Starling (9 page)

“Don’t you worry about that, honey,” he said without turning back to look at her. “It was only a thing. Things aren’t important. Possessions are fleeting....” He trailed off before he could really heartily launch into one of his signature “material things are of no consequence/life beyond this life is what’s important” lectures. It was a fave theme of his. Which always struck Mason as kind of funny. Her father was one of the wealthiest men in North America, and yet he was always telling her how unimportant it all was. From anyone else, it probably would have come off as disingenuous. But coming from Gunnar Starling, they seemed like words to live by. Mason wondered if any of Gosforth’s other wealthy patrons thought that way. Patrons like the tall, striking woman who walked through the archway at that very moment, pausing with one hand on her angular hip to scan the assembled crowd with a sweeping gaze.

Daria Aristarchos. Calum’s mother.

Her dark brown hair was caught up in a messy bun and she wore yoga pants and designer sneakers, and yet somehow she still managed to convey an air of movie star or post-career runway model. It was easy to see where Cal got his looks from, although Mason wondered if his father was even half as good-looking as his mom. She had never seen him. Cal’s parents were divorced and his dad lived somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic. It hadn’t been a very pleasant parting, Mason gathered, and Cal had adopted his mother’s last name in the wake of the split.

Mrs.—
Ms
. Aristarchos, Mason mentally corrected herself—looked like she was barely managing to contain a simmering rage as she pulled Gosforth’s headmaster over to a corner of the quad for a private discussion.

Mason turned to see her father looking in Cal’s mother’s direction, and his expression had hardened again. “Honey,” he said without looking at Mason, “get your things and meet me at the car.”

“Dad—”

He swung a blazing glare on his daughter, and Mason’s mouth snapped shut. Then he stalked across the lawn to join the headmaster and Daria Aristarchos. Interrupt was more like it, Mason thought as she watched Cal’s mom turn to her father with a look on her face that might have turned a lesser man to stone. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it seemed to be a bit of a heated exchange.

Roth rolled his eyes and took Mason by the arm. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you to your room and you can grab a few things. It’s Friday. There probably won’t be any classes while they’re doing cleanup anyway. You can spend the weekend at home, and I’ll talk Gunn into letting you come back in time for class on Monday morning. Deal?”

“You will?”

“Trust me, Mason.” Roth gave her one of his rare smiles and led her toward the door into the res wing, past where Heather still sat on the bench, looking just a little lost.

“Hey,” Mason murmured as they passed.

“Hey.” Heather nodded back, and then seemed to notice that Mason’s brother was there. “Hi, Roth.” She turned on a bright smile and tossed her thick blond mane over her shoulder.

“Hello, Heather.” Roth’s mouth ticked upward in a half smile. He was pretty used to that kind of thing from girls, and Mason had never once seen him fall for it. “Are you okay after last night? Do you need anything?”

Heather looked on the verge of making a flirty comment but then seemed to rethink the idea, realizing that it wouldn’t do her any good. Or maybe, Mason thought, she really was just too shaken up by things to actually make the effort. Whatever the case, Heather slumped forward a bit and shrugged a shoulder, saying, “A new gym would be nice.”

“Pretty incredible.” Roth shook his head. “You know, there were blackouts over half of Manhattan last night. But I didn’t see anywhere on the news that took as big a hit as this place....” He glanced back at the gym and the grotesque tangle of oak tree roots that stuck up into the air like so many grasping fingers. “That’s a lot of damage.”

“Yeah.” Heather traced her thumb over a bit of graffiti carved into the wood of the bench:
H+C
, surrounded by a heart. “Well, the tree falling did most of it,” she said absently.

“Most of it?” Roth asked sharply.

Mason and Heather exchanged a look.

“Uh …” Heather shifted on the bench. “I mean, all of it. I mean … what
else
could it have been, right?” She laughed, and it was an awkward, shrill sound.

Roth blinked at her and then glanced back at Mason, who shrugged and tried to look nonchalant.

“Why don’t you walk with us back to the dorm?” Roth asked Heather. “You look like you could use some sleep. You both seem a little on edge.”

“A tree almost killed us, Roth. You probably would be, too.” Mason smiled wanly at him. “Or not. Knowing you. C’mon, Heather. Roth’s right. It’s only quarter after eight, and I’ve already had more than enough excitement for one day.”

They dropped Heather off in front of her door on the second floor, and then Roth escorted Mason down the long hall toward her own quarters. He put an arm around her shoulders, and Mason leaned wearily against her big brother as they walked.

“So,” Roth said quietly as they left Heather behind in her room. “You and Heather Palmerston. Pals?”

“Hardly.” Mason snorted at the very thought. “It’s more like … temporary bonding through shared adversity. I predict that by Monday morning, she’ll be back to wanting to duct tape me upside down to my locker.”

Roth chuckled. “Just as well. Her whole family is whacked, y’know.”

“Really?” Mason stopped in front of her door and fished around in her bag for her key. “And here I thought Heather was just a natural-born bitch.”

Roth answered his sister with a grin. He leaned against the door frame. “I hear the Aristarchos kid got hurt,” he said.

“Yeah.” Mason dug harder through the depth of her bag and avoided making eye contact with her brother.

“I also heard he’s gonna be okay. Basically.”

“I really hope so.”

Mason could feel Roth’s keen gaze on her, and she struggled to keep from blushing. The last thing she wanted Roth to know was who she was crushing on. She also didn’t need him to suspect that Calum hadn’t, in fact, been injured by the tree falling through the gym window. She hated the fact that she had agreed with the others to keep the details of their terrifying ordeal secret. But she had, and she would. And even if she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have even known where to begin to tell Roth the truth of the matter. Thankfully, her fingers brushed her key ring in the corner of her bag, and she opened her door and gestured Roth inside.

The room was cold and smelled of rain. Mason glanced over at the open window and saw that the sill, along with a circle of carpet directly beneath it, was soaking wet from the storm. She ignored it. Mason never closed her window, and a little dampness was a small price to pay for her mental and emotional stability.

She’d suffered from claustrophobia ever since she was a little girl and a game of hide-and-seek had gone horribly awry. At six years old, Mason had thought herself very clever when she’d hidden in the abandoned garden shed on the edge of her father’s rambling Westchester estate. But Rory had seen her pick her hiding spot, and he’d thought it would be a big joke to lock her in and leave her there for a while. Except that … about an hour after sneaking up on Mason and sealing her into the tiny shed with the slid-bar lock, he’d forgotten all about their silly game—mostly because he was already in a car, on his way to a two-day sleepover at a friend’s cottage … a cottage in the Hamptons that had no phone and no way to contact Rory to find out if he’d happened to have seen his baby sister before he’d left. Mason had blocked out most of her memories of the experience, but she’d been told that they still hadn’t found her by the time Rory got back.

Roth glanced at the window but didn’t say anything. After it had all happened, they told her that Roth was the one who’d found her. She didn’t remember that. She didn’t remember any of it—except as distorted night terrors. All she knew was that Roth never bugged Mason about her claustrophobia, and she appreciated it enormously.

She dropped her gear bag on the bed and yanked open the zipper. Then she rummaged through her dresser, tossing her makeup bag and toiletries and a couple of favorite T-shirts into the bag, along with her laptop and a few textbooks she needed for homework. The thought of having to go home made her angry and anxious, but if Roth said he’d get her back to school for Monday, she’d go. Roth never went back on a promise.

She glanced over to where her brother perched on the edge of her desk, arms crossed over his broad chest. The gesture made his arm muscles bulge and Mason grinned a little, remembering how lucky she had considered herself when she was a kid, to have such a big strong brother to take care of her if she ever got into trouble.

She wondered silently what Roth would have done if he’d been in the gym with her only a few hours earlier. She wondered if he would have fared as well as the mysterious Fennrys Wolf. She felt her cheeks grow hot at the thought of the gorgeous, lean-muscled blond guy, and she looked away from Roth and cast around for something to say before he asked her why she was suddenly blushing.

“Hey, um … so what’s the deal between Dad and Cal’s mom?” she asked. “They sort of seem like they hate each other or something.”

Roth frowned faintly. “Yeah. There’s a bit of history there.”

Mason gaped at him. “You’re kidding. You mean, like …”

“No, Mase.” Roth shook his head and laughed. “Not
that
kind of history. Just Gosforth interfamily crap. You know.”

She nodded. Mason tried to avoid anything to do with it, but it wasn’t easy in a place like Gos. The Gosforth Academy had been founded in the late 1800s by a handful of extraordinarily wealthy, extremely influential “Founders,” men and women who had decided that public schools—even other private schools—just weren’t good enough for their little darlings. Gosforth, they claimed, would be a haven. A super-elite sanctuary, as well as a place of exceptional learning and culture. Mason had always been a little embarrassed by the entire situation and had routinely petitioned her father to let her go to a regular school, with no success.

Descendants of the founding families had been attending Gosforth for so many generations that there was a whole tangled mess of feuds and bad blood—and alliances and pacts—that no one could really sort out to any great degree. As far as most of the conflicts went, no one could even remember the origins or reasoning behind them. But it still sometimes made picking where to sit in the dining hall difficult to negotiate. Mason did her best to stay out of it all.

“I don’t know the whole story,” Roth was saying. “All I know is that she and Mom were best friends when they were young.”

“Daria Aristarchos and Mom?
Our
mom?” Mason’s jaw dropped. That was something she couldn’t fathom. Not from everything she knew about Calum’s mother. And everything she knew about her own, which admittedly wasn’t all that much. “You’re kidding. I thought Mom went to school somewhere else. Somewhere
not
Gosforth.”

“She did. Mom wasn’t part of all this.” Roth smiled, rolling his eyes at the room and, Mason got the impression, the school at large. “She never had to deal with being a Gosling. With all of the impossible expectations and the ‘hallowed histories’ of a bunch of deluded, spoiled aristocrats who think they’re above everyone else and hold the fate of mankind in their greasy palms—”

He broke off when he realized that Mason was staring at him. She didn’t think she’d ever heard him string that many words together in a sentence before.

Roth chuckled and shook his head. “Mom was normal. That’s all, Mase. And
that
is why she was so much cooler than any of us have any hope of ever being.”

“I wish I’d known her,” Mason said quietly, feeling the familiar ache of her mother’s absence. Yelena Starling had died in childbirth, and it was a hard thing for Mason to think about—without thinking about that fact that
she
was the reason her mother was gone.

Roth pushed himself away from the desk and walked over to where Mason stood by the bed. “C’mon,” he said, holding out his hand for her bag.

She zipped it shut and handed it over with a sigh. “Right. Home sweet home, here I come.”

F
ennrys crouched on his haunches, huddled under the Hell Gate Bridge trestle waiting for the dawn, or his sanity, to return. He needed one or the other, something that would shine a light on his darkness and banish the things that went bump—and thrash, and chase, and kill—in the night. He squinted into the east, where the horizon was finally brightening. He’d made it. At the very least, he seemed to have—hopefully permanently—ditched the marauding horse-men that had been hunting him.