He will leave her, with the Beasts rising and their enemies at the gates, with nothing but a rusting sword and the House he’s hated for twelve years.
Arthur rests his forehead against the damp stone wall of the passage and attempts an extremely overdue apology. “It was never your fault.” The inside of his mouth is coated in dust, and the words come out thick and glottal. The foundations of the House moan back at him. “You did your best for them, I always knew it.” He remembers, reluctantly, the first time he walked back into the House after finding his parents’ bodies. The funereal black cloths across every mirror, the mournful groans of the stairs. He’d been too furious to care, too selfish to see the grief in it.
He presses his forehead harder into the stone, until he can feel tiny indentations forming in his flesh. His voice is like the scraping of a rusted key in a rusted lock. “Do better for her.”
Arthur Starling makes his final descent while, far above him, the monsters rise.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I can feel them, the way you’d feel flies tiptoeing across your bedsheets. There’s more than one Beast this time, and they’ve already made it out of the House. I feel hooves that leave rot behind them, claws made of vapor and hate. I experience a disquieting urge to rush out and do battle with them, like every Warden before me, but I brush it aside. Arthur spent his whole life protecting this ugly, ungrateful town; tonight, they’ll just have to wait their turn.
I leave Arthur’s will on his desk and run down the stairs with the sword held awkwardly in my right hand. The lights pop to life ahead of me as if an invisible row of butlers is flipping the switches, and the House arranges itself so that I come out into the kitchen.
Something has gone badly wrong in here. The cabinets are crooked, doors swinging open, plates splintered on the counters. The floor is more slanted than usual, sloping downward, and there are cracks in the tile big enough to swallow the hellcat whole. Mist rises from the cracks like steam, gathering on the ceiling and rolling down the hall.
In the pantry I find the trapdoor thrown wide, the lock hanging ajar. I throw myself downward with a weird sense of playing out a scene I’ve already lived, except this time I’m the one holding the sword. I’m the one chasing after someone who’s made a stupid choice and hoping against hope that I’m not too late.
The air turns hot and acrid, like the morning after the Fourth of July, when you can still taste gunpowder in the back of your throat. Dust stings my eyes, forms a sweaty gray film on my skin. I hit the last step and stumble over a pile of stone and plaster. The cellar looks like a bombed-out building from a social studies textbook: the rafters overhead are cracked, dangling at odd angles, and the walls are leaning dangerously inward. The floor is scorched black in a way that makes me remember the deep boom that woke me up.
“Arthur, you ass.” Imagine being so stupid, so gratuitously noble, that you try to explode your own cellar rather than risk someone helping you.
His plan only half worked. I scramble over the rubble and shove a rafter away from the door. The entire wall seems to be collapsing, falling into whatever hell lies under the House, but the door itself is still standing.
And it’s still locked. If Arthur found the fourth key and went down to Underland—like he’s always wanted to, like I know he did—then he must have closed it behind him.
Since the moment I woke up, the moment I reached for him and found nothing but cold silver beside me, I’ve been afraid. I’m pretty good at ignoring emotions it would be inconvenient to feel, so it’s been nothing but a dull buzzing at the back of my head—until now. Now the noise rises, rushing through me. What if this is really it? What if Arthur is already gone, lost somewhere I can’t follow? I picture myself all alone in this grand, cursed, dreaming house, just another lonely Starling doomed to spend her life discovering the terrible distance between a house and a home.
I fumble for a stone and bash it against the hinges, knowing it won’t work, too angry not to try. It doesn’t leave so much as a scratch. I try my own blood next, slapping my gory palm on the wood. The door remains serenely shut.
I experience an unpleasant tugging sensation, like a stranger yanking at a strand of my hair. There is a key turning in my front gate. The tumblers are grinding and the hinges are screaming, but they can’t resist for long. Very soon I feel the tread of boots up the drive, and the nauseous certainty that there’s someone on my land who shouldn’t be.
Nobody born and raised in Eden would set foot on Starling property before dawn, especially on a night like this, when the fog is up and the moon is missing—which means I know who it is. Which means I know the precise terms of Arthur’s deal. He gave Elizabeth Baine the keys to Starling House, offered her every secret his ancestors fought to protect—for me. When I find him I’m going to push him against the wall and cuss him blue, right before I kiss him bloody.