“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.”