Since the moment I woke up, the moment I reached for him and found nothing but cold silver beside me, I’ve been afraid. I’m pretty good at ignoring emotions it would be inconvenient to feel, so it’s been nothing but a dull buzzing at the back of my head—until now. Now the noise rises, rushing through me. What if this is really it? What if Arthur is already gone, lost somewhere I can’t follow? I picture myself all alone in this grand, cursed, dreaming house, just another lonely Starling doomed to spend her life discovering the terrible distance between a house and a home.
I fumble for a stone and bash it against the hinges, knowing it won’t work, too angry not to try. It doesn’t leave so much as a scratch. I try my own blood next, slapping my gory palm on the wood. The door remains serenely shut.
I experience an unpleasant tugging sensation, like a stranger yanking at a strand of my hair. There is a key turning in my front gate. The tumblers are grinding and the hinges are screaming, but they can’t resist for long. Very soon I feel the tread of boots up the drive, and the nauseous certainty that there’s someone on my land who shouldn’t be.
Nobody born and raised in Eden would set foot on Starling property before dawn, especially on a night like this, when the fog is up and the moon is missing—which means I know who it is. Which means I know the precise terms of Arthur’s deal. He gave Elizabeth Baine the keys to Starling House, offered her every secret his ancestors fought to protect—for me. When I find him I’m going to push him against the wall and cuss him blue, right before I kiss him bloody.
I can feel Baine advancing, others following behind her. My land recoils from their touch: the driveway twists back on itself, lengthening and dividing until there are many paths through the woods, none of which lead to the House. The trees crowd close, bending low as lovers, and the briars sharpen into green coils of barbed wire. The ironwork beasts on the front gates lick their metal lips and in the woods the real Beasts lift their heads.
A certain dark eagerness runs through me—let them find out what happens to trespassers around here, let their bones rot in my woods—but then I realize: if there are still Beasts aboveground, then there’s still a way through this door. If Arthur could do it, why can’t I?
I’m in the kitchen, running for the back door, when the screaming starts.
I fall twice on the way out of the house. The floor is uneven, groaning and popping beneath my feet like the deck of a sinking ship. I wonder if the whole thing is going under, if the cellar will open like a mouth and swallow it down.
A mottled white creature streaks past my ankles when I open the front door. The hellcat, disappearing into the trees. At least one of us still knows when to cut and run.
I make it down the front steps and across the lawn, following the screams. I see the Beasts only in peripheral glances: a sinuous flash of scaled flesh, a cloven hoof striking the earth, the flick of a forked tail. Ghostly white creatures that move between the trees without displacing a single leaf or snapping a single twig. They’re chasing toward the front gates, pouring over the land with a sickening hunger that makes me think of those old stories about wild hunts led by the devil himself.
My feet hit the bare clay of the drive. The old sycamore is gnarled and black overhead. There are people in dark clothes coming toward me up the drive, but I’m not worried about them, because suddenly there is a Beast between us.
It emerges from the trees, trailing fog. This one is almost deer-shaped, except its spine is far too long and its antlers branch too many times, like a tree uprooted. Maybe I’ve gotten used to them, or maybe I’ve lost my mind, but it doesn’t seem as awful as the first Beast I saw. There’s a grace to it, an elegant horror that reminds me, disconcertingly, of Arthur’s drawings.
One of the men walks ahead of the others. He can’t see the Beast, but he must sense it. Some ancient, animal instinct turns his face pale and sweaty, makes his eyes dart from side to side. I want to shout a warning, but it’s too late: the Beast is loping to meet him, leaving a line of dead earth behind it.
It doesn’t attack. It merely moves through the man, like a cloud breaking around a hilltop. For a moment I think he’s been spared. Then I hear the hollow snap of bone. The screaming starts again.
The people behind him scatter, ant-like, scurrying toward him or away, talking into radios, receiving answers in bursts of static—except one. The starlight shows me a sleek bob, the gold flash of a watch. Elizabeth Baine continues up the drive to Starling House without faltering or slowing. I can feel the weight of my keys in her hand.
She walks past the fallen man—now clutching his ankle and emitting a high, childish whimper—without looking down at him. She sees me, maybe catches the glint of my sword, and her smile stretches Cheshire-like in the dark. As if she isn’t surprised or concerned. As if, even now, with her men falling around her and the land rising against her, she doesn’t believe anything could truly stand between her and her desires. I wonder what it would be like, to move through the world without bothering to distinguish your wants from your needs, and a weird envy unfurls in my belly.
Baine keeps walking, keeps smiling. There’s something wrong with her face. There are dark gouges clustered around her eyes and mouth, glistening, oozing a little.
Another scream splits the air, followed by a muffled shot, then silence. She doesn’t look back. But even if she had, she wouldn’t have seen the second Beast prowling behind her.
Hateful. Beautiful. A vulpine jaw and a sinuous body. The wrong number of legs ending in too many talons. Black, black eyes, fixed on Baine. Its body brushes through the woods, and I see leaves curling and dying, bark turning soft and wormy, pale shelves of mushrooms blooming from the trunks of trees.
A wrenching, splintering crack cuts the air. The old sycamore makes a mournful sound before it begins—gently, with great dignity—to fall.
Baine still hasn’t faltered or flinched. She’ll die with that damn smile still on her face.
There is a moment here I’m not proud of, where I hesitate. Where I’m the House again, watching Baine fly toward me like one of those dark-flecked birds that crash sometimes in my windows. I feel nothing but distant pity for these fragile, foolish creatures. But then I remember I’m a person, about to watch another person be crushed to death, and my legs start moving.
My shoulder hits Baine in the belly, driving the air from her lungs and throwing her to the ground in grand action-movie style. She hits the earth with a hollow thud, like a watermelon on pavement, just as the sycamore crashes around us. The trunk misses us, but the canopy slaps and claws across my hunched back, tearing cloth, scraping skin.
Silence. I take one breath, two, before uncurling from my crouch. Baine is struggling upright, her expensive hair mussed and white welts swelling across her cheeks. Up close, I can see that those black gouges are dozens of tiny, gory wounds. Her lips look like the pulpy wet pit of a peach.
“How did you—it doesn’t matter, you can’t s-stop me.” There’s something dark trickling from Baine’s temple and her eyes aren’t focusing quite right. She looks weak and fleshy, and I find I’m no longer afraid of her at all.
I am, however, afraid of the Beast, which is now looming above us like a cresting wave. Its eyes are fixed on me, dark and mad.
I stand, raising the sword on instinct. It takes an enormous effort to lower it, to loosen my grip and let it fall back to the soft white undersides of the sycamore leaves.
Befriend the Beasts. So simple, so unnatural. I wonder what it cost Arthur to leave his sword behind, to approach his oldest enemies without a weapon.
It’s easier for me. I read Eleanor’s books so often her nightmares felt like old friends. Sometimes, on the bad days, I imagined the Beasts would greet me as one of their own, another thing with teeth, and let me sleep in Underland forever.
“Please.” My voice breaks on the word, going hoarse. “Please. I don’t want to hurt you.”
The Beast watches me. Every desperate instinct, every cell in my body is telling me to run, to reach for a weapon, to put anything at all between myself and the nightmare looking down at me.