Starling House(52)

“You have to go.” At my feet Arthur rolls to his stomach and scrabbles blindly for the hilt of his sword. “Run.” His fingers find the blade. He drags it to him, surging to his knees with terrible effort. He sways, bloodied and pale, unable even to lift the tip of the sword from the ground but still glaring up at the Beast as if he intends to stop it with the sheer power of his scowl. It occurs to me that this lonely, beastly, bleeding boy is the only person who has ever fought for me, ever stood between me and the dark and told me to save myself. I feel like laughing, or maybe screaming.

The Beast takes a silent step toward us. The grass dies where its foot lands, going from green to brown to rotten black. The crickets and night birds have gone quiet, the air dead and dreaming around us.

Now,I think. Run now.

“Now,” Arthur echoes. “Please—Opal—” His voice shivers very slightly around my name, trembling under the weight of unsaid things, and I think, very clearly: Goddammit.

Then I step in front of him and take the sword from his shaking hands. It’s heavier than I imagined. I can feel my joints protesting, the small bones of my wrists grating together. The symbols etched into the blade have an odd, phosphorescent glow, like fox fire.

“No, stop, you can’t—”

“Arthur,” I tell him, and if my voice trips over the shape of his name, I’m sure it’s just the effort of holding the sword in the air. “Shut up.”

Arthur shuts up. I hear his breath behind me, ragged and uneven.

Maybe, if I’d had more than a half second to think about it, I’d have chickened out. Maybe I would have remembered that I have one list with one name on it, which sure as hell isn’t Arthur Starling. Maybe that cold thing inside me would’ve won, and sent me running.

But the Beast strikes before I can even brace my feet. One limb unfurls, snakelike, obscenely fast, and I’m flung sideways. My face scrapes damp grass. The sword spins away from me, skidding far out of reach.

I look up and see nothing but teeth, white and wicked, and a single eye so filled with malice that my heart seizes. It’s the kind of hate no natural animal has ever felt, a mad, howling, frothing fury, the kind that only comes from unrighted wrongs and unpunished sins.

The maw opens wide above me. There are claws on either side of my body, and the putrid, fungal smell of dead grass. Someone is screaming, a hoarse, grieving sound, as if they’ve seen this movie before and know how exactly how it ends.

I’m flailing, scrabbling, reaching, still hoping, somehow, to live. The ground ripples weirdly beneath me, and my fingers close around cold iron. It’s not the sword, but it’s good enough for me. I twist the metal between my knuckles without thinking, the same way I do when I walk alone across a dark parking lot or shout back at catcallers.

The Beast strikes again, except this time it’s a killing blow, teeth heading straight for my sternum. And this time I roll aside at the last moment, and punch the gate key three inches into the black pulp of its eye.

There’s no blood, no thrashing, no animal screaming. The Beast simply comes undone, disintegrates back into lifeless mist and leaves me lying bruised and alone on the cold earth, still stubbornly alive.

I spend the following seconds reveling in the itch of grass on the back of my neck, the smeared shine of the stars, the miraculous rise and fall of my own chest. I don’t remember crawling out of the river that night—nothing but clay in my fingernails and heat against my back—but I remember this feeling, the quiet delirium that comes from not dying when you absolutely should have.

Normal night sounds return: spring peepers, crickets, a couple of chuck-will’s-widows chirping brainlessly to one another. And an awful, racking sobbing from somewhere nearby.

“Arthur?” The sobbing stops.

There’s a pause, followed by a thrashing, dragging sound, and then Arthur Starling’s face is hovering inches above mine, blotting out the stars. His skin has gone a sickly, waxy white and his hair is matted with gore and sweat. His collar has stiffened into ragged black peaks beneath the oozing wounds of his throat, and his eyes are ringed in wild white.

He looks like a werewolf that turned accidentally back into a man, mid-meal. He looks like a character invented during a late-night back-porch ghost story, a human collage of every dark thing anyone has ever whispered about the Starlings.

He looks like shit, so I say, laughing a little, unreasonably delighted by the shape he makes against the sky, “You look like shit.”

He makes a small, harassed sound. Then he kisses me.

If I had ever imagined Arthur Starling kissing me (I have), I would have thought it would be quick and awkward: a passionless, pent-up affair that would leave me irritable for a week but otherwise cold. This is, after all, a man who put his fist through a window rather than have an emotion about me.

At first, going by the taut lines of his face, I think I’m right. But then his hands find the sides of my face and his lips crush into mine with a bruising, furious heat, almost cruel in its intensity, and I think: I should have known. I should have known that he would only touch me if he’d come to the end of all his tight-held restraint. I should have known there would be no sparks between us, only a conflagration.

I could stop it. I probably should, rather than go up in flames—but it feels so good and both of us are so beautifully, absurdly alive and I don’t know who I am or where I come from but I know, right now, what I want. I push toward him instead, just as hard, twice as hungry.