Sedna seized Mercury by the ankles and dragged him across the room, while he clawed impotently at the floor. She jerked him to his knees in front of the bookshelf and pressed his face roughly against a stone bust modeled in his own likeness. The sculpture’s eyes glowed green.
Sedna laughed. “Only the worst kind of narcissist would hide a retinal scanner in a sculpture of himself, so he’d get to look lovingly into his own eyes.”
Mercury scrunched his eyes shut like a petulant child.
“Open them,” Sedna snapped, “or I will get that samurai sword and cut them out.”
Still, the god resisted, so she used her free hand to pry open his eyelids. Green lasers danced over his irises and with a hiss, the bookshelf’s secret door unsealed.
Sedna pushed the sick millionaire aside. She grabbed the heavy, reinforced door and opened it the rest of the way.
She had thought she was prepared for what she’d find inside, but faced with the reality of it, she wasn’t prepared at all. The claustrophobic room consisted of a single toilet, a hard cot with no sheets—
—And a blindfolded teenage girl in a tank top and pajama pants.
She quivered on the bed, curled into the fetal position. When the light from the open door filtered through her blindfold, she screamed hoarsely into her gag. Poor girl probably thought she was about to get shipped off to gods-know-where.
“It’s okay,” Sedna assured her in her calmest voice. “I’m a friend. Before I untie you, I need just sixty more seconds to tie up a loose end. Hang tight.”
Dima Ra sobbed a muffled “thank you” into her gag.
The reality of seeing a child—a child!—bound in such conditions snapped something inside Sedna. Her own daughter was only a few years older. What if it had been Cairn in this room?
Sedna found Mercury crawling across the floor like the worm that he was, making for the private elevator up to his helipad.
Sedna intercepted him, this time seizing him by the roots of his wispy hair and dragging him over to the now-nonexistent window where the guard’s blind gunfire had shattered the glass.
She held his head out into the open air. As soon as the hard, upward current hit his face, he immediately stopped fighting, afraid that she might let go. An animal-like whimper escaped his lips. “Please,” he pleaded. “I could make you very rich! Name your price.”
“I don’t want your blood money, you sick bastard,” Sedna seethed into his ear. “I want you to answer me two questions. If I don’t like your answers, I will let you splatter on Washington Street. Understood?”
Mercury nodded frantically and moaned.
“First question,” Sedna said. “Who put you up to this?”
Even faced with death, Mercury let a pause pass before he stuttered, “No one put me up to this. I just thought a senator’s daughter would fetch a pretty—”
Sedna let him drop an inch further.
“Wait, wait, I’ll tell you!” Mercury wailed. “I … I don’t know her name. But she wears a suit of crimson armor and—she walks through walls.”
Sedna’s stomach tightened. A memory had stirred in her, one she’d been trying half her life to forget. The face of a young girl stared sullenly back at her through the tunnel of time.
Mercury mistook her pause for disbelief. “You have to believe me! The woman materialized right into my bedroom. Stepped out of a black cloud like some sort of wraith. She stuck the tip of her sword in my mouth and said she’d ram it down my throat if I didn’t do as she asked.”
Sedna couldn’t believe it. She knew of only one person with the ability to teleport like that.
And as far as she knew, that girl had been presumed dead for almost twenty years.
Sedna shook off the eerie sensation that had seized her. “And how did she want you to do it? How did you steal Dima out of the senator’s residence in the middle of the night?”
“We didn’t kidnap—”
Sedna made to drop him again.
“I’m telling you, I don’t know shit!” Mercury shouted through spittle-slick teeth. “My men were told to idle in a van on the street outside and—I swear to the gods—that girl walked out through the grass like she was sleepwalking or something. Calmly climbed into the back of the vehicle without so much as a peep. She even fastened her own seatbelt, for fuck sake.”
It was a weird story. The weirder part was that Sedna almost believed him.
She pulled Mercury back into the building so that he rested on his knees in front of the gaping void, breathing deeply in relief.
Sedna glanced back at the panic room, where she could hear the girl crying. “Last question,” she said. “Do you think your feet can outrun gravity?”
Mercury’s face twisted in confusion before exploding into panic. “Wait—”
Sedna kicked him in the sternum and reveled in his scream as he tumbled five hundred feet off the side of the skyscraper. The hostile winds outside quickly drowned out his cries.
After a moment, Sedna touched her earpiece. “Vulcan, you set up the nets on the north side of the building, right?”
“Yes,” Vulcan replied, then added incredulously, “Did you just confirm that after kicking that creep out the window?”
Sedna poked her head outside, watching as an ant-sized figure squirmed around in the snare that had captured him forty stories below. “I’m no gambler, but I think one-out-of-four odds were better than he deserved.”
Vulcan started to chastise her, but Sedna muted him and wandered over to the open door of the panic room. As soon as she’d removed the blindfold and gag and untied the girl’s wrists, Dima threw her arms around Sedna.
Sedna patted her back. “Everything is going to be okay. You’ll be home before you know it.”
Dima stiffened. She pulled away, her eyes suddenly stricken with terror. And her next five words chilled Sedna to the bone:
“Please don’t send me back.”
Part One
The Godslayer
The Ice Lair
November
Cairn woke to the sound of glass shattering somewhere in the house. Her first panicked thought was that someone had broken in, but then she distantly heard her father muttering—drunk again, for the countless consecutive night.
She let her head drop back to the pillow with a heavy sigh, willing her heart rate to slow. The crash had interrupted a dreamless sleep, and dreamless sleeps were a prized commodity these days. It had been more than two months now since the Coast Guard divers retrieved her mother’s lifeless body from the Atlantic, and while the nightmares about it were painful, it was the happy dreams, the ones in which her mother was alive again, that proved most devastating. Sometimes the fantasy bled into reality, a few torturous moments of false hope when Cairn opened her eyes in the morning, her mother’s presence so palpable that she swore she could smell her making pancakes downstairs.
And then the icy tendrils of truth would wrap around Cairn, squeezing, suffocating, until all that hope was gone, and she was left with nothing but the jagged chasm her mother had left behind.
Squall stirred at the foot of the bed, where he insisted on nestling in the gap between Cairn’s outstretched feet. Though still technically a kitten, the lynx had already outgrown most adult house cats. He padded onto her chest and began to lick her face.