First, that the light in the window has gone out.
And second, that there is someone standing on the other side of the gates of Starling House.
There are never any guests at Starling House. There are no private parties or visiting relatives, no HVAC repair vans or delivery trucks. Sometimes in a fit of hormonal frustration a pack of high schoolers will talk about climbing the wall and sneaking up to the house itself, but then the mist rises or the wind blows sideways and the dare is never quite made. Groceries are piled outside the gate once a week, the milk sweating through brown paper sacks, and every now and then a sleek black car parks across the road and idles for an hour or two without anyone getting in or out. I doubt whether any outsider has set foot on Starling land in the last decade.
Which means there’s exactly one person who could be standing on the other side of the gate.
The latest Starling lives entirely alone, a Boo Radley–ish creature who was damned first by his pretentious name （Alistair or Alfred, no one can ever agree which）， second by his haircut （unkempt enough to imply unfortunate politics, when last seen）， and third by the dark rumor that his parents died strangely, and strangely young.4
But the heir to Starling House doesn’t look like a rich recluse or a murderer; he looks like an underfed crow wearing a button-up that doesn’t quite fit, his shoulders hunched against the seams. His face is all hard angles and sullen bones split by a beak of a nose, and his hair is a tattered wing an inch shy of becoming a mullet. His eyes are clawing into mine.
I become aware that I’m staring back at him from a feral crouch, like a possum caught raiding the motel dumpsters. I wasn’t doing anything illegal, but I don’t have a fantastic explanation for why I’m standing at the end of his driveway just after dusk, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance he actually is a murderer, so I do what Mom did whenever she got herself in a tight spot, which was every day: I smile.
“Oh, I didn’t see you there!” I clutch my chest and give a girly little laugh. “I was just passing by and thought I’d take a closer look at these gates. They’re so fancy. Anyway, I didn’t mean to bother you, so I’ll head on my way.”
The heir to Starling House doesn’t smile back. He doesn’t look like he’s ever smiled at anything, actually, or ever will, as if he were carved from bitter stone rather than born in the usual way. His eyes move to my left hand, where the blood has soaked through the wadded sleeve to drip dramatically from my fingertips. “Oh, shit.” I make an abortive effort to shove the hand into my pocket, which hurts. “I mean, that’s nothing. I tripped earlier, see, and—”
He moves so quickly I barely have time to gasp. His hand darts through the gate and catches mine, and I know I should snatch it back—when you grow up on your own from the age of fifteen you learn not to let strange men grab ahold of any part of you—but there’s an enormous padlock between us and his skin is so warm and mine is so damn cold. He turns my hand palm up in his and I hear a low hiss of breath.
I lift one shoulder. “It’s fine.” It’s not fine: my hand is gummy mess of red, the flesh gaping in a way that makes me think superglue and peroxide might be insufficient. “My brother will patch me up. He’s waiting for me, by the way, so I really should get going.”
He doesn’t let go. I don’t pull away. His thumb hovers over the jagged line of the cut, not-quite-touching it, and I realize abruptly that his fingers are trembling, shaking around mine. Maybe he’s one of those people who faint at the sight of blood, or maybe eccentric recluses aren’t accustomed to young women bleeding all over their front gates.
“It’s no big deal.” I don’t generally do sincerity, except for Jasper, but I feel a certain sympathy for him. Or it might be symmetry: he’s about my age, underdressed and shivering, hated by half the town. “I’m really fine.”
He looks up, and as I meet his eyes I know with sudden and terrible clarity that I was mistaken. His hands aren’t shaking with nerves or cold: they’re shaking with rage.
His skin is bloodless, stretched tight over the bleak bones of his face, and his lips are peeled away from his teeth in an animal snarl. His eyes are the starless black of caves.
I reel back as if shoved, my smile abandoned, my good hand fumbling for the motel key in my pocket. He might be taller but I’d bet money I fight dirtier.
But he doesn’t open the gate. He leans closer, forehead pressing hard against the iron, fingers wrapping whitely around the bars. My blood is slick and shining across his knuckles.