I shake it. “Everything will be okay,” I tell him, because I love him.
I tug him toward me and kiss his forehead, like I did when he was little, and he does me the courtesy of not physically combusting from embarrassment, and then he leaves.
I watch him walk up to the counter, where a peeling Greyhound sign hangs above the register, and slide two twenties across the Formica. I watch the cashier soften by degrees, like everyone else who talks to Jasper for more than thirty seconds, until she’s handing him a mug of hot chocolate I suspect is complimentary. I watch him slide into a booth and squint through the window. I don’t know if he can see me past the yellow glare of the glass, but he jerks his chin toward the county road. Go.
I go. It’s only after I’ve pulled back onto the county road that I catch the bronze gleam on the dash, and realize he left Arthur’s stolen penny behind. For luck.
I drive with the windows down, just over the speed limit, wind whipping the tears off my cheeks. I don’t think about the motel, the drifts of ash and glass, the wracked iron bones of the bed frames. I don’t think about Elizabeth Baine or Don Gravely or the long line of Starlings standing between them and the abyss. I don’t even know where I’m going.
Another lie; I know exactly where I’m going.
I cross the river and drive to the place where the streetlights stop and the woods turn wild, where the only light is the faint, amber glimmer of a lit window, shining to me through the trees.
TWENTY-SIX
It’s very late now, but Arthur Starling isn’t sleeping. He tried, briefly, but all he accomplished was ten minutes lying stiffly on the couch, conscious of every bruise pulsing in synchrony across his body, while the House howled with worry.
The mist had thickened so fast, and the Beast had come slithering out the door before he’d even gotten the sword in his hand. The fight had been desperate and ugly, ending only when he clamped his forearm around a sharp-scaled throat. His tattoos had hissed and burned, dispersing the Beast in great gouts of steam.
And then, while he stood there panting and bleeding, the second Beast had emerged, darting past him and slinking over the southern wall.
His hands had been shaking so badly it took him three tries to get the truck keys in the ignition.
But she was alive, and so was her brother.
He’s too busy to sleep, anyway. There’s so much to do—preparations to make, explosives to distribute, a will to write, flowers to water, foolishly, knowing there will be no one to tend them soon—and so little time.
He supposes he might have a few days left, even a week. He’d signed all of Gravely’s miserable little forms, but it will take time for him to assemble all his monstrous machines at the edge of Starling land. He gave Baine three keys—while she smiled up at him with such professional satisfaction that he briefly imagined burying one of them in her eye, the way Opal brought down the Beast—but not the fourth.
The fourth he will claim for himself, as soon as the mist rises again. He has a suspicion it won’t be long, based on nothing more than the weight of the air, the prickle at the base of his spine.
Arthur thinks he should probably feel mournful, but all he feels is relief so strong it resembles euphoria, as a distance runner might feel upon entering the final mile of a very long race. It began the moment his pen touched Gravely’s paperwork, the peaceful sense that he was balancing an invisible scale. Very soon now, Opal will be safe.
And anyway, he likes the symmetry of it: the first Warden of Starling House vanished into Underland never to be seen again, and so will the last. The House might mourn him, but not for long. Gravely’s machines will come for it soon enough and shove it into some sinkhole, where it will rot away, unmarked and unremembered, except for the faint smell of wisteria at the beginning of summer. There won’t even be stories about it, after a while.
He finishes emptying the plastic bag he stole from the strip mine and dusts pink crystals from his palms. The walls shiver around him and he touches the stone gently. “I know. But I can’t have anyone following me.” It seems like terrible hubris to imagine that anyone would try, but he remembers the way she looked at him when he walked into that conference room—teeth bared, eyes scorching in a filthy face—and wonders if he should have stolen more explosives.
He climbs up and up, through the cellar door, past the library, back to his little room in the attic. He lights the lamp and sits in the soft light, wondering if he should sleep, knowing he won’t. A stray breeze fingers through the window, rich and sweet-smelling, and flutters the drawings pinned to his wall. One of them comes loose and slips to the floor.