Starling (18 page)

“Wow,” she said, looking around at all of the cafés and shops, at galleries that had sprung up like wildflowers in the old warehouse buildings. “Every time I come down here it seems like there’s another half-dozen trendy art galleries that have opened up. This place has really changed a lot.”

“You’re telling me. I remember when …” Fenn faltered to a stop and frowned at a building in the distance as if it was an affront to his sensibilities.

“What?”

“That’s not possible,” he said flatly.

“What isn’t?”

“That apartment complex there. The big one. When do you figure it was built?”

“London Terrace?” Mason asked, following Fennrys’s gaze toward the stacks of redbrick buildings with the square-turreted towers. “It’s pretty well-known. It was built sometime in the 1930s. At the time, I think it was the largest of its kind in the world. Why?”

Fennrys went a bit pale. “I remember when it wasn’t there.”

“Fenn, that’s …”

“Impossible. Yeah. That’s what I just said.” He turned to face her and his eyes flashed dangerously. As if he thought maybe she knew something about him—something she wasn’t telling him—and he was angry with her. “Why did you bring me down this way?”

Mason backed off a step. It was hard sometimes to remember that she knew virtually nothing about this guy. “I don’t know,” she said. Mason didn’t want to tell him that it was because a spooky, premonitory feeling had led her to suggest they go to that part of town, and she felt her cheeks growing hot under his stare. “I … I had a flash. Like an idea, I guess.”

“You mean like a vision?” he asked her in all seriousness.

“More like a mental picture. I just wanted to come down to this part of town with you all of a sudden. That’s all. I swear.”

Fenn turned back to glare at the apartment buildings in the distance, and Mason realized that he wasn’t angry. He was frightened. His fists were clenched, white-knuckled, at his sides, and the muscles of his jaw bunched as he ground his teeth together.

“Hey,” Mason said gently, tugging on his arm. “C’mon. Maybe you’re just having a really wicked déjà vu, you know? Or a past-life experience.”

“Just what I need. I don’t even have any present-life experience,” he muttered. But he let her lead him on, toward the Eighteenth Street entrance stairs that would lead them up to where the High Line stretched out, a ribbon of park floating above the streets of Chelsea. The silence stretched out between the two of them until it seemed like Fennrys couldn’t stand it any longer.

“So,” he said finally. “You used to come here with your dad, huh?”

Mason got the feeling that he really was actually taking a stab at making conversation. She nodded. “My dad is kind of a big cheese in the shipping industry. He has a bunch of warehouses over there.” She pointed toward the docks. “At least, he used to. I don’t really know if he does anymore. I don’t keep track of the family biz—not like he’d let me. That’s Roth’s job. But he used to bring me down here with him sometimes when I was really little. Before it started to get all hipsterfied. I remember when it used to be pretty rough and pretty scary.”

“I remember when it used to be mud flats and ship docks and not much else … and …” Fennrys’s footsteps faltered to a stop. “There was a newspaper seller on that corner. I remember …”

Mason watched, fascinated, as he squeezed his eyes shut in sudden, fierce concentration.

“I can see the front page of a paper in my head. From October … in 1912.” Fenn’s eyes snapped open, and he turned and gazed down the street toward the Hudson River. “They brought the survivors of the
Titanic
disaster in the
Carpathia
into the Chelsea docks and the papers were still talking about it in October. Mostly I remember this place in the fall. Does that make any sense?”

“No. Well, maybe.” Mason tried to shrug nonchalantly, but a sudden chill crawled up her spine and made her scalp tingle. What she was about to say sounded stupid inside her own head, but she was going to say it anyway. “Fenn … maybe … I don’t know. Do you think you might be reincarnated?”

He snorted. “No. I think I’m clinically insane and—wait.”

“What?”

“This street …”

As Fennrys turned to peer down Eighteenth Street, Mason gasped—suddenly the medallion in her pocket felt almost like it was squirming in the palm of her hand. As if the knotted and twisting designs on the iron disk were writhing and twining around one another. She pulled it out and held it up, dangling from its new leather cord. It swung back and forth like a pendulum for a few moments, and Fennrys raised a questioning eyebrow at Mason but didn’t say anything.

She felt herself blushing. “I was going to give it back to you when we got to the park—”

Suddenly the medallion’s cord went taut as the iron disk swung east, pointing down the street in the direction that Fennrys had been looking. Mason tried to swing it in another direction, but the thing was stuck like a compass needle pointing to magnetic north. It almost felt as if it was tugging her in the direction in which it pointed. She let it guide her, walking a few steps forward with Fennrys following silently in her wake. Their trajectory took them under the High Line and past an anonymous, somewhat dilapidated two-story brick warehouse with a heavily padlocked front door—an anomaly in the gentrified area. As they passed the warehouse the disk swung as if on a fulcrum and pointed sharply back at the door. Mason and Fennrys exchanged a glance and then walked to the door.

Fennrys backed up a few steps and looked up at the building. It was stout and nondescript and stood beside the High Line elevated railway, with a pull-down iron fire escape clinging to its face like a spindly deformity. It was two tall stories high with large, small-paned windows, most of which looked as if they had been either painted or bricked over from the inside. The loading door looked as if it hadn’t been used in years. There was no way to see inside—not that such a thing was encouraged: there was a small, neatly lettered, black-and-white
NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY
sign tacked up beside the door. The bricks on the facade of the building were painted a drab medium beige. All in all, it was exactly the kind of building that any normal person in New York City wouldn’t have thought twice about when passing by.

Fennrys cautiously approached the door. It was thick and made of steel, and the padlock looked like something found on a medieval dungeon. Fenn reached out with a steady hand and pressed his fingers against the surface of the lock. Mason watched, holding her breath as he closed his eyes and the lines of his face went taut with concentration. A faint shadow of a frown appeared on his brow, and his mouth twitched. He tilted his head slightly as if listening to some voice only he could hear, and then he began to murmur under his breath.

Mason strained forward, trying to understand what he was saying. Only, as before, with Calum, she couldn’t catch the sounds of the words. But this time, he was brief. The padlock body fell away from the U-shaped shackle with a loud
clank
. And Mason felt her mouth drop open. She started forward, but Fennrys thrust out a hand, warning her back. He moved his hand from the lock to the door itself, and Mason thought she felt a faint crackle of energy as he did so. The air in front of them seemed to waver slightly, as though his fingers had disrupted a heat mirage. Another murmured phrase, and suddenly the tension in the air in front of them loosened and dissipated. Fenn turned to look at Mason and raised an eyebrow at her expression. Then he shrugged and, stepping forward, shouldered the door open.

The inside of the building was murky. And empty. At least that was how it appeared at first glance. Deep gray shadows gathered in the corners of a huge, dusty space populated only by thick brick support pillars and, in the far corner, a slat-sided, ancient-looking freight elevator with a massive sliding grate instead of doors.

Neither of them called out “hello.” It was, Mason thought, as if they both already sensed there was no one there to answer back. Fennrys rolled his shoulders, as if loosening up before a fight, and stalked across the concrete floor, Mason following in his wake. Fenn heaved up the grate—it screeched like a warning bell, and Mason wondered if they shouldn’t heed it—and stepped inside. There was a big brass operating panel to one side with a lever instead of buttons and a large black toggle switch that, when Fennrys flipped it, caused an overhead incandescent bulb in a wire cage to slowly glow to reddish life. Mason swallowed nervously and, taking Fennrys’s offered hand, stepped into the boxy conveyance. Instantly her claustrophobia started tearing at the edges of her self-control. She took a deep breath and squeezed Fenn’s hand spasmodically as he threw the lever into the up position and the elevator cab lurched and began a slow ascent to the second floor.

What they found there was nothing short of astonishing.

As the elevator rose and the floor before them came into view, Fennrys heard Mason draw an astonished breath. For his part, he was way too freaked out to actually breathe in that moment. The lift cab shuddered to a stop, and soft, silvery-gold lighting from hidden sources grew to illuminate a sleek, stylish loftlike apartment. Hesitantly Fennrys stepped out onto the gleaming hardwood floor of a wide vestibule that sported a hall table and a large mirror in a polished ebony-wood frame that reflected his astonished expression back at him.

Mason’s face bore an almost identical look as she drifted out into the main room, her fingers trailing along table edges and the back of a long leather couch.

“You live here,” she said, winding her way from living to dining room.

“Your guess is as good as mine, Mase,” he answered, turning in circles to take everything in.

“No.” She shook her head. “I mean—you
live
here.”

She stared at Fennrys from across the room, sapphire eyes gleaming in the artful illumination and a slight hectic flush to her cheeks.

He sighed gustily and said, “Okay. I live here. And apparently I have good taste. Maybe I’m a nineteen-year-old interior design wunderkind.”

Mason grinned. “Maybe you are. So let’s see if we can’t find a business card or something here at La Maison Wolf that can confirm it.”

For the better part of half an hour, they went through drawers and cupboards and cabinets. Mason even started lifting the carefully hung abstracts away from the walls to see if she couldn’t find a hidden safe or something. There was nothing.

Where were the photographs? Mementos? Personal effects? There was absolutely zilch. Clothes in the wardrobe, boots and jackets in the front hall closet. Expensive furniture with a slightly European flair. Rich, but not extravagant. All very cool and classy and utterly lacking any clues as to the person who lived there. Even the paintings that Mason was nosing around were just bleak landscapes splashed with crimson in a series of large canvases that marched across one long brick wall.

What kind of a person was he? Who had he been? There were no personal papers. No filing cabinets or bookshelves. No mail, not even a Chinese takeout flyer, and no wallet on the front hall table. No prescriptions in the bathroom cabinet. He was almost surprised when he found a toothbrush.

Fennrys closed the mirrored cabinet door and stared at his reflection.

Who are you?

What the hell was a nineteen/twenty/however-many-year-old doing with an apartment like this in downtown Manhattan? Maybe he was some kind of computer genius entrepreneur. Which might have made sense if there had been a computer anywhere in the place. He couldn’t even find a phone. In fact, there was a minimum of electronics—no TV or stereo, not even a microwave in the kitchen. And while Fennrys had the sense that he knew
of
such things, he also suspected that he was perfectly comfortable not having them in his home. And Mason was right. This was, he knew instinctively and beyond a shadow of a doubt, his home.

Or at least,
a
home.

He wandered back out into the main living space and stood between two brick support pillars. There was a metal bar suspended between them a foot and a half above head height. He reached up and wrapped his hands around it, and the metal felt cool and familiar against the palms of his hands and he knew what it was there for. A chin-up bar.

Fenn pulled up his feet and swung his legs back and forth, launching himself into a leap and landing in a casual crouch in front of the cold, dead fireplace. Something caught at his gaze, and his eyes narrowed. There was a spot, no more than a hand’s-breadth wide, on the wooden mantel where the sheen of the varnish was slightly dulled. He wouldn’t have noticed from any other angle. Fenn stood up and walked over to the mantel. He placed his hand on the worn patch and pushed.

There was a whisper of sound from over his shoulder, and Fenn turned to see what he’d thought had been a decorative black-glass wall turn suddenly transparent as lights on the other side began to glow. He sucked in a breath as one panel shifted and rolled aside on a hidden track, revealing a shallow floor-to-ceiling storage cabinet that was full of … something really quite unexpected.