Starling House(31)
I blink at her, swaying. “So?”
Her eyes move finally away from the sky to land on me. I can still see the dark, wild shape of the birds reflected in her sclera. “So we’d very much like to know if they have any unnatural predators.” Baine gives me a false, concerned frown as the window glides up. “You don’t look well. Take it easy, okay?”
I watch the car disappear over the crest of a hill. I try to count to ten in my head, but the numbers won’t stay where they belong, so I give up and pull the key out from under my collar. It rests heavy in my hand.
The driveway feels shorter today, a quick twist through the woods that leaves me dizzy and panting on the front steps. I raise my fist to knock, but the door whips open before my knuckles land.
Arthur glowers down at me, heavy-browed and sullen, even more hunched-up than usual. There’s a bruise yellowing along his jaw and a burst blood vessel in one eye. He gives me an insolent once-over, mouth twisting. “You’re late.”
The idea of him skulking on the other side of the door, waiting for me to show up just so he can give me shit about it, strikes me as very funny, so I laugh at him.
Then I puke across his shoes.
Arthur didn’t sleep the night before. The mist had risen for the second time in a single week—an unsettling coincidence which had happened more and more often these last few years—and he’d spent hours stalking the halls, blade held high, listening hard for the sound of something that shouldn’t exist: the susurration of scales against wallpaper, the tap-tap of claws across hardwood floors. He found it on the spiral stairs, still half-formed and weak, lost in the clever maze of the House, and sent it scattering into nothing once more.
After that he’d sagged onto his mother’s couch, watched by all the Wardens that came before him, and waited for the sun to rise. For Opal to arrive with her overloud knock and her overbright smile, for the House to fill with her relentless humming.
The sun came, wan but warm; Opal did not.
He supposes it’s possible that she’s grown tired of wasting her days with housekeeping and petty theft, that she’d waltzed out the door the previous evening with her paycheck and her crooked teeth, never intending to return. This is, of course, his dearest ambition, and does not distress him in the least.
He begins to pace, glaring out windows, scratching at the scabbed lines of the Gorgoneion. The House is restless, too, settling and shifting beneath his feet. The fire won’t stay lit and the forks clink tunelessly in their drawers. The light in the kitchen pops as he passes beneath it, the bulb staring down at him like a mournful gray eye.
He finds himself staring out a third-floor window, scowling at the horizon. A black rush of birds startles into the sky near the road, just above the gates. Arthur knows just by the shape of them, the outraged pattern they make against the gray, and that those people must have come back.
He’s felt them circling, watching, buzzing like flies against the property lines. He’s seen the vehicles idling at the gates and ripped out the sensors and wires they leave behind. He’s found the elegant business cards wedged in the front gates and received the bland corporate letters, and he’s burned them both.
Arthur has read enough records from the previous Wardens to know they aren’t the first outsiders to come calling. There have been explorers and journalists, cultists and spies, generations of Gravelys and their damn lawyers. All of them want the same thing: to exploit, to extract, to profit, to throw open doors that should remain closed. So they followed the stories and starlings to his front gates.
They’ve never gotten any farther. Part of the duty of the Warden is to ward the walls, to feed the land a few drops of blood, fresh and hot, so that it never forgets who is and isn’t a Starling.15 Elizabeth Baine will never set foot on his property, unless she is much cleverer than she seems.
Or, he supposes, simply patient. She would have to wait until Arthur has found a way past that final door, the one that has no key. Until he’s descended into the dark and done what none of the previous Wardens have ever managed. The gate would swing wide for her then, but it wouldn’t matter, because the House would be only a house, with nothing beneath it but worms and wisteria roots.
The starlings settle back into the branches. The car is gone.
A moment later, Arthur feels the gates open. He presses his forehead hard against the glass.
A figure emerges from the woods, a scrawny shape swallowed by the black square of his coat, her face white beneath the red blaze of her hair. The sight strikes him as entirely and dangerously correct, as if she should always be wearing his clothes, walking toward his House. It’s difficult to tell, but he thinks her face might be tilted up toward his; the possibility makes all his scars itch.
It’s not an itch, of course. It’s that tedious, boyish hunger, which he hasn’t indulged since he returned from school. Luke sent a few letters, but Arthur burned them unopened. Luke had always been too soft, too sweet; after an hour in Starling House he would have run screaming and never come back.
He watches Opal walk closer and thinks, inanely: She keeps coming back.
The House sighs around him. He raps his knuckles against the sill hard enough to sting, unsure which of them he’s trying to reprimand.
He tries to make himself as forbidding and unpleasant as possible when he opens the door, but Opal doesn’t notice. She looks up at him with her eyes gone odd and dark, her freckles stark against bloodless cheeks. She laughs at him. And then—