I haul him onto his back and he blinks up at me, eyes fogged and faraway. One of his hands lifts sluggishly into the air and comes to rest against the tangled nest of my hair. He says, in a voice like a rusted saw blade, “Thought I told you to run.” Surely, if he were truly dying, he could not manage to sound so profoundly exasperated with me.
I cover his hand with mine, turning my face in to the heat of his palm, aware that I am completely and permanently blowing my cover as a disinterested housekeeper but unable in this moment to care. “I did.” I push harder against his hand, pressing our skin together. “You goddamn fool.”
“Thought . . . never come back . . . was implied.”
I shift so that I’m holding his hand in mine, our thumbs hooked around each other’s wrists. The salt of his blood stings my scraped palms, but I don’t let go. “You’re coming too. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but—”
I stop talking, because something strange is happening to me. It begins in my palm, at the precise place where my blood mingles with Arthur’s: a spreading chill, a deadening cold. It flows up my wrist, laps across my sternum. I feel like I’m walking slowly into a cold river, the water rising fast.
Arthur is saying something, pulling weakly at my shoulders. I hardly hear him. I’m too busy staring at the mist that surrounds us, which is suddenly much more than mist. Somewhere beneath the terror I feel a distant, childish disappointment; I’d always thought Eleanor Starling was a writer of pure imagination, a liar of the highest order, just like me.
Now I know she never told anything but the truth.
I used to have nightmares about the Beasts of Underland.
Honestly, who didn’t? I read somewhere there was an animated adaptation in the works back in the eighties, but little kids puked during the early screeners so the whole project was pulled. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know I used to stare at E. Starling’s illustrations and imagine that the Beasts had moved since the last time I’d looked, as if they might creep off the page on those racked and tortured limbs.
The creature that crouches on the steps of Starling House—its body the color of mist, its eyes the color of midnight, its legs bent beneath it like fractured bones—is far worse than any of my nightmares or daydreams. It’s as if someone had given a child a piece of white chalk and told her to draw a wolf, but the only thing she knew about wolves was that they frightened her. There are teeth. There are claws. There is a long, lupine skull. But the spine is warped, and the fur drifts and twists like mist in a gentle wind, faintly translucent. Also, it’s way, way too big.
I don’t understand how a picture-book monster came to be standing in the ordinary springtime moonlight of Eden, Kentucky, but I know this is when I run. This moment, right here—as the Beast is gathering itself, as its lips peel away from its canines and its tendons flex beneath translucent flesh—is exactly when a girl like me splits. This is the river closing over my head, the cold filling my lungs, my own death staring at me with black and pitiless eyes. Last time I let go of my mother’s hand and left her to die alone, and I know with weary certainty that I’m going to do it again.
I pull my hand away from Arthur’s. Our blood separates with a faint, gluey pop.
I rise to a crouch. The Beast lowers its head, shoulder blades high and jagged on either side of its spine. There’s a wariness to it, as if it doesn’t much like Arthur or his sword. For the first time I notice the wounds along its flanks, and the mats of silvery fur caught around the doorway. There’s a pool of pale mist spilled across the threshold, as if the Beast had to fight its way free of Starling House. Even now I see vines creeping across the steps, coiling around its claws only to be ripped away.
“You have to go.” At my feet Arthur rolls to his stomach and scrabbles blindly for the hilt of his sword. “Run.” His fingers find the blade. He drags it to him, surging to his knees with terrible effort. He sways, bloodied and pale, unable even to lift the tip of the sword from the ground but still glaring up at the Beast as if he intends to stop it with the sheer power of his scowl. It occurs to me that this lonely, beastly, bleeding boy is the only person who has ever fought for me, ever stood between me and the dark and told me to save myself. I feel like laughing, or maybe screaming.
The Beast takes a silent step toward us. The grass dies where its foot lands, going from green to brown to rotten black. The crickets and night birds have gone quiet, the air dead and dreaming around us.
Now,I think. Run now.
“Now,” Arthur echoes. “Please—Opal—” His voice shivers very slightly around my name, trembling under the weight of unsaid things, and I think, very clearly: Goddammit.
Then I step in front of him and take the sword from his shaking hands. It’s heavier than I imagined. I can feel my joints protesting, the small bones of my wrists grating together. The symbols etched into the blade have an odd, phosphorescent glow, like fox fire.
“No, stop, you can’t—”
“Arthur,” I tell him, and if my voice trips over the shape of his name, I’m sure it’s just the effort of holding the sword in the air. “Shut up.”
Arthur shuts up. I hear his breath behind me, ragged and uneven.
Maybe, if I’d had more than a half second to think about it, I’d have chickened out. Maybe I would have remembered that I have one list with one name on it, which sure as hell isn’t Arthur Starling. Maybe that cold thing inside me would’ve won, and sent me running.
But the Beast strikes before I can even brace my feet. One limb unfurls, snakelike, obscenely fast, and I’m flung sideways. My face scrapes damp grass. The sword spins away from me, skidding far out of reach.
I look up and see nothing but teeth, white and wicked, and a single eye so filled with malice that my heart seizes. It’s the kind of hate no natural animal has ever felt, a mad, howling, frothing fury, the kind that only comes from unrighted wrongs and unpunished sins.
The maw opens wide above me. There are claws on either side of my body, and the putrid, fungal smell of dead grass. Someone is screaming, a hoarse, grieving sound, as if they’ve seen this movie before and know how exactly how it ends.
I’m flailing, scrabbling, reaching, still hoping, somehow, to live. The ground ripples weirdly beneath me, and my fingers close around cold iron. It’s not the sword, but it’s good enough for me. I twist the metal between my knuckles without thinking, the same way I do when I walk alone across a dark parking lot or shout back at catcallers.
The Beast strikes again, except this time it’s a killing blow, teeth heading straight for my sternum. And this time I roll aside at the last moment, and punch the gate key three inches into the black pulp of its eye.
There’s no blood, no thrashing, no animal screaming. The Beast simply comes undone, disintegrates back into lifeless mist and leaves me lying bruised and alone on the cold earth, still stubbornly alive.
I spend the following seconds reveling in the itch of grass on the back of my neck, the smeared shine of the stars, the miraculous rise and fall of my own chest. I don’t remember crawling out of the river that night—nothing but clay in my fingernails and heat against my back—but I remember this feeling, the quiet delirium that comes from not dying when you absolutely should have.
Normal night sounds return: spring peepers, crickets, a couple of chuck-will’s-widows chirping brainlessly to one another. And an awful, racking sobbing from somewhere nearby.
“Arthur?” The sobbing stops.
There’s a pause, followed by a thrashing, dragging sound, and then Arthur Starling’s face is hovering inches above mine, blotting out the stars. His skin has gone a sickly, waxy white and his hair is matted with gore and sweat. His collar has stiffened into ragged black peaks beneath the oozing wounds of his throat, and his eyes are ringed in wild white.