Starling (28 page)

For an instant, it felt like she was flying. And then falling.

Then Fennrys caught her out of the sky and pulled her in against his chest and she was back on solid ground again. Well … sort of. Her arms were wrapped around his neck and her feet were about three inches above the ground.

“There,” he whispered in her ear. “That wasn’t so hard, now was it?”

The High Line lay stretched out peacefully under the night sky, a long, winding pastoral path that meandered through steel and concrete canyons.

“My dad told me all about this stretch of track when he used to bring me down to the docks as a little girl,” Mason said quietly as they strolled, drinking in the view of the Hudson River. “He was always sad about the elevated track being decommissioned. Said it was a waste of a good idea. He’s kind of a train nut. And by ‘kind of,’ I mean ‘obsessively.’ I guess it’s a reasonable fascination to have if you’re in the business of transporting stuff, but he even has his own train and private rail lines that run in tunnels all over the place under Manhattan.”

Fennrys whistled low, impressed. “At least he’s got the cash to support his little habit.”

“Yup. He sure does.”

Fennrys gestured at the trees growing on either side of them. “What does he think about this thing being turned into a park?”

“Oh, all for it. Gunnar’s big into reclamation.” Mason laughed. “He thinks that we humans are horrible, wasteful, wanton creatures who don’t appreciate the resources we have and mostly don’t deserve them.”

“Sounds a little harsh.”

“I dunno....” Mason shrugged, running the palm of her hand over the feathery tops of a stand of wild grasses, silvery in the moonlight. “I mean, for the most part, we haven’t been very wise conservators of this planet, have we?”

“In that case, I’ll refrain from gathering wildflowers for you.”

As they strolled along a section of the park where the walkway narrowed to a long, straight strip, Mason pointed at the path and said, “It kind of reminds me of a piste.”

“Which is?”

“The mat they lay down that defines the legal area we can fight on in fencing bouts.”

Fennrys stopped walking and eyed the path. “It does, huh?”

She nodded.

“Well then, I say we use it as one. Why don’t you come back tomorrow and we’ll do another training session, out here under the stars?”

“Aren’t you a little worried I might just kill you outright next time?”

“Death holds no fear for me,” he said airily, waving a dismissive hand. “I shall conquer it as I conquer all things.”

“So I can just keep stabbing you, then?” She smiled brightly up at him.

“I’d actually prefer you didn’t,” he said. “Not for my sake, so much as my wardrobe’s. You understand.”

Mason punched him playfully on the shoulder, and he winced and crumpled a bit. “Oh my god!” she gasped, reaching an arm around him to help. “I’m so sorry—”

“I’m not,” he growled in her ear, as his arms suddenly wrapped around her in the kind of embrace that she could have struggled in for hours without being able to break. “Good to know that you always fall for the poor wounded-warrior act. Now I know your weakness.” He grinned down at her and she punched him again, although without any leverage behind the blow, because he had her forearms pinned to his broad chest.

“You’re evil,” she said. At least, that’s what she meant to say. Only she suddenly discovered that her lips had found other employment than speech. Fenn loosened his grip on her just enough so that she could wind her arms around his neck and pull his head down closer as they kissed under the moonlight, standing in the middle of a paradise in the sky reclaimed from what had once been an abandoned bridge to nowhere.

I
n all the time she’d been at Gosforth, Mason had never had to sneak into her room after lights-out. A week ago, she wouldn’t even have been able to imagine the circumstances that would necessitate such a thing. Or, for that matter, how she would even go about it.

But it turned out it wasn’t so very difficult. Not after Fenn had told her how to do it. Start at the end of the maintenance shed near the back of the main stone building that housed the dining hall. Go from the stacked plastic cafeteria crates to the top of the Dumpster. From the Dumpster, it was easy—for him maybe;
she’d
had to really reach—to get to the stone ledge that ran around the perimeter of the second floor of the residence. That was how he’d gotten his pebble message to her. She smiled when she thought of the lengths he’d gone to just to see her again.

Mason dropped barefoot onto the ledge, her shoes stuffed into her purse, which was slung crosswise over her torso. She’d left the beautiful silver sword and scabbard with Fennrys, promising that she’d come back the next night to practice—hopefully with less bloodshed, but an equal or greater amount of kissing. Which had been extraordinary and made her bare toes tingle on the cold stone ledge just thinking about it. The ledge was probably close to a foot wide, and the rough stone of the wall offered enough finger grips as she catwalked toward the window that was always open. Her window. It was with a small, only slightly weary sense of accomplishment that she threw a knee over the sill and ducked inside.

When the desk lamp flicked on behind her, she almost had a heart attack.

Mason spun around and saw Heather Palmerston sitting cross-legged and elegant in one of the room’s two chairs, glaring at her.

“Yon weary traveler returns,” Heather drawled. “At last.”

“Jeezus, Heather!” Mason gasped. “You scared me half to death.”

“Just returning the favor,” she said drily. “I’ve spent pretty much all day covering for your perky ass, y’know. I had to tell Toby you were at math tutorial, the math tutor that you were at fencing practice, your brother that you were at the bowling alley, and your other brother you were at the library.”

“Bowling alley?”

“Shut up.” Heather pointed to the empty chair in the room. “Sit.”

Mason did as she was told.

“I was really starting to think maybe you were dead in a ditch somewhere or something. I thought they might have
gotten
you.”

“What—the draugr?”

“N … uh, yeah. Them too.” Heather blinked as if she’d been about to say something else, but then she just shook her head, glaring fiercely at Mason. “The freaking
headmaster
stopped me in the hall today and asked me if there was something up with you lately. And my mom—my
mom
—mentioned that she’d seen your dad at the club and did I know if you were behaving yourself, because apparently he seemed, and I quote, ‘troubled’ when your name came up.”

That wasn’t good. Mason was going to have to start being more careful if she wanted to keep seeing Fenn. She looked over to where Heather was still sitting, staring at her. It was obvious that she was pretty pissed. But Mason was secretly pleased—surprised as hell, but pleased—that someone like Heather Palmerston had actually gone to the mat for her.

“I don’t work this hard when
I
skip class!” Heather huffed.

“Heather?”

“What?”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Her eyes glittered fiercely in the lamplight. “And all I can say is, it better have been worth it.”

Mason couldn’t stop the grin she could feel spreading across her face. It had been
so
worth it, she thought, remembering the kissing and the moonlight—and conveniently mentally editing out the stabbing part. After a moment of silence, Heather lobbed a throw cushion at her head.

“Spill it!” Heather yelped suddenly, bounding over from the chair to the bed, where she grabbed another cushion, hugged it, and leaned forward with an expression of anticipation that was just short of salacious. “Details! All of ’em! I know you were with super-bad hot blond. What
happened
?”

Mason was shocked to her core to witness the transformation of ice queen Heather Palmerston into—apparently—Mason’s gossip-hungry BFF. But she didn’t sense anything the least bit insincere about it. After all, Heather had spent all day blowing smoke on Mason’s behalf when she could have just ratted her out and the hell with it. Slowly it dawned on Mason that the girl she’d always thought of as the singular creature at the top of the Gosforth food chain might very well be just as lonely and friend starved as Mason herself was. But as she looked at where Heather sat staring at her expectantly, she decided it wasn’t worth risking the moment of connection by psychoanalyzing the situation. Instead, she grabbed the pillow off the floor that Heather had thrown at her and flopped down on the end of the bed, facing the other girl.

She told her everything that had happened with Fennrys, including the incident at the Boat Basin Café and all that had occurred over the last few hours. Up to and including burying three inches of cold steel in Fenn’s shoulder muscle.

“Ohmigod, you
stabbed
him?”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“No! I
totally
would have done that too!” Heather shook her head enthusiastically. “What a great way to get his shirt off. And then you could totally be all ‘oh, baby, does it hurt?’ and sexy-nurse his hot blond hotness.” She leered wickedly.

Mason stifled a laugh and smacked her with a pillow. “You’re such a perv.”

“Like you weren’t all breathless and fluttery when it happened.”

“More like panicking and fainty. There was a
lot
of blood.” Mason shook her head. “But … then he used that medallion thing—like he did with Cal in the storage room—and healed himself. Almost good as new. Although I’m guessing he’ll carry around another pretty impressive scar to go with all the other ones.”

“Yeah. I remember those,” Heather said.

“I figured.” Mason snorted. “I thought you were trying to commit them all to memory, the way you were staring at him.”

“It’s how I cope with unmitigated terror.” Heather shrugged. “I still wonder where he got them, though.” She leaned back against the wall and cast a sideways glance at Mason. “He doesn’t remember
any
thing?”

Mason shook her head. “Not really.”

“Wow. That’s weird, Starling.”

“No, Heather. What’s weird is that he appeared in the middle of a storm and saved us from monsters,” Mason said drily. “
That
was weird. Everything else that’s happened since then? I’m just kinda going with it.”

“Have you kissed him yet?”

“Heather!”

“Are you gonna kiss him again?”

Mason felt herself blushing a deep crimson. But she smiled at Heather and said, “Every single chance I get.”

Just outside Mason’s room, Rory felt the skin on his hand and arm go from fever warm to ice-cold as he lifted his fingertips away from the polished wooden surface of the door. The instant he did so, the voices of the two girls on the other side became muffled and indistinct once again. He opened his other hand and glanced down at the tiny golden acorn in his palm. The bright glow of the rune carved on its surface dimmed as he watched, and Rory pocketed it.

He hated using the precious store of stolen magicks unless it was something important or—as in the case of the performance-enhancing charms he’d crafted and supplied to Taggert Overlea and some of the other guys on the varsity football team—
extremely
profitable. But when he’d passed by his sister’s dorm room, shortcutting to the kitchen to pilfer an after-hours snack, and heard voices coming from behind her door, Rory had acted on a hunch.

After all, eavesdropping had always served him well in the past.

Drawing a tiny bit of magick from the rune-inscribed acorn, he’d augmented his own senses and
listened
 … and every word that passed between Mason and Heather had come to him through the thick oak door with crystal clarity. His hunch had proved to be a damned good one.

Shaking the tingling chill from his hand, Rory turned on his heel and ran swiftly back down the hallway before anyone caught him lurking. He was extremely pleased with himself—that was one bout of eavesdropping that would pay off handsomely. And fulfilling Gunnar’s plan just got a
whole
lot easier. Rory and Roth would no longer have to scour the entire city looking for one guy. Not when their very own baby sister had just admitted to indulging in regular make-out sessions with him.