Descendant (25 page)

“That’s right,” he said, nodding. “What Gunnar doesn’t know—at least, I sincerely
hope
he doesn’t know—is that he’s not the only one I work for.”

“Don’t tell me,” Rafe said with sour mirth from where he still sat hunched on the bow bench seat. “Daria Aristarchos?”

“No.” Toby grimaced in distaste. “Not directly. I can’t stand the woman, to be honest. But her ends and mine are sometimes . . . in agreement. Much as yours are, I would imagine, lord. I just don’t necessarily approve of her methods. Look, my primary goal is the safety of my charges. The students at the academy. That’s what I signed on to do. Keep them—keep
you
—safe. For a while, working for Gunnar Starling on the side seemed like a good way to help make that happen.”

“Know thine enemy?” Mason said drily. She felt a twinge in her heart at those words.

“Until recently, I wasn’t entirely convinced that he was,” Toby said quietly. “Gunnar seemed like he’d pretty much abandoned the whole idea of a Norse apocalypse after your mother died, and I saw that as being a step forward for him. In some ways, Mason, I actually believe in the same things as your father. At least Gunnar believes in free will. More so than Daria and her ilk. He believes
that humanity has done what it’s done to itself, without much in the way of interference from the gods—for better or worse—and that we get what we deserve. The other Gosforth families—some of them—actually want to not only keep the memory of their gods alive, but bring them back into the world. So that humanity could one day worship them again.”

“You know that Cal’s dead, right?” Mason said quietly.

Toby, pale in the scattered moonlight, went even paler. He swore softly under his breath and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “No. I didn’t know.”

Fennrys put an arm around Mason’s shoulders and did her the kindness of telling Toby for her what had happened. Mason could feel her muscles shivering beneath his arm as she struggled not to cry for Cal again.

The shadow of the Triborough Bridge cast them into a deeper darkness as they passed beneath it. Mason could hear the honking of car horns and the distant murmur of raised voices. There seemed to be a traffic backup of some kind, but she couldn’t bring herself to care about something so mundane as that just in that moment.

Toby angled the craft around the southernmost point of Wards Island and aimed it toward the shores of Manhattan, revving the engine so the rubber boat surged forward.

“There’s a ferry terminal and an industrial shipping jetty around East Ninetieth Street,” he said. “I can tie up the boat and we can flag a cab to take you somewhere safe from there.”

“You know,” Mason said, trying hard to reconcile her suddenly
radically
expanded view of her coach, “I never would have thought you were the kind of guy to give all that much credence to gods and goddesses, Toby.”

“My views on gods and goddesses are . . . complicated, Mase.” The fencing master’s placid expression shifted, his gaze clouding. “That’s kind of what happens when you actually fall in love with one—
and
they fall in love back.”

Mason blinked at him, speechless.

Toby shook his head and twisted the throttle on the outboard. “It’s a really long story, kiddo, and it’ll have to wait.” He grunted and torqued the steering handle, gunning the engine. “It seems we’re going to have a bit of a fight on our hands making landfall. . . .”

Toby had the nose of the inflatable boat pointed toward the city, but even though he was running the outboard motor now at top speed, it seemed as though they were
making little to no headway—almost as if some invisible force was pushing them back. The current began to carry them rapidly downstream. Mason noticed that it was getting harder and harder to discern individual buildings on the Upper East Side.

The fog they’d seen earlier, gathering near North Brother Island, seemed to have moved off westward, as if drawn there by some kind of magnet. On the eastern bank of the river, the lights of Queens still shone brightly, unobscured, but all around Manhattan, a shimmering, silver-gray fog barrier was rising up from the surface of the water to hang like the fifty-foot-high battlements of a medieval fortress.

An impassable barrier between the boat and the city.

“I’m starting to understand what you meant when you said you didn’t trust fog, Rafe . . . ,” Mason said.

She eyed the fog bank piling up around Manhattan with suspicion. But then she noticed something even more worrying. A pale shape—no,
shapes
—moving just below the surface of the dark water, alongside the Zodiac.

Mason opened her mouth to warn her companions, but suddenly, in spite of all Toby’s best efforts to steer, the boat began rotating in a slow circle, as if caught in an unseen whirlpool.

The little craft heaved up out of the water as something huge and heavy hit one of the float chambers from below. Toby was thrown backward, and the engine sputtered and threatened to stall as he clutched the rope handholds on the side of the boat, managing somehow not to tumble into the water.

A good thing, too, Mason thought, frantically grabbing for her own rope. Because not far off the port side of the boat, one of Cal’s mer-girls rose up out of the water in a plume of spray. Her mouth was open wide in savage song, showing her teeth, which were like long white knives. In a flash, the vicious sea maid had closed the distance to the Zodiac and was trying to scrabble her way up over the side with her grasping, talon-tipped webbed hands. Without a second thought, Mason hauled off and kicked the creature in the head as hard as she could. The heel of her boot connected with a loud
crack
, and the nymph squealed in pain and rage and disappeared back down below the surface.

Suddenly, she surged back out of the water, snarling and thrashing, blood running from the side of her mouth, and this time Mason scrambled out of the way as Fennrys shouted for her to move. Wielding an oar like a club, he bashed the creature repeatedly over her green-haired head,
punctuating his blows with angry words that echoed Mason’s sentiment: “
Why
. . . does
every
thing . . . that
lives
. . . in these
rivers
. . . have
fangs
?”

On the other side of the boat, Rafe picked up a gas can and smashed it down on another of the things trying to scrabble over the pontoon and into the boat. “People keep flushing expired meds down the toilet,” he said, grunting with exertion. “All that stuff was bound to have adverse effects on the marine life, eventually.”

“You’re a god!” Mason called to Rafe as the surface of the river boiled with thrashing movement. “Can’t you
do
something?”

“I’m a
desert
god!” he called back. “Water-based magick is a little beyond me!”

Still, he had a pretty good swing, and between Mason’s boot heel, Fenn’s devastating oar wielding, and Rafe’s gas-can smashing, their assailants seemed wary about approaching again. For a long moment, everything went still. The little rubber boat still spun in a lazy circle, but the river seemed suddenly calm and empty. As silently as she could, Mason loosened her rapier in its sheath and prepared to draw.

Fennrys noticed and shook his head. “It’s too close quarters for a long blade,” he said in a whisper. “If you puncture the boat, we’ll wind up in the river.”

“That would suck,” she whispered back.

“It really would.” Fennrys grinned. “Take this.”

He handed over the oar and drew his short sword. But when several long minutes ticked by and all was silent, she started to think that maybe she wouldn’t need to use the oar, either. Toby eased himself back onto the bench seat in the stern and gripped the motor handle. He twisted the throttle, the engine revved, the boat plowed forward a few precious feet . . .

And then a geyser erupted at the bow.

Fennrys was flung forward and cracked his head against the rigid bench seat, splitting the skin above his eyebrow. Blood poured from the wound, and his face went slack as he lost consciousness. Mason caught a fleeting glimpse of a seaweed-draped nymph riding on the back of an enormous, fish-tailed, snow-white bull in the instant before she lost her footing on the slick, wet floor of the boat. The oar flew from her hand and disappeared over the
side into the black water. And then Mason followed it, toppling over the side of the boat to vanish beneath the waves with barely a cry for help.

For some strange reason, her last thought as she sank into darkness was of Cal—of his smile . . . and his laughter. And his sea-green eyes.

T
he sound of waves washing the shore, lulling him with a constant, steady rhythm—like the beating of a giant heart—gave way to the insistent beeping of a heart monitor. He listened to it for a very long time before he realized that it was beeping in time with
his
heartbeat. There was cool, dry air on his face where before there had been the chill caress of water. Through closed eyes he
could sense light where only moments before—or so it had seemed—there had been deep, profound darkness. He heard the sounds of gasping and realized it was his own parched throat that had made the noise. His lungs were uncomfortably dry. Arid. He was drowning in the way a fish drowns, and he felt his hands reaching, grasping at the nothingness in front of his face as if he could swim back into the watery embrace where he had felt so at home. So at peace . . .

“Easy . . .”

Calum Aristarchos felt a hand on his arm.

“Easy, son.”

Strong, gentle fingers circled his wrist. Cal tried to open his eyes, but it was as if all the moisture had been sucked out of them. His eyelids felt stuck together and it was hard, painful to try to pry them open. When he finally managed the feat, everything was blurry and wavering. It seemed to take a long time for his vision to clear enough for him to be able to tell that he was lying in a bed in a room with greenish-white walls. Pale curtains billowed slightly in the breeze that came through a window, and stiff, starched sheets rubbed his skin like sandpaper as he moved weakly. Looking up, Cal saw a bag with a clear liquid hanging from a hook beside his bed. It flowed through a tube and into a needle stuck in the back of his hand.

Cal swallowed painfully. He was so thirsty.

Remembering the voice that had spoken to him, Cal turned his head away from the IV and saw that on the other side of his bed, there was a man. A stranger. At first Cal thought he must have been sitting on a very low stool, but then he caught the gleam of chrome-rimmed wheels and saw that the man was, in fact, in a wheelchair. There was a plaid blanket tucked tightly around his legs and feet.

Cal shifted his gaze to the man’s face and felt a strange sense that he’d seen him somewhere before. The stranger’s face, above a neatly trimmed beard, was deeply tanned and his hair, pulled back into a short ponytail at the nape of his neck, was thick and wavy, a shade of rich chestnut brown shot through with highlights. His eyes were green. Sea green.

The same color as Cal’s eyes.

“How are you feeling?” the man asked, his voice a pleasing baritone.

“Where am I?”

“Hospital.” The man shrugged one heavily muscled shoulder. “It’s actually a specialty care facility on Roosevelt Island. They don’t usually take in emergency patients, but seeing as how you washed up half-dead and mostly drowned pretty much right on their doorstep, they didn’t really have much choice but to give you a bed. When I got here, I convinced them not to transfer you to a facility in Manhattan.”

“And how did
you
do that?” Cal asked warily.

“Money talks.” The man grinned. His teeth were almost blindingly white in his tanned face. “You know that.”

Of course he knew that. Cal’s family was one of the wealthiest in New York. “So you know who I am, then,” he said.

The man nodded.

Cal gritted his teeth. “And who are you?”

There was a glint of wry amusement in the man’s eyes. “You mean to tell me your mother didn’t keep my picture on the mantel? I’m wounded.”

“You’re . . .” Cal had, of course, known in an instant. He knew it now, with bone-deep certainty.

“Your father. That’s right, Calum.” His gaze flicked away for a moment, and one hand clenched tightly for a brief instant on the rim of the chair’s wheel. But when he
looked back at Cal, his gaze was calm. “Don’t worry. I don’t expect you to call me ‘Dad.’ My name is Douglas—”

“I
know
your name. You’re Douglas Muir.”

He shrugged, unfazed by Cal’s less-than-welcoming tone. “I wasn’t sure you would. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Daria had banned the speaking of it in her house.”

Cal’s glance strayed, once again, to the blanket that was tucked tight across his father’s lap. “She never said you were . . . uh.”

“She doesn’t know.” Douglas waved a hand dismissively. “It happened after I left. Boating accident. One of the hazards of my . . . lifestyle.”

“You sail?”

He laughed, a low, mellow sound. “That’s how I got
here
. My sloop is moored at a jetty just south of the hospital grounds. I came as soon as I could. As soon as I got word.”

Cal frowned. There was something very weird about this situation. It was all a bit surreal, and he wasn’t entirely certain that he wasn’t just experiencing some kind of side effect of pain medication. “No offense,” he said, “but why did the hospital call
you
?”

“Hospital administration
didn’t
call me. They don’t yet know who you are.” He wheeled to the end of the bed, plucked Cal’s chart from the hook where it hung on a clipboard, and tossed it onto the bed beside him, where it landed with a thump.

Cal fumbled to pick it up with prickly-numb fingers and looked at it, his frown deepening. In the space for his name, it actually said “John Doe.” In the notes section, it made reference to the scars on his face—almost fully healed—and to the injuries to his head—inconclusive as to extent, but indicative of recent trauma. Also, the chart noted the fact that Cal’s lungs had been full of water when he was found, and the nurse who’d accidentally stumbled across him had had to revive him using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR.