Starling (12 page)

Gunnar Starling, however, had formulated other plans.

Rory glanced nervously at the clock on the dash. He would have to return the diary soon to the brass-bound lockbox on the desk in Gunnar’s study. He didn’t like having it in his possession for more than an hour or two at a time. Rory was already worried that his father might one day notice that a few of the handful of gilded acorns were missing from the box. But before he returned the diary, he opened the leather book back up and flipped to the one page he’d spent the most hours staring at.

The words of the prophecy were scrawled across the page, as if Gunnar had still been caught in the throes of the vision when he’d written them.

Even if Gunnar hadn’t spelled out the meaning in the diary, Rory would have figured it out. His mother’s maiden name had been Rose. Apple trees were part of the rose family, and apples held all kinds of significance in myths and legends. Starlings were birds noted for the iridescent rainbowlike sheen of their feathers. And Norse mythology was predicated on an end-of-the-world scenario—Ragnarok, when a monstrous giant wolf named Fenris would devour Odin, the father of the gods, and a great war, fought by the souls of the dead, would destroy the mortal realm.

The prophecy, as Gunnar had understood it, meant that he and Yelena would have three sons who would become “Odin Sons,” leaders of the warrior host of Asgard, an army of fallen heroes. The Devourer, the Fenris Wolf, would appear. Then Thor, the god of thunder, would be reborn into the mortal realm.

When Gunnar met Yelena, it was the start of the end of everything.

Except that their third child born turned out to be a girl.

And Yelena had died bearing her.

M
ason had promised her father no nightmares, but it wasn’t a promise she’d figured she could realistically keep. Mason had been having nightmares since she was six. Most of them variations on a theme.

This time, when she opened the dream shed door she found a different twist to the old hide-and-seek scenario. Stepping inside the old forgotten gardening hut led, quite unexpectedly, to a dark, rough-walled cell. Like a medieval dungeon carved into the earth. Manacles hung from rusting chains. It was a place Mason had never been before—in dreams or otherwise—but it felt strangely familiar. In the corner, she saw a bench, once painted a bright sky blue with red roses on it. But the design was faded, the paint dull and peeling.
That
was something she knew. It was the bench in the garden shed where she’d gone to hide from Rory when they’d played a game. Where she’d become trapped. After her second full day locked in the darkness, her six-year-old self had lain down on that bench and cried herself to sleep. Beyond that, she couldn’t remember what happened until after they’d found her.

Now, though, she knew she wasn’t in a shed. She backed away, and her shoulders jammed up against iron bars. When she turned around, she saw that the Fennrys Wolf stood on the other side.

He held something in his hand that looked like a staff or a spear. And he was smiling. But his smile, Mason thought, was … strange. And when he opened his mouth to speak, his whole face distorted, jaws opening wider and wider until all Mason could see was a cavelike blackness in front of her. And all she could hear was the sound of the Fennrys Wolf’s voice.

Telling her to run.

Mason’s eyes snapped open and she lay flat on her back, staring up at her ceiling. Moonlight poured in through her open window and shifting, silvery patterns shimmered along the walls and ceiling, reflections from the pool outside below. She must have been asleep for hours. But she knew that there was no way she would ever be able to make her brain calm down so she could return to that state.

Fennrys …

The Fennrys Wolf …

What kind of a name was that? Well, she knew exactly
what
kind of a name it was. She just wanted to know the
why
of it. She rolled her head on her pillow and gazed over to where the messenger bag with her laptop in it lay on her desk in the corner of the room. She thought about getting it out and just calling up Wikipedia, but after a moment, she got out of bed and wandered instead down the long hall to her dad’s study.

Stretching as she went, Mason padded on cat-silent feet, stiff from having fallen so instantly asleep. In her nightmare, she hadn’t been able to run when Fennrys told her to, and she had awakened in the exact same position she’d fallen asleep in.

It was the thought of him that sent her now to the wall of books that covered one long side of the study, floor to ceiling. Mason had spent a lot of time here when she was a little girl, climbing like a monkey up and down the rolling ladder, running her fingers across raised letters on leather-bound spines. On one of the high shelves, Gunnar had a large collection of Scandinavian literature—histories and myths and folklore—and it was to those volumes that Mason climbed. She was careful not to make any noise. She didn’t want anyone to know why she’d taken a sudden, fierce interest in the myths of the Vikings.

Mason had learned some of the stories of the Norse gods, but they had always struck her as just grimmer, colder, weirder versions of the same kinds of stuff found in Greek and Roman myths. Jealous gods, scheming and plotting against one another—only with the added bonus of a fatalistic rush toward the eventual prophesied annihilation of the world. Mason had never developed her father’s fierce fascination with the myths. Still, she knew enough about the ancient stories of her ancestors to know that a wolf figured prominently in the lore.

She pulled down a large hardcover picture book that she remembered fondly from reading it repeatedly as a kid. It was full of brightly colored, fanciful illustrations of long-haired maidens and spiky-haired bearded warriors. A merry depiction of a fatalistic cosmology that was supposed to end—or already
had
ended; Mason could never get the whole Ragnarok thing quite straight—with the destruction of the world.

Cheery
, she thought.

“F-e-n …,” she murmured to herself as she ran a finger down the index and remembered that the story of the Fenris Wolf—or Fenrir, as the creature was often called—was under the heading of “Loki’s Monstrous Brood.”

“Monstrous,” Mason muttered, turning to sit on the ladder step with the book in her lap. “Well,
there’s
a comforting adjective....”

Even just flipping through the book brought back her dormant memories of the stories. She remembered that the wolf was the offspring of an occasionally mischievous, frequently downright malicious jotun, a giant, named Loki. She knew that, in the great apocalyptic Norse battle at the end of days, Ragnarok, the Fenris Wolf was fated to devour Odin, the one-eyed father of the Aesir, what the Norse called the good guys in their convoluted pantheon of gods.

Mason avoided turning to the page that she knew depicted Odin, in helmet and eyepatch, astride his eight-legged steed and with his mighty magic spear in his hand, riding full tilt straight into the giant wolf’s slavering maw and down its gullet to his doom. She knew that all sorts of really bad stuff happened when he did.

What she
didn’t
know was why some guy named after that particular monster had made such a bizarre and frightening entrance into her life. Or why she couldn’t stop thinking about him in ways that weren’t necessarily bizarre or frightening, but were nevertheless disturbing enough to keep her awake in the middle of the night.

Calum Aristarchos was having similar difficulties sleeping, jolted from restless dreams by the sound of voices wafting through his open bedroom window. At first he thought he was dreaming, or that his mother was listening to opera somewhere in the house. The voices were high and sweet, singing complicated harmonies that beckoned him.

Cal sat up, head fuzzy from his medication and muscles aching from the punishment they’d taken, and swung his legs stiffly over the side of the bed. Awkwardly, he pulled on a pair of sweats and, barefoot and shirtless, padded soundlessly across the thick carpeting of his bedroom to a set of French doors. They opened out onto his own private terrace overlooking the lawn that swept down to the waters of Long Island Sound. He stepped out into a night of velvet blackness and liquid silver moonlight and wondered if he wasn’t still dreaming. Everything shone with a kind of surreal glimmer. Cal hadn’t been home since the beginning of the semester and he had grown used to not being able to see the stars in Manhattan. Then again, he couldn’t remember ever having seen that many stars at home either, but there they were: like handfuls of diamonds strewn across the night sky.

Outside, the music was … not
louder
 … but more compelling. Irresistible. Cal felt an instant of searing electricity where the wounds on his face and chest tingled sharply, and then he was moving, striding down the immaculate landscaped path accented with classical Greek marble sculptures, down toward the landing where he usually tied up his jet-ski when he was home for the summer months. Cal had learned to swim almost before he could walk. The water had always been like a second home to him, and his mother and sister had always joked that he was half fish. One of the mer-folk. It was a joke.

Or maybe … it wasn’t.

When he got to the bottom of the path, he crept around a stand of cedar trees, scarcely daring to breathe. For a brief instant, he thought he’d stumbled on some kind of sorority initiation week. Girls—really,
really
beautiful girls—sat on the shore and swam, frolicking and splashing, out in the Sound. They were all laughing and singing, and only half of them wore anything that could even remotely be considered clothing—filmy tunics and gossamer gowns that clung to lithe wet limbs—and they didn’t seem to notice Cal spying on them. Or maybe they just didn’t care.

He watched, mesmerized by the spectacle, when suddenly, out in the middle of the glassy black water, a pearly froth of foam bubbled up, as if churned by something below the surface. Cal squinted at the disturbance, struggling to make out what was causing it.

Suddenly a boiling geyser of white water burst high into the air and a massive silver horse—its hindquarters fused into a single muscular tail, finned like a fish’s—leaped into the night. A girl of unearthly beauty rode upon its back, holding fast to the creature’s sweeping sea-green mane and laughing with abandon.

She was followed by dozens of others, and they all rode upon the backs of monsters. Bulls and horses and snow-white leopards that leaped, breaching the surface of the water like dolphins so that Cal could see them clearly. Their back ends were uniformly scaly and had long, iridescent fins where legs and hooves should be.

“I’m definitely dreaming,” Cal heard himself say.

Then one of the nymphs hoisted herself up onto the deck of the landing and turned toward where he stood hidden. She held out a delicate, web-fingered hand to him. Her eyes were black, glittering, and pulled at him like magnets. Her skin was silver-white, the color of driftwood, and glistened with phosphorescence beneath the transparent sheath she wore. She opened her full, berry-red mouth, and laughter like bells tinkling fell from her lips. Her teeth were sharp, narrow, and there were too many of them.

She sang his name.

Cal closed his eyes and swallowed the fear that surged up his throat. He put a hand to the side of his face, where the claw-marks were, and remembered other monsters. Other things that had no business existing in the world.

Then he turned and sprinted back up the path toward the house, covering his ears as he ran so he wouldn’t hear the longing in the mer-girl’s voice.

B
y late Tuesday afternoon, Mason was seriously rethinking her decision to return to school so soon. A pop quiz in Latin class on Monday threw her for a loop, and an assignment she’d thought wasn’t due until the next week was, of course, due that very day. She was starting to think Rory might have had the right idea when he’d begged off sick and stayed home.

Mason had known instantly that her brother was faking, and she’d been feeling fairly righteous about returning to school herself. On top of that, she’d looked forward to getting some real sleep. It was easier for her to sleep peacefully at Gosforth, for some reason. Like there was some kind of protective bubble around the academy grounds that kept the nightmares at bay.