Arthur’s knuckle traces a tear from the corner of my eye to my temple. He doesn’t say anything.
“Can I—” I’ve never asked to stay the night with anyone before and I don’t like it much. It feels like turning belly up, exposing my weakest flesh to him. “It’s just, with the motel gone, I don’t really know where to . . .”
A darkness passes over Arthur’s face, and for an unbearable second I think he’s going to send me away again, but then he presses his lips to the place where my collarbone meets my shoulder.
He leads me upstairs.
Arthur has spent his life preparing—for battle, for Beasts, for his own bitter end—but he wasn’t prepared for this. He wasn’t prepared for the flayed look in her eyes or the feel of her above him, or the way she wept when she came, like some final barricade had been breached inside her and left her without defense. He wasn’t prepared for the sight of her in his bed, the way the white tops of her shoulders would extend past the edge of his quilt. He looks away, but their afterimage lingers on the backs of his eyelids, a ghostly pair of half-moons.
Opal falls asleep easily and thoroughly, as a child would. Arthur thinks it’s probably a sign of physical exhaustion more than an act of trust, but he resolves to deserve it anyway. He holds himself rigidly awake, listening for the creak of a hinge, the scrape of a key in a lock. Baast keeps him company, sitting in the round window with her eyes fixed on the ground below.
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.