Starling

  And the handwriting was Gunnar Starling’s.

  When Rory was young, he’d learned that the most interesting things in life were almost always kept hidden. Locked away in dark places. And the harder it was to break the locks, the better the prize inside. He’d been overcome with a fervent, abiding desire to ferret out those treasures, so he’d developed a talent for listening at keyholes and finding ways into places he was forbidden to go.

  It had been over a year since Rory had last read through the diary pages. He’d almost convinced himself that it was best just to leave it alone. To forget about all the things he’d learned. But now, after the storm—after the attack by the draugr—he felt a savage anticipation. Maybe all the things he’d dreamed about would finally have a chance to come true. He flipped the diary open and began to read from the very first pages once again.

  Gunnar Starling had begun to keep a diary after he had first stumbled across a trio of women who called themselves the Norns in Copenhagen.

  If I am to be honest with myself, I must admit that this was no accident. I suspect they had been hunting me, though who knows for how long …

  Rory ran his fingertip across that line on the first page of the diary, even though he almost had the passage memorized.

  The Norns.

  Three beings, clothed in the guise of mortal women, who—according to Norse mythology—were responsible for deciding the fate of men.

  Rory’s father had been in Copenhagen on a business trip with his father, Magnus Starling; a young man learning the ropes of the family shipping business. One night, Gunnar had gone out into the city on his own. He’d been looking for something, anything, to alleviate his restlessness brought on by the tedium of the past few days.

  And he found it.

  As he walked through the front door of a dark, cavernous bar down near the canal, heavy velvet curtains parted and a man appeared: impeccably dressed, with deeply tanned skin, dark glittering eyes, and a head of perfectly coifed dreadlocks that fell uniformly to brush his shoulders.

  He grinned at me—a gleaming, pointed grin—and said, “Welcome, Mr. Starling. You can call me Rafe. I’ll be your host for the evening.”

  I cannot remember having given the man my name. He showed me to a table in a private alcove that was set with four chairs, as if he thought I might be expecting company. I wasn’t, of course. But company found me, nonetheless.

  At first, Gunnar thought they must be “working” girls by the way they were dressed, with their wild hair and heavy makeup and tight, revealing black clothes. He was about to wave them away. But then the man returned, bearing a tray of four stout clay mugs full of something pungent and murky—mead, maybe? The three women sat down at his table without invitation.

  “On the house,” Rafe said, nodding at the mugs. Then he gestured to the women. “Gunnar Starling, meet Verda, Skully, and Weirdo.”

  The women turned as one and glared at the man, and I felt a surge of apprehension. But he just grinned at me and said, “Not their true names, of course, but they insist on dressing like a Berlin dive-bar punk band.”

  His mockery of them struck me as reckless. Dangerous. But then the woman he’d called Verda turned and gazed into my face with pale yellow-green eyes and said, “This is the one.”

  “Sure he is.” My host laughed cruelly. “I’ve heard that from you before.” Then he turned to leave us alone. “Don’t take too long,” he said. “And don’t wreck the joint.”

  He closed the curtain, leaving me alone with the strange trio, but at that point, I’d had enough. I swallowed the drink in one mouthful, fully intending to leave. But then something … extraordinary happened. And even though my eyes will be the only ones that ever read these words, I am almost afraid to write them....

  Rory let the leather-bound book fall open in his lap as he leaned his head back and pictured the scene....

  The women reached into small leather pouches that hung from their belts and spilled handfuls of tiny golden acorns, each one carved with a mark—a rune—out onto the table. Gunnar tried to pull his hands away from the table but suddenly found that he couldn’t. His fingers felt as though they were rooted to the surface. He felt the wooden chair beneath him shift and ripple, bending toward his spine, wrapping around his torso....

  Rory opened his eyes, and his gaze drifted back to the page.

  My feet felt as if they were spreading out across the floor, sending roots into the ground. I looked down at my hands, horrified—they were gnarled and barklike, and when I struggled to break free, my arms only creaked like tree branches in a storm wind. I opened my mouth to cry out but could utter only a thin, wailing moan.

  “Let go of your fear, Gunnar Starling,” the three women said in unison, their voices echoing like thunder in my head. “You are at the heart of Yggdrasil, the world tree. You will know your destiny. You will fulfill it.”

  The acorns lying at the center of the table began to spin like tops, emitting rays of golden light, and I could not tear my gaze away. The world blurred all around me and I saw my life—branching out into several different paths like the limbs of a tree, each decision taking me in a different direction.

  One of those paths led to my most closely held, most sacred soul-deep desire....

  The dearest wish of Gunnar Starling’s heart, Rory knew, had never been that of a normal young man. Most normal young men didn’t yearn to bring about the destruction of the world. They didn’t think that humanity was beyond redemption—had been for centuries—and didn’t seek an end to mankind so that the world could start over again from scratch. But that exact thing was the one singular ambition Gunnar had been nurturing secretly since he was a child and his own father had told him who—and what—he was. The secret history of the Starling family was a legacy that had been passed from generation to generation. Since before his ancestors could write down the stories of their gods, they had served them. The Aesir. Thor and Odin and Loki; lovely Freya; fearsome Hel, Mistress of the Underworld; and Heimdall the Bridgekeeper … the gods and goddesses of the Vikings were the guiding stars in the skies above the Starling clan’s heads. The prophecies of those gods demanded an eventual, catastrophic ending, and it was the duty of their devotees to help bring that about.

  Until my own father betrayed that sacred trust, Rory thought bitterly, his hand clenching into a fist on top of the diary page. But that was much later.

  On that night in Copenhagen, Gunnar had found himself at the head of the path. He followed that path in his mind and was rewarded with a glimpse of the glorious horror he would bring down upon the world … but then, suddenly, everything went dim. A thick fog rolled across his mind, and the images were swallowed up in uncertainty. But it was enough. He knew what he must do.

  When I came back to my senses, I was alone. I swept up the acorns that lay scattered on the table, put them in my pocket, and left the bar. The night air was cool and soft, and everything around me was brighter and sharper than it had been before. Down in the harbor, I stopped to gaze out over the dark waters. It was late enough that there were only a handful of people around, and no one paid me any heed. No one—except the famous bronze statue of the Little Mermaid, who sat out on her rock in the middle of the bay. As I gazed out at her, I swear I saw her lips curve in a wicked, beckoning smile as she flicked the tip of her tail fin.

  I nodded politely and continued on my way. My own eyes have been opened, and now I can see … but I realize also that such visions hold dangers of their own. I must be careful. But I must be brave—

  Rory was jolted out of his immersion in his father’s story by the sharp, insistent ringtone of his phone. He looked at the number and decided not to answer it. His “business transactions” could wait. He turned his gaze back to the last lines of the entry.

  This morning, Father asked me what I seemed to be so very happy about.

  “I have met my future,” I said. “I have met the woman I will marry, and she is wonderful. Her name is Yelena Rose. She li
ves in New York City. And she is as beautiful as I knew she would be.”

  With her at my side, I will do what must be done.

  It is my destiny. Mine … and Yelena’s.

  “And mine, Top Gunn,” Rory murmured as he closed the diary in his lap and stared out over the lake. “Only I won’t give up on my destiny like you did, old man....”

  If he was to believe any of what his father had written, then he knew that his ancestors had dedicated their lives in service to the Aesir—the gods of Norse legend—and awaited their return to the mortal realm.

  Rory had also learned that there were other pantheons of gods, all with devoted clans of mortal followers. He knew that magick existed. He even knew how to use it after discovering the golden acorns hidden in Gunnar’s study.

  Perhaps most surprising of all the things Rory had discovered was that Gosforth Academy wasn’t just a school. It was a safe house. Neutral ground. A place where the influential families—rival clans serving rival gods—could keep their children safe under the same roof. It was both a fail-safe situation and an insurance policy.

  According to what Rory had subsequently learned about the school history, it had worked extremely well from the time the school was founded. No single family had ever gone out of its way to make trouble. Rites were kept, rituals preserved, but so far none of the old gods had come thundering back—either as nuisance or outright threat to humanity.

  Gunnar Starling, however, had formulated other plans.

  Rory glanced nervously at the clock on the dash. He would have to return the diary soon to the brass-bound lockbox on the desk in Gunnar’s study. He didn’t like having it in his possession for more than an hour or two at a time. Rory was already worried that his father might one day notice that a few of the handful of gilded acorns were missing from the box. But before he returned the diary, he opened the leather book back up and flipped to the one page he’d spent the most hours staring at.

  The words of the prophecy were scrawled across the page, as if Gunnar had still been caught in the throes of the vision when he’d written them.

  One tree. A rainbow bird wings among the branches.

  Three seeds of the apple tree, grown tall as Odin’s spear is,

  gripped in the hand of the Valkyrie.

  They shall awaken, Odin Sons, when the Devourer returns.

  The hammer will fall down onto the earth to be reborn.

  Even if Gunnar hadn’t spelled out the meaning in the diary, Rory would have figured it out. His mother’s maiden name had been Rose. Apple trees were part of the rose family, and apples held all kinds of significance in myths and legends. Starlings were birds noted for the iridescent rainbowlike sheen of their feathers. And Norse mythology was predicated on an end-of-the-world scenario—Ragnarok, when a monstrous giant wolf named Fenris would devour Odin, the father of the gods, and a great war, fought by the souls of the dead, would destroy the mortal realm.

  The prophecy, as Gunnar had understood it, meant that he and Yelena would have three sons who would become “Odin Sons,” leaders of the warrior host of Asgard, an army of fallen heroes. The Devourer, the Fenris Wolf, would appear. Then Thor, the god of thunder, would be reborn into the mortal realm.

  When Gunnar met Yelena, it was the start of the end of everything.

  Except that their third child born turned out to be a girl.

  And Yelena had died bearing her.

  XI

  Mason had promised her father no nightmares, but it wasn’t a promise she’d figured she could realistically keep. Mason had been having nightmares since she was six. Most of them variations on a theme.

  This time, when she opened the dream shed door she found a different twist to the old hide-and-seek scenario. Stepping inside the old forgotten gardening hut led, quite unexpectedly, to a dark, rough-walled cell. Like a medieval dungeon carved into the earth. Manacles hung from rusting chains. It was a place Mason had never been before—in dreams or otherwise—but it felt strangely familiar. In the corner, she saw a bench, once painted a bright sky blue with red roses on it. But the design was faded, the paint dull and peeling. That was something she knew. It was the bench in the garden shed where she’d gone to hide from Rory when they’d played a game. Where she’d become trapped. After her second full day locked in the darkness, her six-year-old self had lain down on that bench and cried herself to sleep. Beyond that, she couldn’t remember what happened until after they’d found her.

  Now, though, she knew she wasn’t in a shed. She backed away, and her shoulders jammed up against iron bars. When she turned around, she saw that the Fennrys Wolf stood on the other side.

  He held something in his hand that looked like a staff or a spear. And he was smiling. But his smile, Mason thought, was … strange. And when he opened his mouth to speak, his whole face distorted, jaws opening wider and wider until all Mason could see was a cavelike blackness in front of her. And all she could hear was the sound of the Fennrys Wolf’s voice.

  Telling her to run.

  Mason’s eyes snapped open and she lay flat on her back, staring up at her ceiling. Moonlight poured in through her open window and shifting, silvery patterns shimmered along the walls and ceiling, reflections from the pool outside below. She must have been asleep for hours. But she knew that there was no way she would ever be able to make her brain calm down so she could return to that state.

  Fennrys …

  The Fennrys Wolf …

  What kind of a name was that? Well, she knew exactly what kind of a name it was. She just wanted to know the why of it. She rolled her head on her pillow and gazed over to where the messenger bag with her laptop in it lay on her desk in the corner of the room. She thought about getting it out and just calling up Wikipedia, but after a moment, she got out of bed and wandered instead down the long hall to her dad’s study.

  Stretching as she went, Mason padded on cat-silent feet, stiff from having fallen so instantly asleep. In her nightmare, she hadn’t been able to run when Fennrys told her to, and she had awakened in the exact same position she’d fallen asleep in.

  It was the thought of him that sent her now to the wall of books that covered one long side of the study, floor to ceiling. Mason had spent a lot of time here when she was a little girl, climbing like a monkey up and down the rolling ladder, running her fingers across raised letters on leather-bound spines. On one of the high shelves, Gunnar had a large collection of Scandinavian literature—histories and myths and folklore—and it was to those volumes that Mason climbed. She was careful not to make any noise. She didn’t want anyone to know why she’d taken a sudden, fierce interest in the myths of the Vikings.

  Mason had learned some of the stories of the Norse gods, but they had always struck her as just grimmer, colder, weirder versions of the same kinds of stuff found in Greek and Roman myths. Jealous gods, scheming and plotting against one another—only with the added bonus of a fatalistic rush toward the eventual prophesied annihilation of the world. Mason had never developed her father’s fierce fascination with the myths. Still, she knew enough about the ancient stories of her ancestors to know that a wolf figured prominently in the lore.

  She pulled down a large hardcover picture book that she remembered fondly from reading it repeatedly as a kid. It was full of brightly colored, fanciful illustrations of long-haired maidens and spiky-haired bearded warriors. A merry depiction of a fatalistic cosmology that was supposed to end—or already had ended; Mason could never get the whole Ragnarok thing quite straight—with the destruction of the world.

  Cheery, she thought.

  “F-e-n …,” she murmured to herself as she ran a finger down the index and remembered that the story of the Fenris Wolf—or Fenrir, as the creature was often called—was under the heading of “Loki’s Monstrous Brood.”

  “Monstrous,” Mason muttered, turning to sit on the ladder step with the book in her lap. “Well, there’s a comforting adjective....”

  Even just flipping through the book
brought back her dormant memories of the stories. She remembered that the wolf was the offspring of an occasionally mischievous, frequently downright malicious jotun, a giant, named Loki. She knew that, in the great apocalyptic Norse battle at the end of days, Ragnarok, the Fenris Wolf was fated to devour Odin, the one-eyed father of the Aesir, what the Norse called the good guys in their convoluted pantheon of gods.

  Mason avoided turning to the page that she knew depicted Odin, in helmet and eyepatch, astride his eight-legged steed and with his mighty magic spear in his hand, riding full tilt straight into the giant wolf’s slavering maw and down its gullet to his doom. She knew that all sorts of really bad stuff happened when he did.

  What she didn’t know was why some guy named after that particular monster had made such a bizarre and frightening entrance into her life. Or why she couldn’t stop thinking about him in ways that weren’t necessarily bizarre or frightening, but were nevertheless disturbing enough to keep her awake in the middle of the night.

  Calum Aristarchos was having similar difficulties sleeping, jolted from restless dreams by the sound of voices wafting through his open bedroom window. At first he thought he was dreaming, or that his mother was listening to opera somewhere in the house. The voices were high and sweet, singing complicated harmonies that beckoned him.

  Cal sat up, head fuzzy from his medication and muscles aching from the punishment they’d taken, and swung his legs stiffly over the side of the bed. Awkwardly, he pulled on a pair of sweats and, barefoot and shirtless, padded soundlessly across the thick carpeting of his bedroom to a set of French doors. They opened out onto his own private terrace overlooking the lawn that swept down to the waters of Long Island Sound. He stepped out into a night of velvet blackness and liquid silver moonlight and wondered if he wasn’t still dreaming. Everything shone with a kind of surreal glimmer. Cal hadn’t been home since the beginning of the semester and he had grown used to not being able to see the stars in Manhattan. Then again, he couldn’t remember ever having seen that many stars at home either, but there they were: like handfuls of diamonds strewn across the night sky.