Descendant (20 page)

Fennrys shrugged out of Rafe’s grip and pushed himself to his knees, gazing all around. Opposite the trees, a ragged little cove and a refuse-strewn, rocky beach gave way to a view of the East River. The sun was close to setting, and streamers of bloody-red clouds unfurled against the burnished gold backdrop of the sky. Behind them, beneath the trees, the shadows were deep purple, and the twilight contrast clarified every little detail of leaf and twig, picking them out in sharp, stark focus.

“Did it work?” Mason asked, rolling over and pushing the hair from her face. “Are we there?”

“Yeah. It did. We are.” Fennrys hauled himself to his feet and held out a hand to help Mason to hers. “Welcome to
North Brother Island, Mase. The place I died.”

Mason’s eyes went wide, and her mouth drifted open. Her hand tightened convulsively on his, and he could see her gaze fill with concern for him. Fennrys wasn’t quite sure how he felt in that moment, revisiting the place where he’d sacrificed himself and gone to Valhalla so that another man could live. He’d thought it might have been hard to take—that it might’ve hurt coming back. But in fact, all he felt was a kind of hollowness. Echoes. It felt like that life had belonged to someone else. The only thing that mattered to him was who he was
now
. And who he was with.

He reached out a hand and smoothed Mason’s hair, the strands slipping through his fingers like spun silk, midnight-hued and shining. Her eyes never left his face as he did so, and the warmth and compassion in that sapphire gaze made everything Fennrys had gone through to be there, in that moment, completely, totally worth it.

He felt himself smiling as he reluctantly turned his gaze from her face to their surroundings. In the distance, he could make out the contours of several buildings, their outlines softened by the massive overgrowth of vegetation that had taken over the island since it had been abandoned. The island had once been home to a quarantine hospital and had seen more than its fair share of tragedies, but now the whole place looked as though it was being consumed by nature. It was eerie. As were the strange, will-o’-the-wisp-ish lights that sparkled and danced in the deep shadows under the trees.

“As islands go,” Mason murmured, “this place is less resort-y than I generally prefer.” She shivered and hugged her elbows. “It feels kind of . . . haunted.”

“It
is
haunted,” Fennrys said.

In the west, the glass-and-stone towers of Manhattan lay glittering far beyond the restless gray stretch of the Hell Gate strait like some fairy-tale kingdom. The sun was sinking swiftly behind the artificial horizon of the city line, and a deep indigo blue tinted the vault of the sky in its wake.

“I wonder what time it is,” Mason said.

“Yeah? I wonder what
day
it is,” Rafe muttered, then shrugged when Mason glanced questioningly at him.
“Time passes a little differently in the Beyond Realms. Until I see a calendar, even I can’t be sure how much of it passed
here
, while we were
there
.” He turned to the water and scanned up and down the shore, a frown creasing his forehead.

Mason sighed. “This isn’t going to be one of those ‘hapless mortal returns home after a night of revels to discover a hundred years have passed and everyone she knows is long dead’ folktale things, is it?” she asked drily. “Because that would suck more than all the other weird things that have gone on in the last few hours of my life.”

“Hey, there are worse fates,” Fennrys said, striving for lightness.

But Mason had obviously heard the edge in his voice, and he mentally kicked himself. It wasn’t her fault that what she’d just described was, fundamentally, almost exactly what had happened to him.

“Oh god.” She winced. “I’m so sorry, Fenn . . . I didn’t mean—I wasn’t thinking—”

“Forget it, Mase.” He shook his head and forced the smile back onto his face. “It’s okay. Really.
I’m
okay. Hell . . . if I’d lived and died when I was supposed to, I never would have met you, right?”

“I’m starting to think that’s maybe not such a bad thing.”

“Stop.” He gripped her by the shoulders—hard enough to make her blink up at him. “Don’t
ever
say that. Nothing about this is your fault, and you are
not
the guilty party here. We will figure out how to make all of this right and then, when all this is done, we will go back to the Boat Basin Café and we will sit at that pain-in-the-ass waiter’s table again and we will finish those beers and order those burgers like we were supposed to. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Damned ferryman,” Rafe muttered, still scanning the boatless river. “I’m going to go see if I can spot our transport farther down. You two find somewhere safe to hunker down and wait until I get back. With darkness falling, I don’t want Mason wandering around out in the open in this place.”

Fennrys agreed, even though he could feel Mason bristle a bit at his side. But then, in the near distance, something horrible-sounding yowled, yelped, and went crashing through the shadow-bound underbrush. Mason’s hand flew convulsively to the hilt of her sword, but Fennrys just
smiled at her and shook his head, covering her hand with his own.

“Don’t give them a reason,” he said. “This is the kind of place where the best offense is strictly defensive. Flight first,” he said. “Fight only when you have to, remember?”

“Right.” Of
course
she remembered. It was the same thing he’d said to her in both real life and real scary dreams. “Run.”

“If you have to.”

She nodded and relaxed her grip, flashing him a brief smile and taking a breath to calm herself. Fennrys looked around and spotted the shell of one of the island’s old service buildings looming up through the trees like a medieval castle.

“We’ll hole up in there until you give us the word,” he said to Rafe.

Rafe nodded. Then, in the blink of an eye, his form blurred and a sleek black wolf took off at a run down the ragged beach, disappearing around a weedy promontory.

When he was gone from view, Fennrys took Mason by the hand and led her along a barely discernible path and through a gaping hole in the brick wall of the outbuilding—the actual door was impassable, blocked by a stand of saplings—and into a blue-shadowed, vaulting room. Half the roof had collapsed, and the floor was carpeted with fallen leaves that gathered in knee-deep drifts in the corners. In the gloom, Mason and Fenn could barely make out each other’s faces, so Fennrys gathered up a small pile of fallen twigs and branches and cleared a space in a crumbling alcove that could serve nicely as a makeshift fireplace.

“Here . . .” He fished in his pocket for the lighter he carried. “Why don’t you start a fire for us?”

Mason blinked up at him. “Really?”

Fennrys reached out and tapped the iron medallion hanging on the leather cord around Mason’s throat. “Do you remember that night back in my loft?”

Mason nodded, the hint of a wicked grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Only every second of it, yeah . . .” She reached up to trace her finger lightly along the line of the scar she’d given him.

Fennrys smiled, his eyes gleaming in the dimness. “Okay. Good. No stabbing this time, all right? I just want to see if you can conjure a little fire. Like I taught you in the boat basin—use your mind to shape the magick.”

“I’m not like you, Fenn. I’m not trained for this stuff. Should I really be doing this?”

“I don’t see why not. I believe in carrying as many tricks in your bag as you can. Never know when they might come in handy.” He flicked his thumb on the wheel of the lighter, and a little blue-and-yellow flame sprang to life on the wick.

Hesitantly, Mason reached out with thumb and forefinger. . . .

“Ouch!” she yelped, and drew back.

Fennrys grinned. “You’re playing with fire, Mase. You have to will yourself to
not
get burned. Try again.”

He watched as her other hand drifted up, fingertips resting lightly on the face of the iron medallion. A tiny crease formed between the dark arches of her brows as her face settled into an expression of fierce concentration. She took a deep breath, reached out again, and gently plucked the flame from the wick of the Zippo. The delighted grin that spread across her face, lit by the tiny fire’s glow, made Fennrys’s heart constrict in his chest.

Mason turned her hand over and nudged the flame from her fingertips to her palm, where it flickered and danced, cycling through shades of orange and blue and green . . . then, suddenly, the blazing little teardrop turned violet and shot into the air like a bullet. Fennrys ducked as it rocketed past his head and began to ricochet wildly off the crumbling brick walls. Mason threw her arms up over her head and crouched, and Fennrys bent his body around her, shielding her from the incendiary little missile. Suddenly, they were both in very real danger of getting badly burned, and there wasn’t anything Fennrys could do. It wasn’t his spell.

Beneath him, he could feel Mason struggling to wriggle free of his protective embrace. He made a grab for her as she slipped free and thrust her hand high above her head—fingers spread wide as if she wore a baseball glove—and snatched the fiery little projectile out of the air. In one fluid motion, she snapped her fingers shut on it like a cage, spun around, and hurled the flame at the pile of kindling . . . where it burst in a miniature explosion of orange and crimson, splashing sparks onto dry branches that blazed up into a crackling, cheery little fire.

Gasping, Mason collapsed forward, propping her hands on her knees, and Fennrys started to laugh. From behind the curtain of her hair, she cast an incredulous look at him as his mirth almost doubled him over.

“See?” he said. “You’re a natural!” Still chuckling, Fennrys walked over and stomped on a pile of leaves smoldering in one corner of the room. He pointed to the campfire. “Look. All we need is marshmallows.”

“Great.
You
can conjure those. I’d probably wind up calling forth a tiny horde of tasty, demonically possessed puff balls.” She slipped the medallion from around her neck and handed it back to Fennrys, shaking her head. “I’m gonna leave the spell casting to the pros, thank you.”

Fennrys grinned and fastened the charm back around his neck. Instead of the metal shocking him with a chill against the skin of his bare chest, it was warm. He didn’t know whether the heat was from the magick or from Mason, but both were welcome. There was a substantial pile of leaves in a drift near the fire and they sat down in it, Fenn wrapping his arms around Mason and pulling her close.

“You know, this place really isn’t so bad,” Mason said, leaning her head on Fennrys’s chest and gazing up at the broken windowpanes glinting in the last gleam of twilight.

The firelight reflected off her smooth, fair skin, turning her face to pale gold. She gestured at the leaf-and-rubbish-strewn space where the shadows crawled, writhing up the walls and gathering in the broken corners of the roof rafters. As the very last of the day’s light leached from the sky, it felt to Fennrys as if nightmarish things might come seeping through the holes in the walls at any moment.

“All it needs is a good sweeping up,” Mason continued. “A few pieces of art on the walls. Maybe some nice curtains . . .”

The temperature was dropping precipitously with the onset of night, and Fennrys felt the shivering that ran through Mason’s limbs despite her game face. He hugged her close, gazing down at her. She gazed back; brave, trusting, beautiful.

“Curtains,” he said.

“Yeah. Curtains.”

“You’re a weirdo.” Fenn shook his head. “Must be why I love you.”

And time suddenly stopped.

Right there. With those words. That word.

He hadn’t meant to say it, but he knew—in that moment—that he meant it.

Love . . .

Love . . .

Mason’s breath caught in her throat, and her heartbeat slowed to nothing.

She was stranded in a derelict ruin, surrounded by a haunted forest on a phantom island in the middle of the East River with a dead guy, having just escaped from a place that wasn’t
really
supposed to exist, and her family seemed to be plotting sinister things for her future, and . . .

And none of it mattered.
None
of it.

Because Fennrys had just told Mason that she was a weirdo.

And that
he loved her
.

Stunned to silence, Mason looked up into his eyes and saw that he meant what he’d said. And that he felt the exact same way as she did about every other damned thing in that moment.
None of it mattered.
Smiling his strange and ridiculously beautiful smile, he bent his head to hers, and Mason reached up to wrap her arms around his neck. Her mouth opened under his, and she felt as though she could devour him whole and still be hungry for more.

The way he kissed her back, she could feel that he was just as ravenous. As they pressed against each other, everything else fell away. All Mason could feel was Fennrys’s lips as they moved over hers, his hands—fingers strong and splayed wide, roaming over her back and shoulders as if he needed to touch as much of her as he could all at once—and the beating of his heart as they fell back into the bed of leaves beneath them. The broken walls that sheltered them loomed like the battlements of a medieval fortress, and overhead, Mason thought she saw stars peeking through. The lonely cry of a hunting owl echoed in the distance, the firelight cast Fenn’s profile in crimson and shadows, and Mason felt as though she had fallen into the pages of a fairy tale. Even prefaced by all the madness that had led to that moment, she could hardly find cause for complaint. She just gave herself over to passionately kissing her handsome prince.

So far, this is one of the fairy tales with a happy ending. . . .

She could feel the corners of her mouth turning up at
the edges beneath Fennrys’s lips, and he broke the kiss, pulling his head back a few inches so that he could gaze into her eyes.

“Did that tickle?” he asked, his winter-blue eyes glinting with amusement.

“No . . .”

“Then why are you giggling?”