“I’m not sure you should exist,” I tell it, conversationally.
The Beast bites me, casually.
I don’t have to climb down any stairs, which is nice, because I’m not sure I could. I simply open the attic door and I’m standing on the threshold of the House, several floors below. I rub my thumb over the doorknob in thanks and the rug ripples under my feet like a contented animal.
The Beast dodges around my legs and bounds down the front steps, tail standing straight in the air. I run after it, expecting to find Arthur staggering with exhaustion, maybe smiling in relief—
But he’s still fighting. There are still Beasts seething on all sides, just as vast and terrible as before, circling like white vultures. The ground beneath their feet is crusted with frost now, as if entire seasons have passed while I was in the House.
Except Arthur doesn’t look any older. He looks younger, younger than I’ve ever seen him in the waking world. His hair is cut almost neatly and his skin looks eerily smooth, the tattoos and scars wiped away. He’s wearing his long wool coat, but his shoulders don’t fill it properly yet. His face is soft, slightly rounded, unmarred by pain. He’s just a boy, and he’s crying.
It’s then that I see the bodies around his feet. A man and woman lying side by side, their ribs broken open like milkweed pods. A line of people still wearing hard hats and uniforms, frost creeping over their faces like lace. A pair of burnt corpses. All the people taken by the Beasts over the years, every accident and unexplained fire, every sudden illness and run of bad luck, every person Arthur couldn’t save.
One of them has red hair, longer than mine. Her face is turned away, but I would know my mother by the curve of her ear, the exposed nape of her neck.
There’s a body lying beside my mother’s, and it takes me longer to recognize myself. Or the version of myself that would have existed if Arthur hadn’t pulled me out of the river that night: my flesh is blanched and swollen, my clothes are heavy with mud. River reeds straggle through my hair.
This is Arthur’s Underland, then: a world where he’s too late and too weak, surrounded on all sides by enemies he can’t stop, doomed to fight alone, forever, for nothing. I thought the Beasts would disappear with Eleanor, but of course they didn’t. They belong to us now, horrors handed down like ugly porcelain.
I shout Arthur’s name, but he doesn’t hear me. His gaze remains fixed on the Beasts, his face furious with grief, his sword lifting and falling, lifting and falling.
He won’t stop. He won’t sleep. He’ll stay down here, trapped in his own nightmare for always and always.
Except I won’t let him, because I need him. And I might be a liar and a thief and a cheat, but I’ll walk barefoot through Hell for what I need.
I step forward, into the raging, snapping, slavering circle of Beasts, and shout his name again.
Arthur Starling wants to sleep very badly, or to wake up, to do anything except what he’s doing. His body has been reduced to a system of pulleys and wires, limbs that lift and drop, sweep and cut. The sword is immensely heavy in his hand, but he can’t seem to let it go.
He doesn’t know why. Why should he keep fighting when everyone he’s ever loved is lying on the ground around him, wide-eyed, unblinking? His mother’s mouth is open and there’s grave dirt caught in the seams of her teeth; his father is still holding her hand, his glasses blind with frost. Arthur tries not to look at any of the others, especially the one with hair like a lit match, but he stumbles across them sometimes. Their flesh is hard and frozen beneath his feet.
Still, the Beasts keep coming. Still, he keeps fighting.
And then, after a very long time, Arthur hears his own name. This gives him brief pause, because he hadn’t thought there was anyone left in the world who knew his name, or cared enough to shout it.
His name, again. It floats through the tangle of snapping teeth and many-jointed limbs and settles over him gently, like a blanket across his shoulders. It’s a voice he knows, a voice he has heard swearing and singing in every room of the House, in every good dream and half his nightmares.
The Beasts have gone strangely still around him. They withdraw slightly, watching him like a pack of wolves gathered around some thrashing thing, waiting for it to die. Arthur’s skin shivers with the expectation of attack, that last killing blow that will leave him like the others.
Instead, the Beasts part. A slim gap appears between them, and a figure walks through it.
She comes slowly, easily, as if she doesn’t notice the fangs and talons bristling on either side of her, as if she can’t see the bodies broken like eggs on the ground before her. The light falls strangely on her, warm and golden, nothing like the bitter winter around her.