Starling (22 page)

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.

T
he 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 her to get back, but she ignored him. And she more than held her own, hacking and hewing with the kind of skill that transcended raw desperation. It seemed as if she was drawing upon the same kind of pure, berserker urge to fight that Fennrys himself felt. It was as though, in those few desperate moments, Mason was possessed by a force outside herself. His sudden impulse to lend her his medallion had been right on the money, he thought. The power of the thing seemed to feed a kind of soul-deep fury in her, augmenting and unleashing it on the draugr to devastating effect. While it was enormously useful under the circumstances, a small, separate corner of Fennrys’s mind sounded an alarm at that thought.

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?

And then he glanced up and realized what was wrong.

A thick, heavy fog had lowered over the open circle of the café’s central courtyard like an impenetrable ceiling, a smoky-black shroud that blotted out the sky. It hung like heavy velvet curtains everywhere, and the effect was disorienting, suffocating. It was suddenly impossible to tell which archway led up out of the courtyard. If they chose the wrong one, they’d be trapped and they’d never battle their way back out.

It was a neat trick—and specifically designed to target Mason’s “spatial boundary” issues. It was pretty damned clear to Fennrys in that moment that someone knew a whole lot more about Mason Starling than was healthy for her. Or, at the moment, for him. Whoever was behind the attack was using Mason’s fear against them.

“Aw … crap …,” Fenn muttered.

The draugr had them completely encircled.

“C’mon,” Fennrys said, grabbing Mason by the hand and pulling her into the center of the rotunda. He pointed to the now-identical arches. “Which way do we go, Mase?”

“No way,” she gasped.

He glanced over and saw that Mason had gone incredibly pale. The palm of her hand was clammy with cold sweat against his as he tightened his grip on her fingers.

“There’s no way out! No escape! I—I don’t know how to get out. Fenn … oh, god … we’re trapped....”

“No such thing,” he snarled, and kicked a charging draugr in the chest with his heavy-soled boot, grinning savagely at the satisfying snap of the thing’s sternum as he felt its ribcage cave in toward its dead, unbeating heart. “Find a way or make one, Mase,” he urged her. “Use the medallion. I mean really
use
it.”

It had worked for Mason before—whatever kind of power the iron disk possessed. Fennrys had to make her use it again, to find a way out of the deathtrap that had been specifically designed to prey upon her greatest fear.

“I can’t. I can’t …”

“Yes. You
can
.” Fennrys turned and gripped her by the shoulders, forcing her to look into his eyes. “Make a hole in your mind, Mason. Find the escape inside of you and then make it real. Make it
happen
.” He turned her back around to face the archways that were swirling with darkly sparkling sinister fog. “That’s how magick works.”

“I’m not—I don’t …”

“Which one?” he said gently. “Don’t worry about the path topside. Just get us to the river, sweetheart. Find a hole. Open the door and I’ll follow you through, alive and kicking.”

He half turned and beheaded a draugr with almost casual contempt. But that was largely show, for Mason’s sake. He wasn’t going to be able to keep it up much longer—his arm muscles seared with fatigue, and there were more of the gray-skinned demons pouring through the arches on all sides, lurching and shambling their way toward them. But there were friendlies in the water—at least, that’s what he hoped they were—who might help them escape. It was worth a shot. Mostly because it was the only bullet they had left.

“Get us
out
of here, Mase,” he whispered urgently.

The temperature was dropping precipitously, and icicles were forming on all of the arches, like sharp teeth bared in open, hungry mouths. Fennrys let go of Mason’s hand, and her shoulders stiffened. But she inhaled sharply through her nostrils and turned outward, looking at each archway with an expression of fierce, arrow-sharp concentration tightening her features. Fennrys saw tiny white sparks shimmer over the surface of the iron disk at her throat. Her sapphire gaze flicked back and forth between the passageways, and suddenly, a blast of warm wind poured out of one, blowing her ebony hair back away from her face like wings on either side of her head.