“Run,” he grates.
I run.
Hard and fast, with my left hand curled tight to my chest, still throbbing, but not quite as cold as it was before.
The heir to Starling House watches her run from him, and does not regret it. He doesn’t regret the way she ripped her hand from his, or the way her eyes flashed at him before she ran, hard and flat as beaten nails. He especially does not regret the sudden departure of that bright, bold smile, which had never been real in the first place.
He wrestles with a brief, absurd urge to shout after her—wait, he might say, or maybe even come back—before he reminds himself that he doesn’t want her to come back at all. He wants her to run and keep running, as fast and far as she can. He wants her to pack her things and buy a Greyhound ticket at the Waffle House and ride out of Eden without looking back once.
She won’t do it, of course. The House wants her, and the House is stubborn. Already her blood has vanished from the gate as if an invisible tongue licked it clean.
He doesn’t know why it would want her, of all people: a freckled scarecrow of a girl with crooked teeth and holes in the knees of her jeans, entirely unremarkable except for the steel in her eyes. And perhaps for the way she stood her ground against him. He is a ghost, a rumor, a story whispered after the children have gone to bed, and she was cold and hurt, all alone in the rising dark—and yet she hadn’t run from him until he told her to. The House has always had a taste for the brave ones.
But Arthur Starling swore on his parents’ graves that he would be the last Warden of Starling House. He is many things—a coward, a fool, a terrible failure—but he is not a man to break his word. No one else will lie awake every night listening for the scrape of claws and the pant of breath. No one else will spend their lives fighting an invisible war, rewarded either with the silence of victory or the too-high cost of failure. No one else will bear the Starling sword after him.
Certainly not a scrawny girl with hard eyes and a liar’s smile.
Arthur unpeels his forehead from the gate and turns away, his shoulders hunched in a manner that would have made his mother narrow her eyes, if she still had eyes to narrow.
The walk back to the House takes longer than it ought to, the drive twisting and coiling more than it should, the ground rougher and the night darker. His legs are aching by the time he steps across the threshold of the House.
He pauses to rest a hand on the doorframe. Her blood cracks and flakes from his skin. “Leave her be,” he says softly. They haven’t addressed one another in civil terms for years, but for some reason he’s compelled to add a single, stiff “Please.”
The floorboards creak and wail. A petulant door slams down some distant hall.
Arthur slouches upstairs and falls into bed fully clothed but still shivering, half expecting a pipe to spring a spiteful leak above his pillow, or a loose shutter to slap arrhythmically against a sill.
Instead, there are only the dreams. Always, the damn dreams.
He is five, and the House is whole and hale. There are no cracks in the plaster, no broken balusters or dripping faucets. To Arthur, it is not a house so much as a country, an endless map made up of secret rooms and creaking stairs, leaf-shadowed floorboards and sun-faded armchairs. Every day he goes exploring, fortified by the peanut-butter-and-jellies his father packs him, and every night the starlings sing him to sleep. He does not even know how lonely he is.
He is eight, and his mother is shaping his fingers around the hilt, straightening his thin wrists when they want to bend. You love our home, don’t you? Her face is grave and tired. She was always tired. You have to fight for what you love.
Arthur wakes then, sweating, and does not sleep again. He stares out the round window of his attic room, watching the silver sway of the trees, thinking of his mother, of all the Wardens before her—of the girl.
His last, hopeful thought before dawn is that there was a cleverness to her, a canniness, and surely only the very worst of fools would ever return to Starling House.
THREE
I will never, ever—no matter how lonesome or tired I get, no matter how pretty the light looks through the trees—return to Starling House. His voice chases me all the way back to the motel, echoing in my ears like a second pulse: run, run, run.
It fades only when I step into the soft lamplight of room 12, panting and shaking, my shoes splattering slush across the carpet.
Jasper greets me without taking off his headphones, his attention on the grayscale frames of whatever video he’s been editing. “You took forever so I went ahead and ate the last picante chicken ramen. If you snooze you lo—” He glances up. He slides the headphones around his neck, smug expression falling off his face. “What happened to you?”