Starling by Lesley Livingston

story,” Roth was saying. “All I know is that she and Mom were best friends when they were young.”
    “Daria Aristarchos and Mom? Our mom?” Mason’s jaw dropped. That was something she couldn’t fathom. Not from everything she knew about Calum’s mother. And everything she knew about her own, which admittedly wasn’t all that much. “You’re kidding. I thought Mom went to school somewhere else. Somewhere not Gosforth.”
    “She did. Mom wasn’t part of all this.” Roth smiled, rolling his eyes at the room and, Mason got the impression, the school at large. “She never had to deal with being a Gosling. With all of the impossible expectations and the ‘hallowed histories’ of a bunch of deluded, spoiled aristocrats who think they’re above everyone else and hold the fate of mankind in their greasy palms—”
    He broke off when he realized that Mason was staring at him. She didn’t think she’d ever heard him string that many words together in a sentence before.
    Roth chuckled and shook his head. “Mom was normal. That’s all, Mase. And that is why she was so much cooler than any of us have any hope of ever being.”
    “I wish I’d known her,” Mason said quietly, feeling the familiar ache of her mother’s absence. Yelena Starling had died in childbirth, and it was a hard thing for Mason to think about—without thinking about that fact that she was the reason her mother was gone.
    Roth pushed himself away from the desk and walked over to where Mason stood by the bed. “C’mon,” he said, holding out his hand for her bag.
    She zipped it shut and handed it over with a sigh. “Right. Home sweet home, here I come.”

IX
     
    F ennrys crouched on his haunches, huddled under the Hell Gate Bridge trestle waiting for the dawn, or his sanity, to return. He needed one or the other, something that would shine a light on his darkness and banish the things that went bump—and thrash, and chase, and kill—in the night. He squinted into the east, where the horizon was finally brightening. He’d made it. At the very least, he seemed to have—hopefully permanently—ditched the marauding horse-men that had been hunting him.
    Centaurs .
    He must be in some kind of serious trouble.
    Or—and this was far more likely—clearly insane. As the rose-and-gold light of predawn crept toward his shadowed hiding place, Fennrys stood and peered around the corner. Nothing. The big homeless guy had disappeared, as if into the morning mist, and Fennrys was alone.
    He remembered that he had told the fight guy at the school—what was his name? Toby?—that they would be safe with the coming of the dawn. That the draugr would be gone with the morning light. He knew that to be true. He knew, in all probability, that it was true of the centaurs as well. He did not , however, know how he knew that.
    When the sun finally lifted above the horizon, he waited for at least a whole hour, just to be sure, before he left the safety of his hiding place and made his way back over the pedestrian bridge to Manhattan. Once there, he began to walk south.
    When he reached Ninety-Fifth Street, where the shoreline of the river bent east again, he turned right and headed deeper into the heart of the city. The wind off the water was starting to give him a chill down one side of his body. He shivered and shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. And felt something tucked away in one of them.
    Curious, Fennrys fished the object out of his pocket. It turned out to be a large wad of bills, and he stared at them for a long time. That, at least, solved that problem. He glanced to the east, where the sun had climbed well into the sky, and wondered if the clothing stores on Fifth Avenue were open yet.
    The saleslady in the upscale clothing store was delightful and helpful and never for an instant indicated that the Fennrys Wolf was dressed inappropriately when he walked through the doors of the shop … wearing sweatpants that were two sizes too