The sound comes again, that unnatural click. Arthur braces his sword before him and walks faster.
The stairs don’t lead to a room or a chamber; they simply end, running straight into the great slab of the first door. He sees the chains still stretched taut across the surface, and the lock still shut, but there’s a shape standing before it, pale in the mist-light.
Arthur does not hesitate. He lunges down the last few stairs and swings. It’s an ugly swing, a woodcutter’s downward chop, but it would have been enough to sunder a fresh-hatched nightmare. Except he slips on the damp stone, or the stone slides out from under his foot, and the sword goes wide. It skrees off the limestone in a spray of white sparks.
His body slams into the shape and he flinches, expecting rending teeth and gouging claws, the scuttling, scrabbling attack of a creature with too many joints and limbs—
It doesn’t come. Instead, a voice says, fervently, “Christ on a bicycle.”
Arthur doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. He is reasonably sure that his heart does not beat. “Opal?”
The pale shape lifts its head and he sees a pointed chin, a freckled pair of cheeks, gray irises rimmed with white. “Opal. God—are you alright? Did I—” His hand spasms and the sword clatters to the ground. He runs his fingers frantically up the bare skin of her arms, over her shoulders, dreading the tacky heat of blood.
“I’m fine. It’s okay.” It’s only when she speaks, when he feels the warmth her breath on his face, that he realizes he has her pinned against the door. That his thumb is resting in the hollow between her collarbones, just over the wild rhythm of her pulse. That the expression in her eyes should be fear, but isn’t.
He steps back, too fast, and something gives an expensive-sounding crunch beneath his left foot. “What are you doing here?”
His tone is menacing, but she answers easily. “Cleaning. You owe me overtime, bud.”
Arthur decides the heat coursing through his limbs is anger. It makes his voice shake. “I told you never to come here at night. I told you—”
“You’re standing on my phone.”
He exhales. Bends to retrieve her phone from beneath his left foot. Looks down at the spiderwebbed screen, breathing hard.
“Give it here.”
Her photos are displayed on the screen in a neat grid. One of them appears to be the front gates of Starling House. The next one is the front door, with several close-ups of the wards. Then the library, the sitting room, the kitchen, the mudroom. “What . . . what are these?” His voice sounds muffled in his ears, as if he’s speaking under water.
“Pictures.” He can hear the sullen set of her chin.
He scrolls up. There are pictures of every oddity in the House: claw marks scored in the wallpaper, books in dead languages, charms and spells. It’s strange to see it this way, all the evidence of his family’s long, mad war captured in bright arrangements of pixels. The most recent picture is a gray stone door crisscrossed with chains. There is a ring of three iron keys dangling from the padlock. One of them is jammed awkwardly into the keyhole, although he knows the lock won’t turn. Arthur has wasted hours trying.
When his mother showed him this door, she asked him how many locks Starling House had. He counted in his head: gates, front door, cellar, and the stone door beneath it all. Four,he answered. Then his mother held up the ring of keys and asked how many keys Eleanor had made.
Three,he said. And then, daringly, he asked why.
Because this lock was never meant to be opened.
After nearly a decade spent searching for that fourth key, he has concluded that his mother was telling the truth. But he believes there is another way through. If he didn’t—if he thought he and every Starling after him would be stuck forever fighting this foolish war—he isn’t certain he would get out of bed in the morning.
Arthur exhales carefully. “You stole the keys. From my room.” He doesn’t know why his voice should sound so wounded. He knew what Opal was: a drowning girl who would do anything to keep afloat, a thief and a liar who owed him less than nothing.
Opal doesn’t answer, but the skin of her throat moves as she swallows. His fingers twitch.
“You’ve sent all these pictures to them.”
“So what if I did?”
Arthur doesn’t like the look in her face—guilty and angry but still, even now, not quite afraid—so he closes his eyes.
Opal continues, gathering speed. “So what if people have questions about this place? I have a few questions myself, actually.”
“Don’t. Please.” He isn’t sure if he says the words out loud or merely thinks them.
“For example: Where the hell does this door lead? Why did I dream about it before I ever saw it? Why did you almost behead me just now?”
“I didn’t mean—”
She drives forward, voice high. “Why do you have a goddamn sword in the first place? What happened to your parents? What happened to Eleanor Starling?”
“How in hell should I know?” Arthur’s mother taught him very young how to keep secrets. How to discourage questions and prying eyes, how to drive away the curious and clever. She had not prepared him for Opal. “Do you think Eleanor explained? She disappeared and left her heir nothing but a sword and a fucking children’s book.”
He is surprised to find he is standing very close to Opal again, looming over her. The defiance in her face makes his voice crack. “I should never have let you into the House. I just thought—I thought—” He’d told himself at the time that it was guilt that made him do it, the memory of his second-worst failure and what it had cost her, but that was a child’s lie: he just hadn’t wanted to be alone anymore.
An awful tenderness crosses Opal’s face, that soft streak she tries so hard to hide. “Arthur, I’m sorry. About the pictures. I didn’t want to, but they told me—”
It’s at that moment that Arthur hears another sound: a thin scratching, like nails on the wrong side of a door.
His left hand fists in the worn cotton of Opal’s shirt. He feels the flesh of his palm splitting. She looks down at his hand and back at him, and he refuses to interpret her expression, refuses to think about the swell of her pupils or the infinitesimal slant of her face toward his.
He hauls her past him, away from the stone door, and shoves her roughly up the stairs.
“Okay, what the hell—”
“Get out. Go home. Don’t stop, and don’t look back.” He retrieves his sword and sets his feet, facing the door with the blade half-raised.
Opal hasn’t moved. She’s looking down at him with the same beaten-nail eyes he remembers from the first night he found her outside his gates, like she doesn’t know what’s coming but she’s ready to split her knuckles about it. There’s a smear of his blood on her shirt.
For the second time, he summons all the malice and madness he can, and says, “Run.”
For the second time, he watches her run away from him, and does not regret it.
FIFTEEN
I drive too fast and park shittily, cutting slantwise across two spots in the motel lot. I sit listening to the tick of the engine and the muffled screaming of the crickets, shaking very slightly. I say, softly, “What the hell.” It feels good so I say it a couple more times with differing emphases. “What the hell. What the hell.”
“Hey, you alright in there?” It’s Bev, thumping on the hood, wearing boxer shorts and a ratty tank top. The mist laps at her bare ankles, thickening fast.
I consider telling her the truth, I really do, but at this point it would take a bulleted multilevel list to account for all the fuckery I have engineered and endured over the last eight hours.
1) My little brother yelled at me, which sucked, but he had a point, which sucked more;
2) I failed to accomplish the task Baine assigned to me, which means:
A) She’s going to do something slimy and awful that might lose me custody of Jasper, which means: