“I don’t un-understand.” My tongue feels foreign in my mouth, a wet muscle fumbling against my teeth.
Baine slides the tablet off my knees and swipes through several screens very quickly. “It won’t take much of your time. We just want to know more about your employer and his residence. If you could just answer a few questions for us, keep in touch—maybe send a few pictures, tell us if you see anything interesting—we would be very grateful.” On the word “grateful” she shows me the tablet again. The URL blurs unpleasantly in my vision, but I’m pretty sure I’m looking at my own PayPal account, except there’s an extra comma in the balance. My stomach coils tight.
I don’t know what she wants, but I already know what I’m going to say. When somebody turns up in a fancy car and knows way too much about you—where you work and how your mother died and your little brother’s given name—you say whatever will get them to leave you the hell alone.
It shouldn’t even be hard. What do I care if some out-of-towners get pictures of Starling House? What do I owe Arthur, other than forty hours a week of housecleaning?
But the answer gets lost somewhere between my brain and my tongue, caught in my throat. His coat feels very heavy on my shoulders.
Baine takes her tablet back. “Oh, and if you bring anything else off the property, we’d like to purchase it from you.” The gate key burns cold against my breastbone. I’m careful not to reach for it. “There will be no need for Jasper to list anything else on eBay. Stonewood has very high standards of behavior, after all.” Her voice is delicate, almost apologetic, as if she dislikes the game she is playing but is obliged to win it anyway.
Somewhere beneath the haze of panic and fury, I almost admire her efficiency. She might be a doctor reading an X-ray of my innards, pointing precisely to each wound and fissure. My answer comes out soft and easy, then. “Okay.”
Baine pats my knee. Hal pulls over near the front gates and idles while I tell them everything I’ve seen or thought or guessed about Starling House. I do a pretty shitty job of it—telling things out of order and doubling back, stumbling over my consonants and trailing off, my thoughts derailed by the sour taste of betrayal and fake apple flavoring—but they don’t seem to care. A little red light winks at me from the tablet.
Eventually I run out of words and sit swaying and blinking in the sickly heat. Baine reaches across me to open the door. “Thank you, Opal. We’ll talk more soon.” I scrabble back into the clean winter light, feeling the air like cold hands cupping my face.
The trees shiver above me. A cloud of birds rises from the branches, scatters, coalesces, screams down at us.
Baine leans out the window, watching.
“They do it to evade predators, apparently.” I cannot, in that moment, imagine what she could be talking about. “The way they flock. We brought in an ornithologist, and he said these are a genetically distinct population, but not a remarkable one. Except that they do this”—a nod at the sky, where the starlings twist and wheel like smoke in the wind—“more often than is typical, given the low number of natural predators nearby.”
I blink at her, swaying. “So?”
Her eyes move finally away from the sky to land on me. I can still see the dark, wild shape of the birds reflected in her sclera. “So we’d very much like to know if they have any unnatural predators.” Baine gives me a false, concerned frown as the window glides up. “You don’t look well. Take it easy, okay?”
I watch the car disappear over the crest of a hill. I try to count to ten in my head, but the numbers won’t stay where they belong, so I give up and pull the key out from under my collar. It rests heavy in my hand.
The driveway feels shorter today, a quick twist through the woods that leaves me dizzy and panting on the front steps. I raise my fist to knock, but the door whips open before my knuckles land.
Arthur glowers down at me, heavy-browed and sullen, even more hunched-up than usual. There’s a bruise yellowing along his jaw and a burst blood vessel in one eye. He gives me an insolent once-over, mouth twisting. “You’re late.”
The idea of him skulking on the other side of the door, waiting for me to show up just so he can give me shit about it, strikes me as very funny, so I laugh at him.
Then I puke across his shoes.
Arthur didn’t sleep the night before. The mist had risen for the second time in a single week—an unsettling coincidence which had happened more and more often these last few years—and he’d spent hours stalking the halls, blade held high, listening hard for the sound of something that shouldn’t exist: the susurration of scales against wallpaper, the tap-tap of claws across hardwood floors. He found it on the spiral stairs, still half-formed and weak, lost in the clever maze of the House, and sent it scattering into nothing once more.