Descendant by Lesley Livingston Page A

in this place revealed itself willingly or without reason.
    The trickster god’s gaze was unblinking, placid, and laser-beam focused on Mason’s mother. Like a blazing blue searchlight, it raked over her from head to toe. Loki opened his mouth and looked as if he was on the verge of saying something. Mason hesitated, wondering if she should stay and hear what it was.
    Yelena—Hel—saw her hesitate, and in a low voice murmured, “He lies. I’m your mother, and he lies.”
    Loki’s gaze sharpened, and Mason knew he’d heard. But his mouth drifted closed and he lay his head back down on the stone slab, turning his face away.
    Better to say nothing than to speak a truth that willnever be believed.
    Mason felt a sympathetic twinge, but she still turned away, back to where her mother stood, waiting. The dark stuff of Hel’s cloak draped from her outstretched arm like a raven’s wing, and Mason saw that beneath it she wore a long gown of sapphire blue, the color of her eyes. Hers—and her daughter’s. A pouch hung from the broad, ornate belt that girdled her slender waist, and it looked as though it was made of silvery-furred sealskin. She also wore a heavy golden rope crossways over her torso, and from it a curved horn, bone-pale and chased with more gold—ornately wrought, gleaming golden filigree—hung at her hip. She looked like a queen.
    And she was waiting for her only daughter to step forward into an embrace that Mason had dreamed about, but known all her life she would never experience. Her mother Yelena, beloved wife of Gunnar Starling, had died giving birth to Mason, and she’d always carried that small, secret guilt deep in her heart. She’d yearned to know the woman that her father had spoken of with such tenderness and devotion. And now, here she was, waiting for Mason to step into the circle of her arms. And so Mason left Loki behind and walked forward, determined not to look back as her mother stepped toward her and wrapped her cloak around Mason’s shoulders.
    She turned her back on the chained god and, following in her mother’s footsteps, left him lying there alone.

V
    “H ow long do you think he’s gonna lie there feeling sorry for himself?” a voice in the darkness asked. The familiar voice was male, full of candor and a wry amusement that held hints of both concern and exasperation.
    Fennrys tried to ignore it, except he couldn’t. Music, coming from another room, kept him awake. Singing—a throaty, smoke-and-whiskey kind of voice—curled around Fennrys’s mind and beckoned him back from the edge of the abyss. He struggled against the lure of that sound, wanting nothing more than to sink back into nothingness, where every molecule of his body didn’t pulse with the kind of dull, fiery ache that seemed to eat away at his very core. More than that, he wanted to escape the pain in his head—and in his heart—that was born from the knowledge that he had failed, again. Failed to protect Mason. Failed to save her.
    His facial muscles must have twitched, because the voice spoke again.
    “Right, then,” it said. “C’mon, Sleeping Ugly. Wakey wakey . . .”
    Fennrys could feel someone nudging his foot. And he suddenly placed both of the voices he’d heard. The singer was a girl—a Siren, actually—named Chloe. The other voice, the one irritating Fennrys out from his blissful insensibility, belonged to an ex-coworker, for lack of a better term. Fennrys cracked open one eye and gazed blearily up at the young man, whose name was Maddox Whytehall, and who used to be one of Fenn’s fellow Janus Guards. There had been thirteen of them once, guardians of the gateway between the mortal realm and the Kingdoms of Faerie. Fennrys saw that Maddox still wore the iron medallion—the Janus Guard badge of office, similar to Fenn’s own but with symbols unique to him—around his neck.
    Fennrys’s medallion had disappeared along with Mason Starling when he’d lost her on the Bifrost. He heard