Read Online Starling by Lesley Livingston - Free Book Online Page A

return. He turned to Cal. “Wonder why he left it with you.”
    “Maybe he thought I was hot,” Cal said, equally drily.
    “Children.” Toby rubbed at the bridge of his nose. In the gathering light he looked terrible, gray and worn. “Can we please dial down the bullshit and maybe take a minute to get our stories straight? Before the Headmaster wakes up and looks out his window into the quad?”
    That might have already happened , Mason thought as a siren started to wail in the far distance.
    Closer, she heard a voice, someone shouting, and then another. Gosforth Academy was waking up to find its venerable oak tree felled and its brand-new gym demolished. What it wouldn’t find were the creatures that Mason was almost sure had been responsible for the devastation.
    And now … now that they had all agreed to remain silent … there was no one to tell of their existence.
    Emergency personnel and school administration descended on the scene within minutes, along with a crowd of gawking students from the dorm, most of them still in sweats and sporting bedhead. Mason was led, under protestation that she was fine, to sit beside Heather Palmerston on a bench while a paramedic examined the small collection of cuts and bruises the girls had sustained.
    “Mason!”
    She glanced up in apprehension as she heard her name called out in a familiar voice. Gunnar Starling came striding across the quad, a thundercloud frown on his brow. Mason felt her heart lurch a little—whether in fear or relief, she wasn’t really sure—at the sight of her father. His custom-tailored overcoat flowed cloaklike in his wake, and his thick silver hair was like the mane of a lion. His elegant Nordic features were drawn, and his pale blue eyes dangerously alight with anger.
    Maybe not anger , Mason thought. Maybe it was … worry.
    Which was worse. If Gunnar Starling was angry about something, he dealt with it swiftly, surely, and permanently, and that was that. If he was worried about something—some problem that he couldn’t immediately solve, make better, or make go away—then Gunnar was someone to be avoided at all costs. Mason hoped he was just really pissed about the rainbow window.
    Her father bore down on her where she sat huddled under an emergency blanket. Heather seemed to have lapsed into a kind of dull stupor, unaffected even by the sight of buff firefighters—until the moment two of them rounded the far side of the building, supporting Calum between them. Mason, Heather, and Rory had all been able to clamber over the trunk of the fallen oak tree in order to get out into the quad. But not Calum. Toby had made him stay put inside the ruined gymnasium until the firemen could go around and force open the jammed emergency exit door. It was a decision that had quietly infuriated Cal, Mason could tell, but it was also a moot point. In the state he was in, he hadn’t had the strength to climb over the twisted, massive bulk of the fallen oak, in spite of the Fennrys Wolf’s mysterious ministrations. Which, Mason suspected, had probably saved Cal’s life.
    She wished there was some way she could thank Fennrys for what he’d done for them, but she feared she’d probably never see him again. It made her unaccountably sad, but she had more immediate problems to deal with at the moment. Like her father switching course in midstride when he spotted Toby talking to the fire chief. Gunnar looked like he was going to rend the fencing instructor limb from bloody limb.
    Mason jumped up off the bench and ran straight toward her father, heading him off at the pass.
    “Dad!”
    “Mason! Honey …” Gunnar Starling wrapped his daughter tightly in his strong arms and kissed the top of her head. “What in hell happened to you?”
    “Nothing.” Mason tried to sound convincing. “I’m fine. It was the storm. I guess the old oak just couldn’t stand against it....”
    Her father pushed her to arm’s length and bent down to peer into her face,