Descendant (24 page)

“Do you have any idea where?” Heather asked.

“Somewhere . . . high up.” Gwen opened her eyes and shook her head. “In the vision, I could
feel
it when another tremor hits—it’s bigger than any of the ones we’ve had so far—and I felt as if I was surrounded by glass walls and marble columns, almost like a palace or a temple, and everything was swaying. And I was afraid that I’d fall right through the glass and out into the sky. But . . . I don’t know exactly where I was. I think I could see the park—I mean, there were a lot of trees in the far distance, beyond tall buildings. . . .”

“Right.” Heather thought for a moment.

Fall into the sky . . .

The park . . .

She knew where Roth was.

Reaching up, Heather suddenly yanked the leaden bolt out of Cal’s picture. She felt a corresponding twisting in her own heart at the sight of the hole it left behind. She turned and saw that Gwen was staring at the stubby little arrow in her hand.

“Is that—”

“I don’t
know
what it is. Not exactly.” She still wasn’t sure she wanted to.

“Who—”

“I don’t exactly know who gave it to me, either.” She moved back over to the bed and picked up the weapon, stuffing both bolts and the crossbow into her shoulder bag. It was the only thing she had that resembled a weapon of any kind, and so she took it. Just in case. “I have some
ideas.”

“You should be careful with that,” Gwen said in a hollow, quiet voice. “Really,
really
careful.”

“Yeah.” Heather offered up a brittle smile. “That’s one of my ideas. Now let’s go. I know where Daria has taken Roth Starling.”

T
he sound of a boat engine drifted over the surface of the water. The moon had disappeared behind a cloud, casting the island into darkness. A rumble of thunder drowned out the engine sounds for a moment, but when it faded, they could clearly hear the growl of an outboard. And it seemed to be coming closer.

“Are you expecting someone?” Fennrys asked Rafe quietly. “Besides Aken?”

The god shook his head. “No. But clearly someone was expecting us.”

Some
ones, Mason thought.
First Cal’s mer-girl, and now this.

She took another step forward, her head cocked to one side as she listened intently. She heard it again. A
voice . . . calling softly, as if its owner didn’t want to be overheard by the wrong party.

The voice was calling Mason’s name.

“Mase,” Fennrys hissed, grabbing her hand and drawing her back behind a scraggly stand of trees as the narrow beam of a small searchlight clicked on from somewhere out on the surface of the water and began to sweep the margins of the beach. Rafe ducked behind a rock and motioned for them to stay hidden.

“Mason?” the voice called out again, and the sweep of the beam swung up and down the shore. The call was quiet, the voice deep, the tone hovering somewhere between wary and hopeful. “Are you there?”

Mason opened her mouth to answer, then paused. She recognized the voice now beyond a shadow of a doubt. But while she trusted her ears to identify the source, she didn’t necessarily trust the source itself. Heimdall masquerading as her mother had seen to that. But she definitely recognized those gruff tones. She’d spent far too many hours getting barked at by them on the fencing piste not to.

“
It’s Toby
,” she mouthed to Fennrys silently.

“
Maybe
,” he mouthed back, equally wary.

“Mason . . . ,” the voice called out again. “It’s Toby Fortier. If you can hear me, I’m here to help.”

Mason drew a deep breath and glanced back over her shoulder at Fennrys. It was clear he had no more idea than she did what her fencing instructor was doing out in a boat in the middle of the East River at night, off the shores of North Brother Island, looking for her. Fennrys narrowed his eyes and stared hard into the darkness. Mason followed his gaze, and then she saw it: an inflatable type of boat gliding across the water’s surface. She vaguely recalled from a documentary she’d once seen that the boat was called a Zodiac, and it was a preferred mode of transport for marine researchers and Navy SEALs. Then she remembered something that she wasn’t really supposed to know. Toby Fortier used to be a SEAL.

The matte-black rubber craft was almost invisible in the darkness, and so was its pilot—Mason could only just make out a figure behind the handheld search lamp, clothed in black and wearing a black watch cap. She opened her mouth to call out to him, but Fennrys put a hand on her arm and a finger to his lips, gesturing for her to remain silent. Then he stepped around her and walked
out toward the water, his boots crunching loudly on the gravel as he strolled casually, not attempting to hide his presence.

“Mason?” Toby called, and the beam of light swept up from Fennrys’s feet to his face.

Fennrys put a hand up in front of his face to shadow his eyes and squinted into the spotlight. “Evening, Coach,” he said.

“Well,” Toby said, idling the motor. “You are not the first person I expected to find here, I gotta say.”

Fennrys shrugged. “The feeling is strangely mutual.”

Toby cocked his head to one side, and Mason could see the glint of his dark eyes as the moon made a sudden, brief appearance through a hole in the racing clouds. “I thought you were out of commission. What are you doing out here, son?” Toby asked.

“Picnic. You?”

“Boat cruise.”

“I see.” Fennrys paused for a moment and then asked, “What’s your boot size, Coach?”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Boot size. Yours. What is it?” Fennrys glanced over his shoulder to where Mason was peeking out from around the bushes. She had one hand clamped over her mouth to keep from laughing at the way Fennrys had chosen to confirm Toby’s identity. Seeing as how Fenn—who’d appeared out of nowhere on the night of the raging zombie storm without the benefit of clothing or footwear and thus had been obliged to steal Toby’s boots as the fencing master slept—knew
exactly
what size those clodhoppers were.

There was a pause out on the water.

And then the man in the boat chuckled and said, “I wear a twelve wide in combat boots, which you damned well know. Thanks for returning them—next time, run ’em through a shoeshine stand, will you?”

Mason exhaled a sigh of relief.

“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing out here in this boat,” Toby said, and Mason could almost hear the wry smile on his face.

“It had crossed my mind,” Fennrys said.

“You saved my kids the night of that storm.” Toby’s voice was serious and quiet. “You saved me. Me, I don’t
care about so much. But I hate wasted potential, and my fighters are exactly that. They’re also my sacred charges.” Mason could see him shaking his head. “I don’t take particularly well to having my ass kicked by monsters when I’m trying to do my job. And I don’t like having to rely on someone else to kick monster ass back on my behalf. But that doesn’t mean I’m not grateful, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t repay debts. I do.”

“That’s good to know.” Fennrys crossed his arms over his chest. “But you weren’t expecting to find
me
here, Coach. You just said so yourself.”

“That’s true. But I thought you should know that before I tell you what I am doing here. Because that reasoning is something that impacts upon my decisions here.”

“Fair enough.”

“I assume Mason’s with you?”

“I’m right here, Toby,” she said, stepping out from behind the trees and walking up to stand beside Fennrys.

They both heard Toby sigh with relief and murmur, “Thank the gods. . . .”

Mason and Fennrys exchanged a glance at Toby’s particular word choice. Fennrys raised an eyebrow, and Mason shrugged.

“I’m going to beach the Zodiac. You two can climb onboard, and we’ll get out of here.”

“We
three
,” Mason corrected him. “There’s three of us here.”

“Who else is—oh . . .” Toby fell silent as Rafe stalked out of the darkness to stand beside Mason, and the beam from the searchlight illuminated his decidedly inhuman form. Which Toby clearly recognized immediately. “Humble greetings, mighty Lord of Aaru, Protector of the Dead,” he said, with a respectful bow of his head. “I offer myself in service to you.”

“Gee,” Rafe said drily. “Thanks. ’Cause it just so happens I’m fresh out of boatmen.”

Mason and Fennrys exchanged another glance as the fencing master maneuvered the flat-bottomed boat up onto the ragged little beach, and Fennrys helped steady Mason as she climbed into the boat.

“The good news is,” Toby said to Mason as Fennrys handed her off to him, “the fact that you’re still alive is one less thing your father will want to kill me over.”

Mason went stiff and instantly cold at the mention of Gunnar Starling.

“The bad news is,” Toby continued ruefully, “he’ll still want to kill me anyway over what I’m about to do.”

“And that is?” Fennrys asked warily.

“
Not
take you and Mason directly to him. Now get in.”

Fennrys climbed over the side of the boat, followed by Rafe, who shoved them off, and Toby reversed the engine, then pointed the boat downstream and steered westward. No one spoke for a few minutes as they glided across the black expanse of water. Downriver, banks of portable floodlights had been trucked onto the two severed ends of the Hell Gate Bridge, illuminating the wreckage in a wash of white light that rendered the twisted metal girders in stark black silhouette. The whole thing looked like some kind of abstract sculpture and was strangely beautiful.

And they were passing directly beneath it.

There were police and coast guard boats patrolling the waters of the Hell Gate Strait on either side of them and workers clearing debris above, but Toby kept the Zodiac’s engine purring at just barely over an idle, and the little black craft slipped past utterly unnoticed. Of course, that might have had something to do with the fact that Fennrys had, for the duration of the ride, been clutching the iron medallion at his throat and murmuring. Mason figured he was drawing on some of the power of the charm’s Faerie magick to keep them hidden as they swept past the patrolling boats.

A look of understanding had passed between him and Rafe as he’d begun to cast the veiling spell. The ancient god seemed grateful and more than willing to let Fennrys do some of the arcane “heavy lifting.” The trip through the Between, Aken’s death, and the ritual Rafe had performed for him . . . it all seemed to have taken a bit of a toll on the Jackal God. He sat in the bow of the boat, shoulders slumped and head hanging. His dreadlocks swept forward, curtaining his face.

When they were well past the Hell Gate, Fennrys sat back and looked over at Toby, who sat in the stern, steering the Zodiac. “Hey, Coach,” he called out softly. “Earlier, you said you thought I was out of commission. What exactly would have led you to that conclusion?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Toby took a sip from the travel mug that was his constant companion and wiped the corner of
his mouth on the back of his hand. He kept his voice low, and his eyes never left the river in front of them. “Maybe it was the bullet through the shoulder. Or the cartwheel off the train. Or, y’know”—he pointed with the mug—“the bridge exploding while you were still on it.”

“You know all about our little train trip then,” Fennrys said.

“Of course I do.” Toby grunted. “I was
driving
the train.”

Mason stared at Toby, her mouth drifting open. She cast her mind back to the fencing tournament she’d so spectacularly crashed and burned in . . . and tried to remember what Toby had said to her. How he’d dealt with it. And then she remembered . . . Toby hadn’t been there.

“You missed the competition,” she murmured, shaking her head in disbelief that she hadn’t, at the time, even noticed. How screwed up was
that
? “It was for the Nationals and you missed it.”

Toby blinked at her, as if startled by the accusation leveled at him. “I know, Mase . . . I’m sorry. You didn’t get my note?”

She shook her head, mute. That whole evening—
how
long ago had it been now? a few hours? days?—seemed like a kind of fever dream. She’d been so thrown by her confrontation with Calum, by everything, even though she’d thought she’d had a handle on it all. But now, in hindsight, it seemed almost as if the entire thing had been staged to catch Mason at her most vulnerable. Like Fate had stepped in to mess her up. She wondered . . . if Toby
had
been there, would she have so totally blown the competition? Stormed out afterward and right into Rory’s trap? Maybe she never would have wound up on that train in the first place. The train that Toby had been operating . . .

What. The. Hell . . .

Mason felt a stab of cold in her gut. “Wait. If you were driving the train that night—but—that would mean—”

“That I work for your father, Mason.” Toby’s gaze was steady and calm as he looked at her. “Yeah. I do. Sort of. And Gunnar damn well ordered me to be on duty that night. In an ‘offer I couldn’t refuse’ kind of way.” He shook his head. “You know how proud I am of you, Mase, and you know how badly I wanted to be there. For the team, but mostly for you. I wanted to see you win.”

“I didn’t. I lost.” The dull hurt of her failure had faded
into the background with everything that had happened since, but sharpened suddenly to a new stab of pain at the memory. “I imploded.”

“I’m sorry.” Toby’s eyes never left her face. “And I’m still proud of you.”

Mason felt a corner of her lip curl. “Are you
sure
you’re really Toby Fortier?”

“Let’s see . . . you ever even
think
of performing that badly again, Starling, and I will
bench
your lame ass for life.” He grinned and then reached over and patted her reassuringly on the knee.

“Okay, Coach.” Mason blinked back a sudden sting of tears.

Fennrys sat back, letting the two of them share the moment. Then he leaned forward slightly and cleared his throat. “So, you
work
for Gunnar Starling? And we just got in a boat with you?”

As he asked the questions, Mason saw Fenn’s fingers twitch in the direction of the long dagger he carried. Toby saw it, too, but he didn’t flinch.