Starling (17 page)

“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 blind
ing
.” 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.”

T
ink
.

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.