Starling (14 page)

“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.

Mason warily considered expressing gratitude, at the risk of having Heather turn it around on her. She was in unpredictable waters. But she felt she had to say something. “Thanks,” she murmured casually. “Also? Nice one.”

Heather shrugged an elegantly sculpted shoulder. “Carrie Morgan is a slag, and she’s been asking for it for months now. She also neglected to mention that Calum stomped on
her
when she went after him right after we split. I should be thanking you for giving me an opening.”

Mason felt her own grin spreading over her face. Three days since the night of the storm, and everything had changed. Everything.

Dammit
. Calum cursed himself silently as he stalked down the hallway toward the library.
What the hell did you do that for, you ass?

The hurt in Mason’s gorgeous blue eyes haunted him as he took a seat in the far corner of the library, behind the stacks, where he could be alone.

Why had he been such a jerk to Mason? Cal wondered angrily. He liked Mason.

You more than “like” Mason Starling
.

Up until the beginning of that school year, Cal had actually been blissfully unaware of that fact. All throughout the previous year, Calum Aristarchos and Heather Palmerston had reigned as the uncrowned king and queen of the school. Gosforth’s ruling power couple. Then, at the beginning of semester, Heather had gone and—out of the frickin’
blue
—dropped a bombshell on Cal. She was breaking up with him. Her reason?

Cal was in love with Mason Starling.

News to
him
 … until he actually thought about it.

Cal had, up until that time, been under the impression he’d never really spared the black-haired, sapphire-eyed, heartbreakingly lovely girl on his fencing team a second thought. Then, suddenly, she was the
only
thing on his mind. He’d actually been on the verge of asking her out on a real one-on-one date when …

Cal put a hand to the bandage on his cheek.

Well, that isn’t going to happen now. Is it?

He’d seen the way she’d looked at him. Moreover … he’d seen the way she’d looked at
him
. That guy. The arrogant blond naked—what the
hell
—stranger who’d appeared in the middle of all of that stormy insanity and, like some kind of mythic hero, saved their necks. While Cal stood around and got his face shredded.

And now … everything was different.

Not just Mason, but the whole world around him had changed. After that first night back home on his mother’s estate on Long Island, where she’d fumed and fussed over him in her elegantly awkward, distantly maternal way, Cal hadn’t even wanted to return to Gosforth. Ever. All he’d wanted to do was wait for nightfall and the singing outside his window that made him forget about his failure in the gym and the wounds that marked his flesh. It also made him forget about Mason—almost. The doctors—there’d been more than one—had told him he’d need plastic surgery eventually. A few of them had seemed a little puzzled over the way his scars were healing.

Cal shook his head. He realized that he was clutching the medallion he wore under his T-shirt. It was
his
.... the Fennrys Wolf’s. Cal felt a surge of something like static electricity wash over him, leaving the hairs on his arms standing up. He could sense the power contained in the little iron disk, and he had a sneaking suspicion that he shouldn’t have been able to.

But what he had experienced, in the dark, under the moon … staring out over the black waters of Long Island Sound … had changed him. Maybe even more than the marks on his face.

You’ve been on some pretty heavy meds, you know...
.

Sure he was. Not just for the pain, but to help drive back the nightmares and help him sleep. And if he hadn’t been on those meds because he’d been attacked by
monsters
, then he might have been perfectly willing to believe the things he’d seen were just drug-induced hallucinations. Frankly, that would have been a whole lot easier to accept. He wished he could talk to someone about it.

No. He just wished he could talk to
Mason
about it.

T
he accommodations were fantastic, but the River Hotel’s clientele was … disconcerting. It consisted mostly of European couples, or gatherings of beautiful young men and women who seemed to do little but drink from champagne flutes in the lounge and glance at him sideways as he walked past. Fennrys did his best to ignore them, but it had started to get to him after a couple of days. He didn’t much like the idea of spending another evening hanging around in a place where the people looked at him as if they knew something about him that he didn’t.

Instead, he went in search of a Laundromat he remembered seeing on his way to the hotel from the clothing store. After three blocks or so he found it, underneath an ancient, peeling sign that advertised
WATERFORD LAUNDERETTE AND SHIRT SERVICE
.

He pushed the door open and stepped inside the long, dingy room that was basically just an alley of front-loading washers and dryers facing off against one another. The Laundromat was deserted except for the bundled shape of a very old woman wrapped in shawls, sitting at the very back of the place on a plastic chair. It didn’t exactly look like somewhere one went to get something cleaned.

He stuck a ten in the change machine at the front of the store and bought a soap packet from the vending machine. Then he wandered to the back of the Laundromat and chose a washer. He threw in the sweats he’d borrowed that first night, set the dial to the shortest cycle, and paced, waiting for it to finish.

When it did, he tossed the damp clothes into the dryer and slumped down on a bench to wait. In the heat, the drone of the machine was hypnotic, and eventually Fennrys found himself struggling to stay conscious. His body jerked as he forced himself awake, and he turned his head to find the old woman watching him from the back of the laundry. At least she seemed to be watching him. Her eyes were fixed in his direction, even though he could see that they were filmy with advanced cataracts—a shade of milky blue that reminded him, uncomfortably, of the eyes of the draugr.

He nodded politely, not even knowing if she could see him. But then she nodded back and raised a gnarled hand, knocking on the glass of the front-load washer beside her. Fennrys could see a load sloshing around inside it, but when he looked closer, he noticed that the soap froth was tinged a pinkish color. As he stared at the churning water, it turned steadily darker, becoming crimson. Then blood colored. Through the murky red water, Fennrys caught a sudden glimpse of an article of clothing within and was startled to see that, whatever it was, it bore an emblem that was strikingly similar to the Gosforth private school crest on the sweats tumbling in the machine behind his head.

Fennrys shot to his feet and spun around to yank open the door of his dryer. A waft of steam engulfed his face as he hauled out the still-damp clothes and shoved them in the bag along with Toby’s boots. He turned on his heel and left the Laundromat, without so much as glancing back at the old woman. He walked for blocks before he finally felt like her rheumy white eyes were no longer fixed upon his back.

Fennrys’s aim was outstanding, even in the uncertain light and deepening shadows of evening. He hit the dead center of the window with the pebble, first time. It just happened to be the wrong window. After a moment, the casement slid up with a grating noise and a blond head appeared, leaning out.

“Hey, hotshot,” the gorgeous girl from the gymnasium said after a moment—the
other
gorgeous girl, not the one he had come to find. For some reason, she didn’t seem surprised to see him again. Or maybe she just did a really good job of suppressing any reaction that would make her seem less than completely cool and in control. “Nice pants.” She grinned wickedly. “Think I liked you better without them.”

“Oh. Uh …”

“You’re looking for Mason, aren’t you?”

“I think so.” He didn’t actually know the name of the girl he was looking for. “She has, uh—”

“Dark hair, blue eyes,” the blonde interrupted him. “Little light in the bra-filling department. That the one? You know, the one you couldn’t rip your
own
eyes off … even while you were killing monsters?”

Fenn frowned up at her. This wasn’t going the way he’d planned. He nodded. “That’s who I’m looking for. I thought I saw her in that window.”

“She was here a second ago. I ditched class today and needed to borrow her poli-sci notes.”

“Right. Sorry I disturbed you.” He turned to go.

“Wait!” She stared down at him for a long moment and then shrugged. “Her name’s Mason Starling. And her room is the south corner window, same floor. That’s where she was headed when she left here.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, hotshot.” The girl called him back again. “We might not be best friends or anything, but Mason’s okay. And I might feel obliged to hire someone to make your life particularly miserable if you bring trouble down on her.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that, Miss …”

“Palmerston. Heather Palmerston. You can Google my family, and you’ll see I have the means to follow up on my threat.”

He grinned up at her. “Like I said—you don’t have to worry about that. I won’t. But if I do … you’re certainly welcome to try.” The way he said it didn’t sound like a boast, even to his own ears. It sounded like a simple invitation, and an unself-conscious assessment of his own abilities.

“Okay then,” Heather said, crossing her arms and tossing her hair over her shoulder. She glared fiercely down at him. “Just so long as we understand each other.”

“I’m pretty sure we do.”

“You were definitely more fun pantsless,” Heather said, and slammed the window shut.

Fennrys shook his head and loped around to the other side of the stone building, where he could see a light glowing behind the curtained corner window on the second floor. The bottom pane had been lifted open, so he aimed for the center of the top glass square. As accurate as his aim was, it took three or four tries to get Mason to come to the window. When she finally stuck her head out, there was a look of confusion on her face as she glanced cautiously into the night.

“Evening,” Fennrys said in a quiet voice, and stepped out of the shadows beneath the trees.

It startled Mason enough so that she jumped and hit her head on the casement. She swore and drew back, her eyes wide when she saw him standing there. He saw her breathing quicken, and he wondered if it was in fear. Not that he would have blamed her. Considering the circumstances of their last meeting.

“What are you doing here?” she asked in a hissing whisper, her hands gripping the windowsill with rigid fingers. “What do you want?”

“I just wanted to talk,” he said. “Is that all right?” He considered telling her that he came by to drop off her brother’s gear and the boots, but he was afraid she would tell him to just leave the bag on the sidewalk and get lost. “Just talk.”

“Are you alone?” she asked. “Or did you bring zombies with you again?”

“I’m flying solo tonight.”

Mason chewed on her lower lip as if trying to decide whether to believe him or not. Her gaze flicked to the trees and darkened buildings behind him as if looking for confirmation that he was truly alone. Then she looked back down at him, and he was struck again by how pretty she was. The orange glow from a streetlamp down the block highlighted the curve of her cheekbone and emphasized the deep sapphire blue of her eyes. And her black hair hung in a straight and shining curtain in front of her shoulder.