Starling House(75)

The air is hushed and the fog is thickening fast. The leaves are thrashing above me, white-bellied, and the wind tastes bitter in the back of my throat. Dark, oily clouds boil on the horizon.

Maybe Jasper just turned his phone off for his interview and forgot to turn it back on. Maybe he fell asleep with headphones on. Maybe Arthur is drawing the Starling sword even now, standing between the Beasts and my brother.

Or maybe he’s waiting to befriend them, empty-handed, leaving Eden to fend for itself. I walk a little faster.

I’m getting close when I hear the sound of sirens. High and distant, howling closer.

I look up at the sky and realize that it isn’t thunderclouds massing overheard, eating the last of the light: it’s smoke.

I stop trying to call Jasper. I run, shoes slapping the road, lungs aching. The sky darkens. The smoke thickens, pooling and coiling above the fog, nothing at all like the honest gray of chimney smoke, or even the bleached white clouds from the power plant. It’s black and sour, littered with greasy flakes of ash and the chemical remains of things that were never meant to burn. It tangles with the mist, forming dark shapes that make my eyes sting.

All the Gutiérrez kids are out on the sidewalk in front of Las Palmas, coughing into their elbows, their faces blurred by mist and smoke. One of their aunts shoos them back inside as I pass, casting worried looks over her shoulder. Her face appears at the old drive-thru window, watching the sky. She pulls a charm from her blouse and kisses it three times.

Four fire trucks scream past me, cutting through the haze. I stare after them, willing them to keep going straight, as if my will matters at all, as if anything in this damn town has ever gone right.

The trucks turn in to the motel parking lot. My jaw twinges, the way it does when I’m about to puke.

I run faster.

I make the last turn and the heat hits me. It boils off the motel in an acrid wave, drying my eyes and cracking my lips, burning the mist away. I shove past knots of onlookers, knocking phones out of hands, taking an elbow to the corner of my mouth and not caring, not even feeling it. I trip over a canvas hose and lurch back up, coughing hard, lying to myself as hard as I can.

Maybe Bev tried to reheat her pizza in the toaster again. Maybe a guest stubbed their cigarette out on their mattress. Maybe it was just regular bad luck, rather than a Beast with a taste for Gravely blood.

It’ll be fine. Everything’s okay.

Then I make it around the last car and see that nothing is okay, that it might never be okay again, because the Garden of Eden is burning.

The Garden of Eden is burning—flames blooming from the rooftop, shingles melting and oozing into the gutters, guests huddled beneath shiny emergency blankets—and I don’t know where my little brother is, and it’s all my fault.

Someone is shouting at me. I ignore them, squinting through the smog, blinded by the blue strobe of police lights and the sting of smoke. I’m looking for that brass number 12, that not-quite-a-home, that one safe place—but it’s gone. There’s nothing but a gaping hole where our door used to be, a black throat spewing smoke. The window is gone, too, the sidewalk glittering with glass. Flames lick over the sill to lap at the eaves.

I run. A hand grabs my shoulder and I bite it, quick and vicious. The hand disappears. I taste someone else’s blood.

I’m yelling now, my voice swallowed by the hungry roar of the fire, close enough to feel the bite of cinders through my jeans. They get me right before I dive through the hot maw of the door.

I don’t go down easy. It takes two volunteer firefighters and a state trooper to pin me and get the cuffs around my wrists, and even then I’m still kicking and clawing, because once I stop fighting I’ll start screaming.

I should have gotten him out of Eden. I should’ve known a lucky penny and a mad Warden weren’t enough to keep him safe. It’s only now, thrashing on the hot pavement, that I realize how much I still trusted Arthur Starling. He failed my mother, but I never really believed he would fail me.

“Let me go, let me go, where is he? Did you get him out?”

They don’t answer. Someone steps through the smoke and stares down at me with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, and of course Constable Mayhew would be here. Of course the two worst moments of my life would be overseen by a saggy old man dressed like an extra from the set of a direct-to-DVD Western, his ten-gallon hat held up by the sheer density of his eyebrows.

I laugh at him, and note distantly that it sounds like sobbing.

He points at me with the waxed tip of his mustache. “This her?” It takes me a dizzy second to understand that he isn’t speaking to me.

He’s speaking to the man just behind him, a hulking figure in a sharp black suit. His face is unpleasantly familiar; I remember those eyes staring at me from the slanted surface of a rearview mirror.

It occurs to me that not every Beast comes crawling out of Underland. That some of them live up here, and walk around in expensive suits and pencil skirts.

That Arthur didn’t fail us, after all.

“Yes, sir,” the man says earnestly. His accent is local but overblown, a step away from caricature. “I saw her acting funny this evening. She dropped this.”

He hands the constable something small and square, and Mayhew squints down at it. It’s an old-fashioned matchbook with something written across the front in blue cursive. I can’t read the words by the flare and flicker of the firelight, but I don’t have to. I already know what they say.