Free Descendant by Lesley Livingston Page A

going to happen. Valhalla is . . . not the same as it once was. The great sadness of it is that it’s just not a place worth fighting to get to anymore. You’ll see what I mean.”
    “Oh .”
    “I’m sorry to disappoint.”
    “That’s okay.” Mason looked down at her tattered fencing whites and then back up at her mother, trying her hardest to muster a smile. “I’m not really dressed for a great hall, anyway. . . .”
    Hel reached out with her other hand so that she held Mason by both shoulders. Her grip was firm, but surprisingly gentle, and Mason felt an electric tingling running all over her body. Dark, sparkling energy engulfed her in a wave. After a moment, the sensation faded and her mother lifted away her hands, her fingers combing through Mason’s suddenly shining, tangle-free hair as she did. It fell in a silken curtain that Mason could see in her peripheral vision on either side of her face. In the weird, stormy light, it looked almost as if the dark fall of strands was shot through with indigo highlights. When Mason looked down, she saw that her destroyed fencing whites were gone. Instead, she found herself wearing her favorite pair of dark jeans and boots and the sleek, shimmery top that she’d been wearing the last time she’d gone over to Fennrys’s for an evening of surreptitious swordplay and moonlit strolling through the after-hours High Line park in Manhattan.
    Thinking about that moment now, Mason understood why her mother had chosen those clothes. Because what she’d been wearing when Fennrys had looked at her the way hehad that night really had made her feel like a princess. “Dressed for a great hall,” like she’d said . . . Her black tooled-leather baldric—the gift Fenn had given her to go with the silver, swept-hilt rapier—still hung across her body, the blue jewel in the silver buckle winking at her. She lifted a hand to the buckle and saw that her hands, torn and bloodied from escaping Rory’s car, were whole again; her long, pale fingers clean and unmarked, her nails unbroken.
    Mason felt the tightness in her chest loosen a little.
    “Now,” Hel said quietly. “Will you come with me?” She gestured back toward the path.
    Mason nodded, and they began to climb once more, up toward Valhalla, the home of her ancestors’ gods.
    They reached another bend in the path, and the ground beneath Mason’s feet shuddered—the movement coinciding with another now-familiar distant wail of pain. Loki. Mason remembered reading in her myth classes that the ancient Norse had used the bound god’s convulsions deep below the earth as an explanation for the cause of earthquakes. It didn’t seem like such a far-fetched theory to her anymore.
    “Just how often does he get subjected to the snake spit?” she asked her mother as they stepped out of the mouth of the cavern they’d been traveling up through.
    The ghost of a frown swept over Hel’s face. Shadows stirred in her deep blue gaze, and Mason tried to read what she was thinking. It was impossible. “I know it’s hard for you to understand what goes on here, Mason. It was hard, at first, for me too. But there is a very good reason that monster is kept in the state he’s in.”
    “Imprisoned and tortured? You’re okay with that?”
    “Imprisoned, yes. Absolutely.” Hel’s voice was firm. “And as for what you call torture . . . I know it seems cruel, but it keeps Loki weak. Distracted. The pain directs his energies elsewhere, energies that otherwise would be wholly dedicated to finding an avenue of escape. That cannot happen.” Hel turned and lifted a hand, laying it gently on Mason’s cheek. “I so loved the world when I walked upon it. I would do anything to preserve it. Even if it means keeping that treacherous beast chained and hurting in the darkness. Even if it means sending you back into the world . . . when all I want to do is keep you by my side and never let you go again.”
    The warmth of her mother’s