Starling (8 page)

“Ow! Hey!”

The bulky shape dropped the pipe and backed off, putting a hand to his chest. Fennrys kicked it out of easy reach. The man glowered at him and pointed at the iron span overhead.

“My bridge, brother,” he rumbled in a voice like a rock slide. “I been here longer ’n you. Longer ’n most. Show a little respect.”

“I’m not your brother and I won’t be staying. But I’m also not going anywhere until after sunup. So you can either sit over there—
way
over there—and behave yourself, or go find another bridge to lurk under. Like that one.” Fennrys nodded to where he could see the elegant swooping lines of the bridge the centaurs had been shooting at him from.

“The Triborough?” The enormous rag-and-blanket-clad bum snorted. “That’s just a
bridge
.”

Fennrys glanced quizzically at the guy and rolled his eyes at the span above their heads.

“Not all bridges are created equal, brother.” The man backed off and sat with his broad, hulking shoulders against the soaring concrete arch. “This”—he knocked on the concrete bridge support behind his head with one enormous knuckle—“is the Hell Gate. And this”—he put his hand flat on the ground—“is Dead Ground.
They
won’t follow you down here.”

“Really.” Fennrys was too weary to be surprised by the fact that the guy had seen a pair of centaurs shooting arrows at him and didn’t seem to think it was anything out of the ordinary. “And why’s that?”

“Here’s Dead Ground.” He shrugged again, as if that explained everything. “Unquiet at that.”

Dead Ground
. That was what the one centaur had said to the other, Fennrys realized. What on earth was that? Before he could ask the question, the big man was speaking again, patting the packed earth beside him with his baseball-glove-sized hand.

“Many dead, many many, lie under this land,” he rumbled. “Makes this place safe for some. Not so safe for others.” He turned toward Fennrys, his shiny bead-black eyes gleaming in a face defined by bulky, misshapen features. “I wonder … which one are you?”

Before Fennrys could ask what he meant by that, the guy lurched to his feet and shambled around to the other side of the massive concrete bridge trestle, laughing quietly to himself.

A
s Toby and the students moved cautiously through the gym, Mason kept surreptitiously scanning the wreckage, searching for anything that might give her a clue as to what those things had been. Or some kind of proof that they had even existed at all. But there was nothing. Not even a tuft of hair or a broken fingernail left behind—let alone the arm or head that Fennrys had so expertly severed. Fennrys, who, for all intents and purposes, was just as much a phantom as the draugr. Aside from the theft of Toby’s boots, there really was no evidence he’d ever been there either.

Almost
no evidence …

“Cal …” Mason reached out suddenly and touched something hanging from his injured left wrist, which he cradled with his other arm. Her fingers closed around the gray metal disk tied there with a leather thong, and it felt hot. Mason jerked her hand away as if she’d touched a live wire, and her arm tingled almost up to her elbow. She rubbed at it and stared at the iron medallion. It was
his
. The Fennrys Wolf’s. She’d seen it hanging around his neck, and she felt almost irresistibly compelled to reach out for it again, in spite of the shock it had just given her.

But Calum lowered his arm to his side, almost as if he was trying to hide it behind his back.

“That’s
his
,” Heather said. “The wolf guy’s. I saw him wearing it.”

“I can’t see how you could have missed
any
detail of his wardrobe, with the way you were staring,” Rory said drily, ignoring the dagger glance she shot him in return. He turned to Cal. “Wonder why he left it with you.”

“Maybe he thought I was hot,” Cal said, equally drily.

“Children.” Toby rubbed at the bridge of his nose. In the gathering light he looked terrible, gray and worn. “Can we please dial down the bullshit and maybe take a minute to get our stories straight? Before the Headmaster wakes up and looks out his window into the quad?”

That might have already happened
, Mason thought as a siren started to wail in the far distance.

Closer, she heard a voice, someone shouting, and then another. Gosforth Academy was waking up to find its venerable oak tree felled and its brand-new gym demolished. What it
wouldn’t
find were the creatures that Mason was almost sure had been responsible
for
the devastation.

And now … now that they had all agreed to remain silent … there was no one to tell of their existence.

Emergency personnel and school administration descended on the scene within minutes, along with a crowd of gawking students from the dorm, most of them still in sweats and sporting bedhead. Mason was led, under protestation that she was fine, to sit beside Heather Palmerston on a bench while a paramedic examined the small collection of cuts and bruises the girls had sustained.

“Mason!”

She glanced up in apprehension as she heard her name called out in a familiar voice. Gunnar Starling came striding across the quad, a thundercloud frown on his brow. Mason felt her heart lurch a little—whether in fear or relief, she wasn’t really sure—at the sight of her father. His custom-tailored overcoat flowed cloaklike in his wake, and his thick silver hair was like the mane of a lion. His elegant Nordic features were drawn, and his pale blue eyes dangerously alight with anger.

Maybe not anger
, Mason thought. Maybe it was … worry.

Which was worse. If Gunnar Starling was angry about something, he dealt with it swiftly, surely, and permanently, and that was that. If he was worried about something—some problem that he couldn’t immediately solve, make better, or make go away—then Gunnar was someone to be avoided at all costs. Mason hoped he was just really pissed about the rainbow window.

Her father bore down on her where she sat huddled under an emergency blanket. Heather seemed to have lapsed into a kind of dull stupor, unaffected even by the sight of buff firefighters—until the moment two of them rounded the far side of the building, supporting Calum between them. Mason, Heather, and Rory had all been able to clamber over the trunk of the fallen oak tree in order to get out into the quad. But not Calum. Toby had made him stay put inside the ruined gymnasium until the firemen could go around and force open the jammed emergency exit door. It was a decision that had quietly infuriated Cal, Mason could tell, but it was also a moot point. In the state he was in, he hadn’t had the strength to climb over the twisted, massive bulk of the fallen oak, in spite of the Fennrys Wolf’s mysterious ministrations. Which, Mason suspected, had probably saved Cal’s life.

She wished there was some way she could thank Fennrys for what he’d done for them, but she feared she’d probably never see him again. It made her unaccountably sad, but she had more immediate problems to deal with at the moment. Like her father switching course in midstride when he spotted Toby talking to the fire chief. Gunnar looked like he was going to rend the fencing instructor limb from bloody limb.

Mason jumped up off the bench and ran straight toward her father, heading him off at the pass.

“Dad!”

“Mason! Honey …” Gunnar Starling wrapped his daughter tightly in his strong arms and kissed the top of her head. “What in hell happened to you?”

“Nothing.” Mason tried to sound convincing. “I’m fine. It was the storm. I guess the old oak just couldn’t stand against it....”

Her father pushed her to arm’s length and bent down to peer into her face, his stare almost palpable in its intensity. “You shouldn’t have been in the gym.”

“Dad, I had practice—”

“And you shouldn’t have been alone like that with no one to protect you.”

“I
wasn’t
—”

“Hey, Pop,” Rory said, wandering up next to them, hands stuffed casually into the pockets of his jeans. Mason noticed, though, that they were balled into tight fists.

“Rory. Damn it!” Gunnar rounded on his younger son. “You should have been looking out for your sister.”

“I’m
fine
, thanks,” Rory muttered acidly.

“Rory was great, Dad,” Mason pulled at her father’s arm, ignoring the pointed glare her brother gave her. Mason had learned early in life that Rory did
not
exactly appreciate anyone standing up for him. “And Toby was awesome, too—he totally took care of us!”

Gunnar’s glance flicked over to where a paramedic had bandaged Calum and was leading him to an ambulance. Cal shrugged angrily away when the woman tried to support him under his arm.

“Yeah,” Mason continued, trying to recapture her father’s attention. “I mean, poor Cal got pretty banged up, but that’s because he was just in exactly the wrong place when the oak came crashing down.”

Gunnar turned back to his daughter, frowning.

“But nobody panicked and Toby made sure we all knew what to do and we’re all okay.” Mason tried to smile brightly. “He made us stay in the storage cellar overnight, until the storm passed, just in case and … and …” She faltered to a stop, willing her father to remain calm and not kill anyone on her behalf.

“The car’s around front of the academy,” Gunnar said. “Go wait for me.”

“What? Why?”

“You’re coming home with me for a few days until I get to the bottom of this.” He glanced at Rory. “Both of you.”

“Dad—no! It’s the middle of the semester.” Mason was horrified. “I have exams. And practice. The national qualifiers are coming up. I can’t leave.”

“Mason—”

“It was just a
storm
.” She glanced at Rory, who frowned deeply at her but stayed silent. “That’s
all
. It could’ve happened anywhere. It could’ve happened on the estate.”

“Where I could have taken care of you—”

“I can take care of myself.
Please
. I’m really,
really
okay.”

She watched anxiously as Gunnar exchanged a long, laden glance with Toby. She was doomed, Mason thought. Her father was going to drag her out of there kicking and screaming—because that was the only way she was going to go—and she’d be locked up in the gloomy, gothic Starling estate for who knows how long. Rory had been right.

But then suddenly Gunnar’s arm muscles seemed to relax a bit beneath Mason’s fingers. His glance had shifted and he was looking over her shoulder. Mason followed his gaze and relaxed a little, too.

Roth. Oh, thank god
, Mason thought.
Saved
.

Her other brother, Rothgar—except nobody really got away with calling him Rothgar except their father—had arrived, dressed head to toe in the motorcycle leathers that made him look armored. He stalked through the quad archway and headed toward them, his gait relaxed, casual, supremely confident. He would keep her father calm.

Roth’s presence had a way of acting like a mute button or a freeze frame. Everyone always seemed to get very quiet and still around him. Mason was used to it, but it always secretly amused her. He was only twenty-two years old, and it wasn’t like he was some huge, muscle-bound biker dude or bouncer or something. And yet people always tended to behave themselves around him.

With Gunnar, he was simply a calming influence, because anything the elder Starling required, Rothgar Starling would simply make happen. He was the epitome of the strong, silent type; usually the only thing anyone heard out of him was the sound of his thick-soled, steel-toed boots as he stalked into a room. Rory had once secretly referred to Roth as their father’s errand boy, but really it was more like he was Gunnar’s second-in-command.

“Hey, Mase.” Roth held out a hand as he walked toward her. Mason took it, and he drew her into a quick embrace. “I heard you had an unscheduled sleepover in the gym last night, little sister.”

“Yup. Complete with light show and bonus random acts of God. Or Goddess. Apparently it’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.”

“Better believe it.” Roth bestowed a grin and wink on her. “She has a temper.”

“Hope Gosforth has insurance.”

Gunnar Starling’s expression darkened, and he turned and glanced over his shoulder at the gaping hole on the athletic center’s outer wall, framed as it was by shattered rainbow shards.

“I’m really sorry about the window, Dad,” Mason said. “It was so beautiful and I know how proud you were of it....”