success. From inside the train, Heather had watched Fennrys climb from the back of the bike Cal was driving onto the train. She’d been a helpless observer, trapped behind a pane of glass as Cal’s bike had wobbled treacherously and then pitched him off.

She closed her eyes at the memory of him cartwheeling into the air . . . falling down toward the unforgiving waters of the East River far below. Just like that, in a flash, Calum was gone. And with him, Heather’s broken heart.

In the wake of Cal’s plunge into darkness had come a sudden, blinding brightness. It had lit up the interior of the train car like a blazing sun, rainbow colors building to coruscating whiteness. The air in the cabin had crackled with lightning-storm energy, and time had seemed to slow and stretch. . . .

Then everything went dark.

Once Heather had been able to see again, the world had returned to normalcy. The train chugged across to Long Island and down the ramp that curved away to the south. Framed by the lounge car’s picture window, the elegant, sweeping bow curve of the Hell Gate Bridge grew smaller behind them.

And then, Heather recalled, the bridge exploded.

When the center section of the massive iron span blew apart, the train had been far enough away not to derail. The tracks had shuddered and bucked, and Heather had screamed and fallen to the floor, jarred by the shock-wave impact.

Moments later, Rory had come staggering back into the passenger compartment, beaten and bloodied, his arm a twisted wreck and his face pummeled. He’d collapsed on the floor across from Heather, whimpering in agony, as the train had shunted off a main track and entered the mouth of a tunnel, slowing to a stop in a dimly lit, rock-walled cavern somewhere beneath Queens. And only a few moments after that, the door had slid open once again, and Gunnar Starling had stepped inside.

Now Heather Palmerston—rich, privileged, beautiful, never one to back down from anything or anybody— cowered in a corner, afraid for her life. She watched, scarcely daring to breathe, as Rory climbed awkwardly to his feet and stood swaying, his arm hanging useless, bloodied, bent in places where arms don’t bend.

“What happened?” Gunnar asked, all his attention focused, for the moment, on his son. “Where is Rothgar?”

Heather wondered fleetingly what Mason’s hottie older brother Roth had to do with this whole situation. As far as she knew, he wasn’t on the train. She hadn’t seen him anywhere and hoped, just for the sake of her own opinion of him, that he wasn’t involved in this insanity.

“And where is the Fennrys Wolf?” Gunnar continued. “Not in Asgard, I take it.”

Asgard? Heather thought, her thoughts a tangle of disbelief. He’s not serious. That’s gotta be a code word or something. Or, like, the name of a nightclub. Or a high-tech business park. Or . . .

Or was it?

Maybe when Gunnar Starling said “Asgard,” he actually meant . . . Asgard.

Every year, one of the mandatory humanities courses for all students at Gosforth Academy was a comparative history of world mythologies. The faculty had always taken it seriously, which was why Heather had to