Arthur is about to reply that if he could make the House behave as he liked then Jasper wouldn’t be standing in his library, when the plural pronoun penetrates the haze of nausea. He forces both his eyes to focus on Jasper—lean and dangerous in the afternoon light, brave or stupid enough to face a monster for his sister’s sake—and repeats, softly, “Us?”
Opal would have smiled or lied or cheated her way out of the question. Jasper just lowers his head, a boy with the bit in his teeth, and ignores it. “She’s not eating. She’s not sleeping. I don’t even think she’s reading.” The slightest, most awful break in his voice. “I’ve never seen her like this.”
The weight that has been hovering above Arthur for days now—the suffocating guilt he’s been holding off with sheer volume of alcohol—descends upon him then. It lands like cannon shot, smashing through him. “Is she—someone should look at her ribs—” He hears an unhealthy wheeze in his own voice, swallows twice. “Is she alright?”
Jasper is perfectly cold, not scathing so much as searing. “It’s none of your business, because you’re never going to speak to her again, are you?” Jasper steps closer, crouching among the glittering teeth of broken bottles until his face is level with Arthur’s. “I don’t know what happened. But if I see another bruise on my sister, I’ll know who to blame.”
It occurs to Arthur, with the painful clarity that follows a long period of stupidity, that Jasper would be entirely correct to blame him. The mist could have risen any night in the past week and the Beasts would have found the Warden insensate, mired in self-pity. They would have been free to roam as they liked, sowing their bad seeds, perhaps sinking their teeth into a pale throat, raking their claws across a freckled face.
The fumes from the bourbon bottles make Arthur suddenly, violently sick.
Jasper watches impassively. He stands, looking down at Arthur with a disgusted, almost pitying expression, before turning away. His shoes crunch across the glass.
“Jasper.” Arthur’s eyes are closed, his head propped against the bookcase. “You should leave. Get out of Eden.”
Jasper turns slowly back, hands jammed deep in his pockets. Arthur can see the outline of fists through the denim, but his voice is flat and bored. “People have told me that my whole life, you know that? People who love me, people who hate me. All of them seem to agree that I don’t belong here.”
Arthur begins a garbled, embarrassed denial but Jasper cuts him off. “The hilarious thing, the real fucking joke of it all, is that my family’s been here longer than any of them, and they know it. I think it drives them crazy, actually.”
Arthur tries to imagine how the son of a part-time dealer living in a motel and a migrant worker could have a claim on that kind of old Kentucky legacy; he fails. “What do you mean?”
“Opal always got by on forgeries and bullshit and everyone feeling sorry for her, and never once wondered what it was like for me to walk around with faked papers. I used to have these nightmares . . .” Jasper’s flat affect has cracked. Through the fault lines, Arthur sees something familiar: a lonely, tired boy who is too young to have this many secrets. “But did you know if you write the Department of Health they’ll email you an index of every birth certificate in the county? If Opal had ever really wanted to know where Mom came from, she could’ve figured it out, too.”
He asks, carefully, “And where did your mom come from?”
“The same place everything in this town comes from.” And then Arthur knows, oh Jesus, why didn’t he guess? No wonder the mist had risen so often this spring; no wonder Opal and her brother had such accursed luck. The only surprise is that their mother made it as long as she did.
Jasper shrugs, a hard jerk of his shoulders. “The goddamn Gravelys.”
Arthur pushes the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, pressing until fireworks burst in the black. “Jasper. You have to get out of this town. Now. Tonight.”
“I literally just told you how sick I am of hearing that.”
“You don’t understand. The Beasts—the curse—” Arthur pauses to reflect on all the poor life choices that led him here, sitting in his own sick, speaking freely of his family’s secrets to a boy who wants him dead, or at least maimed. He swallows. “Haven’t you ever wondered why no Gravely stays longer than a night or two in this town? Even if they don’t know the whole truth, they know what happens to the ones who stay.”
Jasper’s eyes have widened, very slightly. Arthur can almost see the machinery of his mind working, recalling every near-miss and brutal accident, all the times the mist rose and he felt the weight of black eyes on the nape of his neck.
Then Arthur watches him gather it all up and shove it someplace cold and private. He arranges a sneer on his face. “You think it’s news to me, how much my life has sucked?”
“But it’s getting worse. You have to leave—”
“I will.” Jasper turns away again. This time he makes it all the way to the door before he pauses. In a much softer voice, he says, “But she won’t. So if you can stop this, whatever it is—now’s the goddamn time.”
It’s past time. Opal handed him a vital, final clue—befriend the Beasts—and he spent a week pickling himself in self-pity and booze, just because he was too cowardly to pursue it. To unlock the door he’s been trying to unlock for his entire adult life, and follow the Beasts down into Hell and make war on whatever he finds there.
He doesn’t know what it is. He suspects there’s a locus or a source, something that sends the Beasts up to do their bloody work, and he hopes that it’s mortal enough to be stopped by a sword through its heart. All he knows for sure is that there have been other places plagued by foul mists and invisible Beasts—until they weren’t. Until someone stopped them.
Even now, Arthur should be arming himself, pursuing that dedication, making ready. Instead, he’s been delaying. Drinking, because then he would sleep, and when he sleeps the House sends him dreams of her, of them, of a future they won’t have.
How selfish, how fundamentally silly, that he should start wanting to live right when he ought to die.
When Arthur finally looks up, Jasper is gone.
It’s only much, much later—after Arthur has swept up the glass and puke, emptied the rest of the bourbon down the bathtub drain, opened the fridge, puked again, and begun to assemble everything he’ll need for his final descent—that he realizes: his notepad is gone, too.
NINETEEN
I must fall into actual sleep at some point, because I dream of the house again. Except—for the first time—Jasper is there. He’s standing in front of the gates, eyes accusatory, both palms red and wet. As I watch, the wrought-iron beasts of the gates begin to move. They coil and writhe, reaching for Jasper, wrapping their metal limbs around him, opening their rusted mouths to swallow him whole.
My own scream wakes me up. The dream fades, but I remember snatches of Jasper’s real voice, the worry and fear in it, and think, with disgust: Enough.
I take the trash out that evening, embarrassed by the flaccid, stringy feeling of my muscles. On the way back from the dumpster I lift two middle fingers in the direction of Bev’s office. The blinds snap back into place.
The next morning I shove my feet into my tennis shoes, trying not to notice the drips of Antique Eggshell scattered over the tops, and slouch across town.