Starling by Lesley Livingston Read Free Book Online Page A

then he heard another sound, a different rhythmic pounding, and looking up, he saw two massive shapes in the middle of the road, moving swiftly toward him.
    Horse cops, Fennrys thought. NYPD. About bloody time …
    A pair of them, armored and helmeted men perched on the backs of huge, heavy beasts—Hanoverians or a similar breed, horses with hooves the size of dinner plates. Fennrys tucked his head farther down between his shoulders and tried to make like he was just another jogger, out in the middle of a citywide, blackout-making torrential downpour.
    For reasons he couldn’t quite fathom, Fennrys really wished he still had the iron medallion with him that he’d left with the injured kid at the school. He also knew he’d left it there for a good reason. Instinct was the only thing he had to go on at the moment, but it was everything. Instinct … and the reassuring weight of the sword in the canvas bag slung across his back.
    The echoing clop-clop of the horse cops’ passage rang in his ears, weirdly amplified by the wet, shimmering air.
    The sound chilled him to the bone. Jog casual, Fenn thought, trying not to glance back again in their direction. There was nothing about him to attract their attention. Almost nothing. Maybe it was the combat boots that gave him away. Maybe it was the undisguised fighter’s physique that the school-logo workout gear did nothing to disguise. He didn’t know. But something did …
    He heard a murmured, guttural exchange and the sound of those enormous hooves clattering on the asphalt as they accelerated from walk, to trot, to gallop. Fennrys glanced up and felt his heart leap into his throat. Those are no cops! he thought as two magnificent figures thundered toward him through the rolling banks of fog. Now he saw high-crested helmets with noseguards and cheek plates covering the planes of their faces. Longbows and arrow quivers carried crisscrossed over the bare-chested torsos of men. Torsos that flowed seamlessly down, melding with equine musculature. The mirage image of New York City cops astride their mounts shimmered and dissolved, revealing the strange, mythic, impossible creatures beneath: centaurs.
    Okay. Now I know I’m crazy , Fenn thought.
    And then he thought, Run!

VI
     
    “D amn his eyes!”
    Toby’s roaring jolted Mason from sleep and a strange, tangled dream where she was falling through darkness and then light and then darkness again, through a storm-ridden sky and then a vast underground cavern riddled with masses of tree roots and then the sky again—and she’d been on fire. At least she’d woken before she’d hit the ground. Her brother Rory, taunting her about a falling nightmare when she’d been just a kid, had told her that if you hit the ground in one of those falling/flying dreams, then you die in real life. That your heart would stop from shock. Mason didn’t believe him, but she still wasn’t anxious to test the theory.
    Toby was waving around the now-sputtering flashlight and swearing a blue streak—something he usually tried to keep a lid on, with varying degrees of success, in front of the students—and Mason pushed herself to her feet and went to see what had gotten him foaming at the mouth.
    “He stole my damned boots!” Toby growled before she even had a chance to ask him. Toby was something of a freak of nature in that he could fence in combat boots—thick, heavy-soled things that he’d lovingly broken in over a couple of decades—but now he stood there, sock footed and outraged on the cold concrete floor, looking slightly comical.
    And the young man they knew only as the Fennrys Wolf was gone.
    Over near the wall, Rory snuffled in sleep and shifted as if swimming back toward consciousness. Mason noticed that one of his running shoes was untied and lying on the floor beside his foot. She knew what must have happened. Rory had little girly feet and Fennrys had obviously not been able to fit into his footwear.
    She turned back to Toby