He looks like a werewolf that turned accidentally back into a man, mid-meal. He looks like a character invented during a late-night back-porch ghost story, a human collage of every dark thing anyone has ever whispered about the Starlings.
He looks like shit, so I say, laughing a little, unreasonably delighted by the shape he makes against the sky, “You look like shit.”
He makes a small, harassed sound. Then he kisses me.
If I had ever imagined Arthur Starling kissing me (I have), I would have thought it would be quick and awkward: a passionless, pent-up affair that would leave me irritable for a week but otherwise cold. This is, after all, a man who put his fist through a window rather than have an emotion about me.
At first, going by the taut lines of his face, I think I’m right. But then his hands find the sides of my face and his lips crush into mine with a bruising, furious heat, almost cruel in its intensity, and I think: I should have known. I should have known that he would only touch me if he’d come to the end of all his tight-held restraint. I should have known there would be no sparks between us, only a conflagration.
I could stop it. I probably should, rather than go up in flames—but it feels so good and both of us are so beautifully, absurdly alive and I don’t know who I am or where I come from but I know, right now, what I want. I push toward him instead, just as hard, twice as hungry.
His hands tighten, fingers fisting in my hair, pulling right at the raw edge of pain—I gasp—
And he breaks away, panting, wild-eyed. “Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m—” He straightens, burying his hands in his own hair and pulling hard. “It’s just—I thought you were—just like them—” His sentence falters beneath the weight of em dashes.
“No, it’s . . .” My lips sting. I press them together, hard. “I’m okay.”
I am not okay. I have rarely been less okay in my life. I just found out my family name and fought an imaginary creature with a magic sword and I am very, very close to grabbing Arthur by the collar and sinking my teeth into his bottom lip. “I mean like in general you should probably ask first, but . . .” I give him a lazy, devilish smile, as if this is nothing to either of us, as if my pulse is not pounding in my ears.
He scowls at me. “Stop that. It’s not—I can’t—” He tugs harder at his hair, looking thoroughly wretched, and I cannot honestly believe I am harboring any feelings at all for someone this absurd.
I fold my smile away. “Okay, whatever. Let’s get inside, get you cleaned up. Do you have your phone on you? It’s so dark—” Before I can finish there’s a faint, electric snap and the lights of Starling House flick on all at once. The windows cast long bars of gold across the drive, burning through the last wisps of fog. I observe, conversationally, “You know, somebody told me once the house was never hooked up to the grid.”
Arthur is still shaking, but his fingers have unwound from his hair. “It wasn’t.” He gives a jerky shrug. “Light switches started turning up sometime in the early fifties, my mother told me, and an electric stove. Just like the plumbing did in the thirties.”
I should probably freak out. I should have at least one small crisis about the existence of actual, honest-to-Jesus magic in the world, but I’m really tired and the sword is still glowing faintly in the grass, and anyway it’s not like I thought Starling House abided strictly by the laws of reality. So I just say, in a carrying voice, “Any house that can grow its own light bulbs shouldn’t need a housekeeper.”
The windows flicker, like rolled eyes.
“I think it just likes the attention,” Arthur mutters. I nearly laugh, and he nearly smiles, but the motion wrenches the torn flesh of his throat. He winces instead.
“Alright, come on.” Standing up hurts more than it should. There’s something messed up in my left side, a splintery sharpness that makes me swear as I haul Arthur to his feet. He tries to pull his hand away from mine but I pull it over my shoulders instead, ignoring the silent shriek of my ribs.
Arthur tries to hold his body away from mine and I elbow him. “Don’t be weird, just do it.” His protest strikes me as half-hearted.
We lurch together into Starling House, the sword point striking sparks against the stone. The front steps are somehow only two or three stairs long and the front door swings open before I can touch it. I stroke the frame as we pass and the wood creaks worriedly at me. The carved symbols are still very slightly luminescent, like glow sticks the day after a sleepover.
I don’t know where we’re headed or which of us is steering, but the first room we stumble into is the cozy parlor with the squashy couch. I dump Arthur on the cushions and his palm skims the back of my arm as we part. I walk away without looking at him.
There are an unlikely number of freshly laundered washcloths in the kitchen. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet is already open, displaying a slightly frantic array of antibiotics and disinfectants. “It’s alright,” I say. “He’ll be okay.” The ceiling shudders.
Arthur does a very unconvincing I-don’t-need-you-I-can-do-this-myself act when I return to the parlor, but his skin is the color of old mushrooms and his pupils are swollen and shocky and there are bruises blooming beneath his tattoos. The hellcat ends the argument by materializing on his lap and curling into a ball, like a furry land mine.
I slap Arthur’s hand away from my stack of washcloths and shove him back against the couch. Maybe I should be a little gentler but he did recently kiss me with ardent desperation before suffering a sudden change of heart and apologizing for it, so the way I see it he’s lucky I’m not scrubbing salt in his wounds.
I begin roughly, sitting on the coffee table while I swipe ruthlessly at dirt and blood, wringing gory brown water back into the bowl. Arthur bears it with perfect stoicism, his breath barely hitching even when I drag the cloth over the tattered skin of his throat. The only time he flinches is when my knuckles brush the underside of his jaw.
“Sorry,” I say, not meaning it. He makes a hoarse, wordless sound and tilts his head against the couch with his eyes firmly closed. His pulse is quick and uneven beneath the rag.
Under the blood I find other, older marks. Scars, jagged and knotted; yellowed bruises and lines of scabs like scattered ellipses; tattoos he inked himself, the lines shaky over the bones, where it must have stung most. There’s a crooked cross visible beneath his torn collar, a constellation on his left shoulder, an open eye where his collarbones meet. That one must have hurt. All of it must have hurt: his skin is a map of suffering, a litany of pain. I’m plenty familiar with pain, with scars that never heal quite right and still ache sometimes on misty nights, but at least I’ve always had Jasper. At least I’ve always had a reason.
My hands are slowing, gentling against my will. “Jesus, Arthur. What have you done to yourself?” He doesn’t answer. I want to shake him, hold him, touch him. I unscrew the cap on the hydrogen peroxide instead. “Why don’t you leave?”
“I did, once.” He’s speaking to the ceiling, eyes still closed as I dab peroxide on his throat. It hisses and bubbles, foaming pink. “I came back. Not that I don’t dream about selling this place and getting an apartment in Phoenix.” The curtains give a small, offended huff.
“Phoenix?”
He must hear the laugh in my voice because he shrugs defensively. “It seems nice. Hot, dry. Bet there’s never any fog.”
“So what are you still doing here?”