Descendant by Lesley Livingston Page A

Fennrys thought. So they needed to go not just to the library but to . . . whatever was underneath it.
    What’s the library built on top of?
    He cast back through his memories, sifting through all the years he’d made an annual pilgrimage to the great gray mortal city at the behest of the Faerie King in order to guard a gate that opened once a year in fall.
    “The reservoir,” he murmured.
    Rafe just raised an eyebrow at him in the mirror as he turned left on West Fortieth Street.
    “The old Croton Distributing Reservoir,” Fennrys said to Maddox, who was still frowning with some puzzlement. “It used to stand on the same ground as the library, didn’t it?”
    “Yeah.” Maddox nodded. “Yeah . . . I remember now. Took up that whole block and most of the one that’s now Bryant Park.”
    Fennrys thought about that for a moment. The library and the park occupied two city blocks, right in the middle of Manhattan. He’d been to the library himself only a few days earlier, before he’d regained his memory, to use one of the public computer terminals there to search for clues to his identity. He’d found virtually nothing. Then he’d chatted with an old homeless guy and his teddy bear in Bryant Park, and found out almost everything . . . except he hadn’t known it at the time.
    But that wasn’t what Rafe was getting at.
    The structures that occupied that space now—the library and the park—were latecomers on the Manhattan landscape. A massive, man-made reservoir, part of the water delivery system for the island, had been there first. It had stood aboveground, with soaring fifty-foot walls, twenty-five feet thick, and topped with a wide promenade where the likes of Edgar Allan Poe used to take nightly strolls around the dark, star-reflecting pools. Fennrys had gone there once in the late 1800s, and he remembered how the place had seemed to have a strange, eerie quality to it. He remembered it had been built with a very distinctive style. It had, in fact, been designed to resemble . . .
    “An Egyptian temple!” Maddox blurted out suddenly. “I remember now! The thing looked like a bloody greathulking Karnak.” He turned and looked at Rafe, his eyes narrowing.
    “What?” The man-god shrugged with extreme nonchalance. “You think that was my idea? Egyptian Revival style was very big back then.” Rafe pulled the Jag over and parked illegally in the shadow of the library’s South Court. “Here we are.”
    The three of them piled out of the car, and Fennrys and Maddox followed Rafe as he headed for the wide sweep of stone steps where normally, on any given night, New Yorkers and tourists would still be hanging about, sitting on the steps or strolling or taking pictures. But on that night, the place was deserted. Almost. A handful of individuals stood scattered about the perimeter of the terrace. At a glance, they looked as if they had absolutely nothing to do with one another . . . but every one of them watched Rafe and the two Janus Guards approach with the same focused intensity.
    Rafe glanced over his shoulder to see that Fennrys and Maddox had slowed and were eyeing the group warily. In the deep shadows behind one of the library’s massive pillars, Fennrys saw one woman with dark hair, wearing a tailored suit, suddenly blur like smoke, and a sleek black wolf appeared in her place. Maddox saw it too and stopped in his tracks, one hand going to the leather pouch he wore on his belt.
    “Relax,” Rafe said. “They’re my pack. I thought we could use some backup. They’ll stay here and make sure nothing unexpected follows us.”
    Fennrys remembered the wolves from his first encounter with Rafe in Central Park and figured that they must have some kind of psychic bond with the Egyptian god. He looked over at Maddox, who still stood, frowning with uncertainty.
    “What?” Fennrys said. “He’s the god of werewolves. You didn’t know that?”
    Maddox blinked in surprise. “Well, of course