Starling House, page 18
Relief moves through me in a searing wave, far too intense. I swallow and say, somewhat at random, “I don’t know. What about the dedication?”
Arthur is frowning at me. “It doesn’t have a dedication.”
“Yes it—” I close my mouth. Maybe Eleanor Starling’s drafts and manuscripts didn’t include the dedication; maybe Arthur hasn’t read the later editions. I hope, suddenly and desperately, that he hasn’t. “I still don’t understand why you’d want to go down there in the first place. I mean, look at you.” I let my eyes move over him, lingering on the oozing red furrows along his neck, the rusty patches on the couch where blood has dried and flaked from his skin. “Why are you doing any of this?”
The small muscles of his jaw clench. “It’s the duty of the Warden to wield the sword,” he says stiffly. “To keep the House and ward the walls and do your damnedest to keep the Beasts from breaching the gates.”
He makes it sound so noble, so tragic, like one of those medieval ballads that ends with a knight lying dead on the field of battle with his lady weeping over his broken body. I picture myself finding him slumped in the hall or sprawled on the driveway, his throat torn out but his sword still in hand, and a panicked, senseless fury boils up my spine. “Oh, right, you’re the Warden, of course.”
I’m aware that my tone has edged away from sarcastic and toward genuine outrage, that I’m giving away a game I shouldn’t even be playing, but I don’t care. “It’s your birthright, I forgot.” He flinches from the word, eyes white-ringed. “Did you have to swear it on the full moon? Was there a blood sacrifice? Because I’d hate to hear Lacey Matthews say she told me so—”
“Stop it.” He says it very quietly, face turned as if he’s speaking to the hellcat still curled in his lap.
“Do you want to die, is that your deal?” I’m mildly surprised to find that I’m on my feet, fingers curled into fists, ribs screaming. “Because it sure looks like it. You could have called me, you could have—I don’t know—hidden in a closet, or run away—”
“I did. I told you.” He doesn’t shout, but his voice has a rasp to it that makes me think he’d like to. His features are white and contorted, aggressively ugly. I make a distant note that this is what Arthur looks like when he’s actually angry, rather than just pretending. “My parents didn’t let me go off to school, I ran away. Because I was tired of living in a ghost story, because I wanted a nice normal life with lockers and—and stupid worksheets—and for a while I thought I’d done it. Made a clean getaway. For two years, I didn’t dream at all.”
It occurs to me that I would have been about twelve when he ran away to school. That my dreams began just when Starling House lost its heir. A whole string of what-ifs and might-have-beens unfurls in my head, an alternate life where I took up the sword instead of Arthur. I stamp on it.
“I came home because the town commissioner called me to complain. My parents had stopped picking up the groceries, see, and it was all rotting outside the gate, attracting vermin. It was a public nuisance, he said.”
I remember—in a cold, unwilling rush—what Bev said when I asked her about the Starlings. How the boy didn’t call the police for days after his parents died. How he didn’t shed a tear, but just told the coroner it was past his suppertime.
At the time, the story scared me. Now I feel nothing but terrible, familiar grief. I remember my first meal after the crash: the constable brought me a Happy Meal and I sat staring at the bright-colored box in my lap, printed with smiling, bumbling cartoons, and realized all at once that I was too old for it. That I’d spent the last minutes of my childhood dying on a riverbank in the cold light of the power plant, dreaming there were warm arms wrapped around me, and when I woke up the next morning I had outgrown such youthful fantasies.
My temper rushes out of me in a long sigh. I take a step back toward the couch. “Oh, Arthur.”
He’s looking down at the hellcat again, eyes glassy, stroking her spine with a single, miraculously unharmed finger. “They must have been in the middle of dinner when the mist rose, because there was still food on their plates. The Beast breached the gates, and they took the truck, followed behind. I don’t know how they made it back after, the state they were in. I found them crawling back toward the house, right where you—”
He’s interrupted by a sound like gravel in a dishwasher. It takes both of us a moment to realize it’s the hellcat, purring. Arthur’s hands unclench on the couch and the knot of his face loosens very slightly.
He looks up, finally, to meet my eyes. “I’m going to make it stop. It’s not a choice. I have to.”
There’s an urgency to his voice that I know very well. Arthur has been many things to me—a mystery, a vampire, a knight, an orphan, a real dick—but now I see him for what he is: a man with a list just like mine, with only one thing on it.
And that should warn me away, because I know a person like that doesn’t have room for wanting, for wishing, but my body moves of its own accord. I step closer, too close, my feet small and bare between his. He tilts his head to look up at me and his wounds gape wide. He doesn’t flinch.
His hair is matted to his throat with sweat and gore. I brush it aside. He shivers but his skin is hot, almost feverish beneath my fingers, and I think dizzily that I know exactly why Icarus flew so high: when you’ve spent too long in the dark, you’ll melt your own wings just to feel the sun on your skin.
My fingers find the collar of his shirt. I lean closer, not smiling at all now. “And do you have to do it alone?”
“Yes.” Arthur’s voice is ragged, as if it caught on barbed wire and ripped itself free. “Yes, I do,” he says, but he’s reaching for me and the hellcat is clawing out of his lap with an aggrieved hiss and his eyes are wide and dark on mine.
“Horseshit,” I say, and this time, I’m the one who kisses him.
* * *
Arthur Starling considers himself a strong-willed man. He has, after all, spent most of his life locked in a one-man war against an ancient evil with nothing but a sword and an opinionated House for company. He has stood against a hundred nightmares and lain alone for a thousand nights, dry-eyed; he has scrubbed his own blood from the floors and stitched his own wounds with steady hands.
And yet he cannot seem to push Opal away. His hands are tangled in the bloody red of her hair and she is kissing him with a heedless, reckless hunger, her mouth like a match against his, burning every dark thing away. Her hands are fisted in the collar of his shirt and she is so vital, so furiously alive that Arthur understands for the first time why Hades stole Persephone, why a man who has spent his life in winter might do anything at all for a taste of spring.
But he will not bring Opal down into the dark with him. He is not, perhaps, as strong as he hoped, but he is not that weak.
He breaks away. He can’t quite make himself let go of her hair, so he presses his forehead against hers, their breath mingling. He says, hoarsely, wretchedly, “You don’t understand.”
She pulls back so fast he feels hairs snapping around his fingers. She crosses her arms over the tired cotton of her shirt and presses a palm hard to her rib cage, like she’s trying to hold herself together. “Hey, you’re the one who kissed me like ten seconds ago so excuse me if I got mixed signals.” Her voice is caustic and careless, the way it always gets when she’s scared. He pictures her planting her feet in the grass, wrists straining beneath the weight of the Starling sword, telling him to shut up.
He reaches up to her a little helplessly, wiping a smear of dirt or blood away from the harsh angle of her elbow. “It’s not that I don’t—it’s just—”
Opal flinches back from his touch, then pauses. Her eyes narrow in sudden suspicion. “Wait. Have you done this before?”
“Done what before?”
“I just—I mean, I’d understand.” She shrugs, not unkindly. “You’ve spent your whole life locked in a haunted mansion, so it’s not like you’ve had many chances to…” She drifts into tactful silence.
Several seconds later, Arthur grates, “I went away to school for two years. I dated.”
“Oh yeah?” A sliver of that mocking, too-sharp smile. “What was her name?”
“Victoria Wallstone,” he says stiffly, a little surprised he remembers her surname. Victoria had been a loud, likable girl who asked if he wanted to have sex with the disarming ease of someone asking for a stick of gum. He hesitates before adding, “And Luke Radcliffe.” He has no difficulty remembering Luke’s name.
He half hopes that Opal is a secret bigot who will be frightened off by the implication that he spent a semester sneaking into another boy’s dorm room, but she merely rolls her eyes and mutters “Rich kid names” in a tone of mild disgust.
“So then…” She looks away from his face, as if the next question doesn’t much matter. “What’s your deal?” The mocking smile has wilted very slightly, leaving her looking young and wounded, almost vulnerable. Arthur traps his hands between his knees and presses hard.
“It has nothing to do with you. I mean it does, but it’s not—you don’t understand.” It sounds pathetic even to him.
“Jesus, fine. It doesn’t matter.” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “I’m tired, and you’re probably not going to bleed out overnight. Could you dig up a spare blanket somewhere?”
She tries to throw herself defiantly onto the couch, but she stiffens as her body hits the cushions. It’s a tiny motion, less than a wince, but Arthur hears the hitch in her breath. He notes that her palm is still pressed to her left side, that the pads of her fingers have gone white.
And it’s just like that night on the riverbank: the sight of her pain sends a hot tide of guilt through his body, fills him with an urgent, animal desire to make it stop. He finds himself on his knees, folders and notes scattered around him, reaching for Opal as if she belongs to him.
But they were children back then, and Opal was too busy dying to notice him. Now she watches him warily, her body held stiff and upright. He wonders when she learned to hide her wounds from the world, and why the thought makes his throat tight. He stops his own hand in midair, an inch above hers.
After a moment he manages to say, more roughly than he intended, “Let me.” He is distantly aware that it should have been a question. He scrapes up the ragged remains of his decency and adds, “Please.” Opal watches him for another uncertain second, searching for God knows what in his face, before lowering her hand slowly to the couch. It feels like surrender, like trust; Arthur deserves neither.
He runs his fingers over each rib, pushing through the soft heat of her skin to feel the bones beneath. He wishes he couldn’t feel her heart beating on the other side of her sternum, quick and light. He wishes she weren’t watching him with that foolish trust in her eyes, as if she’s forgotten it’s his fault she’s hurt. He wishes his hands weren’t shaking.
But he finds no cracks or splinters. The terror recedes, leaves his voice hoarse. “Just bruised, I think. Not broken.”
“I’m lucky like that.” Opal is aiming for sarcasm, but her ribs are rising and falling too fast beneath Arthur’s hand. He reminds himself that there is no medical emergency, that he should absolutely stop touching her now. The desperate, animal feeling should fade away, but instead it turns hot and languorous, coiling in the pit of his stomach.
He feels Opal swallow. Her voice is an exhalation. “Are you really going to kick me out again?”
God, he doesn’t want to. He wants to push up her shirt and press his lips to the hollow place between the wings of her ribs. He wants to make her spine arch against the couch. He wants her to stay, and stay.
So does the House: the room is warm and wisteria-sweet around them, the light gentle amber. He wonders if Opal has noticed that the water comes out of the faucet whatever temperature she wants and the cushions are always precisely where she likes them best. That she never trips on the stairs or fumbles for a light switch, that the sun follows her from window to window, room to room, like a cat hoping for affection.
Arthur knows she would make a good Warden, much better than himself. He was born in the House, but Opal was called, and the House calls the homeless and hungry, the desperately brave, the fools who will fight to the very last.
For a dark, tilted moment he can almost see her as she would be years from now, if the House had its way: scarred and war-weary, smiling that crooked smile over her shoulder at him. The Wardens don’t last as long as they used to, but Opal would. She would make a war of her life, would fight so long and fiercely that Hell itself would tremble.
Until the day—perhaps a long time from now—when she would fall, and would not rise again. Then a new headstone would join the others, and a new portrait would appear on the wall, the latest addition to a gallery of stolen years. Somewhere, another homeless bastard would begin to dream of staircases and hallways and black eyes that watched through the mist.
Unless Arthur stops it all.
He takes his hand away from her side. The air chills several degrees. A floor nail worries itself loose from the wood and jabs into his right knee. Arthur relishes it. “Opal.” He says her name slowly, savoring it the way you might linger over a last meal. “Here’s what’s going to happen: I am going to explain about the Beasts, about me, and then you are going to run. And this time you will not come back.”
“Well, third time’s the charm,” she says. She is looking down at him with fond exasperation, as if he is a child who has announced, once again, that he’s running away from home.
Arthur closes his eyes. He has to make her understand, but surely he doesn’t have to see her face when she does.
He hammers his voice flat. “When those Beasts get past the walls—when I fail to stop them—they run until they find someone else to hurt. Only Starlings can see them, but anyone can suffer.” He thinks of generations of newspaper clippings and journal entries, all those fires and floods and freak accidents, sudden deaths and strange disappearances, centuries of sin mistaken as bad luck. “And certain people … draw them.”
“Which people?”
“The Gravelys. Above everyone else, they’ll go after Gravely blood. I don’t know why.”
Opal goes very, very still, then. Arthur is grateful.
“The night my parents died was the night the turbine blew at the power plant. Four people died.” Arthur had torn the story from the paper with clumsy fingers, understanding for the first time that his life did not belong to him, that even his tragedies were not entirely his own. “I was so careful after that. I kept up the wards and patrolled the halls. For a whole year, I was vigilant, attentive. Until I wasn’t.”
It was Christmas that got him, the first one since he buried his parents. The House produced a few sad clumps of tinsel and mistletoe, but he ripped it all down in a fit of petulant grief. After that he had locked the sword in an old trunk, ordered a case of cheap whiskey using his father’s ID, and spent a week on the run from his own conscience. He found that, if he began drinking straight after breakfast, he could achieve a weightless, careless state by midday, and complete unconsciousness by dinner.
And then one night he’d woken up with his forehead smeared against his mother’s grave and tear-tracks frozen on his cheeks, feeling dramatic and slightly ashamed and extremely sick to his stomach. It took him far too long to notice the mist had risen.
He doesn’t tell Opal any of this; he doesn’t want to temper her fury with pity. “I saw the Beast rise. It looked at me, right at me, and I…” He’d looked straight back into its eyes, a pair of open wounds teeming with terror and fury and barren grief. He hadn’t been scared. How could he be scared of the eyes he saw in the bathroom mirror every morning?
Arthur doesn’t tell her that, either. “I didn’t even try to stop it. I just let it go. I ran after it, once I’d realized what I’d done. Through the gates, across the old railroad bridge. But I was too late. There were tire tracks running off the road, headed down the riverbank…” Arthur swallows, savoring this last moment before she hates him, before she knows what his cowardice cost her. “It was New Year’s Day.”
Her breath stops. He wonders if she is feeling the water close over her head again.
“I saw in the paper they said she drove into the river on purpose. But I knew it wasn’t her fault.”
Opal is breathing now, hitched and jagged.
Arthur keeps his eyes screwed shut. His voice scrapes out of his throat. “It was mine.”
Silence, thick and cold. Arthur thinks of food congealing on a plate.
He doesn’t expect Opal to speak to him again—what is there to say, after all, to the man who murdered your mother?—but she does. “You should know. Eleanor dedicated her book to ‘every child who needs a way into Underland.’”
Opal has puked on him and kissed him and told him to go fuck himself more than once, but she’s never spoken to him like this: cool and distant, perfectly detached. “She said to befriend the Beasts and follow them down. Maybe you should try it.” Her voice betrays her on the last sentence, a fatal, furious shake.
Arthur doesn’t know what she’s trying to tell him or why; he’s expending all his attention on keeping his eyes shut and his hands still.
He hears the couch creak, followed by a metallic clink and then, finally, the slap of bare feet on wood floors.
When Arthur opens his eyes several minutes later, his gate key is lying on the floor in front of him, and he is alone. She has run from him a third time, and God, he regrets everything.
EIGHTEEN
The thing is: I already knew. I may not have known where Mom was headed that night or who she really was, but I knew she didn’t do it on purpose. I’d seen something wrong-shaped in the white flash of the headlights. A deer, I told the officers, or maybe a coyote, but I knew it was neither. I knew it was bad luck on four legs, a nightmare set loose by whatever petty and careless god rules over Eden.
