Starling House(47)
He remembers the steps, slick and endless. He remembers trailing a hand along the walls and finding them wet, weeping cold water. He remembers crying, and his mother noticing, but not stopping.
He doesn’t understand how the door was opened again—he keeps the keys safe in his room, and these aren’t the sort of locks that can be picked—but his thoughts have become very slow, very simple. He is the Warden of Starling House, and the locks have failed.
Arthur goes down beneath Starling House for the second time in his life, his heart beating evenly, his tattoos burning into his skin.
The walls are smooth limestone, untouched by picks or chisels; it’s like the world split open and someone built stairs in the gap. It should be completely black, but the mist has its own ghostly fox-fire glow.
The sound comes again, that unnatural click. Arthur braces his sword before him and walks faster.
The stairs don’t lead to a room or a chamber; they simply end, running straight into the great slab of the first door. He sees the chains still stretched taut across the surface, and the lock still shut, but there’s a shape standing before it, pale in the mist-light.
Arthur does not hesitate. He lunges down the last few stairs and swings. It’s an ugly swing, a woodcutter’s downward chop, but it would have been enough to sunder a fresh-hatched nightmare. Except he slips on the damp stone, or the stone slides out from under his foot, and the sword goes wide. It skrees off the limestone in a spray of white sparks.
His body slams into the shape and he flinches, expecting rending teeth and gouging claws, the scuttling, scrabbling attack of a creature with too many joints and limbs—
It doesn’t come. Instead, a voice says, fervently, “Christ on a bicycle.”
Arthur doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. He is reasonably sure that his heart does not beat. “Opal?”
The pale shape lifts its head and he sees a pointed chin, a freckled pair of cheeks, gray irises rimmed with white. “Opal. God—are you alright? Did I—” His hand spasms and the sword clatters to the ground. He runs his fingers frantically up the bare skin of her arms, over her shoulders, dreading the tacky heat of blood.
“I’m fine. It’s okay.” It’s only when she speaks, when he feels the warmth her breath on his face, that he realizes he has her pinned against the door. That his thumb is resting in the hollow between her collarbones, just over the wild rhythm of her pulse. That the expression in her eyes should be fear, but isn’t.
He steps back, too fast, and something gives an expensive-sounding crunch beneath his left foot. “What are you doing here?”
His tone is menacing, but she answers easily. “Cleaning. You owe me overtime, bud.”
Arthur decides the heat coursing through his limbs is anger. It makes his voice shake. “I told you never to come here at night. I told you—”
“You’re standing on my phone.”
He exhales. Bends to retrieve her phone from beneath his left foot. Looks down at the spiderwebbed screen, breathing hard.
“Give it here.”
Her photos are displayed on the screen in a neat grid. One of them appears to be the front gates of Starling House. The next one is the front door, with several close-ups of the wards. Then the library, the sitting room, the kitchen, the mudroom. “What . . . what are these?” His voice sounds muffled in his ears, as if he’s speaking under water.
“Pictures.” He can hear the sullen set of her chin.
He scrolls up. There are pictures of every oddity in the House: claw marks scored in the wallpaper, books in dead languages, charms and spells. It’s strange to see it this way, all the evidence of his family’s long, mad war captured in bright arrangements of pixels. The most recent picture is a gray stone door crisscrossed with chains. There is a ring of three iron keys dangling from the padlock. One of them is jammed awkwardly into the keyhole, although he knows the lock won’t turn. Arthur has wasted hours trying.
When his mother showed him this door, she asked him how many locks Starling House had. He counted in his head: gates, front door, cellar, and the stone door beneath it all. Four,he answered. Then his mother held up the ring of keys and asked how many keys Eleanor had made.
Three,he said. And then, daringly, he asked why.
Because this lock was never meant to be opened.
After nearly a decade spent searching for that fourth key, he has concluded that his mother was telling the truth. But he believes there is another way through. If he didn’t—if he thought he and every Starling after him would be stuck forever fighting this foolish war—he isn’t certain he would get out of bed in the morning.
Arthur exhales carefully. “You stole the keys. From my room.” He doesn’t know why his voice should sound so wounded. He knew what Opal was: a drowning girl who would do anything to keep afloat, a thief and a liar who owed him less than nothing.
Opal doesn’t answer, but the skin of her throat moves as she swallows. His fingers twitch.
“You’ve sent all these pictures to them.”
“So what if I did?”
Arthur doesn’t like the look in her face—guilty and angry but still, even now, not quite afraid—so he closes his eyes.
Opal continues, gathering speed. “So what if people have questions about this place? I have a few questions myself, actually.”
“Don’t. Please.” He isn’t sure if he says the words out loud or merely thinks them.