Starling House(62)
His third clue is the sound of a bourbon bottle shattering several inches away from his head. This, he finds, he cannot ignore.
Arthur opens his eyes—a process not dissimilar from prying open a pair of crusted paint cans—to find himself on the library floor, which is something of a surprise. The afternoon air is gluey and hot because none of the windows will open, and there’s a young man watching him. Glossy curls, rangy brown limbs, a surplus of eyelashes. There’s nothing even slightly familiar about him—except for his expression.
Only one person has ever regarded Arthur with that particular canny, cornered-animal fury.
“Oh God, there’s another one.” The words come out smeary and flat, which tells Arthur that his face is still adhered to the floorboards. He closes his eyes again and hopes Opal’s little brother will leave, or perhaps dissipate, like a bad dream.
A second bottle hits the floor, a little closer.
“Is there something,” Arthur asks the floor, “I can do for you?”
“I’d say ‘die in a ditch,’ but it looks like you’re halfway there.”
From the way she talked about him, Arthur had formed an idea that Jasper was a sheltered, delicate creature, in need of constant protection. But he is, in fact, a sharp and resentful sixteen-year-old from Muhlenberg County, whom everyone else needs protection from.
Arthur detaches himself from the floor in unpleasant stages, pausing several times to reacquaint his stomach with vertical gravity. Eventually he achieves a slouched sitting position, his back braced by a bookshelf, and tries again. “Why are you here?”
Jasper, who had apparently grown bored while Arthur wormed himself upright, is leaning over a desk, perusing Arthur’s notes and folders. They’re in a state of fantastic disarray, folders emptied, papers crumpled, his yellow notepad teetering precariously on the edge with half its pages torn out. Arthur has an embarrassing suspicion that he removed them in a fit of impotent temper.
“Opal left her favorite hoodie here,” Jasper says, without looking away from the desk.
Arthur grunts. “Your sister’s a better liar.”
“Yeah, but I’m smarter.” Jasper looks away from the notes and meets Arthur’s eyes, flatly threatening. “I came to tell you to leave her alone.”
Arthur feels infinitely too old for this conversation, and also too drunk, too sober, and too wretched. “I’ve been trying. You’re the ones who keep turning up at my House.”
“Tell it to leave us alone, too.”
Arthur is about to reply that if he could make the House behave as he liked then Jasper wouldn’t be standing in his library, when the plural pronoun penetrates the haze of nausea. He forces both his eyes to focus on Jasper—lean and dangerous in the afternoon light, brave or stupid enough to face a monster for his sister’s sake—and repeats, softly, “Us?”
Opal would have smiled or lied or cheated her way out of the question. Jasper just lowers his head, a boy with the bit in his teeth, and ignores it. “She’s not eating. She’s not sleeping. I don’t even think she’s reading.” The slightest, most awful break in his voice. “I’ve never seen her like this.”
The weight that has been hovering above Arthur for days now—the suffocating guilt he’s been holding off with sheer volume of alcohol—descends upon him then. It lands like cannon shot, smashing through him. “Is she—someone should look at her ribs—” He hears an unhealthy wheeze in his own voice, swallows twice. “Is she alright?”
Jasper is perfectly cold, not scathing so much as searing. “It’s none of your business, because you’re never going to speak to her again, are you?” Jasper steps closer, crouching among the glittering teeth of broken bottles until his face is level with Arthur’s. “I don’t know what happened. But if I see another bruise on my sister, I’ll know who to blame.”
It occurs to Arthur, with the painful clarity that follows a long period of stupidity, that Jasper would be entirely correct to blame him. The mist could have risen any night in the past week and the Beasts would have found the Warden insensate, mired in self-pity. They would have been free to roam as they liked, sowing their bad seeds, perhaps sinking their teeth into a pale throat, raking their claws across a freckled face.
The fumes from the bourbon bottles make Arthur suddenly, violently sick.
Jasper watches impassively. He stands, looking down at Arthur with a disgusted, almost pitying expression, before turning away. His shoes crunch across the glass.
“Jasper.” Arthur’s eyes are closed, his head propped against the bookcase. “You should leave. Get out of Eden.”
Jasper turns slowly back, hands jammed deep in his pockets. Arthur can see the outline of fists through the denim, but his voice is flat and bored. “People have told me that my whole life, you know that? People who love me, people who hate me. All of them seem to agree that I don’t belong here.”
Arthur begins a garbled, embarrassed denial but Jasper cuts him off. “The hilarious thing, the real fucking joke of it all, is that my family’s been here longer than any of them, and they know it. I think it drives them crazy, actually.”
Arthur tries to imagine how the son of a part-time dealer living in a motel and a migrant worker could have a claim on that kind of old Kentucky legacy; he fails. “What do you mean?”