After that he’d sagged onto his mother’s couch, watched by all the Wardens that came before him, and waited for the sun to rise. For Opal to arrive with her overloud knock and her overbright smile, for the House to fill with her relentless humming.
The sun came, wan but warm; Opal did not.
He supposes it’s possible that she’s grown tired of wasting her days with housekeeping and petty theft, that she’d waltzed out the door the previous evening with her paycheck and her crooked teeth, never intending to return. This is, of course, his dearest ambition, and does not distress him in the least.
He begins to pace, glaring out windows, scratching at the scabbed lines of the Gorgoneion. The House is restless, too, settling and shifting beneath his feet. The fire won’t stay lit and the forks clink tunelessly in their drawers. The light in the kitchen pops as he passes beneath it, the bulb staring down at him like a mournful gray eye.
He finds himself staring out a third-floor window, scowling at the horizon. A black rush of birds startles into the sky near the road, just above the gates. Arthur knows just by the shape of them, the outraged pattern they make against the gray, and that those people must have come back.
He’s felt them circling, watching, buzzing like flies against the property lines. He’s seen the vehicles idling at the gates and ripped out the sensors and wires they leave behind. He’s found the elegant business cards wedged in the front gates and received the bland corporate letters, and he’s burned them both.
Arthur has read enough records from the previous Wardens to know they aren’t the first outsiders to come calling. There have been explorers and journalists, cultists and spies, generations of Gravelys and their damn lawyers. All of them want the same thing: to exploit, to extract, to profit, to throw open doors that should remain closed. So they followed the stories and starlings to his front gates.
They’ve never gotten any farther. Part of the duty of the Warden is to ward the walls, to feed the land a few drops of blood, fresh and hot, so that it never forgets who is and isn’t a Starling.15 Elizabeth Baine will never set foot on his property, unless she is much cleverer than she seems.
Or, he supposes, simply patient. She would have to wait until Arthur has found a way past that final door, the one that has no key. Until he’s descended into the dark and done what none of the previous Wardens have ever managed. The gate would swing wide for her then, but it wouldn’t matter, because the House would be only a house, with nothing beneath it but worms and wisteria roots.
The starlings settle back into the branches. The car is gone.
A moment later, Arthur feels the gates open. He presses his forehead hard against the glass.
A figure emerges from the woods, a scrawny shape swallowed by the black square of his coat, her face white beneath the red blaze of her hair. The sight strikes him as entirely and dangerously correct, as if she should always be wearing his clothes, walking toward his House. It’s difficult to tell, but he thinks her face might be tilted up toward his; the possibility makes all his scars itch.
It’s not an itch, of course. It’s that tedious, boyish hunger, which he hasn’t indulged since he returned from school. Luke sent a few letters, but Arthur burned them unopened. Luke had always been too soft, too sweet; after an hour in Starling House he would have run screaming and never come back.
He watches Opal walk closer and thinks, inanely: She keeps coming back.
The House sighs around him. He raps his knuckles against the sill hard enough to sting, unsure which of them he’s trying to reprimand.
He tries to make himself as forbidding and unpleasant as possible when he opens the door, but Opal doesn’t notice. She looks up at him with her eyes gone odd and dark, her freckles stark against bloodless cheeks. She laughs at him. And then—
Arthur stares down at his shoes, spattered with stringy bile.
Opal wipes her mouth on her sleeve, swaying a little, and whispers, hoarsely, “Sorry.”
He gestures her wordlessly into the hall. She stumbles a little over the threshold and his hands give a traitorous twitch. “Bathroom?” His voice is indifferent. She nods, lips white.
Her footsteps are usually light and furtive, like those of an animal ready to bolt, but now she walks heavily, bones loose, shoes scuffing. Arthur’s arm hovers at her back, not quite touching her.
“Sorry man. I mean Arthur. I mean Mr. Starling. About your shoes I didn’t mean to.” Her sentences run in a strange, flat rhythm, as if someone shook the punctuation out of them. “I’ll clean it up just give me a sec.”