Starling House(94)

Befriend the Beasts. So simple, so unnatural. I wonder what it cost Arthur to leave his sword behind, to approach his oldest enemies without a weapon.

It’s easier for me. I read Eleanor’s books so often her nightmares felt like old friends. Sometimes, on the bad days, I imagined the Beasts would greet me as one of their own, another thing with teeth, and let me sleep in Underland forever.

“Please.” My voice breaks on the word, going hoarse. “Please. I don’t want to hurt you.”

The Beast watches me. Every desperate instinct, every cell in my body is telling me to run, to reach for a weapon, to put anything at all between myself and the nightmare looking down at me.

Instead, I hold out my gory left hand, palm up, as if the Beast is just a strange dog I met behind somebody’s trailer. I screw my eyes shut.

I think: Gravely blood. I think: That’s not my name.

An imperceptible chill touches my skin, a faint pressure against my hand. I open my eyes to find my palm licked clean, the wound bloodless and white. The Beast runs a long silver tongue across its lips.

I might be sick. I might laugh. “I need to go down. To Underland.” A part of me is standing outside myself, watching the scene as if it’s one of the ghost stories I used to tell Jasper. My own image blurs in my mind, merging with little Nora Lee.

A rippling, buzzing sound rises around us, and for a wild moment I think the Beast is purring at me. But it’s the hellcat, trotting out of the trees to wind herself around the Beast’s forelegs. I meet the Beast’s eyes and find them subtly changed. They’re still the same abyssal black, but there’s a gentleness to them, an aching sadness. An image comes to me, of those same eyes looking up at me from a field of flowers.

“No,” I whisper, and the hellcat gives me a cool amber stare, rubbing her cheek against the mist-colored fur. It occurs to me that she’s only ever been that affectionate with one living creature.

I reach for the Beast without deciding to, the same way I reached for Arthur across the empty bed. For a moment I think it’s going to work. I think it’s going to give me the key and lead me down—but it rears back before my hand touches it, eyes sad and fierce. Then it’s gone, vanishing down the drive and taking my only way into Underland with it.

The hellcat gives me a long, accusing look before trotting after it.

Fear rises again, filling my ears, my mouth, drowning me. There was something of Arthur in that Beast—God knows how—which means he’s already gone. He’s deep under the earth, deeper than the longest roots of the oldest oak, just like Nora Lee.

But she wasn’t the first, was she? The hare told her the way down. In another version it was Nathaniel Boone who told Eleanor Starling. The stories mirror each other too closely to be coincidental, a single history told a dozen different ways. But all of them agree: long before Starling House, long before Eleanor and her keys, there was another way into Underland.

Cold fingers grab my ankle. Baine is slumped on one elbow, blood softening the stiff collar of her shirt. “The a-aperture. Where is it?”

At least some of her goons have fallen back, but others are crashing through the trees, still heading for the House. “My people will find it eventually, of course, but if you assist us . . .” Her pupils are mismatched, wrong-sized. One of the wounds around her mouth goes all the way through to her teeth; I can see the wet white of the bone.

I kick my leg out of her grasp. “You should get out of here. Call your people and leave.”

Baine attempts one of her urbane laughs, but it comes out off-key, far too high. “What, now? When we’re so close?” For an uncomfortable second she reminds me of Mom: a woman whose wants outweighed everything else, an endless appetite. “I made it past the gates. Past those fucking birds”—I picture a dozen sharp yellow beaks driving into her flesh, again and again—“and you think I’ll stop now?”

“If you go in that House, I guarantee you’ll have a bad time.” It sounds like a bluff, but it’s nothing but the truth. I can feel the House at my back like a living thing, a guard dog with its hackles high. The explosion seems to have pushed it off some secret edge, sent the entire structure a little farther out of reality. It’s less a house now than the idea of one, and a house is meant to shelter some people and keep out the rest. If Baine forces her way through the door she will meet nothing but misery.

She isn’t listening to me. She’s scanning the ground with her mismatched gaze, blinking too often. Her eyes catch the iron shine of a ring of keys and she dives for it, clutching it to her chest as if she thinks I might try to take it away, as if she still imagines she has anything I want.

A tortured, resentful pity moves through me. I’m suddenly tired of standing here talking to this vicious, hollow creature. “You go ahead and hold on to those,” I tell her, not ungently. “I don’t need them.”

By the time she opens her mouth to reply with some other offer or threat or bribe, I’m already gone, running for the front gates.

It hurts, leaving Starling land. Stepping across the property line is like tearing myself free from a briar patch, leaving blood and skin behind. The gates swing wide for me, and I step through them, ignoring the twitching, whimpering figures tangled in metal. The iron animals frolic in my peripheral vision, their sides slick and red in the moonlight.

I feel smaller on the other side, less than I was.