Transcendent

  DEDICATION

  For Laura

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Lesley Livingston

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I

  “This is not right . . . ,” Mason Starling murmured softly as she sank to her knees beside the crumpled form at the center of a swiftly widening circle of blood.

  The stone tiles beneath her shuddered with earthquake tremors and her ears rang with the screams of the white-robed crowd gathered on the terrace swaying high above the streets of Manhattan—streets tangled in chaos, awash in a blood curse that had turned the city into a slumbering wasteland.

  None of that mattered.

  None of it even touched Mason in that moment.

  “I am the chooser of the slain . . .” The words drifted like smoke from between her lips. “I did not choose this.”

  “Neither did I, sweetheart,” Fennrys whispered. “Not this time . . .”

  A gout of blood bubbled up and spilled from his mouth down the side of his face, shockingly red against the pallor that washed his skin white. It sparked fire and fury in Mason’s heart and the roar of her denial was so loud in her head she thought her skull might burst.

  A clap of thunder shattered the night.

  The raven, perched on the spear Mason held, shrieked and her mind snapped back into focus as the bird launched itself into the stygian darkness of the stormy sky. She stared in horror at the Odin spear, clutched in her armored fist. With a cry of outrage, she threw it away from her. It clattered against the black marble altar where her brother Roth lay bound, bleeding, gasping, whispering apologies for the murder he’d done. A deed, past and gone, that fueled the Miasma curse spilling out over the city.

  That could wait.

  This . . . couldn’t.

  Mason lurched forward, reaching for the dark slender figure kneeling on the other side of Fennrys’s blood-soaked body. She grabbed the Egyptian god of death by the lapels of his sleek designer suit and said, “Fix this.”

  “Mason—”

  “Fix him!” she howled, cutting short Rafe’s protestations. Her hands balled into fists and she hauled the god toward her until they were almost nose to nose. Her howl turned into a harsh, choking sob. “I’m begging you. . . .”

  The muscles of Rafe’s jaw twitched and his dark brows drew together in a fierce frown. “You know damn well there’s only one way I can do that. And there is no guarantee that—”

  “Do it.”

  Still the god hesitated. Mason could see the anguish in his dark, timeless gaze. The thing that had just happened . . . it was wrong, and Rafe knew it. Fennrys had beaten the odds. He deserved a second chance and now, to have that chance stolen from him . . .

  Mason shivered in the wind. The water from Calum Aristarchos’s trident soaked the front of her chain-mail tunic, shockingly cold. It had taken only a moment of thoughtless reaction on Cal’s part to form the weapon—transforming water from a weeping fountain, turning it hard as forged steel with his newfound, godlike powers. And only another moment more to pierce Fennrys’s body with the lethal instrument.

  It had all been a terrible mistake. Still, Cal would pay for it. Later.

  Cal could wait.

  Fennrys’s breath had gone from shallow to a rasping gasp. A death rattle . . .

  “Do it!” Mason snarled at Rafe.

  The god squeezed his eyes shut.

  “I’ll owe you,” she said.

  His eyes snapped back open. And there was fire in their depths.

  Hellfire.

  Rafe, who was Anubis, growled low in the back of his throat and his shoulders hunched forward toward his ears. Suddenly, he threw his head back, his helmet of dreadlocks whipping around his face and his features blurred like inky smoke. In the blink of an eye, the stylish young man in the tailored suit was gone and a huge, sleek black wolf crouched on its haunches on the stone terrace, lips pulled back from long, white, sharp teeth bared in a vicious snarl. The wolf shook its head from side to side, ears flattened back against its skull. The muscles along its shoulders and spine rippled and Mason backed off, fighting the urge to wrap Fennrys’s body in an embrace and shield him from the monstrous creature.

  She looked down and saw Fenn’s eyelids flutter and go still.

  The planes of his face went slack.

  Then her view of him was blotted out by the dark shape of the wolf as it lunged, jaws opened wide . . . to sink his teeth deep into Fennrys’s throat.

  Fennrys was dying.

  Again . . .

  Only, the weird thing was, it actually felt different this time.

  Real.

  He could feel the warm breath cooling in his lungs.

  Hear the rhythm of his heart, slowing . . .

  There was peace.

  Acceptance . . .

  And then, just as his eyes were drifting closed for the last time, his fading vision captured a glimpse of something twisting in the depths of Mason Starling’s sapphire-blue gaze. And all of it shattered into a thousand jagged shards of pain.

  Of course. It was never gonna be that easy, was it?

  The sudden, scorching agony that tore at his throat flooded down into this chest and up into his brain. His heart squeezed like a fist and his body arched like a bow, stretching away from the cold marble floor and the warm pool of blood. A sudden, overwhelming, gut-deep feeling crashed down on him like a load of bricks falling from a great height—a purely, potently physical sensation—something that Fennrys was pretty sure he shouldn’t be feeling in his death throes.

  Hunger.

  A dark red ravenous wave washed over him, pounding him insensible. . . .

  And then there was nothing more.

  II

  Lightning flashed overhead.

  And again.

  And one last time.

  The glass barriers surrounding the terrace shattered and shards flew through the air like deadly arrows, propelled by gale-force winds. Chaos erupted as the gathered crowd of white-robed Eleusinians—most of them the parents or relatives of Gosforth Academy students—scattered, pushing and shoving to get back inside the Weather Room and running for the elevators and the emergency stairs as they abandoned their truncated ritual. They fled from the terrace, and the black marble altar where Mason’s brother, Roth, lay bound and bleeding, fueling the curse that had cast all of the island of Manhattan in a death sleep.

  Mason didn’t care.

  Let them run, she thought. They are sheep. They don’t matter.

  All that mattered was the Wolf.

  The Fennrys Wolf, whose body writhed and contorted before her, his throat gripped in Anubis’s lupine jaws. Mason watched, numb, as the horror of the moment stretched out to seeming infinity.

  She felt hollow, transparent . . . a phantasm.

  Anubis sank his long white fangs into Fenn’s flesh, spilling even more of the precious blood from his b
ody, and in that moment the world all around her went from bright white to dark red . . . and then faded to a gray, grainy static. She stood there, detached, distant.

  Fennrys is going to live.

  He had to. Anything else wasn’t an option.

  Mason was dimly aware of when Toby Fortier and Maddox, Fenn’s fellow Janus Guard and friend, stepped out onto the terrace. She heard their voices—angry, frightened, demanding to know what the hell was going on—and she ignored them. She saw Maddox step in front of Daria Aristarchos to keep her from going anywhere, and Toby rush to where Heather Palmerston still knelt, crouched in a ball behind the altar near the gaping space where the glass barrier used to be. The fencing master used his black-bladed knife to free her from the cloth ropes that tied her hands and helped her stand. She was covered in sharp, tiny shards that tinkled as they fell from her hair and clothes, but she seemed unharmed. Mason knew she should have been happy about that. Or relieved. Or something. Heather was a friend—a good one—and she’d gone to the wall for Mason and had suffered for it.

  But in that moment, all Mason could think about was Fennrys. Time seemed to stop and the universe spiraled out in a dark wave from the single, spotlight circle where she knelt beside him. Beside him . . . and the dark god who was, at her demand, doing his best to save Fenn’s life. In the worst way imaginable. She closed her eyes, willing herself not to see how much blood had already spilled from Fenn’s body. An eternity passed, and then she heard a shredded gasp escape Fennrys’s lips.

  Mason’s eyes flew open and she saw Rafe falling back and away from the prone body beneath him. The ancient Egyptian god, his human shape still blurred around the edges, staggered to his feet. He wiped the back of one hand across his mouth, lips pulled back in a feral snarl, teeth crimson with blood.

  When he turned his gaze on her, Mason saw that his eyes were completely black. They stared at each other for a long moment. Then Rafe shook his head, the pencil-thin dreadlocks falling forward to curtain his face, and called to someone in the Weather Room in a language Mason couldn’t understand. Before she could gather her thoughts, the wolves of Rafe’s pack padded out onto the terrace, and Rafe disappeared back inside, stumbling with exhaustion. The pack surrounded Fenn, and two of the wolves shimmered and blurred, shifting. Suddenly, there was a pair of hard-muscled young men standing in their place. Without a word, they bent down and picked up Fennrys by his arms and legs. His head lolled back and he struggled weakly as they carried him in Rafe’s wake.

  The Fennrys Wolf was alive.

  Mason almost wept with relief as the fog in her brain suddenly dissipated. She scrambled to her feet and started to follow, but another of the wolves—the she-wolf with the white blaze on her forehead—suddenly shifted into her human form and stepped in front of Mason and didn’t move aside.

  Honora, the investment banker who moonlights as a werewolf, Mason thought, remembering what Rafe had told her. She wondered fleetingly if the “moonlighting” was a literal truth. She didn’t, after all, know very much at all about these creatures and their existence. Maybe you should have thought about that before you consigned Fennrys to share their fate.

  I didn’t have a chance. I didn’t have a choice.

  Mason cleared her throat. “Honora, isn’t it?” she asked.

  The woman nodded. There wasn’t a hair out of place in her sleek chignon coif, accented with a streak of silver that corresponded with the blaze on the forehead of her wolf-self, and her eyes, a shade of pale greenish-gold, flashed with sharp intelligence. She was slender but strong looking beneath a navy tailored suit and looked almost exactly the way Mason had pictured she would.

  “Excuse me, Honora,” Mason said, trying to keep her voice from cracking with strain. “I need to go see him—”

  “No. You don’t.” Honora didn’t move. “Not now. Let the pack deal with him. He’s one of us now and that’s not going to be an easy thing for that boy to handle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think I mean, Ms. Starling?”

  Honora’s eyes narrowed as she held Mason’s gaze. Her voice was quiet, but it was firm. Mason realized that she might find understanding in this woman, but not sympathy. Honora knew what Mason had asked Rafe to do, and she most likely understood why. But it was apparent in that instant that she did not approve. Not even a little bit. Mason wondered under what circumstances Honora had made her bargain with Anubis.

  “I mean, you just turned that boy into a monster,” Honora continued. “Now you’re going to have to step back and let us help him hold on to his humanity. If he can.” Then she turned on the heels of her sensible-but-sexy black leather pumps and stalked after her pack, her god, and Fennrys.

  Mason watched her go, and then turned to find that only a handful of people were left standing on that windswept square of stone perched high above the city: Toby and Heather, both of them eyeing her warily, as if worried about what she might do next, and Calum—transfigured, transformed, alien to Mason on almost every level now, and looking strangely adrift in the wake of the chaos.

  Maddox stood before Daria Aristarchos—one hand held out in front of her and the spiked silver chain he wielded so expertly dangling from his other fist. The high priestess of the Eleusinian mysteries barely seemed to notice the Janus Guard. She seemed frozen, her gaze the only thing about her that moved as it flicked back and forth, rife with disbelief, shifting with suspicion, from Mason to the blood on the terrace, to the face of her son, Cal.

  The son Daria had believed was dead.

  That belief had been the catalyst that had triggered a diabolically planned—but long dormant—revenge scheme and pushed Daria to conjure a blood curse, using Rothgar Starling, Mason’s beloved brother, as fuel. Because Roth was a kin killer. He lay sprawled on top of the black marble surface of the terrible altar, senseless and twitching in agony. Behind him, Gwen Littlefield—slender, purple-haired, her face a mask of anguish—still stood with her hands pressed to the cold stone, pale fingers splayed wide, as the blood curse coursed from Roth through her . . . and out into the city.

  Gwen was Daria’s haruspex—a young, hapless sorceress the Elusinian priestess had trapped into serving as her seer—and the conduit for her terrible blood magick. Mason could feel the power emanating from the slight, fragile-looking girl. It rolled off her in waves.

  Roth was incoherent, his arms and chest covered in long shallow cuts made by the sickle in Daria’s fist. The wounds must have been painful, but they weren’t life threatening. It was only the curse that seriously afflicted him.

  Just as it afflicted the girl he shared the terrible connection with.

  Mason stooped to pick up the long knife lying in the puddled blood and water at her feet—the one that Fennrys had dropped when Cal had stabbed him through the chest—and she stalked over to Daria. The priestess swept the elegantly curved blade she held up to ward off the furious young Valkyrie, but Mason just ducked past the blur of the sickle and smashed her armor-clad elbow against Daria’s wrist. Then she grabbed her by the front of her priestess robes and brought her own knife up to press against Cal’s mother’s throat.

  The silver blade in Daria’s hand clattered to the stone tiles and she backed up as far as she could, stumbling over the hem of her robes and grabbing at the low stone buttress surrounding the terrace—the only barrier left to keep her from plummeting off the building now that the glass panels had been blown to smithereens.

  The wind pushed at Mason’s back.

  “Mason!” Cal cried out in alarm.

  She ignored him.

  “Make this stop,” she said, her voice shuddering through the air like thunder.

  For a moment, Daria just looked at her as if she was speaking in tongues. Her gaze raked up and down over Mason’s Valkyrie armor, and she shook her head in dazed disbelief. Or denial. Her sharp shoulders, draped in the white tunic of her priestess order, began to quake as though she was on the verge of either sobbing or laughing hysterical
ly.

  Mason shook her by the arm, hard. “The curse,” she said. “Make it stop!”

  Cal took a wary step toward them. “Mase—”

  Mason shot him a look from beneath the brim of her helmet that stopped him in his tracks. Then she turned back to Daria. “Now.”

  “I can’t . . . ,” she said in a ragged croak.

  A sickly, silver light twisted in the black depths of Daria’s widely dilated eyes, and Mason realized that the priestess was still caught in the throes of the enchantment herself.

  “Once begun, the Miasma will continue until the engine that drives the curse is no more,” Daria continued. “You want me to end it? That means breaking the link between your brother and my haruspex—a link that can only be broken by death.”

  Death . . .

  The word knifed through Mason’s brain, acid-sweet, seductive as Siren song.

  Down below in the streets, amid the wrecked cars and the brownstone blocks on fire, she could feel death. All of them. Every single one. She could sense—distantly, but distinctly—the passing of each and every human life that was ending in the city that night. And those numbers were creeping steadily upward. It was like a thousand tiny wounds, cutting her up inside. Mason felt a blinding rush of rage filling her head. She heard herself snarling like an animal as she pressed the knife blade into the flesh of Daria’s throat. The high priestess bent backward, hanging out over the empty space high above Rockefeller Plaza, real fear carving the planes of her face.

  Through the haze of incandescent anger, Mason heard someone calling her name again, but it wasn’t Cal this time. “Mason!” Toby Fortier, Mason’s erstwhile coach, shouted. “Stand down! Drop that weapon, Starling!”

  Her knee-jerk reflexes from hundreds of hours obeying the fencing master’s barked commands almost made her do just that.

  “Mason! Do you hear me?”

  She did. But she ignored both him and the impulse to disengage, and instead tightened her grip around the weapon’s hilt and pressed the blade tighter to Daria’s throat.

  “Mason—”

  “It’s too late!” Daria screeched. “It’s your father, Mason, who pushed me to this! He would end us all—you, me, the world!—if I don’t stop him. You . . . you don’t want that! I know you don’t. Help me. Defy him. We can build a paradise on Earth. Don’t let your brother’s noble sacrifice be in vain—”