Starling

  “Wish I was. Believe me. But I’m not. Our hero, Calum Aristarchos, carries a torch held very high for Mason Starling.” Heather pronounced it like she was narrating a story. Some kind of twisted fairy tale. “And it looked as though he was just starting to get her to notice that fact when there was a little incident which shall remain unspoken of. Now … he’s damaged goods.”

  Mason was shocked to her core by what Heather had just told her. “I don’t care about the scars. I really don’t. Do you?”

  “Of course not. It’s not just the scars, though. It’s how he got them.” Heather shook her head. “Cal thinks he’s hero material. And when you needed a hero, he didn’t measure up. He got his ass kicked, his face chewed up, and then not only did a screaming-hot blond mystery man show up on the scene and save you instead of him doing it—you had to go and save Cal from further damage. You probably should have just left him behind to get eaten by the zombies.”

  “I wouldn’t have done that. And I think that’s all a bunch of bull.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s not true. You’re Gunnar Starling’s little girl, for crying out loud. That makes you, like, royalty in this town. Boy’s gotta measure up to court the likes of you, highness.”

  Mason snorted. “Cal isn’t exactly descended from a long line of paupers, you know. And how do you know this stuff, anyway? Did he … tell you he likes me?”

  “I didn’t say like. I said love.” Heather picked at a thread on a throw cushion, frowning faintly. “And he didn’t tell me. I told him. Then we broke up.”

  “What?” Mason gaped at her. “That’s crazy! What if you were wrong?”

  “I’m never wrong. It’s a gift. I just know when people are in love. You want to know the real reason Calum and I broke up? Well, that’s it. He wasn’t in love with me, and he never will be.”

  “You’re awfully jaded for someone with such a keen insight into the romantic inner workings of the soul.”

  “Why do you think that’s not the reason I’m jaded? I see people every day who are hopeless for each other. And most of them are too stupid to do anything about it. Either that, or they’re in love with the wrong person and they can’t see the right person standing in front of them because, you know what? Love isn’t blind. It’s blinding.” Heather had gone from picking at the cushion’s stitching to punching it, like she was trying to soften it into shape. “It turns perfectly normal, rational people into drooling brain-deads. The whole Hallmark image of the chubby little naked kid with the blindfold and arrows? Seriously. I think the real Cupid is probably more like some psycho juvie with dark glasses and a Taser.”

  Mason grinned at the mental picture. It wouldn’t sell as many cards in February, but it was pretty funny.

  “Anyway, don’t worry about Aristarchos.” Heather sighed. “He’ll get over himself eventually. Or he won’t. And then he’ll either get with you, or you will have moved on by then. Because you don’t know what you want. Yet. And he’s not worth pining over in the meantime.”

  “Are you?”

  “What?”

  “Pining over him.”

  “Why would I do something like that when I just told you that it isn’t worth it?” Heather answered flatly.

  “Right.”

  Mason stood and turned to leave. Then she stopped and asked, “Hey, Heather? You say I don’t know what I want yet. Does that mean you do? Do you know who I’m in love with?”

  Heather looked at her as if Mason had just asked a question in a foreign language. She stared blankly at Mason for a moment and then looked away. “I … no. I don’t know. Probably nobody. Or … I don’t know—you haven’t met them yet. Or something.”

  “I thought you said you could always tell.”

  “I can. If it’s a living, breathing person, I know. I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t been in love at least once by the time they’re twelve. You’re an enigma, Starling. Or, possibly, you just don’t have a soul.”

  Heather smiled brightly as she said it, but Mason felt a chill crawl over her scalp. She swallowed a tightness in her throat.

  “Go to bed, will you?” Heather waved her toward the door. “But before you do, bring me back your chem homework to copy. Payment for Heather’s Advice to Lovelorn Losers.”

  XVI

  Tink.

  Tink.

  Afternoon sunlight poured through Mason’s dorm room window, even as a shower of pebbles bounced off it.

  Tink.

  Mason blinked and shut the textbook she’d been reading without actually seeing any of the words or absorbing the information. She rolled off her bed and went to the window, trying not to already be smiling by the time she got there.

  “You could get a cell phone, you know,” she called down to Fennrys, who stood in the deep blue shadows cast by the trees on what had turned out to be a cloudless day.

  “Why do I need to do that?” He grinned up at her. “As far as I can tell, you’re only ever in one of two places. Either in your room, or at the gym. And you’re the only person I know, remember? Who else would I call?”

  “Right. Either I really need to broaden my horizons … or you do.” Mason leaned on her elbows and felt a little like Juliet leaning over her balcony, bantering back and forth with Romeo in the garden below.

  Fennrys stepped out into the sunshine—and for some reason, that single act reassured Mason enormously. It was silly, she knew, but thinking about it, she’d never seen him in broad daylight before. She’d begun to think, only half jokingly, that he was some sort of creature of the night. A vampire or—no … more like a werewolf. But standing there in a sunbeam with his dark-gold hair glinting in the light and the paleness of his skin not quite so pronounced as the first night she’d seen him, Mason began to think that maybe he was just a regular guy after all.

  Oh, he is so not regular and you know it. Well, no. Not regular like any of the guys she went to school with. But regular enough that she could go for a walk with him. In the daytime. In populated areas.

  As she was thinking that, Fennrys cocked his head and called up to her again: “It’s a beautiful day, Mason. I would like to spend it with someone, and as I said, you bear the distinction of being the only person in the world who I actually know. So it falls to you.”

  “Well, so long as I’m your first choice, then....” She rolled her eyes and ducked her head back inside. His attempts at suave kind of fell somewhere between stilted and goofy, but it was somehow borderline charming all the same.

  She had his medallion in the pocket of her jeans. She’d taken it to a shop and had it restrung on a new braided leather thong with a silver clasp and silver rings knotted throughout the leather. She’d asked the guy to polish it up too, and the iron gleamed like new, almost silvery itself. But she didn’t give it back to him right away, even though she knew that was why he was there.

  Because she was afraid that the minute she did that, he’d be gone.

  “So … how’ve you been?” she asked, turning to wander casually down the street, as if they were just heading out for coffee or something. As if they had met under normal circumstances in the first place and this was nothing out of the ordinary.

  Fenn tilted his head and walked beside Mason down the sidewalk. “I’ve been okay. I guess.”

  She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. Small talk was not a forte of the Fennrys Wolf, she decided. It sort of reminded her of Roth, the way he only seemed to say something when he really figured it was necessary. Maybe they’d read the same handbook on mastering the arts of the strong silent type. Whatever. Mason already knew that it worked for her brother. Roth left scores of girls pining in his wake, even though he never seemed to notice. She wondered if it was the same with Fennrys.

  “Have you remembered anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Found clues?”

  “No.” He frowned.

  “Any idea what you’ll do next?”

  “No.”

  Mason sighed. So
much for Conversational English 101. Fennrys seemed to notice after a moment that she’d fallen silent.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered in a tone that fell somewhere between annoyance and frustration. With a shading of utter bewilderment that, try as he might to disguise it, was the thing that Mason heard most clearly. “It would be a hell of a lot easier to find myself if I knew where to start looking, you know?”

  He looked so forlorn for a moment. Mason wished with all her heart that she could somehow help him find his way home. Suddenly, in the depths of her pocket, where her hand was clutched around the iron disk, she felt a kind of spark—like an electrical shock. Her feet stuttered to a sudden halt in the middle of the sidewalk, and she closed her eyes. An image flashed into her mind....

  Mason’s eyes snapped open and she stifled a gasp. For a brief second, it had seemed as though she stood in the middle of a dream, complete with vivid imagery of a place she knew perfectly well she’d never been to—but seeing it had drenched her with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. And even though the exact spot where she’d been standing had been unfamiliar, landmarks all around her hadn’t been.

  “I have an idea,” she said, turning abruptly and taking Fenn’s arm with her free hand. “I think we should explore the city together. See if anything sparks your memory.”

  “Sure.” Fennrys lifted a shoulder and looked at her, curiosity kindling in his gaze. “What the hell. I don’t start my paper route until Monday.”

  Mason laughed, remembering what he’d said before about Rory’s ill-gotten income. “Cool.” She grinned, almost tingling with excitement. “Let’s grab a cab.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “South. Down around Chelsea.”

  “Why there?”

  Mason shrugged. She didn’t want to tell Fennrys that, at the exact moment she’d wished she could help him find his home, she’d had a kind of … vision. For one thing, it would make her sound like a flake. For another, she could be totally wrong. What was even scarier was that she might be totally right. Either way, she needed to know. “Gotta start somewhere. And Chelsea’s nice. My dad used to take me there. A new park just opened up not too long ago called the High Line, and it’s kind of cool. It’s built on this old elevated stretch of railway track. You’ll see when we get there.”

  She stepped out into the street to look for a cab, but Fenn pointed to the nearby subway station at 116th Street.

  “If I’m a New Yorker—and I’m not saying I am, but I feel like I might be—wouldn’t I take the subway?”

  “Yup,” Mason agreed, “you probably would. But not with me.”

  “Is this a private school thing?”

  She rolled an eye at him. “It’s a Mason Starling thing. I told you the other night, I have spatial boundary issues.”

  “I don’t actually know what that means,” Fennrys said, frowning down at her. “And the subway entrance is right there. Couldn’t we just—”

  “Spatial. Boundary. Issues.”

  Mason flung her arm in the air and hailed a yellow cab that was weaving its way through traffic on Broadway. She opened the door as the cab pulled to a stop in front of them and rolled the window halfway down before climbing into the backseat. Then she scooted over to the opposite side and did the same to the other window as Fennrys slid in beside her and closed the door behind him. His eyebrow twitched up at her as she settled back on the seat.

  “You really like your fresh air.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and gazed at him defiantly. “‘Spatial boundary issues’ is my way of saying I don’t really do enclosed spaces very well.”

  “I sort of noticed that about you, yeah.” Fennrys shrugged. “Hey. I don’t blame you. I’m all in favor of exit strategies, myself.”

  “Is that what you think it is?” She cocked her head and looked at him sideways, trying to figure out if he was mocking her. “You think I need to have planned escape routes around you?”

  But it seemed he wasn’t actually kidding. “I think maybe, yeah. It’s not a bad idea,” he said flatly. “And not just around me.”

  It was the kind of statement that effectively killed the small talk between them for the rest of the ride. Mason told the driver where to let them off once they got down to Chelsea. He pulled over to the curb, and she ran her debit card through the reader—if she was going to force him to take cabs instead of the subway, the least she could do was pay for the ride. The cab drove off, and Mason was left standing on the sidewalk in a part of town that she was only vaguely familiar with, beside a guy she was totally unfamiliar with, and wondering what the hell had gotten into her. Her normally reserved character was noticeably absent. In truth, she barely recognized herself. And the same could be said for her surroundings.

  “Wow,” she said, looking around at all of the cafés and shops, at galleries that had sprung up like wildflowers in the old warehouse buildings. “Every time I come down here it seems like there’s another half-dozen trendy art galleries that have opened up. This place has really changed a lot.”

  “You’re telling me. I remember when …” Fenn faltered to a stop and frowned at a building in the distance as if it was an affront to his sensibilities.

  “What?”

  “That’s not possible,” he said flatly.

  “What isn’t?”

  “That apartment complex there. The big one. When do you figure it was built?”

  “London Terrace?” Mason asked, following Fennrys’s gaze toward the stacks of redbrick buildings with the square-turreted towers. “It’s pretty well-known. It was built sometime in the 1930s. At the time, I think it was the largest of its kind in the world. Why?”

  Fennrys went a bit pale. “I remember when it wasn’t there.”

  “Fenn, that’s …”

  “Impossible. Yeah. That’s what I just said.” He turned to face her and his eyes flashed dangerously. As if he thought maybe she knew something about him—something she wasn’t telling him—and he was angry with her. “Why did you bring me down this way?”

  Mason backed off a step. It was hard sometimes to remember that she knew virtually nothing about this guy. “I don’t know,” she said. Mason didn’t want to tell him that it was because a spooky, premonitory feeling had led her to suggest they go to that part of town, and she felt her cheeks growing hot under his stare. “I … I had a flash. Like an idea, I guess.”

  “You mean like a vision?” he asked her in all seriousness.

  “More like a mental picture. I just wanted to come down to this part of town with you all of a sudden. That’s all. I swear.”

  Fenn turned back to glare at the apartment buildings in the distance, and Mason realized that he wasn’t angry. He was frightened. His fists were clenched, white-knuckled, at his sides, and the muscles of his jaw bunched as he ground his teeth together.

  “Hey,” Mason said gently, tugging on his arm. “C’mon. Maybe you’re just having a really wicked déjà vu, you know? Or a past-life experience.”

  “Just what I need. I don’t even have any present-life experience,” he muttered. But he let her lead him on, toward the Eighteenth Street entrance stairs that would lead them up to where the High Line stretched out, a ribbon of park floating above the streets of Chelsea. The silence stretched out between the two of them until it seemed like Fennrys couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “So,” he said finally. “You used to come here with your dad, huh?”

  Mason got the feeling that he really was actually taking a stab at making conversation. She nodded. “My dad is kind of a big cheese in the shipping industry. He has a bunch of warehouses over there.” She pointed toward the docks. “At least, he used to. I don’t really know if he does anymore. I don’t keep track of the family biz—not like he’d let me. That’s Roth’s job. But he used to bring me down here with him sometimes when I was really little. Before it started to get all hipsterfied. I remember when it used to be pretty rough and pretty scary.”

&
nbsp; “I remember when it used to be mud flats and ship docks and not much else … and …” Fennrys’s footsteps faltered to a stop. “There was a newspaper seller on that corner. I remember …”

  Mason watched, fascinated, as he squeezed his eyes shut in sudden, fierce concentration.

  “I can see the front page of a paper in my head. From October … in 1912.” Fenn’s eyes snapped open, and he turned and gazed down the street toward the Hudson River. “They brought the survivors of the Titanic disaster in the Carpathia into the Chelsea docks and the papers were still talking about it in October. Mostly I remember this place in the fall. Does that make any sense?”

  “No. Well, maybe.” Mason tried to shrug nonchalantly, but a sudden chill crawled up her spine and made her scalp tingle. What she was about to say sounded stupid inside her own head, but she was going to say it anyway. “Fenn … maybe … I don’t know. Do you think you might be reincarnated?”

  He snorted. “No. I think I’m clinically insane and—wait.”

  “What?”

  “This street …”

  As Fennrys turned to peer down Eighteenth Street, Mason gasped—suddenly the medallion in her pocket felt almost like it was squirming in the palm of her hand. As if the knotted and twisting designs on the iron disk were writhing and twining around one another. She pulled it out and held it up, dangling from its new leather cord. It swung back and forth like a pendulum for a few moments, and Fennrys raised a questioning eyebrow at Mason but didn’t say anything.

  She felt herself blushing. “I was going to give it back to you when we got to the park—”

  Suddenly the medallion’s cord went taut as the iron disk swung east, pointing down the street in the direction that Fennrys had been looking. Mason tried to swing it in another direction, but the thing was stuck like a compass needle pointing to magnetic north. It almost felt as if it was tugging her in the direction in which it pointed. She let it guide her, walking a few steps forward with Fennrys following silently in her wake. Their trajectory took them under the High Line and past an anonymous, somewhat dilapidated two-story brick warehouse with a heavily padlocked front door—an anomaly in the gentrified area. As they passed the warehouse the disk swung as if on a fulcrum and pointed sharply back at the door. Mason and Fennrys exchanged a glance and then walked to the door.