Starling (24 page)

R
ory reached over and switched off the TV. The news that day was all about some kind of attack on the yacht docks down on the Hudson River, and the talking heads at the news desks had all, inevitably, turned to speculating about the T word. Rory snorted. What kind of crap-assed terrorist sets fire to a bunch of tricked-out daddy’s-boy sloops with stupid names like
Into the Mystic
painted on their sterns? At any rate, the excitement was over, and nobody had even shot any decent pics of the carnage with a camera phone. Manhattanites were so lame.

Maybe, he thought, Mason was fine with living there, in a boring old dorm at the academy, but Mason was a loser and never did anything all that interesting anyway. As far as Rory was concerned, it was like trading a private spa for a public pool. To say Rory Starling was jaded on the subject of the human condition was something of an understatement.

So when the opportunity came to go home, he’d jumped at the chance. And then decided, once there, that he would extend the opportunity by pleading a wicked head cold, brought on, no doubt, by exposure to the elements during the storm. When Mason headed back to Gosforth on Monday morning, Rory bid his baby sister a faux-congested, snuffly adieu and crawled back under the crisp Egyptian cotton sheets of his king-size bed. With any luck, he could draw this out long enough to get a full week off school.

After a few token days of lying sprawled in his room, immersed in his wide selection of video games, he finally emerged and, whistling to himself, headed off to the steam room with a pilfered bottle of his dad’s special reserve cognac hidden in the pocket of his plush bathrobe.

Rory knew that Top Gunn wasn’t exactly overjoyed to have him home, but the place was big enough that he’d barely even seen his father, and he was content to keep it like that. Gunnar was in a particularly stormy mood anyway, these days. So Rory could spend all the time he wanted, alone, to try to sort out just exactly what the hell had happened in the gym during the storm.

The others could ignore it or forget it or sweep it under the rug as much as they wanted—Rory was perfectly happy to let them. He knew there was a reason why he’d instinctively encouraged Mason to keep her mouth shut when he’d seen which way the others were leaning. And it wasn’t just because he didn’t want to wind up tabloid fodder.

They didn’t want to tell anyone the truth?
Good
.

That suited him just fine.

He wanted this all for himself.

He didn’t even know what “this” was … yet. But there were strange, excited voices whispering to him in the back of his head—voices that told him
this
was what he’d been waiting for all his life. This was that beginning of something … extraordinary. And Rory didn’t want to share it with anyone. Especially Mason.

Padding barefoot and wrapped only in a bath towel down the plushly carpeted, dark-paneled corridor and feeling pleasantly buzzed on steam heat and brandy, Rory contemplated how to spend the rest of the day. Once he’d decided, he changed into jeans and a T-shirt and, after a brief side trip to his father’s unoccupied study, headed down to the enormous cellar beneath the mansion.

Back before Rory was even born, his grandfather Magnus Starling had converted the cavernous room into a space that now housed an enormous, elaborate model train set—one which had a ridiculously accurate miniature New York cityscape, with rail tracks radiating out from Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station, and included all of Manhattan and a good deal of Long Island and the Jersey Shore. It circulated real water around the sculpted islands in the East and Hudson Rivers, down into the harbor, where a little Statue of Liberty poked out of the water.

When he was a kid, Rory would sometimes disappear down there for a whole day and lose himself in the tiny cityscape, running the miniature version of the Starling private train through the secret tunnels under the city—the ones that had been built specifically for Starling family business and were largely unknown even to some of New York’s public figures.

Now, thanks to Gunnar—and Magnus—there were sections of underground track that connected Westchester County and Long Island, giving Gunnar Starling easy access to the far reaches of his empire, as if he were a king.

“He
thinks
he’s a bloody king,” Rory muttered to himself, crouching down and crawling beneath the huge table that supported the model. There was a device that could remove all of Central Park from the middle of the cityscape so the operator could stand there, surrounded by the city on all sides as he conducted. Rory pulled the lever and the park section dropped down to slide under the table. There was a switch on the operator panel that would activate an elaborate fiber-optic system that would make the entire model glow and twinkle like the city at night. Normally, he would have turned them on, but Rory wanted the darkness. All he needed was just enough light to read by.

He sat down in the middle of the miniature city, switched on a penlight, and pulled Gunnar’s old leather diary out from under his shirt. Almost instantly, something about it felt strange. For years, the diary had remained hidden away in the lockbox in Gunnar’s study, untouched by anyone except Rory. But now, on the page after the last entry there was fresh ink. Rory held his breath as he read the new entry.

Rory’s blood turned to ice in his veins.

Rory felt an unaccustomed stab of sympathy for his father. They’d taken half his eyesight! He wondered, for a moment, what that would be like. But then he shook himself out of the thought and scanned down the page. His father had rewritten the same prophecy the Norns had given him all those years ago in Copenhagen. The words themselves were unaltered. But Rory was shocked to see what a few changes in punctuation had done to the meaning of the phrases. He flipped back to the original entry.

The newer version now read:

Perplexed, Rory read his father’s explanation, which suddenly clarified things.

Mason reminds me so much, every day, of her beautiful mother. My precious Yelena. My daughter has been my greatest joy … and my most bitter disappointment. But now she is the key to achieving my dream for the world. I can see to it that she becomes a Valkyrie—a chooser of the slain. With the spear of Odin in her hand, Mason will have the power to create a third Odin Son to stand beside my own two boys. They shall be the harbingers of Ragnarok, they will call forth the Einherjar, the dead warriors—and they shall bring about the end of the world as it exists now. This gray, grieving, tainted realm will be reborn in splendor from its own ashes
.

And all I need do is sacrifice my beloved daughter’s soul...
.

It hit Rory like a lightning bolt. Mason’s gender wasn’t the thwart he’d always thought it had been. She wasn’t the roadblock to the prophecy … she was the
key
. At that moment, Rory heard voices—coming from the wine cellar on the far side of the train room—and he crouched down under the table and shoved the diary as far into a corner beneath the model as he could. Then he held his breath and listened.

“I can hardly believe it.”

“It’s true. And it’s within our grasp, Rothgar,” his father responded.

Rory strained to hear what they were saying, keeping painfully still so that he wouldn’t make any noise. Even the voices that had been whispering in his head for days now quieted.

“The end of the world,” Roth said in a voice full of wonder. And … fear?

“
No
.” Gunnar was adamant. “The beginning of it. Help me pick something appropriate to celebrate this occasion. We will toast our good fortune, and then I will tell you what I need you to do.”

“I’ll do the best I can,” Roth said.

“Of course you will. You’ve never failed me yet, Rothgar,” Gunnar said. “You’ve never disappointed me. I wish I could say the same of all my children.”

Screw you, Pops
, Rory though bitterly. But Gunnar wasn’t talking about him.

“It’s hardly Mason’s fault she was born a girl, Dad,” Roth said.

“I know. And I wouldn’t trade her for the world. Well. I wouldn’t trade her for
this
world. But for the chance for us—for humanity—to start over, Roth? I would trade my wealth, my children, my soul itself. It is what we were put here to do. This is our destiny. And now Mason will be given the chance to redeem the accident of her birth and make us all proud.”

He’s going to do it
, Rory thought.
He’s really going to try to make this thing happen
. And then he thought …
I’m going to help
. Rory stayed where he was, silent and cramped, listening as Gunnar told Roth what he had learned from the three Norns. All things Rory already knew. Still, he needed to arm himself with enough reasons for Gunnar to let him have a hand in what was to come. Because obviously his father didn’t trust him in the same way as he trusted his brother. The fact that his father was down here discussing his grand schemes with Roth—and Roth
alone
—was more than proof enough of that. Rory heard the muted pop of a cork and the clinking of glasses.

“Are you going to join us?” Gunnar’s voice floated down to him from very close by. “Or are you going to stay crouched there like a fox in a hole waiting for the hounds to pass by?”

Slowly Rory turned his head and looked up to see his father standing like a god looking down on him. And he was holding out a glass of champagne. Gunnar flipped a switch, and the miniature cityscape all around Rory lit up and began to glow and twinkle. Rory stood like a giant emerging in the middle of the city from the gaping hole where Central Park should be. Swallowing his fear, he reached over to take the offered libation from his father.

Unlike every other feature of the model city, the Hell Gate Bridge was not exactly accurate. Rory had noticed it almost immediately when he was a small boy and had always wondered about it. In reality, the bridge was painted a dark, almost foreboding, deep red color. But in the tiny model city, the bridge was left unpainted, the metal silvery with an iridescent sheen to it. Rory had always wondered about it but, until that moment, it had never occurred to him what that was supposed to represent.

Bifrost
.

The rainbow bridge to Asgard, the home of the Norse gods.

“Your ancestors had the guiding hand in building this bridge, my boys,” Gunnar mused quietly, sipping on the last of the celebratory champagne. He’d sat on a tall stool beside the city model, describing his prophetic epiphany to his sons—and the steps they had to take to bring it to fruition.

“This stretch of river was originally called Hellegat. It’s Dutch. A word that could mean one of two things: ‘Bright Passage’ … or ‘Gate to Hel.’ That’s
our
Hel, boys. The Norse Hell.” Gunnar traced the contours of the arching bridge with one fingertip. “I suppose it’s both, really. And it has stood there all this time, waiting for us to fulfill its purpose. There is deep magick woven into the very core of its construction. The design, the materials … are all very special. It is a wonder, hidden in plain sight. It’s not just a bridge, it is a gateway to Asgard, a path to the realm of the gods.
But
 …” He held up his hand. “That path can only be walked by the dead, and only in
one
direction. At least, that was the way of things until recently.”