Starling House(89)

Sometime in the black hours after midnight, Opal tenses. Her hands curl into fists and her lips press together, like she’s trying desperately to keep something in or out. A shiver begins in her spine and extends down each of her limbs, until she’s shaking against him. Arthur folds himself more tightly around her, one arm braced across her stomach, as if there’s a physical cold he can keep at bay.

Opal’s eyes open on a gasp. She blinks down at Arthur’s arm with an expression suggesting she’s never seen one before.

He loosens his hold, feeling foolish. “Nightmare?”

“Yeah.” Her voice is hoarse, as if she’s been screaming. “The river again.”

Guilt strikes him, familiar as a fist. He remembers the sound of Opal’s voice as she told him how to find the fourth key—dull and cold, everything she isn’t—and it strikes him as a miracle that she ever spoke to him again. “I’m sorry,” he says, thickly. “I know it doesn’t matter now, it doesn’t fix anything, but I’m sorry.”

Opal cranes her neck around to look at him, her face stricken. “It was you,” she says, and Arthur wonders if she’s still half asleep.

“Yes. It was me. I let the Beast take your mothe—”

“No, I mean, it was you on the riverbank.” Opal doesn’t look half asleep. Her eyes are bright silver, full of eerie clarity. “It was you holding me.”

Arthur hadn’t thought she could possibly remember that. By the time he dragged her out of the river she was half-drowned and three-quarters frozen, her flesh a sickly, mottled blue, a crystalline rime of frost forming on the ends of her hair. He was cold, too, but his head hadn’t gone under and his coat was thick wool, and also he was still slightly drunk.

Arthur withdraws until there’s a tiny space between them on the mattress. “I called 911, but I didn’t know how long they’d take, and your skin was the wrong color . . .”

Opal is propped up on her elbows now, looking at him with inexplicable urgency. “Did you find me on the shore? Or did you—was I still—” Her chest is rising and falling too fast.

Arthur isn’t sure what answer she wants, so he tells the truth. “All I saw was the car. It wasn’t that deep yet so I waded in. Your window was down, your seat belt was off—but you weren’t swimming out. You must have been stuck on something, because I pulled and you came loose.”

That night is a nauseous blur—the Beast rising from the mist, antlered and awful; his own feet slapping the frozen ground; the scream of tires; a girl’s face, blue beneath the water—but he remembers the way her wrist felt in his hand, the moment something gave way and she slid up to the surface.

Opal’s eyes are huge, filling fast. “I wasn’t stuck. I was holding on to—” The tears refuse to fall, pooling on her eyelashes. “I always thought I let go,” she whispers, and then the tears come in a dismaying flood. Arthur isn’t sure exactly why she’s crying or whether it’s his fault, but he touches her shoulder, tentatively, and she buries her face in his chest.

He holds very still while she cries, making his breath slow and even, as if he is trying to pet Baast without being bitten. After a while, Opal says, somewhat incoherently, “I read the letter. I’m sorry.”

Arthur doesn’t know which letter she could mean, but he says, “That’s alright,” in case there’s still a chance of being bitten.

“The one from your mother. I stole it. I tried to put it back, but then Jasper found the second half . . .”

Arthur was already still, but he feels himself calcifying. It simply isn’t possible that he would have left either half of that letter lying carelessly among his other notes, no matter how drunk or dissolute he’d been. Which means the House had taken matters into its own metaphorical hands.

Arthur briefly imagines shoving gum in all the light sockets, or perhaps breaking all the windows on the third floor, before he remembers that he won’t have time.

He clears his throat and produces a feeble “Oh.”

Opal has peeled her face off his chest. “I’m sorry. I know it was wrong.” She pauses. “It was beautiful, though.” She pauses again, seeming to pull the next words from some hard place inside herself. “It made me so damn jealous.”

“Why?”

A fresh sheen of tears turns her eyes into shards of mirror. “Because like—at least she said goodbye. At least she tried to do right by you.” But it’s not jealousy in her voice; it’s just grief.

Arthur asks, “What was she like?”

Opal exhales. “A fucking mess. A natural disaster wearing Daisy Dukes.” She smiles, and God, Arthur is going to miss that sharp twist at the corner of her mouth, that edge that never quite dulls. “I don’t know. I guess she was trying, too.”

They’re quiet for a little while after that. Arthur lies on his back and she fits herself easily into the crook of his arm, her arm resting in the dip of his sternum. He feels it rise and fall as he breathes. He pictures the two of them as children, separated by a handful of years and a couple of miles. Both of them lonely, both of them bound to a place that didn’t want them. Both of them bent beneath the weight of what their parents left behind: a baby brother, a house, a battle that never ends.

“Arthur . . . why did you stay? She said you didn’t have to.”