Starling (6 page)

After a moment, the fragmented memory faded and Fennrys opened his eyes again. He looked down at the dark-haired girl where she lay on her side, one arm flung out. The sleeve of her fencing jacket was pushed up and the skin of her arm shone pale in the gloom. As pale as Fennrys’s own flesh—which bore an unhealthy pallor, as if he hadn’t seen the sun in a very long time—only hers glowed like an alabaster sculpture lit from within. Fenn traced the path of a blue vein on the inside of her wrist, like following the course of a river on a map. Then he ran his fingertips over the roughness of his own wrists. Toby was right. Fennrys had been chained. Recently and for a long time.

What the
hell
was he?

The question framed itself in his mind that way … not “who” but “what.” Maybe he didn’t want to know. Maybe he’d be better off if he never found out.... He could just disappear into the world and … what? Start a brand-new life for himself? He couldn’t even begin to imagine what the old one had been like.

Swords. Monsters. Danger …

The dark-haired girl stirred in her sleep and made a small sound, almost like a whimper. Her hands floated up in front of her face, as if she fought against something in her dream. Gently Fennrys took her hands and lowered them to rest at her sides. He lightly stroked her forehead until she settled back into stillness and the shadow of a frown on her brow smoothed.

In the silence and the darkness, he turned and listened for a long moment. No rain. No thunder … even the wind seemed to have died to nothing. And there were no sounds of the draugr now, either. Had he killed them all in those few frantic moments, hours earlier? He wasn’t sure. Maybe there were others still out there, lying in wait. Waiting for him … or for these kids and their teacher? Fennrys considered that an unlikely possibility. They were nothing. Nobodies. A bunch of absolutely normal teenagers.

While
he
seemed to be … something else. Something dangerous. He didn’t want the dark-haired girl in danger because of him. He stood and turned away from her. A small, single action that made him feel unutterably alone.

Once outside, Fennrys picked his way through the wreckage of oak tree roots and torn earth and headed across the otherwise manicured lawn of a courtyard toward the stone arch that led out onto the street. The pale, anemic gloom of predawn told him that sunrise was still a good hour or two away as he left the grounds of the Gosforth Academy—that was what the sign out front told him the place was called—but he hoped it was enough to give him a margin of safety. Fennrys headed south for several dark, silent blocks until, eventually, he looked up at the street signs to get his bearings. Broadway and West 110th, Cathedral Parkway.

So … Upper West Side, then?

Yeah. He knew what that was. Where it was. And he also knew that a large expanse of Broadway played host to a famous theater district, although that was much farther south than he was now. He was, it seemed, very familiar with New York City. He knew streets and neighborhoods, directions, destinations … the only blank on the map of his mind was himself. It was as if he was an empty space drifting around the city, untethered. Detached from his surroundings instead of defined by them, by what could have been a life’s worth of experience accumulated on these streets. The harder he tried to relate to the landmarks around him, the slipperier everything seemed. Anything that might have pertained directly to him just twisted away and was lost to a vacuum in his mind.

“That’s great,” Fenn muttered to himself. “I know where to go to catch a musical, but I have no idea where I live. Not an ideal situation.” He twitched up the hood of his borrowed sweatshirt. “Especially considering that I have a sneaking suspicion I’m the kind of guy who hates musicals.”

Even in his present state of what seemed like some kind of amnesia, Fennrys knew that the broad-bladed sword he’d been carrying when he’d found himself naked in a tree in a rainstorm wasn’t something a normal person would carry around on the streets of …
New York
.

Why
did he have a sword? Why was he in New York? Did he, in fact, live there?

If so, where was his place? His clothes?

Why did he bear those marks on his ankles and wrists?

Who was he?

Who am I …?

The question pounded in his brain in time with his footsteps, and he turned east and broke into a loping jog, the sword slung on his back bouncing gently against his spine with each step. A fine mist now hung in the dim air, thickening at ground level to a rolling fog. The buildings on either side of him were dark, the streetlights were out, and no one—absolutely no one else—was around. That struck Fenn as … strange. A blackout in the middle of a city like New York, and nobody was taking advantage of it? No mayhem, no mischief … it was as if even the unsavory elements of society knew better than to venture out on a night like the one that had just passed.

He headed farther east, skirting the southern edge of Harlem. As he ran, the lights in the buildings and on the streets began to slowly, one by one, blink and flicker back to life. Silhouettes in doorways, eyes in shadowed faces peeked out at Fennrys as he passed. On his right, a long stone wall ran alongside him for blocks. Behind it, through the curtain of rain that fell gently now, softly, he could see trees. A lot of trees … a park.

Central Park.

A violent shiver ran up Fenn’s spine. He knew, instinctively, exactly where he was now. And he knew that, unless his life depended on it, the park was the one place he wouldn’t—shouldn’t—go. What he didn’t know was
why
, but the feeling in his gut was enough to make him just keep running.

Finally, far in the distance, he could hear the sound of wailing sirens. Fennrys kept running. It was the only thing that felt right at the moment—the pounding of his feet on the pavement in the fencing master’s stolen boots, the feel of the rain-wet air stinging his face, and the sound of his breath and heart, loud in his ears.

But then he heard another sound, a different rhythmic pounding, and looking up, he saw two massive shapes in the middle of the road, moving swiftly toward him.

Horse cops,
Fennrys thought.
NYPD. About bloody time …

A pair of them, armored and helmeted men perched on the backs of huge, heavy beasts—Hanoverians or a similar breed, horses with hooves the size of dinner plates. Fennrys tucked his head farther down between his shoulders and tried to make like he was just another jogger, out in the middle of a citywide, blackout-making torrential downpour.

For reasons he couldn’t quite fathom, Fennrys really wished he still had the iron medallion with him that he’d left with the injured kid at the school. He also knew he’d left it there for a good reason. Instinct was the only thing he had to go on at the moment, but it was everything. Instinct … and the reassuring weight of the sword in the canvas bag slung across his back.

The echoing
clop-clop
of the horse cops’ passage rang in his ears, weirdly amplified by the wet, shimmering air.

The sound chilled him to the bone.
Jog casual,
Fenn thought, trying not to glance back again in their direction. There was nothing about him to attract their attention. Almost nothing. Maybe it was the combat boots that gave him away. Maybe it was the undisguised fighter’s physique that the school-logo workout gear did nothing to disguise. He didn’t know. But something did …

He heard a murmured, guttural exchange and the sound of those enormous hooves clattering on the asphalt as they accelerated from walk, to trot, to gallop. Fennrys glanced up and felt his heart leap into his throat.
Those are no cops!
he thought as two magnificent figures thundered toward him through the rolling banks of fog. Now he saw high-crested helmets with noseguards and cheek plates covering the planes of their faces. Longbows and arrow quivers carried crisscrossed over the bare-chested torsos of men. Torsos that flowed seamlessly down, melding with equine musculature. The mirage image of New York City cops astride their mounts shimmered and dissolved, revealing the strange, mythic,
impossible
creatures beneath: centaurs.

Okay. Now I know I’m crazy
, Fenn thought.

And then he thought,
Run!

“D
amn his eyes!”

Toby’s roaring jolted Mason from sleep and a strange, tangled dream where she was falling through darkness and then light and then darkness again, through a storm-ridden sky and then a vast underground cavern riddled with masses of tree roots and then the sky again—and she’d been on fire. At least she’d woken before she’d hit the ground. Her brother Rory, taunting her about a falling nightmare when she’d been just a kid, had told her that if you hit the ground in one of those falling/flying dreams, then you die in real life. That your heart would stop from shock. Mason didn’t believe him, but she still wasn’t anxious to test the theory.

Toby was waving around the now-sputtering flashlight and swearing a blue streak—something he usually tried to keep a lid on, with varying degrees of success, in front of the students—and Mason pushed herself to her feet and went to see what had gotten him foaming at the mouth.

“He stole my damned boots!” Toby growled before she even had a chance to ask him. Toby was something of a freak of nature in that he could fence in combat boots—thick, heavy-soled things that he’d lovingly broken in over a couple of decades—but now he stood there, sock footed and outraged on the cold concrete floor, looking slightly comical.

And the young man they knew only as the Fennrys Wolf was gone.

Over near the wall, Rory snuffled in sleep and shifted as if swimming back toward consciousness. Mason noticed that one of his running shoes was untied and lying on the floor beside his foot. She knew what must have happened. Rory had little girly feet and Fennrys had obviously not been able to fit into
his
footwear.

She turned back to Toby and had to stifle a laugh at his expression. “How deeply asleep do you have to be for a guy to be able to steal your boots?” she asked.

“I can’t even believe I fell asleep in the first place,” Toby muttered. “It’s like someone slipped me a mickey or something. One second I’m standing there talking to the guy, next thing I know is I can feel a cold breeze up my ankles. Something very weird just happened here.”

“You think?” Heather said, a little blearily, as she walked up to stand beside Mason. Heather was calm and her eyes looked a little vacant, as if she’d been given a sedative. Mason felt a little like that herself. She searched inward for the panic she would have normally experienced full bore under the circumstances and found it—but it was a distant, muted thing. Still … better not to push her luck.

“Toby.” Mason checked her watch by the flashlight’s pale glow. “It’s morning. Can we please get out of here? He said we could.”

“Yeah, I …” Toby stopped, eyeing her sharply, and Mason realized that she’d basically just told him that she’d eavesdropped on his conversation with Fennrys. To her relief, he decided against calling her on it. Instead he just said, “Yeah. I think we’re probably okay now.”

“Why hasn’t anyone come to find us?” Heather asked quietly. “Where
is
everyone?”

Mason had been wondering that herself. It had seemed pretty unlikely that anyone would have been wandering around in that storm, but surely someone would have noticed that the oak tree had come crashing down. Heard it? Maybe not. Not above the noise of the storm. But now …

Toby eased open the storage hatch and climbed up out into the gym, the girls following at his heels. The light coming through the shattered window could barely be called that. It was still murky predawn. And the place looked like a bomb had hit it. A section of the roof had caved in, and there were branches and bricks, shattered slate roof tiles, and shards of rainbow glass everywhere. The new pine floor was soaked and warping already, and there was a gaping hole where the main entrance used to be.

There was no sign of the … what had Fennrys called them? Mason frowned, remembering.
Draugr.
That was it. But there were none to be found. Not even bodies, or any signs that there had ever been a fight, let alone a small-scale battle. No blood—black
or
red—and no tell-tale marks to show they’d been dragged off somewhere....

It was like the whole thing, except for the storm, had been nothing more than a terrible dream.

“Toby.”

Calum’s ragged-edged voice made Mason jump. He stood there, bent inward and holding his left arm tightly against his body. The sound of his breathing rasped through his teeth, as if every breath hurt. He was deathly pale, Mason thought, but still so handsome....