Starling House(91)

Except if that’s really who I was, I would have bought a second Greyhound ticket and left with Jasper hours ago. I would have walked right past that amber window last February and kept working at Tractor Supply. I would have let go of my mother’s hand and saved myself. But I hadn’t saved myself, that night; Arthur had.

And now he’s gone into Underland, and it’s my turn to save him.

I can feel the attention of Starling House like a weight in the air around me, a gaze facing inward. The windows rattle in their frames and the pipes howl in the walls. There’s a tremor in the floor, like the house has suffered some secret wound and is holding itself upright through sheer stubbornness.

“Tell me what I have to do,” I say.

The house doesn’t answer, but a stray shaft of moonlight falls through the window and finds the silver edge of the sword. It flashes at me, a vicious wink, and I remember Jasper’s voice, oozing disgust: some kind of blood oath.

The hilt is cold and heavy, already familiar. I cup the blade with my left hand, laying the edge along the first scar Starling House ever gave me. I should have known, then, what it wanted from me. I should have known I would wind up here, with the house leaning hungrily around me and my pulse beating loud in my ears, no matter how hard Arthur tried to drive me away.

I close my eyes, shout a swear word, and draw the sword across my palm.

It cuts deeper than I meant it to, falling through the strata of my skin, biting deep into the wet muscle at the base of my thumb. Blood fills my palm and spills between my fingers. It falls to the floor in a syrupy stream, pooling at my feet.

Nothing in particular seems to happen, except that I feel queasy and stupid.

Maybe my blood is tainted in some way. Maybe the house can taste the Gravely in me, every sin I inherited from my ancestors. But honestly, screw that: I don’t know my name, but I’ve never been Opal Gravely. My mother shed her name like a skin and raised the two of us to be no one, or anyone. I have no name but the one I choose.

I clench my fist, squeezing hard. My blood lingers for another second, two, before it soaks into the wood, as if an animal lapped it away.

And I feel myself tipping over an edge and falling downward, slipping into delirium. The boundaries of my body turn thin and permeable. I am conscious of my blood following the grain of the wood, sliding between the boards, dripping from the points of unseen nails. I follow it along the joists and behind the walls, pumping through the secret arteries of the house, tracing the vascular map of pipes and wires, mouseholes and wheedling vines. I follow it down into the foundations and deeper still, into the hot wet earth. My blood becomes the dirt itself, riddled with small blind creatures, pierced by taproots and fence posts.

For a moment, or maybe a season, I am Starling House. I am an impossible architecture, a thing built from the dreams and nightmares of ten generations. There are wisteria roots wrapped around my bones and coffins buried beneath my skin. I sigh and the curtains billow. I curl my fist and the rafters moan.

I remember myself—myself-the-girl, myself-the-mere-human—in stages. My left hand comes first, because it hurts. Then my knees, bruised and aching on the floor, my shoulders, my lungs, my fragile mortal pulse. My mind comes last, disentangling itself reluctantly from the House. By the time I open my eyes, I know one thing with absolute certainty: that Arthur Starling was wrong.

He was not the last Warden of Starling House.

To Arthur Starling, running down the stone steps to Underland, it comes as a sudden, deafening silence. For twelve years his senses have extended past his own borders. He knew the taste of dew and the weight of dust on the windowsills and the shapes the starlings made in the sky. And now he knows nothing but the panicked sound of his own heartbeat in his ears.

He says, aloud, “No.” And then, several times in a row, “Damn you.” But the House has a new Warden now, and it pays him no mind. It shouldn’t have been possible—there’s never been a new Warden while the previous one still lived—but the House must have decided walking down into Underland was close enough to dying.

And then all it took was a little blood, a lot of guts, and the sword.

Arthur always planned to take it with him to face whatever waited for him beneath Starling House—Eleanor’s last and best inheritance, finally finishing its work—but he hadn’t accounted for Opal. Alone in his bed, fragile and trusting, that deadly Gravely blood beating softly in her throat.

It was hard enough to leave her; it was impossible to leave her undefended.

So Arthur had gone down through the trapdoor empty-handed. He had stood in the cellar while the mist grew teeth and claws, assembling itself. He had waited, unmoving, until there was a fully formed Beast staring down at him with eyes like ragged black bullet holes, and he had held out both his hands, palm up, weaponless. It had prowled closer, chitinous, sickening, and Arthur had knelt with his head tilted back, throat exposed.

“Please,” he’d said. Please, to the thing he had fought his entire life, the thing that left his parents bloodied corpses in the grass.

And it had bent its terrible head and left something cold and iron in his hands.

Arthur did not hesitate. He opened the fourth lock and stepped through the door, telling himself that it was for the best. That Opal would remain safe and sleeping while he went down to Underland, and when she woke it would be to a House that was merely a house, and Beasts that were merely bad dreams. She would be grateful, probably. (He knew she would not be grateful.)