Starling by Lesley Livingston Read Free Book Online Page B

and had to stifle a laugh at his expression. “How deeply asleep do you have to be for a guy to be able to steal your boots?” she asked.
    “I can’t even believe I fell asleep in the first place,” Toby muttered. “It’s like someone slipped me a mickey or something. One second I’m standing there talking to the guy, next thing I know is I can feel a cold breeze up my ankles. Something very weird just happened here.”
    “You think?” Heather said, a little blearily, as she walked up to stand beside Mason. Heather was calm and her eyes looked a little vacant, as if she’d been given a sedative. Mason felt a little like that herself. She searched inward for the panic she would have normally experienced full bore under the circumstances and found it—but it was a distant, muted thing. Still … better not to push her luck.
    “Toby.” Mason checked her watch by the flashlight’s pale glow. “It’s morning. Can we please get out of here? He said we could.”
    “Yeah, I …” Toby stopped, eyeing her sharply, and Mason realized that she’d basically just told him that she’d eavesdropped on his conversation with Fennrys. To her relief, he decided against calling her on it. Instead he just said, “Yeah. I think we’re probably okay now.”
    “Why hasn’t anyone come to find us?” Heather asked quietly. “Where is everyone?”
    Mason had been wondering that herself. It had seemed pretty unlikely that anyone would have been wandering around in that storm, but surely someone would have noticed that the oak tree had come crashing down. Heard it? Maybe not. Not above the noise of the storm. But now …
    Toby eased open the storage hatch and climbed up out into the gym, the girls following at his heels. The light coming through the shattered window could barely be called that. It was still murky predawn. And the place looked like a bomb had hit it. A section of the roof had caved in, and there were branches and bricks, shattered slate roof tiles, and shards of rainbow glass everywhere. The new pine floor was soaked and warping already, and there was a gaping hole where the main entrance used to be.
    There was no sign of the … what had Fennrys called them? Mason frowned, remembering. Draugr. That was it. But there were none to be found. Not even bodies, or any signs that there had ever been a fight, let alone a small-scale battle. No blood—black or red—and no tell-tale marks to show they’d been dragged off somewhere....
    It was like the whole thing, except for the storm, had been nothing more than a terrible dream.
    “Toby.”
    Calum’s ragged-edged voice made Mason jump. He stood there, bent inward and holding his left arm tightly against his body. The sound of his breathing rasped through his teeth, as if every breath hurt. He was deathly pale, Mason thought, but still so handsome....
    Until he turned toward her.
    And she saw the parallel claw marks that ran from his hairline to his chin on the left side of his face. It hadn’t been a dream. But it had definitely been a nightmare.
    “Toby,” Cal said again, and Mason saw that the left side of his mouth was twisted upward in pain. “What are we gonna tell people when they ask what the hell happened here?”
    Mason couldn’t keep from wincing at the sight of the gashes on his face. Cal’s green eyes flicked over to her as she did so, and his gaze went ice cold under the gloss of pain. He turned his face away from her and looked back to where the fencing master stood in silent thought. The furrows on Toby’s brow were etched deeply, and his eyes moved back and forth over the ruined state of the Gosforth gymnasium. Finally he turned back to Cal, his expression carefully neutral as he looked at him. She wished she’d been able to do the same a moment earlier.
    “What the hell are we going to say, Toby?” Calum asked again.
    “It was the tree,” Toby said quietly. He gestured with one hand at the gashes on Cal’s face. “And the broken