Starling

by Lesley Livingston

  Damn. Fenn sighed inwardly. “That’s okay. Maybe another time.”

  “Your call, chief.”

  “Listen,” he said to the man and his bear. “I gotta go. You take care of yourself, old timer, all right?” He fished in his pocket for what was actually the last of Rory’s roll of cash and handed it over to him.

  The man’s eyes bulged huge. “Dang. Thanks, buddy.”

  “That’s for burgers. Not booze. Okay?”

  “Aye-firmative, chief.” The old guy made the bear salute and took the cash. Fennrys watched him go, shaking his head in bemusement. Having done his part to fill a hobo’s stomach, he was still no closer to filling in the gaps in his own head.

  XXVI

  “She’s dangerous.”

  “Thanks, Toby.” Mason rolled her eyes and pulled the laces tight on her shoe. “Just what I needed to hear.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” Toby’s sarcasm was expansive. “Did you want me to say, ‘Ooh, that one’s a pushover, Mase. Just like the girl you fought last week—you know, the one who whupped your butt’? Would that help?”

  “No, Coach Hardass, it wouldn’t.” She grinned up at him.

  Toby shook his head and lifted his travel mug to swallow a large mouthful of coffee. “Somebody around here seems like they’ve had a couple of good nights’ sleeps for a change.”

  “Something like that.” Mason switched feet and laced up her other shoe snugly. Good nights, yes. But it wasn’t the sleeping that had put the smile back on her face and the sting back in her blade. It was Fennrys.

  She sailed through her first three bouts. The one thing Mason loved about fighting saber over foil or épée was that the competitors in saber tended to yell a lot. The fact that you could slash at an opponent and not just poke away at them seemed to bring out something primal in the fencers, and they hollered back and forth at each other as the flurry of attacks and ripostes sent them charging up and down the piste. She’d had to mostly keep a lid on the vocal histrionics when she and Fennrys sparred on the High Line because a lot of yelling probably would have brought the park authority—or even the cops—down on them in a heartbeat. But there in the gym, Mason could holler till she was blue in the face behind her mask.

  And she did. Mostly cries of victory. She cleaned up.

  “So,” Toby said nonchalantly at the end of the day. “That most definitely did not suck. Nice to have you back, kid. And then some.”

  “Thanks, Tobe.” Mason shook her hair out of its tail. “I guess all I needed was for you to get your boots back.” She kicked one of his dilapidated steel-toes lightly. “The Birkenstocks and socks just really threw me last time.”

  He growled under his breath at her, and she saw a flash of apprehension in his eyes—most likely the fear that she would bring up the night of the storm again—but Mason knew better, and she kept her mouth shut. And it didn’t seem so daunting anymore, keeping the terrible secret of that night. Not when she had Fennrys to share it with. After the attack at the boat basin, her strange bond with Fennrys seemed to be growing stronger day by day. All of the weirdness and the wonder that had befallen her were somehow so much easier to bear because she knew that Fennrys was there. Waiting with a sword in his hand and that crazy sexy smile on his face.

  Even though almost nothing had happened between them—a kiss here, hands held there, an embrace at the end of each night before he hailed her a cab to take her home (and always opened the window for her before she got in)—Mason got breathless and light-headed just thinking about him. Like she was now.

  “Hey, Mason …”

  She spun around and, for a split second, was confused that the one who’d called her name wasn’t the Fennrys Wolf.

  “Oh! Uh … hey, Cal!” she stammered, flustered at being caught daydreaming. About the boy who was not the boy standing in front of her—the boy she used to daydream about only days earlier. Mason felt a sudden, stinging wash of guilt.

  Calum was watching her face, and she wondered what he’d seen there, because his tentative smile wavered and a frown line ticked between his brows.

  She made herself smile at him. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay.” His hand twitched toward his face. “Can I talk to you?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Calum gestured for Mason to follow him, and together they walked side by side in silence for a few minutes, away from the busier paths between the university buildings and toward a quiet corner of campus. Cal kept glancing sideways at Mason, as if to make sure she was still walking with him.

  “You did pretty good today.”

  “Thanks,” Mason said noncommittally. She didn’t want Cal asking about the improvement in her game, especially not when he was the one who was supposed to be helping her with that improvement. But, then again, there was no reason for her to feel bad. Cal was the one who had dropped off the face of the earth, not her. Mason knew he was hurting, but he hadn’t even returned any of the texts she’d sent him in the first few days after, asking how he was. And it wasn’t as if the last time they had seen each other he’d been particularly pleasant....

  “I’m sorry about the other day,” he said, almost as if he’d heard her thoughts. “I guess I was kind of—”

  “A bitch to me?” Mason asked. It was something that Heather would have said, and it felt a little weird coming out of Mason’s mouth, but she was glad she’d said it. She realized that she was still pretty pissed at Cal for the way he’d treated her that day in the hallway in front of Carrie Morgan and the other Gos students. But now she worried that Calum would just turn around and forget about talking to her.

  Instead Cal just smiled wanly. “Yeah. I was kind of a bitch. I’ve been trying to track you down to apologize, but you’ve been sort of scarce lately. You haven’t been avoiding me or anything, have you?”

  There was an almost accusatory tone to the question that, for some reason, got under her skin. She stopped short in the middle of the path. “Don’t you have that the other way around?”

  Mason remembered the conversation she’d had with Heather. About how Cal was—or, rather, how Heather said he was—in love with Mason. Casual flirting, a few movie nights with a bunch of other people … that did not equal love. Cal didn’t know Mason well enough to have those kinds of feelings for her. Heather may have been convinced, enough so that she’d actually broken up with him because of it, but Mason just didn’t believe it. Not for a second.

  And even if she did, she wasn’t sure she wanted that. Not anymore …

  “What did you want to say to me, Calum?” she asked, hearing for herself the sharpness in her tone.

  “Right. Yeah …” He took a deep breath. “Look. I think you might be the only one I can talk to about this.”

  The look on Cal’s face melted Mason’s sudden ire, and she reigned in her temper. Cal was serious. Something was deeply troubling him, and Mason couldn’t help but feel badly for him. He looked really … lost. Alone. She wondered why he thought she was the only one he could talk to, and then she tried to remember the last time she’d seen him talking to anyone else at Gos. She couldn’t. In fact, it seemed almost as if Cal was isolating himself from all the other students. She remembered Heather telling her that, even though he was back in class, Cal wasn’t staying in the dorm. He was going home at night, and that in itself was enough to get Gosforth tongues wagging.

  Mason had just assumed that he needed time away to recuperate from his injuries. But aside from the rapidly healing scars, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Cal. Nothing physical, at least.

  “What is it, Cal?” she asked. “What’s bugging you?”

  “Yeah, um …” He ran a hand through his hair, frowning. “Last night, when I was at home, I couldn’t sleep. I mean—it wasn’t just last night. I haven’t been sleeping much since … you know.”

  Mason nodded. “I know.”

  “Well … I’ve been going down to the water …”

  Cal’s family owned super-
swanky old-money property on Long Island, right at the very tip of Kings Point on the Gold Coast, where all the extravagant historic mansions owned by people like the Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts used to be. It was the place that F. Scott Fitzgerald had glamorously fictionalized in The Great Gatsby. Most of the grand old estates had been torn down or converted into public facilities, but the Aristarchos place was still standing.

  She glanced over at Cal, wondering what he wanted to say to her. She saw that his gaze had become cloudy, as though his thoughts were turned inward, focusing on some memory or another.

  “Cal?”

  “Hmm?” His eyes snapped back up to her face. “Oh. Sorry …”

  “So you went down to the water,” Mason prompted. “What happened?”

  He sighed gustily. “Look. I know that you were the one who wanted to tell people about the things that really happened in the gym that night. And I know that when the others said we should just shut up and pretend like it didn’t happen, I went with that....”

  “Cal, it’s okay. I get it. I mean, I understand. And you’re right. Everyone would have thought we were just being a bunch of stupid pranking jerks. Stuff like what happened to us that night just doesn’t happen to the rest of the world. You were right.”

  “No, Mason.” His eyes glittered almost feverishly and he leaned toward her, gripping her by the shoulder, suddenly, frighteningly, intense. “You were. I think this kind of thing goes on more often than most people would ever admit.”

  “Cal … did something happen to you while you were home?”

  He took a deep breath and spilled out an incredible story about strange creatures—frightening and beautiful—in the sound. About how, every night he’d been home since the storm, he would go down to the water’s edge and watch them cavort, listen to them sing. Mason sat listening, frozen statue-still by his words. Suddenly, Cal’s voice broke with emotion and she looked over at him. He was pale and his skin had an almost waxy sheen to it.

  “Last night …” He stopped talking and swallowed convulsively.

  “Last night what?” Mason asked.

  “Last night … they didn’t just sing to me. They called to me to go with them.”

  He’d said it in a whisper, but Mason still could hear the desperate, almost violent yearning in Cal’s voice. He closed his eyes, the muscles in his jaw clenching at the memory, and silence stretched out between them. Mason felt herself growing pale, the blood rushing from her face as if her heart had issued a sudden recall.

  “I can still almost hear their voices in my head. They were so loud. So … insistent …”

  She reached out and took Calum’s hand in her own and said, “I don’t think you should go down to the water anymore, Cal.”

  His eyes snapped open, and he gazed at her with a razor-sharp intensity. He laughed, and his voice cracked again on the sound. “See … that’s kind of funny coming from you, Mason. Because I have a feeling that you and I are in similar situations.”

  “What—”

  “And I could sit here and tell you to stay away from that Fennrys guy until I was blue in the face. For your own damned good. And would you?”

  Mason’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.

  “That’s what I thought.” He laughed mirthlessly and stood. “You know … maybe I should take my sea nymphs up on their offer. Maybe I’d find out I actually belong there. It’d be nice to belong somewhere. With someone.”

  Mason had nothing to say to that as Cal turned his back on her and walked away, but she felt his leaving like a phantom wound. A might-have-been. Calum was a dream she’d almost had. But now—and it felt like it was all her fault—he seemed to be living in a kind of strange and dangerous nightmare.

  XXVII

  Mason shivered, and Fennrys wrapped an arm around her shoulders, although he wasn’t sure if the goose bumps on her arms were from the slight chill in the air or the subject of their conversation. She’d just described to him Calum’s waterside encounter as they wandered along the High Line in the dark—their furtive, after-hours park strolls had become something of a ritual for them after nightly fencing practice. Fennrys cherished those moments, even when Mason found herself compelled to tell him about the problems of another guy.... He mentally smacked down an irrational little spark of jealousy. He would lend an ear, and then, maybe, he might find an opportunity to bring up another topic of conversation that had been ticking away at the back of his mind.

  Fennrys hadn’t yet broached the subject of his discoveries at the library earlier that day. He still didn’t know what to make of the fact that her family and the person—or entity—who owned his warehouse were somehow connected....

  He frowned and dragged his concentration back to Mason’s story.

  “I mean … it’s not like it’s unheard-of for weird things to be found bobbing around in the waters around New York,” she was saying. “Back in the seventies or something, they found a dead giraffe in the river. A marathon swimmer collided with it—can you imagine?” She shuddered at the thought. “But … at least giraffes are real. They exist. What Cal was talking about, though …”

  “Do you think they were the same ones we met?”

  Mason shrugged. “I don’t think so. I mean, I’m pretty sure he would have mentioned if they’d had bright blue skin. And ours weren’t riding monsters. I just think it was a whole new species of weirdness.”

  “Why did he think you were the only one he could talk to about it?” Fennrys asked, and then immediately cursed himself silently as she turned and raised an eyebrow at him. “I mean … what about Heather? Didn’t you tell me they were a couple?”

  “Uh. Yeah. ‘Were’ being the operative word there.”

  “Oh.”

  “And that really wasn’t the point of my story,” Mason said drily.

  “I know, I know …” He smiled down at her for a moment, but then something tugged at the edges of his awareness.

  Fennrys slowed and looked around at the cityscape, glittering in the darkness, surrounding them on all sides. After a week of wildly changeable weather, the air was eerily still.

  “Believe me, Mason,” he said. “If I had the slightest inkling of what’s going on, I’d tell you. I’d tell Calum. Hell, I’d—”

  The sounds of baying animals, faint and far off, stopped Fennrys in his tracks, just inside the cavernous Chelsea Market Passage, a section of the park that ran directly through a corner of the building that housed the Chelsea Market and was home to an art installation of hundreds of panes of colored glass meant to echo the changing moods of the Hudson River. The ethereal blue, green, and red light filtering through lent an otherworldly tinge to the night. It somehow harmonized with the dissonant howling that was getting closer.

  “What,” Mason whispered, “is that?”

  “I don’t know,” Fennrys replied. “But whatever it is … it’s hunting.”

  “Hunting what?”

  Fenn looked down at Mason. “Us.”

  “Ask a stupid question,” Mason muttered under her breath.

  She felt an increasingly familiar jolt of adrenaline shoot through her system. The fact that she was getting used to that couldn’t be a good thing. In the far distance, coming up from the Gansevoort Street end of the park, they could see dark, loping shapes. Tall, shaggy-furred, long-legged creatures. Mason imagined she could see yellow eyes and slavering jaws, even though they were still too far away for that. But they were coming on quickly.

  Fennrys was already shrugging the sword carrier off his shoulder and yanking open the flap closure. He drew Mason’s swept-hilt out and handed it to her with a stern expression on his face. “That,” he said fiercely, “is only for just in case.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you will not even think about trying to be a hero. Your job is to do one thing and to do it so well that not even I can catch up to you.”

  “And that is?”

  “Run.”

 
As the word left his lips, Mason’s dream came flooding back to her. The one where Fennrys had told her to run … and then had become a monster. Before she’d even made a conscious decision, Mason had turned and was pounding north through the deserted park, following the twisting ribbon of the pathway, shining sleek and silver-gray in the light of the moon. The full moon.

  There might have been people—pedestrians or club goers, maybe even a beat cop on the streets below the High Line—but because it was after hours, the park itself was, of course, utterly devoid of any living thing except her, Fennrys, and … whatever was chasing them. Mason didn’t dare take even a moment to find a railing to look over to yell for help. And even if she could have, she didn’t want to involve any innocent bystanders. She just had to run and hope that Fenn could deal with whatever it was. And if he couldn’t … the sword in her hand flashed like molten silver in her peripheral vision as she ran.

  Mason didn’t look back—not even when she heard the terrible snarls and roars and skreeling yelps of pain—and she made it to the Eighteenth Street stairway in record time. She was eternally grateful that she was wearing sneakers and jeans this time. After the first fencing “lesson” with Fennrys in his apartment, Mason had foregone girly allure and opted instead for practical. It served her well in this particular instance. At Eighteenth, there was a metal grid causeway jutting out at a right angle to the park superstructure that led to a staircase, which, in turn, led to the ground. Of course, because it was after hours, the grated door at the bottom of the stairwell would be locked up tight. Mason didn’t bother to try it or see if there was some way to open it from the inside. Instead, once she got to the elevated landing before the last stair flight, she threw her leg over the railing … and jumped.

  She hit the pavement hard and tucked into a shoulder roll, trying not to decapitate herself with her own sword. Above her and to the south, she could hear the sounds of furious fighting. Half of her ached to go back and help Fennrys. The other half was consumed with the urgent need to run. Just as he’d told her. But now that she was out of the park, Mason had nowhere to go. Fenn’s warehouse was right there, but Mason knew that it was guarded. Unless he himself had disabled the wards—that’s what he’d called them—then there was no way for her to get into the building. She could try to hail a cab, but the streets were surprisingly deserted, and she wasn’t sure what kind of cabbie would be inclined to stop for a dirt-stained, wild-eyed, sword-wielding teenage girl anyway.