Starling by Lesley Livingston
Sunlight glinted off the surface of the water, hot and blinding bright, but the breeze coming off the Hudson River was cool and soft on Mason’s face. Fennrys reached up to adjust their table’s umbrella to shade her from the sun’s glare. Then he sat opposite her and fidgeted silently as Mason sat with her hands in her lap, watching him with bemusement. He almost seemed nervous. As if this were some kind of date or something.
It seemed like forever until a bored-looking server with three lip rings and an overabundance of tattoos came over and grunted at them.
Fennrys barely glanced up as he said, “Bring us a couple of Blue Moons. Mason, what are you hungry for?”
She blinked at him. “Uh …”
The server made a huffing sound, and Fennrys looked back up at him.
“What?”
The server flicked his gaze at Mason and said, “I.D.”
Fennrys’s jaw muscles clenched slightly. “You don’t need to see her I.D.,” he said. “Just get the lady a beer.”
Mason put a hand on Fennrys’s arm. “It’s okay. I’m not …” She trailed off as she realized he wasn’t listening to her. Instead he was just staring at the waiter, unmoving, unblinking. He didn’t seem to be breathing, but his hand drifted slowly up until he was resting his fingertips on the iron medallion at his throat. His arctic-blue gaze was sharp as the edge of a finely honed blade, and Mason was glad she wasn’t on the receiving end of it.
The waiter looked as though he was about to get really pissy. But then, as Fenn continued to stare at him, an expression of confusion washed over the guy’s face. He frowned faintly and shook his head. Then he mumbled, “Couple a Moons. Yeah. Sure …” And turned and wandered off.
Fennrys turned back to Mason.
“What was that all about?”
He blinked at her. “What?”
“Did you, like … hypnotize that guy?”
“Of course not.” He didn’t sound as though he was so sure of that. He frowned. “I just … I just ordered.”
He hadn’t just ordered. He’d done something, and had made the waiter do what he’d wanted. Like magic or something.
After a few short minutes, the waiter came back and set down two glasses full of pale gold liquid garnished with round slices of orange. Mason just looked at hers as Fennrys took a long pull from his and stared toward the New Jersey side of the river. The lightness of his mood earlier was gone, and he was back to inhabiting the persona of the Fennrys Wolf.
Mason didn’t really want the beer. But she took a sip, if only because Fennrys really seemed to be trying hard to be nice to her. Or something. Like he was desperate to be chivalrous but just didn’t quite know how. It was actually kind of endearing, if she was going to be honest with herself.
“It’s … good,” she said, nodding at the beer she’d set back down. “Thanks.”
Fennrys sighed. “You don’t have to patronize me, Mase. It’s okay.”
“I’m not. I …” She paused and frowned, not knowing what to say. It was so frustrating. She’d thought about spending time alone with the mysterious Fennrys Wolf ever since he’d disappeared into the storm, and now here she was and there was all this weirdness between them. She took another sip of the beer. It wasn’t bad. The orange slice perched on the side of the glass gave it a sweet flavor that softened the bite of the alcohol.
“I’m not,” she said again, and waited until he looked back at her. “You’re the last person I would ever even think of patronizing. I’m just … I don’t know. Confused, I guess.”
“By what?”
“You.”
He laughed a little and spread his hands, leaning back in his chair. “I’m a pretty simple guy. What you see is what you get … ’cause that’s all there is.”
She smiled at him and shook her head. “All there is right now. You can’t stay a blank slate forever, Fenn. Either you’ll remember who you were, or you’ll become whoever you decide you want to be. That’s not the confusing part.”
“What is then?” he asked. “I mean, other than my rad apartment, obvious penchant for weaponry, apparent mystical gifts, and the sudden, surprising way I entered your life … what could possibly be confusing to you about any of this?”
Mason did laugh then. “Yeah. That. But also … not so much the how you came into my life, but the why you’re still here.” She looked, unblinking, into his face. She hadn’t really meant for the conversation to go this way.
“You saved my life, Mason,” he said, his voice low, gruff.
“Just returning the favor.”
“You were kind to me.”
“I …”
He ran his thumb across the marks on his wrists. “I have a feeling you might be the only one.”
Mason reached out a hand and ran her fingertips lightly across the roughened skin, where old welts had turned to scar tissue and newer ones were healing over them. She felt Fennrys shiver as she touched the underside of his wrist. “I’d really like to know who did this to you,” she said quietly, a slow-burning anger at the thought of him chained up like an animal building in her chest.
“I’m not so sure you do.” Fennrys reached for his beer with his other hand. “Whoever they are, I don’t think they play very nice.”
Mason watched as emotions chased across his face. He looked years younger suddenly, and vulnerable. And, for a moment, as though he was watching a movie only he could see.
He remembers something, she thought. Something he doesn’t want to tell me. Or doesn’t want me to know....
“Do you remember where you got those?” she asked quietly.
He inhaled deeply, his chest expanding to stretch the fabric of his T-shirt. He exhaled in a gusty sigh and took another long swallow of his Blue Moon. “No.” He shook his head. “But I have a delightful collection of recurring nightmares. At least I think they’re nightmares. Might be memories, though. Who knows? It would be easier to tell, I suppose, if any of them made sense. But in one, I’m in a dark place. Small, like a cellar or a cave or something. I can’t really see much, there are no windows, and the floor feels like dirt. The smell is … indescribable. Rot and dank.”
Mason felt her own nose wrinkling. “You can smell in your dreams?”
He shrugged. “Like I said, might be a memory. I just don’t know of what. But I remember … chains. On the wall. And a heavy door barred with iron. I think I might have spent some time there.”
“It sounds horrible.”
Fennrys smiled one of his awkward smiles and shook his head. “To you, yeah. You have claustrophobia. I’m sure I probably thought it was a bloody picnic.”
“Sure.” Mason went with him on the joke. She didn’t want things to turn gloomy. “Make me sound like a freak, why don’t you?”
“Mason … between the two of us, you outstrip me in the normal department by about two hundred percent.” Fennrys smiled. He actually had a really great smile—when he wasn’t trying to use it.
Mason found herself staring at him for so long that eventually he just raised an eyebrow at her. She felt herself start to blush and shifted her gaze away from Fennrys’s face, turning to stare out over the river. The day was starting to cloud over. The bright blue sky had lost some of its brilliance, and the breeze off the Hudson had died to nothing. It was starting to feel cold and clammy sitting outside on the café’s terrace. Mason glanced inside, trying to spot their waiter somewhere among the shadows and clusters of patrons. The grumpy server was nowhere to be seen.
“I’m sorry this is … weird for you,” Fennrys said. “All of it.”
Mason suddenly realized with a start that he was now holding her by the arm, his long fingers lightly circling the strong, lean fencer’s muscles that corded her wrist. She wasn’t sure if it was to reassure her or to keep her from bolting. But the warmth of his hand on her skin sent a wave of heat flowing up her arm and on toward her head and heart. It made the rest of her feel cold in comparison, and she blinked rapidly and looked away, back out over
“Oh … damn,” she whispered. “Weird doesn’t even begin to cover it, Fenn.” She nodded her head significantly in the direction of the thickening fog bank.
Fennrys glanced over his shoulder in the direction she was looking, and his fingers tightened sharply on her arm. Several distant, shadowy shapes were gliding silently up the river toward the boat basin.
“We should go,” Fennrys said.
“I thought you might say something like that,” Mason said as they both stood at the same time.
“Now.” The word came out as a growl.
An eerie wail pierced the strangely dusky air, joined by another and another … sounding to Mason like ancient war horns. From within the heart of the murky darkness, tall, curved shapes—the heads of dragons—seemed to materialize out of the thick fog. Points of flame bloomed out over the water. One of them grew large, and suddenly a massive fireball slammed into the sleek white hull of a yacht moored in the basin.
Fennrys swore under his breath and stepped back, knocking over his chair as he did so. One of the patrons on the patio shrieked as the yacht burst into flames. Others seemed to have only just started to notice that the day had turned to darkness—and that there were ghost ships sailing toward them out of the heart of a demon fog. Over a chorus of startled cries, howling sounds reached Mason’s ears and she went instantly ice-cold. She’d heard that sound before. Draugr. Only this time they weren’t alone.
There were things in the sky.
And things in the water.
“What the hell,” Mason muttered as the café’s patrons started to scream in real terror. The “dragons” she’d seen gliding up the river resolved themselves into the ghostly ships with tall, curved prows in the shapes of mythic beasts. She could see warriors lining the sides of the ships, holding swords like the one Fennrys had had the first time she saw him. Only many of those weapons were broken or bent, the “men” that held them twisted and slack muscled, with round, battered shields strapped to withered forearms. The dilapidated state of them, she knew from her first encounter with the draugr, didn’t make them any less dangerous.
Fennrys gestured at the apparitions. “Seriously,” he said drily, his voice tight. “How often does this kind of thing happen to you?”
“Funny,” Mason answered through clenched teeth. “I was going to ask you the same question.”
Mason glanced over her shoulder. The crowd was pushing and shoving now, screaming, heading for the exit but moving too slowly. Mason thought of the night in the gym and what those things had done to Cal. If the draugr reached the fleeing diners, it would be a massacre. Fennrys knew it too. Mason glanced over and saw him unzipping the weapon case she’d teased him about bringing. “The only chance those people have is if I buy them some time,” he said, glancing over at her. “I want you to get out of here too, Mase.”
Mason’s mouth went dry from fear. But she lifted her chin and said, “I’m not leaving without you.”
Fenn glared at her fiercely and opened his mouth, but she cut him off before he could say anything.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t even think about telling me it’s for my own good. I’m not leaving, Fenn. You’re going to need my help and you know it.”
His nostrils flared and she saw the muscles of his jaw clench. His gaze knifed into her as he stared at her for a long, silent moment. Then he said, “Fine. You can stay. But keep behind me and don’t get in my way, all right?”
“Deal,” Mason said.
“I don’t suppose you packed an extra—”
Wordlessly he drew a short, slender sword out of the case and handed it over.
“Right. Thanks.” It fit her hand nicely and, as she gripped it, she felt a thrill tingling up her arm. But then her resolve faltered for an instant and she groped blindly for her abandoned beer and took a long, nervous swallow.
“Yeah....” Fennrys plucked the plastic cup from her hand and put it back down on the table. “It’s gonna take more than liquid courage to get you through the next few minutes.”
Mason stood staring up at him as his eyes darkened from ice blue to the color of a stormy sea. He reached up and undid the leather rope holding his iron medallion around his neck. Murmuring under his breath, he fastened it around hers, instead.
He nodded at her, and together they turned to face the river.
Gray, tattered, square sails hung like funeral shrouds from single masts, flapping and billowing in the nonexistent breeze like the wings of the dragons. From within the heavy bank of the pea-soup fog, the flares of brilliant fireballs ignited. Behind them, a mad, panicked scramble of café patrons surged toward the exits, crowding the archway leading to the path up out of the restaurant and creating a logjam. A girl fell to her knees on the stone terrace, shrieking in terror or pain, and Mason took a half step in that direction, but Fennrys shook his head.
“Don’t worry about them,” he said sharply. “Don’t get distracted. They’ll get themselves out of here, or they won’t.” He jerked his head in the direction of the shapes leaping into the shallow water and advancing up the banks and swarming across the docks from the river. “But you’ve fought these things before, and you know they’re not gonna get the chance if we don’t give it to them. So concentrate. If one of those things gets past me, it’ll be up to you to stop it. Nothing fancy, just go for the fast kill. All right?”
“Okay … okay.”
“You’ll be fine, Mase.” Fennrys stepped in front of her and dropped into a slight crouch, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. “It’s just like a fencing match.”
“Bout. Fencing bout.”
“Whatever.”
Mason whipped her sword through the air, feeling the weight of it. She rolled her sword-arm shoulder and made the muscles of her face and neck relax, consciously unclenching her jaw. She sank into a modified en garde stance. Her heartbeat slowed and her breathing settled into a steady, circular rhythm. Fennrys’s medallion tingled sharply against her skin. A still, silent pool welled up somewhere deep inside of her, and she saw everything with startling clarity.
And everything she saw … was red.
XIX
The lank gray shapes of the draugr grasped the patio railings and hauled themselves up onto the terrace, heaving aside tables and brightly colored sun umbrellas as they surged forward, milk-white eyes smoldering with mindless rage. The restaurant patrons had emptied off the patio and were scrambling to make it through the bar area, under the stone archways, and out into the round open courtyard where they could get to the spiraling path and get the hell away from the nightmares swarming up from the dark river.
Fennrys and Mason readied themselves. The odds were going to be overwhelmingly against them—at least, that’s what Fennrys thought, but then he suddenly noticed that there was a thrashing in the water. The flat pewter surface of the Hudson River foamed white … and then reddish-black. Whatever was lurking just below the surface of the waves was actually attacking the advancing draugr as they dropped over the sides of the dragon boats. And that wasn’t all. Huge dark shapes appeared in the skies overhead, circling on enormous wings—creatures that would repeatedly dive out of the sky to snatch up one of the fallen draugr in taloned claws and tear it limb from limb, flinging pieces of the monstrous warriors into the river, where they disappeared.
They had allies, it seemed.
The first wave of attackers hit. Teeth and claws and ragged-edged blades came at Fennrys in frenzied volleys, and he found himself parrying and slashing as if the blade in his hand was a living, breathing extension of his body.
His mind slipped effortlessly into a dark, charged place—a deep crimson-tinged reservoir of primal rage and viciously seductive whispering thoughts of mayhem and unfettered violence.
Disregarding his instructions to hang back, Mason suddenly stepped up beside Fennrys as the draugr reached him. He shouted angrily at
Twisted gray bodies had begun to clog the flagstones as the two of them carved out enough time and space with their blades for the bulk of the café’s panicked customers to make it through the restaurant to the exit path. The terrified screams faded in Fennrys’s ears, and at the same time, the draugr backed off, regrouping after their initial wave was decimated by such unexpectedly fierce opposition.
In that moment of breathing space, Fennrys turned to Mason.
“Head through the restaurant. Fall back to the courtyard,” he urged her. “There’s more room there to fight if they come at us again. And if they don’t, then we can just keep going and get the hell out of here.”
Wild-eyed and panting, Mason leaped over one of the sprawled, black-bleeding forms and ran through the maze of tumbled furniture in the restaurant, heading for an archway that led to the open-air courtyard beyond. Fennrys followed in her wake. But once they reached the coliseumlike rotunda, something happened. Fennrys saw Mason suddenly falter and fade, the berserker rage falling away as swiftly as it had come upon her. He saw her shy away from a draugr instead of pressing her attack. Her shoulders crept forward into a defensive, almost cowering, posture, and her eyes rolled wildly. She seemed to wilt right in front of him. It didn’t make any sense. They were winning. What was wrong with her?