Starling

by Lesley Livingston

  Outside, the music was … not louder … but more compelling. Irresistible. Cal felt an instant of searing electricity where the wounds on his face and chest tingled sharply, and then he was moving, striding down the immaculate landscaped path accented with classical Greek marble sculptures, down toward the landing where he usually tied up his jet-ski when he was home for the summer months. Cal had learned to swim almost before he could walk. The water had always been like a second home to him, and his mother and sister had always joked that he was half fish. One of the mer-folk. It was a joke.

  Or maybe … it wasn’t.

  When he got to the bottom of the path, he crept around a stand of cedar trees, scarcely daring to breathe. For a brief instant, he thought he’d stumbled on some kind of sorority initiation week. Girls—really, really beautiful girls—sat on the shore and swam, frolicking and splashing, out in the Sound. They were all laughing and singing, and only half of them wore anything that could even remotely be considered clothing—filmy tunics and gossamer gowns that clung to lithe wet limbs—and they didn’t seem to notice Cal spying on them. Or maybe they just didn’t care.

  He watched, mesmerized by the spectacle, when suddenly, out in the middle of the glassy black water, a pearly froth of foam bubbled up, as if churned by something below the surface. Cal squinted at the disturbance, struggling to make out what was causing it.

  Suddenly a boiling geyser of white water burst high into the air and a massive silver horse—its hindquarters fused into a single muscular tail, finned like a fish’s—leaped into the night. A girl of unearthly beauty rode upon its back, holding fast to the creature’s sweeping sea-green mane and laughing with abandon.

  She was followed by dozens of others, and they all rode upon the backs of monsters. Bulls and horses and snow-white leopards that leaped, breaching the surface of the water like dolphins so that Cal could see them clearly. Their back ends were uniformly scaly and had long, iridescent fins where legs and hooves should be.

  “I’m definitely dreaming,” Cal heard himself say.

  Then one of the nymphs hoisted herself up onto the deck of the landing and turned toward where he stood hidden. She held out a delicate, web-fingered hand to him. Her eyes were black, glittering, and pulled at him like magnets. Her skin was silver-white, the color of driftwood, and glistened with phosphorescence beneath the transparent sheath she wore. She opened her full, berry-red mouth, and laughter like bells tinkling fell from her lips. Her teeth were sharp, narrow, and there were too many of them.

  She sang his name.

  Cal closed his eyes and swallowed the fear that surged up his throat. He put a hand to the side of his face, where the claw-marks were, and remembered other monsters. Other things that had no business existing in the world.

  Then he turned and sprinted back up the path toward the house, covering his ears as he ran so he wouldn’t hear the longing in the mer-girl’s voice.

  XII

  By late Tuesday afternoon, Mason was seriously rethinking her decision to return to school so soon. A pop quiz in Latin class on Monday threw her for a loop, and an assignment she’d thought wasn’t due until the next week was, of course, due that very day. She was starting to think Rory might have had the right idea when he’d begged off sick and stayed home.

  Mason had known instantly that her brother was faking, and she’d been feeling fairly righteous about returning to school herself. On top of that, she’d looked forward to getting some real sleep. It was easier for her to sleep peacefully at Gosforth, for some reason. Like there was some kind of protective bubble around the academy grounds that kept the nightmares at bay.

  Now, however, Mason envied her brother. She’d realized, late on Tuesday, that she had an interschool mini fencing competition scheduled that she’d totally forgotten about, and once she’d actually made it to the gym, things didn’t exactly go swimmingly. “Craptastic” would be a more accurate descriptor.

  The sword in Mason’s hand whipped back and forth through the air like the tail of an angry cat. She’d just given up the winning point in the second bout in a row—to lesser fencers—and she was furious with herself. Heather sat on the bench watching her, having already fought her bouts. She’d won all of them but one and just shook her head as Mason stalked past.

  “Well, that kinda sucked,” Toby murmured drily as she shouldered past him on her way to the dressing room.

  She rounded on him and actually had to count to ten because she was in serious danger of biting her coach’s head off.

  “I know,” she said through gritted teeth.

  She huffed in frustration. She’d tried to tell herself that it was just the fact she’d been home for the weekend and lost two days’ practice that had thrown her off. But it wasn’t that at all. It was just … the second she lifted her sword and faced off against an opponent, she didn’t see another fencer in whites and a mask. She saw monsters.

  “I know …,” she said again, more softly. “I’m sorry, Toby. I guess it’s just having a sword in my hand again … I couldn’t stop thinking—”

  “No!” Toby’s voice was like a whip. “We do not think about it, Starling!”

  Toby turned a blazing glare on her, and Mason blinked up at him in surprise. The fencing master was one of the most even-tempered human beings she knew, and it was really unlike him to snap.

  “It didn’t happen.” He took a large swallow from the coffee mug in his hand, his angry gaze still fixed on her. “Remember? That night was nothing but a storm. And it sure as hell is not going to become some kind of excuse for not producing when you’re out there, Mason. Now pull your head out and get back in the race.”

  “I’m sorry …,” she said, her voice barely a whisper as her throat closed up, threatening tears.

  He took a breath and seemed to calm down a bit. “The NACs are next week—next week—and you are not competing at a national level. Contrary to what I said to you the other day, Mason, I will have no qualms about replacing you on the team with Palmerston. I don’t care if I’m already a fighter short with Cal out of the action. If you keep wussing out on matches like that, I’ll bench you—permanently.”

  Mason swallowed the watery, burning knot that closed off her throat and nodded decisively. Toby didn’t make idle threats. He was serious and he was right. She had been terrible. She’d done her best to forget all about it, but all she’d seen when she’d been out on the floor with a sword in her hand had been the shambling, gray-skinned apparitions from the night of the storm.

  She knew it was just her mind playing tricks on her. Sure, she had every right to be freaked out by recent events. Her reactions were normal, anyone would tell her that—if she was actually allowed to talk about it. But of course that wasn’t an option. She shook her head. Fine. She could wade neck deep into denial, just like they could. She could get on with her life.

  “I’m sorry, Toby,” she said, straightening up and looking him directly in the eye. “You’re right. And I’ll do better. I promise.”

  “I know you will, Mase,” Toby said. His mouth curled up into a smile, but it was a weary one, Mason thought. “Now get out of here. Practice. A lot.”

  Mason packed up her gear, exchanged her fencing jacket for a fleece-lined hoodie, and left the Columbia U gym, letting the chill in the air cool the sweat on her skin. She’d shower when she got back to the dorm. She didn’t want to be around a bunch of people waving weapons. In spite of what she’d said to Toby, even just walking the length of the gym, past the other bouts, made her mind flash back to that night.

  Damn, I wish I could talk to someone about it....

  But there was only one person who hadn’t sworn himself to secrecy about that night, and she didn’t know if she’d ever see him again. She suspected not, although that made her heart clench a little every time she thought about it. Whoever the Fennrys Wolf was—whatever he was—Mason felt almost as though she would be somehow incomplete for the rest of her life if she never saw him again.


  As she walked back to Gosforth, she noticed that there were still an abundance of college students sitting out on café patios, even though the weather was unseasonably chilly. The sky overhead was a bright indigo blue behind tumbling purple and gray clouds, and the wind kicked up eddies of road grit that stung Mason’s cheeks and made her squint. She put her head down and stared at the sidewalk as she walked. Another strong gust of wind forced her to close her eyes—and she ran straight into a solid wall of muscle in a football jacket.

  Mason bounced off his shoulder and almost wound up on her ass, but he caught her on the way down and steadied her. “Hey,” he said, looking down on her from a positively Olympian height. “You’re a Starling, right?”

  “Uh. Yes?” Mason said, blinking up into the square-jawed face of Taggert Overlea. She was surprised he knew who she was. The college boys barely acknowledged any of the Gosforth crowd, with the possible exception of Heather Palmerston and one or two of the other girls.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I thought so.”

  He grinned down at her, and Mason felt an uncomfortable twist in the pit of her stomach. There was something disconcerting about the big football player, like his eyes were just a little too bright or his smile too wide or something. Maybe it was all that posing for the cameras after winning big games. Tag and a couple of the other younger players had become CU heroes recently, dragging their team’s sinking fortunes out of the abyss with berserker-like tough-guy play. At least, that’s what Mason had heard around the gym. This guy was one of a handful of rising football stars. Whoopee.

  “Hey. Can you tell your brother next time you see him that he’s gotta call me? We were supposed to hang this weekend before the game, but he was a no-show and I gotta talk to him.”

  “Roth?” Mason blinked. She couldn’t imagine a less likely person for Taggert to “hang” with than Roth Starling. His letterman jacket would clash with Roth’s head-to-toe leather. And she really couldn’t picture Tag’s meathead buddies sharing amiable conversation with Roth’s legion of glowering biker boys.

  “No.” Tag shook his head. “Not that freak. Your other brother—Rory.”

  “Oh!” And that was somehow even more unlikely.

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh, okay,” she said, stumbling back a step as Tag leaned in closer. “Um. He’s home sick right now—I mean, he’s totally faking it, but whatever. He probably just forgot. If I talk to him, I’ll tell him to get in touch.”

  “Cool. It’s really important. Plus, tell him there’s a bush party next weekend I can get him into—y’know, pull some strings and stuff, ’cause I know people, but he’s gotta call me first. I need to talk to him.”

  “Right.”

  “You could come too, you know.” Tag’s gaze slid from her face to her chest. “It’s a kegger, and I’m kinda guessing you don’t have fake ID.”

  Mason resisted the urge to cross her arms in front of her. “You kinda guessed right.”

  “Yeah, but nobody’ll mess with you if you’re with me.” He grinned wolfishly.

  “Oh, uh, yeah. Sure.” She paused awkwardly. “Well, gotta go,” she said abruptly, spinning on her heel and taking off at a pace that was just short of sprinting. She could feel him staring at her for the better part of a block.

  She shuddered. What was Rory doing hanging out with a creep like that, she wondered. Sure, Rory had his fair share of questionable personality traits. But he was also super-smart—top of his class smart—and a girl magnet with dark eyes and sleek black hair almost as lustrous as Mason’s own lush mane. He was athletic. He could have made almost any of the school’s sports teams. For a few years there, he even seemed interested in securing himself a place on the rowing team. But then something had happened, and he’d blown off practice permanently. She figured that it must have been something like they’d told him he couldn’t be captain of the team after only a few weeks. Rory seemed to think that the world was a special place created for him and him alone, and everyone who didn’t share that opinion was just in his way.

  And strangely enough, it was Gunnar Starling who was chief among those who definitely did not share that opinion. Sometimes Mason thought her father hated Rory with a fierce passion. But then sometimes she would catch Gunn staring at his middle child with an expression of such longing and loss that it made her own heart ache. She didn’t understand it. In some ways, she almost expected that he would have cast that kind of glance her way. After all … she was the one who had ended the life of Yelena Starling, Gunnar’s beloved wife, through the simple act of being born herself.

  Back at Gosforth, Mason felt her heart hop a little in her chest when she saw Calum’s familiar golden-brown head of hair showing just above the heads of a group of students walking through the quad. She quickened her pace to catch up, trying not to seem like she was running.

  She glanced at the gymnasium as she passed, which was once again hidden behind sheets of construction plywood and scaffolding, so soon after having been renovated. The venerable old oak tree had been chainsawed into logs and, at Gunnar Starling’s request, transported in a truck to the Starling estate to be used for firewood. Appropriate revenge, Mason’s dad had joked when she asked him about it, and she supposed it was—considering the tree had taken out Gunnar’s beautiful, expensive window.

  Ahead of her, Cal disappeared through an arched doorway. Mason caught up to him in the hallway in front of his locker.

  “Hi, Calum,” she said, quickening her pace to keep up with him.

  “Hey,” he said. He glanced back but didn’t stop for her, or even slow down much at all.

  “How are you?” He must have been late for an evening tutorial or something, because his stride seemed to be lengthening as he walked. “We missed you at the mini bout today. Of course, I’m kind of glad you weren’t there to see me—it was pretty embarrassing—but, y’know, the team missed you. Are you going to come by tomorrow for prac—”

  He stopped so abruptly that Mason ran into his shoulder with her forehead. She took an awkward hop step back and looked up at him as he turned. The left side of his face was covered with a white gauze bandage from hairline to jaw. It looked as though the healing scars beneath were pulling up the right side of his mouth into the shadow of a sneer. His left arm was in a sling because of the damage to his pectoral muscles.

  “What do you think, Mason?” His hand, hanging limply against his chest, twitched slightly. “Does it look like I’m going to be fighting again anytime soon?”

  Mason swallowed convulsively at the sight of his injuries. They really had been as bad as she’d thought. No. They’d been worse. Much worse … before the Fennrys Wolf had done what he’d done. Mason noticed Calum still had the iron medallion Fenn had given him. He wore it now around his neck—she could see the outline of it beneath the collar of his T-shirt.

  “Right.” Mason ducked her head and stared at her feet, avoiding the look in Cal’s eyes. “Well, no. I mean—I knew you wouldn’t be back to fighting yet. But you said that you’d … um. I mean, I just thought … never mind.”

  She was being selfish. Of course he wouldn’t want to come to practice just to help her prepare for the upcoming competition. Even though he’d promised. Things had changed. Everything had changed. She glanced up at him and saw that he was staring coldly down at her. All the warmth that had been there in his gaze before the night of the storm seemed to have been snuffed out, and Mason felt her heart clench in her chest.

  “I have a test to study for,” he said. “I gotta go.”

  “Right. Sure. It’s nice to see you …”

  He turned and continued on down the hall.

  “… back.”

  He left her standing in the middle of the hallway, clutching the strap of her gear bag, her knuckles turning white with the effort to keep from shaking with anger and embarrassment. It wasn’t as if she’d done anything to Calum. She felt the heat creeping up her throat and into her cheeks. A cluster of students standing by the lockers were sta
ring at her pointedly, mostly smirking. Carrie Morgan was actually snickering out loud at her.

  “Hey, Heather,” Carrie called out suddenly.

  Mason turned to see the other girl coming up behind her. She hadn’t noticed her in the hallway, but she groaned inwardly, figuring that Heather would gleefully join the others in making fun of her.

  “Did you see that?” Carrie said. “Starling here just tried to make a totally lame move on your ex, and Callie Boy shut her down. It was cold.” She grinned viciously.

  “Really, Carrie?” Heather said, tilting her head on her long neck and giving the other girl an appraising look. “Colder than your frigid butt? Or do you just conserve all your body heat for that geeky math TA who smells like a wet goat?”

  A hollow, shocked silence descended on the corridor. Carrie’s face turned a mottled shade of purple with barely repressed fury, and Mason thought she might pop an eyeball. The crowd of students standing around her drifted a few feet back and within seconds had collectively found something else to do or somewhere else to be.

  Mason felt her fingers loosen their death grip on her gear bag, and she turned and continued down the hall without bothering to add anything to Heather’s artful smackdown. There wasn’t anything she could say to top that, anyway. All she had to do now was not show any surprise at what Heather had done. Or the fact that she had fallen into step beside Mason. When they were far enough away, she glanced over to see Heather wearing a very slight grin.