Descendant (26 page)

His father wheeled back to the head of the bed. “They were pretty sure you were a goner when they first found you and—”

“What the hell do you
mean
they don’t know who I am?” Cal interrupted. He was more than a little afraid now and starting to get angry. “If that’s the case, then how did
you
find out I was here?”

“The girls told me.”

“What girls?”

His father’s green eyes glittered. “The Nereids. Daughters of the sea god Nereus. Lovely things. I believe you’ve made their acquaintance recently?”

Cal felt as if a sudden frost was spreading icy fingers throughout his chest.

Nereids . . .

His thoughts turned to the recent nights when he’d been home on his mother’s estate on Long Island Sound. Nights spent down by the water, watching silently as dozens of beautiful girls cavorted in the waves, swimming and diving, riding on the backs of beasts that were half bull or horse or lion at the front end, half fish with scaly, silvery tails at the back. Cal remembered the feelings of longing to join them . . . the dangerous, scintillating temptation that he’d only narrowly avoided, and sometimes wished he hadn’t.

The strange, dreamlike visitations had started just after he’d been injured in the attack on the school—a nightmarish encounter with monsters in a storm that had left Cal injured, his face disfigured by scars. He’d spent most of his daylight hours since trying to convince himself that the water nymphs were a product of his imagination. Some kind of coping mechanism to deal with the stress of his injuries.

And with Mason Starling’s subsequent rejection of him. Because of those injuries.

You still trying to convince yourself that’s what’s
really
going on with her?

No. Not really. But it was easier to think that she was repulsed by his disfigurement, rather than to consider that maybe she just didn’t feel the same way about him as he felt about her. That maybe she felt that way about someone else . . . The sudden gut-punch sensation Cal experienced every time he’d even thought such a thing was almost overwhelming. It was the main reason that when the Nereids had called to Cal a second time, he’d gone to them.

Not
joined
them—his instincts had told him that he would be forever lost if he went so far as to swim with the beguiling creatures—but rather, he’d hovered about on the fringes of the nightly gatherings. As an observer, he could forget for a time the desperate stirrings of deep longing he
harbored for Mason. He could distract himself with other desires. In the beginning, it had worked. But the more he went down to the water, the more the water girls implored him with their seductive songs to stay, to join them. . . . He soon found himself torn between two equally fruitless yearnings. One of them devastating to his heart, the other . . . a danger to his very life.

“Wait . . .” Now he remembered. It all flooded back to him in a painful wave of memory and sensation. “I heard them,” he murmured. “When I was on the bridge. On the bike. They were singing—and then
screeching
—in my head. It was like somebody suddenly filled my helmet with acid. . . .”

Cal remembered the sensation of scorching jealousy filling his thoughts. He’d been on the bridge, near to the waters where they swam. The Nereids had called to him and he had ignored them. Because of Mason. Because he and Fennrys were trying to save her.

The daughters of Nereus the sea god hadn’t taken that very well.

Cal remembered the corrosive anger in their voices—it had set his brain on fire—and he remembered shaking his head like a dog, tearing wildly with one hand at the chin strap to get the thing off his head, as if the helmet was holding the sound in. He would have done anything to make that terrible pain go away. And then, distracted by that—and by the blinding white light that had suddenly blazed up in front of him—he remembered losing control of the bike.

Then blackness . . .

Silence . . .

Cal looked over at his father, who’d gone very still.

“They didn’t mean for you to get hurt,” Douglas said quietly. “They don’t understand how fragile our humanity makes us sometimes. How vulnerable. They just wanted you to go to them—”

“They almost got me
killed
.” Cal glared at the older man. He took a breath. “Why didn’t I drown?”

“It’s called Amphitrite’s Kiss.” Douglas’s mouth bent in a one-sided grin. “If you were anyone else, it would have saved your life. As it is, the kiss just . . . awakened something already inside you. And next semester? You should really think about trying out for the swim team. You’d win every gold medal there is.”

Father and son lapsed into silence, and Douglas reached over and poured Cal a drink of water from a pitcher on the table beside the bed. Cal took a grateful sip
and lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes . . . And there it was again.

The distant sound of roaring tidal waves.

It hadn’t been his imagination on waking. He could
feel
the distant pulse of the East River as it flowed around the contours of Roosevelt Island. He could sense the ebb and flow of the waters of Long Island Sound. And, farther still, he could reach out and, in his mind, touch the salt swell of the Atlantic. He knew that the nurse who’d found him hadn’t saved him. Calum may have been suffering from the effects of the head injury he’d sustained, but he hadn’t succumbed to drowning.

He
couldn’t
drown. Not anymore.

His eyes flew open, and he bolted up in bed. When he turned to his father, Douglas nodded, reading in Cal’s gaze that he understood. Cal could feel it in his bones. Bones in a body that wasn’t entirely human anymore.

Maybe,
a voice whispered in his head,
it never has been. . . .

“This,” his father said, “
this
is your mother’s worst nightmare—this newfound fate of yours. You’ll be even more like me now. More like your grandfather. And his grandfather.” He laughed mirthlessly and shook his head.

Cal just stared at him. “I really,
really
don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Douglas sighed. “Feels a little funny to be having ‘the talk’ with you now, but I guess that can’t be helped. Your mother, while she is devoted to the gods of her ancestors in her own . . . exceptionally dedicated ways, does not approve of those same gods, uh,
consorting
with mortals. She considers human/immortal pairings to have been the essential source of all the troubles, back in the day. She didn’t know that I had Olympian blood in my veins. That my great-grandfather happened to have been a god who’d taken a shine to a mortal woman and . . . well, taken a
shine
to her. In the old stories, they talked about that kind of stuff happening all the time, but by the 1800s, it wasn’t exactly common anymore.”

Cal knew that he’d probably gone a bit pale. “You mean you’re—we’re—”

“Demigods? More like . . .
semi
-gods. Not exactly half-divine, but still. Even in minuscule amounts, god blood has a pretty potent kick to it. If your mother had suspected before we’d gotten married that I had it running through my veins, you wouldn’t be here right now. But
she didn’t know. Hell,
I
didn’t even know until I was in my twenties, and by then it was too late.” Douglas shrugged. “I was already in love with Daria, and I wasn’t about to let a little thing like the occasional manifestation of gills come between us. Of course, your mother figured it out eventually. When your sister, Meredith, was born, Daria suspected something was different about her, even though no one else did. She was just a perfect little baby. But when
you
arrived, it was fairly obvious. You were a child of Poseidon right down to the bright green eyes and webbed fingers and toes.”

Cal glanced at his hands . . . which were perfectly normal.

He raised an eyebrow at his father.

Douglas nodded. “Plastic surgery when you were two. I’m surprised she waited that long, but there wasn’t a doctor she could find that would do the procedure when you were any younger. The membranes were very fine. Didn’t take much to remove them. And our breed heal better than the average human, so of course, there wasn’t any scarring.”

Cal snorted. “I call BS on that. Look at my
face
.” He couldn’t quite manage to keep the acid from his voice.

“Something . . .
other
do that?” his father asked quietly, leaning forward in his chair. “Something supernatural?”

Cal nodded reluctantly.

“Thought so. But I’m betting the gash you came in with on the other side of your head—the one from the bridge accident—is probably pretty much gone already.”

Cal raised a hand to the opposite side of his forehead from where the draugr’s claw marks still seamed his flesh. There was a bandage there, taped to the skin just under his hairline. He peeled the whole bandage off and looked at it. The underside had a fairly large bloodstain on it, but when Douglas held a small mirror out for him to take a look, all Cal saw was a faint pinkness to the skin. Like a fading strip of sunburn. His gaze slid once again to his father’s blanket-wrapped legs.

“So.” He nodded. “Fishing accident, huh?”

“Big-game fish. Really big. Titanic, you might say.”

“A . . . Titan?”

“One of ’em, yeah.” Douglas shifted in the chair. “A lesser one, but still . . .”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I had to do something useful with my life after your mother cut me out of hers. And yours. Meri, at least, still sends the occasional letter. . . .” He shrugged
and waved a hand at his blanketed legs. “That’s how this happened, actually. I was doing her a favor.”

“And the rest of the time you just, what? Sail up and down the East River, waiting for your errant offspring to drop from bridges?” Cal tried to lighten his tone, but even to his own ears the words were laced with bitterness and bewilderment.

Douglas, to his credit, seemed prepared to shrug off his son’s not-so-veiled hostility. “No,” he said with a smile. “As a matter of fact, I was diving off the coast of Antigua when the Nereids caught up with me.”

“Antig . . .” Cal felt his jaw drop open. “How long have I
been
here?”

“About seventy-two hours.”

Cal shook his head, his patience wearing thin. “You just said your boat was docked here. There’s no way you could get here from Antigua in under three days.”

“You mean there’s no way I could get from there to here in under three
hours
,” his father corrected him. “Because that’s how fast I had to move to get here in time to square things with the hospital administration.”

“Hours . . . ?”

“You’d be surprised how fast a boat can move with fair winds, calm seas, and the help of a dozen sea goddesses motivated by guilty consciences.” Douglas’s green stare was sharp, unblinking. “Let me ask
you
something, son. What were you doing on that bridge in the middle of the night? Right before it blew up?”

“I was helping a friend—wait . . .” Cal went silent as his father’s words registered, and an ice-cold hand of fear lay its palm across his chest. He tried to keep the tremor from his voice as he asked, “Right before the bridge did
what
?”

“I guess
that
part of the night’s festivities occurred after you fell.” Douglas’s mouth hardened into a straight line. “Somebody saw fit to blow the hell out of the Hell Gate.”

Mason . . .

Fear spread across his chest and punched straight through Cal’s rib cage to encircle his heart. What if something had happened to her? Cal wasn’t sure he could live with himself if Mason had been hurt. He still felt the sharp sting of knowing that a large part of the reason she’d even been on that train, crossing that bridge in the first
place, was because of him.

Because you were such an ass to her.

“Mase . . .” Cal struggled against the tight-tucked sheets. “I have to get up . . . I have to find her. She has to be okay—”

Douglas reached up and clamped iron fingers around Cal’s arm, keeping him from pulling out his IV needle. “Calm down. Cal! Calm
down
. Who are you talking about? What’s this all about?”

Cal swung his feet to the floor and stood, shakily, steadying himself against the side of the bed. He glared down at his father and after a long moment, when it seemed like he wasn’t going to pitch forward onto his face, Douglas let go of his arm. Cal yanked off the strip of medical tape holding his IV in and pulled the needle from his hand. He felt the cessation of the hydrating drip like a swiftly ebbing tide, but he also felt strong enough to do without it.

“I was trying to help save a friend. Mason Starling—”

“Gunnar’s little girl?”

“Yeah.” Cal nodded. “She was on a train going over the bridge. There’s this guy who was trying to stop it. . . . Look. I really don’t understand everything that was happening. It’s . . .” He lifted his hand in front of his face and spread his fingers wide. His father had said there would be no scars there, and he was right. But Cal could also vividly picture what his hands would’ve looked like with the webbing between his fingers intact. He could almost feel it. He dropped his hand to his side and looked at his father. “It’s just as weird as all of this. Stuff about gods and other realms and the end of the world as we know it . . .”

“Ragnarok,” his father murmured, his green eyes drifting slowly closed. “Damn you, Gunn.”

“So it’s true then?”

“It’s the reason Gosforth exists,” Douglas said. “The reason you go to school there. A long time ago, the founding—or should I say
feuding
—families, all of them dedicated in service to one ancient pantheon of gods or another, decided that their children would all grow up together. Sort of a joint hostage exchange program. Because, yes. The gods, the Beyond Realms, the monsters and the magick . . . it’s all real, Calum.
All
of it. And you’re a part of it now.”

Cal turned and saw that his clothes had been laundered
and folded and placed in a pile on a chair in the corner of his room. He walked over to it and started to get dressed.

“Where are you going?”