Starling

  The Wolf’s pale blue eyes were glittering and cold, his pupils dilated. His nostrils flared as he shifted the point of his sword slightly to one side, so that it rested on her right shoulder, almost as if he was about to knight her, and he closed the distance between them. The cool steel of the flat of the blade slid over Mason’s bare skin in a chill caress, and she shivered and looked up into Fenn’s face.

  “I might not remember much, but I remember this. I definitely think I’ve done this a lot,” he murmured.

  “Disarm young women in your apartment?” she asked, her breath coming in shallow gasps—and not entirely because of the exertion. “Is this your idea of a date?”

  Fennrys grinned down at her. “I meant fight,” he said. “I think I’ve fought … a lot.”

  “I could have told you that when we first met. And then again at the boat basin.” She smiled at him and nodded toward where her sword lay on the floor. “Now can I have my present back, please?”

  He laughed in that low, dangerous-sounding way that was almost a growl and made her heart skip a beat. Then he turned and scooped up her blade from the floor and tossed it lightly through the air toward her. She caught it just under the hilt with her gloved hand.

  “So.” Fennrys swept his own blade through the air in front of him. “You want to have another go?”

  Mason looked at him, raising an eyebrow. She thought she might have figured out what he was up to, but she asked him all the same. “Why are you doing this?”

  “What?”

  “All of this.” She circled the tip of her sword in the air. “The fencing thing.”

  “It’s important to you.”

  “And?”

  “And I want to help you win at the competition next week.” He took a step toward her. “I saw how upset you were after you lost that last bout. You’re an amazing fighter, Mason, but I think I can help you be even better, if you’ll let me. Like I said … I think I’ve done this a lot.”

  “I do have a coach....”

  “I know.”

  “And Calum is supposed to be mentoring me....”

  “But he isn’t, is he?”

  She shook her head silently.

  “Take off your shoes,” he said.

  She looked down. He had a point—heels, even relatively low ones, weren’t really conducive to fighting (of course, neither was the flirty little skirt she’d worn). She kicked off her shoes and stood very still as Fennrys walked around behind her and gently lifted her arms into en garde. She settled into the pose, readying herself.

  “No,” he said.

  His voice was right in her ear. She could feel his breath lifting the stray hairs that had escaped her ponytail.

  “Your fingers are too tight. Brittle. That’s why I was able to disarm you so easily just now. You have to stay relaxed.” He worked the edges of his fingers under hers and loosened them so that the blade rocked slightly in her grip. “Like this.”

  “I know how to hold a sword.”

  “I know you know how to hold one. This isn’t about holding a sword. And it’s not about using one, either. A sword isn’t a tool. Not if you’re doing it right,” he continued in a quiet, murmuring tone. “It’s an extension of your will. There is continuity and flow. This isn’t about using a weapon. It’s about becoming one. About making the sword a part of your hand. Your arm. Your entire body …”

  As he spoke, Fennrys ran his own hands over the back of hers. Along the length of her arm. Across her shoulders. Down the muscles on either side of her spine. Over her backside and the lengths of her thighs and calf muscles, all the way to the heels of her bare feet. Mason felt as though his hands had left trails of fire and ice crystals all along her skin. She struggled to keep from gasping as he knelt beside her and grasped her bare ankles in his long fingers.

  “You’re tense.”

  “I’m standing en garde. Shouldn’t I be ready to fight?”

  “You can’t fight if you’re not loose. You have no give. No room to change your mind. Relax your feet.”

  “How am I supposed to change my mind from my feet?”

  “Your feet will know what they’re supposed to do before your brain tells them. Let them. C’mon, Mase. Wiggle your toes.”

  He put the flats of his palms lightly on the tops of her feet, and his thumbs lightly stroked her arches. It tickled, and she had no choice but to wiggle her toes.

  “Let go of your conscious control of your body,” he murmured.

  Mason didn’t feel like she had any control of her body—conscious or otherwise—at the moment. She was standing there stiff as a board, wiggling her toes and breathing shallowly and rapidly. Her heart was pounding, and it felt like it had shifted from her chest into her head. She had no idea where her brain had gone to make room for it. But, yeah, her brain was definitely gone.

  “Mason?” Fenn looked up at her.

  “Yeah?”

  “Duck.”

  With speed that made him almost a blur, Fennrys launched out of his crouch and whipped his own blade up in a diagonal arc toward her head. She saw it as a flash of lightning, and the air in the room went from heavy and electrically charged to vacuum light. Her own sword flashed up and across her body and parried Fenn’s strike with a screech, sliding off his blade as he sprang back and swept his rapier from side to side. He backed off a step, feinted, and then ran at her, striking with blinding speed—left shoulder, right shoulder, head cut, thrust for the heart—and Mason retreated, parrying for all she was worth, not even chancing a riposte when she could have, because she knew he was expecting that.

  Instead of retaliating, she allowed Fenn to chase her almost all the way back across the room and then, at the very last moment, she dropped her blade tip, beat past his guard, swooped under, and turned her rapier, hammering the flat of the blade against Fenn’s flank in what was supposed to deliver a nasty sting and get him to back off. In a competition saber bout, it would have scored her a point. In this case, it got her disarmed. Again.

  Fennrys spun around and reached back. He wrapped his free arm around her blade, slammed down painfully on her forearm with the pommel of his sword, and yanked the weapon from her hand. Then he advanced on her, the two swords crossed like scissor blades across Mason’s breastbone.

  Ice-blue eyes glittering, that maddening half smile on his face, Fennrys backed Mason across the floor until she found she could go no farther. Her shoulder blades flattened up against the rough surface of the room’s long brick wall as Fennrys leaned in toward her.

  “Well?” he asked, his lips close to her ear.

  She could feel his breath on her cheek, cool and steady. He wasn’t even winded, while she was almost panting for breath. Jerk …

  “This is against the rules,” Mason said between clenched teeth.

  “Yeah.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his grin widen and he shrugged one shoulder, as if daring her to do something about it.

  “So?”

  “So … ,” she said, “you’re disqualified.” And brought her knee up sharply.

  Fennrys flinched—not quite as much as she would have liked—and Mason thrust him away, ducking around to grab her blade from his fist as she went. She lunged for the middle of the room, turning to face Fennrys and expecting him to be spitting mad. But he wasn’t angry. He was laughing. Doubled over in pain, teeth bared in a frightening grimace … and laughing.

  “That’s more like it,” he said, his voice a little ragged around the edges.

  Mason huffed out a breath and shook her head in disbelief. “I just canned you and you’re not mad?”

  “All’s fair, sweetheart.”

  “This isn’t love or war.”

  He raised an eyebrow at her. “I don’t know which disappoints me more.”

  Mason felt herself going red. Damn it. “You said you were going to help me with my fencing. It’s a sport.”

  “Right. A competition.”

  “Right.”

&n
bsp; “The end goal of which is to win.”

  “Yes.”

  “At all costs.”

  “I …”

  “It’s just war with rules.” Fenn straightened up and walked toward her, limping only slightly. “You don’t win a war by half-assing it. You have style and you have skill, Mase. But you don’t win a war without wanting it more than anything else. You don’t win if anything stands in your way. You don’t win without killer instinct.”

  That was what Calum had told her she lacked. Mason’s vision went red, and she felt her fingers tightening on the grip of the sword. She saw the corner of Fenn’s mouth quirk up in that self-satisfied grin again and—just as suddenly as it had come upon her—the red mist cleared. Suddenly she knew what he was doing. Pushing her buttons. All of them.

  And then she remembered what he had told her about tensing up. She forced herself to loosen her grip. She slowed her breathing and made herself remember all of the places on her body where Fennrys had touched her. Hand, arm, shoulder, back, leg … she forced herself to stand there for the seconds it took to relax all of those muscles. A tingle of heat bloomed outward from Fenn’s medallion, which she still wore around her neck. Mason grinned.

  And then she unleashed her killer instinct.

  XXIII

  Blood, a bright, blooming circle of it, seeped through his shirt.

  Fennrys put his hand to his shoulder, and crimson welled up between his fingers. A single drop fell through the air—Mason’s wide eyes followed it as if it was shot in slow motion. When it hit the hardwood floor, it made a small, crimson splash mark. She gasped and, as if suddenly released from a spell, dropped her sword and ran the three steps that separated her from Fennrys, who stood swaying on his feet, staring down at where she’d wounded him as if such a thing had never happened before.

  “That’s never happened before …,” he murmured.

  The coldness, the damn-it-all killer instinct she’d seen in his eyes only a moment earlier, even when he was play fighting—the thing she’d been trying to emulate—was gone. He just stood there looking a bit confused.

  “Oh, jeezus,” Mason said as she dropped her sword and rushed forward to grip him by the shoulders and help him lower himself to the floor. Her sword lay on the hardwood beside them, and the first three inches of the razor-sharp point of the blade were stained with slick, bright blood.

  “Shit, shit, shit …,” she hissed in a panic. Mason knew that the wound was probably not life-threatening. So high up on his shoulder, she probably wouldn’t have punctured his lung, and it was nowhere near his heart. Still. There was a lot of blood.

  Because you just stabbed him. There’s a lot of blood because you stabbed him!

  She turned and ran the length of the loft toward the bathroom. “Where is your first-aid kit?” she shouted as she rifled through the linen closet and the cupboards under the sink. “Don’t tell me that you have all of those weapons in this place and no freaking first-aid kit!”

  “Front hall closet. Top shelf,” Fenn called out, a slight breathiness to his voice. “Hey … I remembered that. That’s a good sign, right?”

  “Sure it is,” she muttered as she ran from the bathroom out into the hall. “It’s great. You’ll probably remember everything about who you are just in time to expire from blood loss.”

  On the very top shelf of the front hall closet there was, indeed, a first-aid kit. An industrial-sized one. And a quick survey of the contents before she carried it over to Fennrys gave her the distinct impression that the kit was well used. This is not the first-aid kit of someone who occasionally burns himself making an omelet or who gets the odd sliver.

  There were places sectioned off in a top tray reserved for heavy-duty bandages, the stacks of which were visibly depleted, and the large bottle of iodine was less than half full. Tubes of antibiotic cream were squeezed halfway down their length, and a spool of surgical thread was down to its last few inches.

  That was disturbing enough. But the contents of a second tray, underneath the first, were even more unnerving. And perplexing. It was full of all kinds of weird stuff like dried herbs and antique-looking glass vials full of strange crystals and liquids. There were stones carved and painted with odd symbols and things wrapped in silk that she couldn’t even begin to identify.

  She closed the lid and hurried back to where Fenn sat looking composed and very pale, his hand still pressed to his shoulder. Mason knelt down beside him and helped him ease his arm out of his shirt sleeve. The wound was deep, but it was clean, the neat edges a testament to the sharpness of the blade. Mason cursed herself silently. She was so used to fighting with blunted blades and padded jackets. She had no business screwing around with a real weapon. She could have killed him. He could have killed her. Yet she couldn’t ignore the thrill she’d experienced when they’d fought. It had been exhilarating.

  “Maybe I could put a cork on the end of my blade next time we do this, okay?” she said, pressing a thick bandage pad to the still-bleeding wound, wincing when Fennrys sucked air between his teeth in pain. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

  He gazed up at her, his pupils dilated so wide that his eyes were like fathomless black pools rimmed with blue ice. “You’re human,” he murmured, his words a little fuzzy.

  “Yup. And you’re delirious.” Mason tore strips of tape off a roll to hold the bandage in place. She checked the back of his shoulder to make sure the blade hadn’t gone all the way through and was relieved beyond measure to see that it hadn’t.

  “No.” Fenn rolled his head from one shoulder to the other. “I mean … I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to have done that.”

  “What—you don’t think I can fight you?”

  “Oh, I think you can fight me. A lot of things can fight me. Very few of them can win.”

  “I’m not a thing, Fenn.”

  “That’s why it’s kind of surprising. You see?” His eyes closed. “Maybe a glaistig coulda tagged me like that back in the day—if they got real lucky. Or one of those damned Wild Hunters …”

  “Glee-what?” Mason asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “You were saying something about glee-somethings and hunters.”

  “I was?” He blinked at her in confusion.

  Mason sat back on her heels and regarded him worriedly. He sounded like he might be going into a bit of shock. “Look …,” she said. “Maybe I should get you to a hospital.”

  “Am I still bleeding?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m still alive. No hospital.”

  She frowned and seriously thought about calling for an ambulance in spite of his protest, but he had a point. There would be way too much to explain about the Fennrys Wolf. And his lack of identity. And his collection of scar tissue. And the fact that Mason had stabbed him with a sword.

  “I’ll be fine, Mase,” he said. “Just help me up. I just need to lie down for a few minutes. Then we’ll take another crack at your lessons.”

  Mason had given him a couple of tablets from a pill bottle labeled codeine that she’d found in the first-aid kit, and eventually the pain in his shoulder subsided to a dull throb. Once it did, Fennrys fell into a fitful, dream-ridden doze. In his dream, he was caged. Like an animal.

  He wasn’t the only one there.

  There was someone else. He knew it, instinctively. He could feel it as if he could feel a burning stare upon him. When he closed his eyes, he could imagine the eyes that were staring at him—like two glowing embers, sullen and hungry in their glare. A wicked smile like a knife edge gleaming. He could hear whispers that sounded like lies, even though he couldn’t make out the words. And, every so often, as he lay chained on the floor of his cell, Fennrys would hear distant cries of pure, unbridled agony echo through the sooty air in that same voice....

  And there was a woman there.

  Her features were mostly hidden in the shadows cast by the deep hood of her cloak, but Fennrys could see that she had blue eyes and
an expression of deep sadness on a face that was beautiful in a strong, classically sculpted way. She also had a ring of keys dangling from her slender fingers.

  Suddenly, for a moment, it was as if he stood outside himself, watching. The woman spoke and he answered her, but in the dream, Fennrys couldn’t hear the words either of them said. He strained to catch the sounds, but there was a fierce buzzing in his ears that just grew louder the harder he tried to hear. He saw himself nod in agreement.

  Then there was the sound of a key turning in the ancient, rust-frozen lock. More clanking as the woman unlocked the manacles around his wrists and ankles. They’d been there for a long time, and the skin beneath the rough metal was tender and raw where it hadn’t scabbed over. The chains fell from him with a slithering, metallic hiss as Fennrys struggled to his feet, uncaring of his nakedness, only wanting to make it out the door and onto the other side of those iron bars. He needed to get away. The floor beneath his bare feet was rough-hewn stone, sharp and chipped in places, worn smooth in others, and it sloped upward in a dark, twisting tunnel, hemmed in by jagged black rock walls that seeped moisture. The stone glistened in places with water and, in other places, with what looked like blood.

  The woman who’d released him led the way swiftly and surely. She didn’t hesitate as she led Fennrys through the labyrinth, although he could have sworn they were going in circles. She never wavered. It was as if she knew the place like it was her home.

  In the dream, the journey seemed to take a long, long time. The woman’s soft-soled boots made no sound as she walked, and the long white tunic dress she wore beneath her cloak flowed around her legs with barely a whisper.

  Suddenly the passageway opened onto a rolling meadow surrounded at its perimeter by thick forest. A wide river ran through the center. The woman spun to face him. Shadowed by the deep hood she wore, her eyes were the blue of a thunderstorm over the ocean. They glittered fiercely.

  “Remember,” she said in a voice of steel and smoke. “Remember your promise to me.”