Starling (37 page)

The very thought sent Mason scrambling, in full panic mode, scurrying into a dark corner of the train container. In the darkness, her shoulder jammed up painfully against a metal rail, and Mason realized that there was a ladder that led up to an access hatch in the roof of the container. Freedom. Air. What she would do when she got out onto the roof, she had no idea. But it didn’t matter. Already it felt as if the walls of the train container were closing in on her. Out of Rory’s car wasn’t enough. She needed off the train.

Mason turned and started to climb.

Rory had waited his entire life for something like this to happen. He felt almost light-headed with glee as he looked over and saw Heather Palmerston cowering on the leather banquette, pale and shaking. Tag was over by the bar, pouring himself another shot of whiskey from Gunnar’s private stock and pocketing cigars from the humidor. Rory wasn’t even drinking, but he still felt absolutely intoxicated. This was what it was like to be his father. This was what it was like to have power. He was the linchpin in Gunnar Starling’s plan, and Top Gunn was trusting Rory not to fail him. And he wouldn’t. Everything so far had gone off without a hitch.

Rory had no doubt that his competent, dutiful brother Roth would do his part and Mason’s wolfy boy toy would show up right on cue. Then Rory would get to put on a big show of threatening to hurt Mason if Fennrys didn’t do exactly what they wanted. He was debating just how much of it would be an act. And just how much he could actually get away with torturing his poor, pure, perfect sister before his father would take exception. In the face of achieving the Odin spear, he thought he could go pretty far.

Rory was pleased with himself in that he’d already put Mason’s claustrophobia to work against her.
By now
, he thought,
she’s probably curled in a fetal position and catatonic
. She wouldn’t give him any trouble.

He glanced out the window and saw that the train had shunted onto the tracks that led to the long, sweeping approach to the Hell Gate Bridge. The approach ramp gradually elevated for almost two miles before it joined with the bridge proper, and the train wasn’t traveling fast. He couldn’t yet see the bow-curve shape of the bridge where it crossed over the East River, soared above Wards Island, and on into Queens, where Rory would stop the train and wait. The sky overhead was purple and black, shot through with neon-orange and silver jagged forks of lightning. He could even hear the thunder over the noise of the train, it was so loud.

“Keep an eye on Party Girl,” he said to Tag, who was leering at Heather. “I’m gonna go check on the Mouse trap.”

He slid the door at the end of the passenger car open and crossed over to the transport container. He didn’t bother fumbling for the light switch. Just felt his way over to the DB5 and, grinning, pounded on the trunk.
That should scare the hell out of her
, he thought.

“Hey, Mouse!” he shouted.

There was no answer.

“What … no squeaks?” he taunted.

But then, in the dimness, he saw that Mason’s gear bag was on the floor of the container, its contents strewn about. He ran over and saw that the passenger door was ajar … and that the inside of the DB5’s cockpit was trashed beyond belief. There was a gaping hole leading from the trunk compartment, blood everywhere … and no sign of his damned sister.

Fury bubbled up in Rory’s chest, and he opened his mouth to scream in rage when something caught his eye. Over in the corner of the car, he saw that the access hatch above the utility ladder was banging up and down, unlatched. Rory snarled an oath and started toward the ladder. Then stopped and ran back to the Aston Martin and opened up the glove compartment, fishing around for something in the dark before he ran back to the ladder to give chase.

The wind on top of the train hit Mason like a punch to her chest, knocking the breath from her lungs and threatening to send her flying. She couldn’t stand upright, and she thought that any second she would be hurled off the top of the car, where she would tumble and smash to pieces like a broken doll on the tracks. She dropped to her knees and began to crawl, working her way toward the ornate brass luggage rail that ran around the top of the antique train car.

If it hadn’t all felt so real, Mason could have sworn she was caught in the depths of another one of her nightmares—the worst one ever. Or maybe it all felt so hyperreal because she’d finally, once and for all,
lost
her grip on reality.

In that state of mind, she was almost not surprised when she glanced down over the side of the train and saw two speeding Harleys and Anubis—a large black wolf—chasing after the train like a dog chasing a car.

From inside the opulent confines of the passenger car, Heather watched through the window as the two Harleys roared up beside the train, driving precariously in the narrow lane where a set of decommissioned tracks had been removed and only a strip of weedy gravel ran. Heather pressed her face closer to the window and gasped when she saw something that looked like a lean black wolf running beside them—faster than a normal wolf should have been able to. She saw that one bike carried Roth Starling, but the one in the lead carried two riders. The Fennrys Wolf sat, clinging grimly, on the passenger backseat. The driver wore a helmet, but Heather recognized Cal’s jacket. He steered the bike perilously close to the train as Fennrys tucked first one booted foot and then the other, under him. Heather held her breath as Fennrys stood, poised for an instant in time as if for flight, and then leaped, reaching to grasp some handhold on the side of the train.

“What the shit are those two lunatics trying to prove?” Tag said from over Heather’s shoulder, his voice suffused with disbelief and something approaching awe. Then he laughed gutturally as the Harley wobbled dangerously underneath Cal.

Heather gasped and pressed close to the window, her heart in her throat as Calum struggled to bring the bike back under control on the uneven surface of the approach ramp. Heather couldn’t exactly tell from where she was, but she saw Fennrys’s feet and legs disappear out of sight, so that she knew he must have hauled himself up a side ladder to the top of the train. Cal gunned the bike’s engine to keep pace with the train as it swept around the curve that led to the Hell Gate Bridge. The gravel strip alongside the tracks must have been punishing to ride on, and Heather could see the tendons on the backs of his hands tensed like steel cables with the effort of keeping the bike steady as they swept under the massive concrete gates and the bridge girders rose up and closed in on them and they swept on, over the East River.

Heather kept her gaze fastened on Cal, as if she could pour her strength out through the window glass and into Cal’s limbs. She knew that he was there to help Fennrys save Mason, not her. It didn’t matter. She saw him hunch forward, helmeted head down....

And then, as Heather watched, Cal twisted his head to one side, as if something had suddenly caught his attention. He shook his head, raising one hand to the side of the helmet, as if he was trying to cover his ear. He looked like he was in pain. Heather saw his shoulders ripple as the bike began to drift toward the outer railing of the bridge. Cal’s head whipped violently from side to side, and he pounded on the side of his helmet. The front wheel of the bike slewed wildly left to right as he lost control, and the back of the Harley pitched forward. Heather screamed in horror as Cal was catapulted into the air. He pinwheeled wildly through the night, and the bike slammed into one of the rust-red, arching girders of the bridge, ricocheting into the path of Roth Starling, who jammed his bike into a screeching slide. Cal’s body arced through the air, plummeting over the side of the bridge, falling toward the raging river far below.

Heather watched him fall, the scream dying in her throat. She slid down the window to slump senseless on the leather banquette, horror giving way to sudden, icy-cold shock. Beside her, Tag Overlea swore under his breath and drew back from the window, wide-eyed and shaken, his features stark with disbelief. The motorcycle tumbled along beside the train for a moment, then disappeared from view.

And Calum Aristarchos … was gone.

F
ennrys threw his leg over the top of the train car, almost kicking Mason’s feet out from under her. She gasped and threw herself wildly back away from him. Her black hair whipped around her head like an inky tornado; her sapphire eyes were wide and rolled white like a terrified animal’s. They were empty of recognition. Fennrys clambered to his feet, crouching to keep from getting knocked off the top of the train by the wind, and held out a hand to her, but she shrank from him. He looked at her face and saw that she was caught in the depths of a profound, mind-fogging panic.

What did Rory do to her?
he wondered with frantic bitterness.

There was blood streaking Mason’s face and arms, staining the fabric of the sweatshirt she wore. Fennrys saw the Gosforth school crest, and the image of the old woman in the Laundromat punched through his mind—the tumbling red water in the washer, the same crest slapping against the glass, soaked in blood....

He shook his head sharply to dispel the horror he felt.

“Mason!” he called out to her, the wind snatching the sound of his words and hurling them behind him. “It’s me!” He reached out a hand. “Come take my hand. It’s going to be all right, Mase....”

She wanted to believe that. She truly did.

But she was caught in a nightmare.

And in her nightmares, Fennrys always told her to run.

So she ran. She turned and lurched, stumbling and falling to her hands and knees, crawling, staggering back up and leaning into the teeth of the wind as she struggled toward the front edge of the train car. Fennrys shouted for her to stop. Massive iron girders, soaring in a graceful arching curve between two monolithic concrete gates, wavered like a mirage before Mason’s eyes as the train pounded up the rising track.

She heard Fennrys call her name and turned around in time to see Rory suddenly burst out of the ladder hatch in the roof of the transport car, between her and Fennrys. He looked back and forth between the two of them, and a purely wicked grin spread across his face.

“Well!” he shouted over the wind, struggling to find his balance as he climbed out to stand in the middle of the train-car roof. “This is convenient!”

Mason couldn’t believe her eyes—he had a pistol clutched in one fist. What the hell was her brother doing with a gun? She could barely make out what he was saying as the gale snatched the words from his mouth.

“I was gonna have fun messing with Mouse, but …”

Fennrys surged forward a step and Rory whipped up his arm, pointing the muzzle of the pistol at him.

“Stay right there, hero!” Rory glared at him. “Fun’s just starting …”

He thrust his other hand into his pocket and pulled out something small and round. Mason couldn’t tell what it was, but Rory started murmuring words she couldn’t hear, and whatever it was, it started to glow.

The golden light seeped like rays of sunlight through Rory’s fingers, casting a widening, brightening nimbus of light all around them. The locomotive passed through the western arch of the Hell Gate, and suddenly the whole of the bridge began to shimmer. The iron struts and girders began to sparkle and dance with cascading light and color, and the entire structure began to telescope, elongating in front of them and behind … stretching out to bridge the gap between the mortal realm and the beyond. Mason clapped her hands over her ears at the cacophony of buzzing and tinkling, like thousands of wind chimes caught in a hurricane, assaulting her senses. The noise built until it sounded like the pounding of hammers on harp strings. It split the air around them as the prismatic light show exploded into whiplash streamers of rainbows, billowing up, up into the night sky. Even numbed as she was, wrapped in the vestiges of her claustrophobic panic, Mason felt a kind of distant awe sweeping over her.

This was Bifrost. The rainbow bridge to Asgard.

She turned and saw, at the very center of the bridge, a shimmering curtain of diamond-white light. She had an overwhelming urge to reach it, to part the curtain and see what was on the other side. She glanced ahead at the train engine, pounding away on its eight spark-churning wheels, and suddenly she didn’t see a machine. She saw a horse. A coal-black giant of a war horse, thundering over the bridge on eight
legs
.

Mason skittered back from the edge, turning in time to see Fennrys rush her brother. In the split second Rory was distracted by the blinding brilliance of the Bifrost’s manifestation, Fenn surged forward and tackled Rory around the middle, slamming him hard onto the ridged metal roof. Mason watched in horror as he drove his fist into her brother’s face while Rory writhed underneath him. Rory twisted around and kicked Fennrys in the side of the head, sending him rolling toward the edge of the car roof. Mason screamed, but Fennrys caught himself before he went over on the rail, just as Rory aimed another kick at him. This time Fennrys caught him and, with a heave, threw Rory back down. The look in Fenn’s eyes was one of pure savagery. He drove his fist into Rory’s face again and slammed down on his wrist over and over, trying to get him to drop the wildly waving gun.