Starling (30 page)

“Thanks, Toby.” Mason rolled her eyes and pulled the laces tight on her shoe. “Just what I needed to hear.”

“Oh.
I’m
sorry.” Toby’s sarcasm was expansive. “Did you want me to say, ‘Ooh, that one’s a pushover, Mase. Just like the girl you fought last week—you know, the one who whupped your butt’? Would that help?”

“No, Coach Hardass, it wouldn’t.” She grinned up at him.

Toby shook his head and lifted his travel mug to swallow a large mouthful of coffee. “Somebody around here seems like they’ve had a couple of good nights’ sleeps for a change.”

“Something like that.” Mason switched feet and laced up her other shoe snugly. Good nights, yes. But it wasn’t the sleeping that had put the smile back on her face and the sting back in her blade. It was Fennrys.

She sailed through her first three bouts. The one thing Mason loved about fighting saber over foil or épée was that the competitors in saber tended to yell a lot. The fact that you could slash at an opponent and not just poke away at them seemed to bring out something primal in the fencers, and they hollered back and forth at each other as the flurry of attacks and ripostes sent them charging up and down the piste. She’d had to mostly keep a lid on the vocal histrionics when she and Fennrys sparred on the High Line because a lot of yelling probably would have brought the park authority—or even the cops—down on them in a heartbeat. But there in the gym, Mason could holler till she was blue in the face behind her mask.

And she did. Mostly cries of victory. She cleaned up.

“So,” Toby said nonchalantly at the end of the day. “That most definitely did
not
suck. Nice to have you back, kid. And then some.”

“Thanks, Tobe.” Mason shook her hair out of its tail. “I guess all I needed was for you to get your boots back.” She kicked one of his dilapidated steel-toes lightly. “The Birkenstocks and socks just really threw me last time.”

He growled under his breath at her, and she saw a flash of apprehension in his eyes—most likely the fear that she would bring up the night of the storm again—but Mason knew better, and she kept her mouth shut. And it didn’t seem so daunting anymore, keeping the terrible secret of that night. Not when she had Fennrys to share it with. After the attack at the boat basin, her strange bond with Fennrys seemed to be growing stronger day by day. All of the weirdness and the wonder that had befallen her were somehow so much easier to bear because she knew that Fennrys was there. Waiting with a sword in his hand and that crazy sexy smile on his face.

Even though almost nothing had happened between them—a kiss here, hands held there, an embrace at the end of each night before he hailed her a cab to take her home (and always opened the window for her before she got in)—Mason got breathless and light-headed just thinking about him. Like she was now.

“Hey, Mason …”

She spun around and, for a split second, was confused that the one who’d called her name wasn’t the Fennrys Wolf.

“Oh! Uh … hey, Cal!” she stammered, flustered at being caught daydreaming. About the boy who was
not
the boy standing in front of her—the boy she used to daydream about only days earlier. Mason felt a sudden, stinging wash of guilt.

Calum was watching her face, and she wondered what he’d seen there, because his tentative smile wavered and a frown line ticked between his brows.

She made herself smile at him. “How are you?”

“I’m okay.” His hand twitched toward his face. “Can I talk to you?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Calum gestured for Mason to follow him, and together they walked side by side in silence for a few minutes, away from the busier paths between the university buildings and toward a quiet corner of campus. Cal kept glancing sideways at Mason, as if to make sure she was still walking with him.

“You did pretty good today.”

“Thanks,” Mason said noncommittally. She didn’t want Cal asking about the improvement in her game, especially not when he was the one who was supposed to be helping her with that improvement. But, then again, there was no reason for her to feel bad. Cal was the one who had dropped off the face of the earth, not her. Mason knew he was hurting, but he hadn’t even returned any of the texts she’d sent him in the first few days after, asking how he was. And it wasn’t as if the last time they had seen each other he’d been particularly pleasant....

“I’m sorry about the other day,” he said, almost as if he’d heard her thoughts. “I guess I was kind of—”

“A bitch to me?” Mason asked. It was something that Heather would have said, and it felt a little weird coming out of Mason’s mouth, but she was glad she’d said it. She realized that she was still pretty pissed at Cal for the way he’d treated her that day in the hallway in front of Carrie Morgan and the other Gos students. But now she worried that Calum would just turn around and forget about talking to her.

Instead Cal just smiled wanly. “Yeah. I was kind of a bitch. I’ve been trying to track you down to apologize, but you’ve been sort of scarce lately. You haven’t been avoiding me or anything, have you?”

There was an almost accusatory tone to the question that, for some reason, got under her skin. She stopped short in the middle of the path. “Don’t you have that the other way around?”

Mason remembered the conversation she’d had with Heather. About how Cal was—or, rather, how Heather
said
he was—in love with Mason. Casual flirting, a few movie nights with a bunch of other people … that did
not
equal love. Cal didn’t know Mason well enough to have those kinds of feelings for her. Heather may have been convinced, enough so that she’d actually broken up with him because of it, but Mason just didn’t believe it. Not for a second.

And even if she
did
, she wasn’t sure she wanted that. Not anymore …

“What did you want to say to me, Calum?” she asked, hearing for herself the sharpness in her tone.

“Right. Yeah …” He took a deep breath. “Look. I think you might be the only one I can talk to about this.”

The look on Cal’s face melted Mason’s sudden ire, and she reigned in her temper. Cal was serious. Something was deeply troubling him, and Mason couldn’t help but feel badly for him. He looked really … lost. Alone. She wondered why he thought
she
was the only one he could talk to, and then she tried to remember the last time she’d seen him talking to anyone else at Gos. She couldn’t. In fact, it seemed almost as if Cal was isolating himself from all the other students. She remembered Heather telling her that, even though he was back in class, Cal wasn’t staying in the dorm. He was going home at night, and that in itself was enough to get Gosforth tongues wagging.

Mason had just assumed that he needed time away to recuperate from his injuries. But aside from the rapidly healing scars, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Cal. Nothing physical, at least.

“What is it, Cal?” she asked. “What’s bugging you?”

“Yeah, um …” He ran a hand through his hair, frowning. “Last night, when I was at home, I couldn’t sleep. I mean—it wasn’t just last night. I haven’t been sleeping much since … you know.”

Mason nodded. “I know.”

“Well … I’ve been going down to the water …”

Cal’s family owned super-swanky old-money property on Long Island, right at the very tip of Kings Point on the Gold Coast, where all the extravagant historic mansions owned by people like the Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts used to be. It was the place that F. Scott Fitzgerald had glamorously fictionalized in
The Great Gatsby
. Most of the grand old estates had been torn down or converted into public facilities, but the Aristarchos place was still standing.

She glanced over at Cal, wondering what he wanted to say to her. She saw that his gaze had become cloudy, as though his thoughts were turned inward, focusing on some memory or another.

“Cal?”

“Hmm?” His eyes snapped back up to her face. “Oh. Sorry …”

“So you went down to the water,” Mason prompted. “What happened?”

He sighed gustily. “Look. I know that you were the one who wanted to tell people about the things that really happened in the gym that night. And I know that when the others said we should just shut up and pretend like it didn’t happen, I went with that....”

“Cal, it’s okay. I get it. I mean, I understand. And you’re right. Everyone would have thought we were just being a bunch of stupid pranking jerks. Stuff like what happened to us that night just doesn’t happen to the rest of the world. You were right.”

“No, Mason.” His eyes glittered almost feverishly and he leaned toward her, gripping her by the shoulder, suddenly, frighteningly, intense. “
You
were. I think this kind of thing goes on more often than most people would ever admit.”

“Cal … did something happen to you while you were home?”

He took a deep breath and spilled out an incredible story about strange creatures—frightening and beautiful—in the sound. About how, every night he’d been home since the storm, he would go down to the water’s edge and watch them cavort, listen to them sing. Mason sat listening, frozen statue-still by his words. Suddenly, Cal’s voice broke with emotion and she looked over at him. He was pale and his skin had an almost waxy sheen to it.

“Last night …” He stopped talking and swallowed convulsively.

“Last night
what
?” Mason asked.

“Last night … they didn’t just sing to me. They called to me to go with them.”

He’d said it in a whisper, but Mason still could hear the desperate, almost violent yearning in Cal’s voice. He closed his eyes, the muscles in his jaw clenching at the memory, and silence stretched out between them. Mason felt herself growing pale, the blood rushing from her face as if her heart had issued a sudden recall.

“I can still almost hear their voices in my head. They were so loud. So …
insistent
 …”

She reached out and took Calum’s hand in her own and said, “I don’t think you should go down to the water anymore, Cal.”

His eyes snapped open, and he gazed at her with a razor-sharp intensity. He laughed, and his voice cracked again on the sound. “See … that’s kind of funny coming from you, Mason. Because I have a feeling that you and I are in similar situations.”

“What—”

“And I could sit here and tell you to stay away from that Fennrys guy until I was blue in the face. For your own damned good. And would you?”

Mason’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.

“That’s what I thought.” He laughed mirthlessly and stood. “You know … maybe I should take my sea nymphs up on their offer. Maybe I’d find out I actually belong there. It’d be nice to belong somewhere. With some
one
.”

Mason had nothing to say to that as Cal turned his back on her and walked away, but she felt his leaving like a phantom wound. A might-have-been. Calum was a dream she’d almost had. But now—and it felt like it was all
her
fault—he seemed to be living in a kind of strange and dangerous nightmare.

M
ason shivered, and Fennrys wrapped an arm around her shoulders, although he wasn’t sure if the goose bumps on her arms were from the slight chill in the air or the subject of their conversation. She’d just described to him Calum’s waterside encounter as they wandered along the High Line in the dark—their furtive, after-hours park strolls had become something of a ritual for them after nightly fencing practice. Fennrys cherished those moments, even when Mason found herself compelled to tell him about the problems of another guy.... He mentally smacked down an irrational little spark of jealousy. He would lend an ear, and then, maybe, he might find an opportunity to bring up another topic of conversation that had been ticking away at the back of his mind.

Fennrys hadn’t yet broached the subject of his discoveries at the library earlier that day. He still didn’t know what to make of the fact that her family and the person—or entity—who owned his warehouse were somehow connected....

He frowned and dragged his concentration back to Mason’s story.

“I mean … it’s not like it’s unheard-of for weird things to be found bobbing around in the waters around New York,” she was saying. “Back in the seventies or something, they found a dead giraffe in the river. A marathon swimmer collided with it—can you imagine?” She shuddered at the thought. “But … at least giraffes are real. They exist. What Cal was talking about, though …”

“Do you think they were the same ones we met?”