Starling by Lesley Livingston Page A

you Top Gunn’s little girl is gonna get yanked back to the estate for some good old-fashioned home schooling and a sundown curfew. Let’s see you compete in the Nationals if that happens, sis.”
    “He wouldn’t.”
    Toby made a rueful sound that wasn’t quite a dry laugh. “Yeah, he probably would, Mason.”
    As much as she didn’t want to believe it, she knew they were probably right. Toby had known her father a long time. It was Gunnar Starling who’d gotten him the job at Gosforth—a job Mason had the feeling Toby wasn’t going to jeopardize with wild stories. Stories about things that they had absolutely no proof of. She gazed around bleakly at the damage to the gym.
    “Okay,” Mason said in a near-whisper voice. “I won’t say anything.” Mason looked up through the hole in the roof. “I promise. But I’m also not going to just forget about what happened here. And I think—no, I know —that we’re all going to have to deal with it at some point.”

VII
     
    H owls of laughter rang out, telling Fennrys that he’d been spotted again by the nightmares hunting him.
    He’d done his best to lose them by dodging down alleys and cutting through apartment complexes and tenements at the southern edge of Harlem, running, hiding, heading east as he zigzagged from one block to another until he’d crossed Park Avenue and was only about three long blocks from the East River.
    But every time he thought he’d eluded the centaurs, they would appear out of a drift of fog at the end of an alleyway and howl for his blood. Just like they were doing now. Fennrys swore and rolled out from behind his latest hiding spot—a thicket of tangled bushes in a vacant lot—as the horse-men rounded the corner of a building and reared in tandem, lashing out with metal-shod hooves. The pair accelerated into a gallop, and Fennrys knew, once they got up to speed, they would run him down.
    They were close enough this time for him to hear one of them roar something about “worthy prey” and the “glory of the hunt.” In the instant before he turned and made a run for it, he saw one of them draw from a holster and, like a double-exposed image of cop and creature, Fennrys saw, not an NYPD standard-issue sidearm, but rather the image of one, wrapped around the real weapon like a tangible shadow—another mirage. He heard a sharp twang and dodged sharply to his right as a crossbow bolt sang past his head like a ferocious, deadly bird.
    Fennrys knew perfectly well that a crossbow like that could fire a projectile that would punch through plate armor. He didn’t bother to question why he possessed that kind of knowledge—rather he just accepted it, took a sharp right, and pounded south, cutting through the grounds of a couple of blocks of housing complexes before turning east and then south again. A dark stairwell behind a Dumpster in a narrow lane gave him a chance to catch his breath.
    After the silence had stretched out for a good few minutes, Fennrys crept slowly from his hiding place. He saw the FDR Drive running past in front of him—and a switchback ramp that led up to the narrow pedestrian bridge that spanned across to Wards Island. Fennrys glanced around, and it seemed as though he might have lost his pursuers. But if he hadn’t, the bridge looked as though it might actually be too narrow to accommodate the massive bulk of the creatures—the horse halves of them were like Clydesdales on steroids, almost more bull-like than equine. Fennrys took a chance and darted up the ramp, sprinting across the long, slender span of the bridge.
    When he got to the island, he just kept running. He scaled the fence surrounding the tennis courts and ran across them at full speed, feeling terribly exposed in the predawn light. He was about halfway across the open expanse when arrows started slamming into the ground on either side of him. Fennrys flinched and threw his arms up over his head and cut sharply right, continuing to run in a