Starling

by Lesley Livingston

  “Can I help you?” Roth asked politely.

  “You’re Rothgar.”

  “You have me at a disadvantage.”

  “I was led to believe that doesn’t happen very often.”

  “It doesn’t. Who, might I ask, was kind enough to tell you that?”

  “Your sister.”

  Cal watched Roth’s eyes flick over Fennrys from head to toe, assessing. “You know Mason?” Roth asked, even more politely.

  He asked it so politely that every instinct in Cal’s body was screaming for him to dive for cover before things got truly ugly.

  “I’m a friend of hers,” Fennrys answered.

  “You don’t go to Gosforth.”

  “No.”

  Roth smiled coldly. “Mason doesn’t have friends who don’t go to Gos.”

  “Maybe just ones she hasn’t told you about.”

  “So you’re the one,” Roth murmured. “Him. The Wolf.”

  A moment passed. Stillness. Then movement …

  Cal hadn’t looked away—hadn’t even blinked—but he still had no idea where the weapons had suddenly appeared from. The blade in Roth’s hand looked like a bowie knife, huge with a wicked curved point and a serrated edge, like a row of shark’s teeth. The one in the Fennrys Wolf’s hand looked like a dagger out of a medieval epic, with a broad, sharply pointed blade that Cal could tell, just by the way the light glinted off the edge, was honed to a razor sharpness.

  “Jeezus,” he muttered to himself, a cold sweat suddenly beading his forehead. “Calm the hell down, you guys. Somebody’s gonna get hurt.”

  “Accidents do happen,” Roth said quietly. “You might want to tell your old friend to put away his toy before misfortune strikes, Cal.”

  Fennrys said nothing, but the grin that spread across his face in that moment was easily the most unnerving facial expression Cal had ever seen on another human being. It even seemed to give Roth pause. And Roth’s two buddies—who hadn’t moved a muscle since the knives came out—exchanged flicking glances.

  The claw marks on the side of his face tingled as all the blood rushed from Calum’s face, and he took a single step forward, holding up a hand at each of the other men. “Stow it, both of you,” he said, in his best channeling-Toby-Fortier manner. He turned to Roth. “Look, I saw Mason right before the competition. And … we argued. I was trying to find her just now to apologize—again. But I don’t think she’s here. I looked everywhere.”

  “She can’t have gone far,” Fennrys said. “I was talking to her only a few minutes ago.”

  Roth lowered his knife and reached into his back pocket, pulling out a cell phone. He punched in a number and waited. As the rain began to fall, they heard the chorus of the Wizard of Oz movie theme song playing faintly, coming from the alleyway leading to the parking lot. Roth broke into a run and reached the place where Mason’s cell phone lay on the ground just as the song stopped playing. The touch screen was spiderwebbed with cracks.

  They could all hear her voice coming from the phone in his hand saying, “Hey, it’s Mason. Leave a message and I’ll catch you on the flip side.”

  And a violent crack of lightning overhead was followed almost immediately by a peal of thunder that shook the air as the rain began to fall in earnest. Roth swore venomously under his breath and bent down to pick up the phone. When he stood, he turned and looked back in the direction from where they’d just come. Fennrys glanced back, too. It was as if both of them had sensed the presence of the man Cal knew as Rafe, before he’d even appeared, stepping out of the shadows and walking swiftly toward them. He was breathing quickly and looked as if he’d been running. And for a brief instant, Cal thought it looked as though the edges of his form were … blurred slightly.

  Roth nodded brusquely to him and said, “We have a big problem.”

  “Oh … it’s bigger than you think,” Rafe said, grimly. He turned to Fennrys and nodded a brisk greeting.

  “Nice to see you again,” Fennrys said flatly. “Or, y’know, not.”

  Rafe snorted. “Remember what I said to you about prophecies having a funny way of coming true in ways you don’t expect? I didn’t mean funny ha-ha.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Tell him, Rothgar,” Rafe said.

  “Gunnar, my father, believes in Ragnarok,” Roth said. “The end of the world. A mythic apocalypse of—”

  “I know what Ragnarok is, dumbass.” Fennrys rolled his eyes.

  “Right. Anyway. He thinks it’s the only way for the world to become good again, but his belief in the prophecy had faded over time because he was missing a fundamental piece of the puzzle.”

  “And that is?”

  “Long story short … it turns out that for the prophecy to be fulfilled, Gunnar needs a Valkyrie. That’s to be Mason’s fate—but only so long as someone could walk into Asgard and out again, carrying the spear of Odin. If Gunnar gets the spear, he can turn my sister into a chooser of the slain. After that, the rest of his plan falls into place.”

  Cal went cold as ice. He should have told her. He should have told Mason all about the meeting between Rafe and his mother and Roth. He’d had the opportunity—when he’d told her about the sea-monsters, or just before the competition—but he’d bitten his tongue both times and said nothing. Sure, he’d been wary about breaking his promise to Roth, but it was more than that. He’d been so angry with her. Angry and jealous. And now Mason was gone, maybe in some kind of serious trouble, and it was his fault. He should have told her to be careful or tried to protect her.

  Fennrys was staring daggers at Roth. “You didn’t come here looking for Mason. Your father sent you here to get me, didn’t he?”

  “No.” Roth hesitated a moment. And then nodded. “Well … yes. I mean, I was supposed to find you and bring you to Bifrost—the rainbow bridge to Asgard—with the intention of forcing you to cross over and get the spear.”

  “And how exactly were you going to do that?”

  Roth looked back and forth between Fennrys and Rafe. “The magick of Bifrost was woven into a train bridge called the Hell Gate. It spans the East River.”

  “Wait.” Fennrys frowned, holding up a hand. “I know that bridge. I think I met the troll that lives under it.”

  Cal blinked at him. “Figure of speech?”

  Fennrys shook his head. “I don’t think so.... He said the island the bridge passes over is—what did he call it?—Dead Ground.”

  “Well, it is a gateway to the underworld,” Rafe muttered, clearly getting impatient. He gestured for Roth to move it along.

  “Right.” Roth ran a hand through his hair. “Well, the plan was for Rory to get Mason after the competition and take her to the other side of the bridge. I was supposed to track you down and tell you to cross after him.”

  “Track me down? How were you going to do that, exactly?”

  “I have my ways.”

  “Those ways don’t include wolfhounds, do they?”

  Rafe frowned in confusion. “No,” he said. “They don’t.”

  Cal took a step forward. “My mother keeps wolfhounds,” he said.

  Fennrys looked at him and shook his head. Then he turned back to Roth. “Why take Mason across?”

  “Insurance policy. Nobody expected you to go willingly. Rory was to threaten her—threaten to hurt her—if you didn’t cross on your own.”

  “You son of a—”

  “Wait!” Roth put up his hands. “This whole thing was Gunnar’s plan. And Rory’s. Not mine! I’ve never wanted Ragnarok. Ask Rafe here. I’ve been meeting secretly with him and Calum’s mother. She’s a powerful woman in her own right. We’ve been trying to find a way to stop this madness.”

  “It’s true.” Cal nodded.

  “I didn’t come here to find you, I swear. There’s no way in hell I want you anywhere near that bridge. I was just trying to get to Mason before Rory did,” Roth said, a strangely helpless expression crossing his face. It didn’t suit him at all.

  Fennr
ys just sneered at him. “You didn’t try hard enough.”

  “Hang on a second …,” Cal said. “What happens if one of the living tries to cross over this bridge? I mean, a regular mortal?”

  “Nothing.” Roth shrugged. “You cross a bridge. Just a bridge. Wind up in Queens, no harm done. Except you’re in Queens.”

  Fennrys shook his head. “So I’m the only guy who can cross it into Asgard.”

  “The only guy, yeah,” Rafe said quietly.

  All eyes turned to him.

  “What?”

  “Remember that bigger problem I mentioned?” Rafe’s gaze was troubled. “Mason Starling’s not exactly … living.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Fennrys looked as if he might actually kill Rafe for saying that. “If something’s happened to her, I’ll—”

  “No. That’s not what I meant. I wasn’t sure at first. Her true nature was … hidden from me somehow.” The shadow of a frown darkened his brow. “I’m a god in exile, remember, and nowhere near as powerful as I once was. I suspected something when I realized that she could see the vision Etienne conjured for you of your time in Valhalla. She shouldn’t have been able to. Etienne confirmed it for me, though. Mason has—at one time or another—passed through to the underworld and made it back out again. Roth … your sister died.”

  Cal didn’t even pretend to understand half of what he’d just heard. He just looked at Roth, who had gone very, very pale. “Oh, god … the game. There was a hide-and-seek game when she was little. She was trapped in a shed for three days. I never even thought that she …,” Roth murmured, stricken. “But we found her. She was alive!”

  “Someone must have revived her,” Rafe said.

  Fennrys swore quietly. “I guess that explains the claustrophobia.”

  “Rory doesn’t know!” Roth exclaimed suddenly, a frantic light growing in his eyes. “When he tries to take her over the bridge—”

  “She’ll cross over. Into the beyond. And if Mason somehow finds the Odin spear on her own, the touch of it will turn her into a Valkyrie,” Rafe said. “She’ll become a chooser of the slain whether she wants to or not. It’ll drive her. Control her. We have to stop your brother before he gets to that bridge.”

  Roth turned to one of his silent companions. “Give him the keys to your bike,” he said, nodding toward Fennrys. “Can you ride?”

  “No. I’ve never—”

  “I can,” Cal said as he stepped forward and caught the tossed keys out of the air. He glanced at Fennrys. “I’ll double you on the handlebars, hero,” he said sardonically, and spun the key ring on his finger as he stalked past. “Let’s go.”

  XXXII

  Mason was dimly aware of a sense of movement. It penetrated the fog of panic that had wrapped itself around her mind and turned her world into a red-and-gray nightmare that she was experiencing as though it was happening to someone else. Which was probably for the best. She knew that if she could have looked into a mirror in that moment, she wouldn’t have even recognized herself. She would have seen a wild-eyed, openmouthed apparition. Pale and screaming. She knew that she’d screamed her throat raw. The stale stench of canvas and rubber choked her; dirt scratched her eyeballs and gathered under her lids. Her muscles ached from thrashing wildly.

  None of it mattered. All that mattered was that she was trapped. All that mattered was that she get free. She knew, in that far corner of her brain where her rational mind had gone to cower, squeezed into a tiny ball like a terrified animal, that she would do anything, say anything, become anything to escape the confinement.

  The roar of an engine started up and she recognized the throaty purr as that of Rory’s car. The rumble of movement indicated that they were traveling at some speed, zigzagging in and out of traffic in the typical way that Rory was used to driving. She felt herself rolling and sliding, bouncing off the walls of the trunk and jabbing her ribs painfully on the spare tire mount—from which the tire had been removed, no doubt for just this occasion. After several infinitely long minutes, she felt the sensation of the car rolling up a ramp and the engine cutting out. Doors slamming. Heather’s voice raised in woozy outrage was cut short by the sound of Tag Overlea’s coarse laughter, all of it fading into the distance.

  There was a long moment of extended, suffocating silence. Still the pitch darkness of the canvas bag inside the trunk and the sensation of the world shrinking around Mason. Closing in on her. Any moment it would crush her.

  But then there was a lurch and the car began to vibrate again, although Mason knew that the engine was turned off. Over the panicked huffing of her own breathing and the thunder of her pulse in her ears, she figured it out. She recognized the sounds, the familiar swaying and chugging motion. Rory’s Aston Martin, she knew, was now sitting in the transport compartment of Gunnar Starling’s private train.

  Mason thrashed around and punched at the canvas that trapped her, twisting and tightening about her arms and legs like mummy wrapping—she felt as if she’d been bound for burial. Felt as if she’d already been entombed. But when her fingers touched the edges of a sewn seam in the canvas where the stitching felt like it had begun to pull away from a frayed edge, Mason felt a tiny, tenuous sliver of hope twist painfully in her heart.

  After a few minutes of frantic activity, she forced herself to stop. To listen. There was nothing beyond the sound of the train rumbling along tracks. A small part of her wondered where in hell Rory was taking her. The rest of her didn’t care. If he’d already done this much to her—knowing her as well as he did—whatever her brother had in mind couldn’t be good. Mason managed to thrust her head and one arm out of the tear she’d opened in the canvas bag. She wriggled and struggled, drenched in sweat and sticky with dirt but exerting an almost superhuman effort to escape. She had to stay focused on that.

  She already sensed, with a kind of clinical detachment that kept her from vomiting, that she’d torn away her fingernails on most of her fingers forcing her way out of the bag. She could feel the wetness of the blood flowing down to pool in the webbing between her fingers and in the palms of her hands.

  She didn’t care.

  She had to get out. Twisting herself around so that her shoulders were wedged against the back of the trunk, Mason began to kick at the partition in between the trunk and the seat backs. Roth had always scoffed at Rory’s “toy car,” telling him it was a flimsy piece of James Bond-wannabe showy crap. Mason aimed to prove his assertions, even if she wasn’t thinking about it as rationally as all that. She kicked and kicked until one of her shoes went straight through the particleboard and stuck in the horsehair padding and spring coils, the ends of which caught in the flesh at the back of her calf. Mason didn’t even feel it. She kept kicking until the passenger seat wrenched off its moorings with a protesting screech and folded forward, leaving her with a ragged hole to crawl through.

  In the darkness, she made her way over the wrecked backseat through to the front of the car. When she caught sight of her reflection in the windshield glass, it was like staring at just another monster. Pale and hollow eyed, cheeks and forehead streaked with grime, her hoodie and leggings painted with stripes of blood and grease. Her black hair hung lank around her face like a shroud, and her face looked gaunt and ghostly. She groped wildly for the door handle and tumbled out onto the floor of the train car when it opened abruptly—and her gear bag, which Tag or Rory must have thrown in the car when they’d taken her, tumbled out too. Frantically Mason pawed through it, and her hand closed on the scabbarded silver swept-hilt sword Fennrys had given her. She’d taken it with her to the competition, for luck. She almost laughed wildly at the thought. Some luck. Still, she pulled it out and slung the strap of the baldric across her body so that the sword hung from her left hip.

  She didn’t know why she did that.

  It wasn’t as if she was going to stab Rory when she found him, was it?

  No. No … she wasn’t even going to go looking for him. Whatever he was playing at
, he was serious. He never would have done such a thing to her otherwise. This was no game. The sound of her rasping breath was so loud in her ears that she was sure Rory or Tag would hear it and come running and stuff her back into the confines of the Aston Martin, making sure she couldn’t get out this time. Or worse.

  The very thought sent Mason scrambling, in full panic mode, scurrying into a dark corner of the train container. In the darkness, her shoulder jammed up painfully against a metal rail, and Mason realized that there was a ladder that led up to an access hatch in the roof of the container. Freedom. Air. What she would do when she got out onto the roof, she had no idea. But it didn’t matter. Already it felt as if the walls of the train container were closing in on her. Out of Rory’s car wasn’t enough. She needed off the train.

  Mason turned and started to climb.

  Rory had waited his entire life for something like this to happen. He felt almost light-headed with glee as he looked over and saw Heather Palmerston cowering on the leather banquette, pale and shaking. Tag was over by the bar, pouring himself another shot of whiskey from Gunnar’s private stock and pocketing cigars from the humidor. Rory wasn’t even drinking, but he still felt absolutely intoxicated. This was what it was like to be his father. This was what it was like to have power. He was the linchpin in Gunnar Starling’s plan, and Top Gunn was trusting Rory not to fail him. And he wouldn’t. Everything so far had gone off without a hitch.

  Rory had no doubt that his competent, dutiful brother Roth would do his part and Mason’s wolfy boy toy would show up right on cue. Then Rory would get to put on a big show of threatening to hurt Mason if Fennrys didn’t do exactly what they wanted. He was debating just how much of it would be an act. And just how much he could actually get away with torturing his poor, pure, perfect sister before his father would take exception. In the face of achieving the Odin spear, he thought he could go pretty far.

  Rory was pleased with himself in that he’d already put Mason’s claustrophobia to work against her. By now, he thought, she’s probably curled in a fetal position and catatonic. She wouldn’t give him any trouble.