I clench my fist, squeezing hard. My blood lingers for another second, two, before it soaks into the wood, as if an animal lapped it away.
And I feel myself tipping over an edge and falling downward, slipping into delirium. The boundaries of my body turn thin and permeable. I am conscious of my blood following the grain of the wood, sliding between the boards, dripping from the points of unseen nails. I follow it along the joists and behind the walls, pumping through the secret arteries of the house, tracing the vascular map of pipes and wires, mouseholes and wheedling vines. I follow it down into the foundations and deeper still, into the hot wet earth. My blood becomes the dirt itself, riddled with small blind creatures, pierced by taproots and fence posts.
For a moment, or maybe a season, I am Starling House. I am an impossible architecture, a thing built from the dreams and nightmares of ten generations. There are wisteria roots wrapped around my bones and coffins buried beneath my skin. I sigh and the curtains billow. I curl my fist and the rafters moan.
I remember myself—myself-the-girl, myself-the-mere-human—in stages. My left hand comes first, because it hurts. Then my knees, bruised and aching on the floor, my shoulders, my lungs, my fragile mortal pulse. My mind comes last, disentangling itself reluctantly from the House. By the time I open my eyes, I know one thing with absolute certainty: that Arthur Starling was wrong.
He was not the last Warden of Starling House.
To Arthur Starling, running down the stone steps to Underland, it comes as a sudden, deafening silence. For twelve years his senses have extended past his own borders. He knew the taste of dew and the weight of dust on the windowsills and the shapes the starlings made in the sky. And now he knows nothing but the panicked sound of his own heartbeat in his ears.
He says, aloud, “No.” And then, several times in a row, “Damn you.” But the House has a new Warden now, and it pays him no mind. It shouldn’t have been possible—there’s never been a new Warden while the previous one still lived—but the House must have decided walking down into Underland was close enough to dying.
And then all it took was a little blood, a lot of guts, and the sword.
Arthur always planned to take it with him to face whatever waited for him beneath Starling House—Eleanor’s last and best inheritance, finally finishing its work—but he hadn’t accounted for Opal. Alone in his bed, fragile and trusting, that deadly Gravely blood beating softly in her throat.
It was hard enough to leave her; it was impossible to leave her undefended.
So Arthur had gone down through the trapdoor empty-handed. He had stood in the cellar while the mist grew teeth and claws, assembling itself. He had waited, unmoving, until there was a fully formed Beast staring down at him with eyes like ragged black bullet holes, and he had held out both his hands, palm up, weaponless. It had prowled closer, chitinous, sickening, and Arthur had knelt with his head tilted back, throat exposed.
“Please,” he’d said. Please, to the thing he had fought his entire life, the thing that left his parents bloodied corpses in the grass.
And it had bent its terrible head and left something cold and iron in his hands.
Arthur did not hesitate. He opened the fourth lock and stepped through the door, telling himself that it was for the best. That Opal would remain safe and sleeping while he went down to Underland, and when she woke it would be to a House that was merely a house, and Beasts that were merely bad dreams. She would be grateful, probably. (He knew she would not be grateful.)
But the House had woken her too soon, and she’d taken up the sword, as he should have known she would. Anyone who would face down a Beast with keys between her knuckles would not shy from a fight.
But even if Arthur could turn back—and he made sure the door would not open again—he wouldn’t. All those years of study and practice, all those ink-stained needles, had led him here, to the end of it all, and the only direction left is down.
He will leave her, with the Beasts rising and their enemies at the gates, with nothing but a rusting sword and the House he’s hated for twelve years.
Arthur rests his forehead against the damp stone wall of the passage and attempts an extremely overdue apology. “It was never your fault.” The inside of his mouth is coated in dust, and the words come out thick and glottal. The foundations of the House moan back at him. “You did your best for them, I always knew it.” He remembers, reluctantly, the first time he walked back into the House after finding his parents’ bodies. The funereal black cloths across every mirror, the mournful groans of the stairs. He’d been too furious to care, too selfish to see the grief in it.
He presses his forehead harder into the stone, until he can feel tiny indentations forming in his flesh. His voice is like the scraping of a rusted key in a rusted lock. “Do better for her.”
Arthur Starling makes his final descent while, far above him, the monsters rise.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I can feel them, the way you’d feel flies tiptoeing across your bedsheets. There’s more than one Beast this time, and they’ve already made it out of the House. I feel hooves that leave rot behind them, claws made of vapor and hate. I experience a disquieting urge to rush out and do battle with them, like every Warden before me, but I brush it aside. Arthur spent his whole life protecting this ugly, ungrateful town; tonight, they’ll just have to wait their turn.
I leave Arthur’s will on his desk and run down the stairs with the sword held awkwardly in my right hand. The lights pop to life ahead of me as if an invisible row of butlers is flipping the switches, and the House arranges itself so that I come out into the kitchen.
Something has gone badly wrong in here. The cabinets are crooked, doors swinging open, plates splintered on the counters. The floor is more slanted than usual, sloping downward, and there are cracks in the tile big enough to swallow the hellcat whole. Mist rises from the cracks like steam, gathering on the ceiling and rolling down the hall.
In the pantry I find the trapdoor thrown wide, the lock hanging ajar. I throw myself downward with a weird sense of playing out a scene I’ve already lived, except this time I’m the one holding the sword. I’m the one chasing after someone who’s made a stupid choice and hoping against hope that I’m not too late.
The air turns hot and acrid, like the morning after the Fourth of July, when you can still taste gunpowder in the back of your throat. Dust stings my eyes, forms a sweaty gray film on my skin. I hit the last step and stumble over a pile of stone and plaster. The cellar looks like a bombed-out building from a social studies textbook: the rafters overhead are cracked, dangling at odd angles, and the walls are leaning dangerously inward. The floor is scorched black in a way that makes me remember the deep boom that woke me up.
“Arthur, you ass.” Imagine being so stupid, so gratuitously noble, that you try to explode your own cellar rather than risk someone helping you.
His plan only half worked. I scramble over the rubble and shove a rafter away from the door. The entire wall seems to be collapsing, falling into whatever hell lies under the House, but the door itself is still standing.
And it’s still locked. If Arthur found the fourth key and went down to Underland—like he’s always wanted to, like I know he did—then he must have closed it behind him.