I pull over at the front gates and fall out of the cab before the truck stops rolling, skinning my palms on the gravel. I fumble for the key but I don’t need it: the gates of Starling House swing wide at the touch of my bloodied hands, hinges screaming.
“Thanks,” I tell them, and from the corner of my eye I see the ironwork writhe, as if the beasts want to pull themselves free and run beside me.
The driveway is shorter than it’s ever been, no more than a few pounding steps. I can almost feel the earth sliding beneath my feet, the wind rushing at my back, shoving me forward.
The house comes into view all at once, like it stepped out from behind a black curtain. It’s more mysterious at night, more alive, maybe just more, full stop. There’s a tension to the shape of it against the sky, as if it has to work hard to remember to be a house and not anything else. The vines rustle and tremble against the stone. Mist coils around every sill and eave. Every window is dark.
So it’s only by the sallow sickle moon that I see him: Arthur, standing alone before the stone steps with his head bowed and his sword braced crosswise before him.
He should look like a fool—a boy standing in his own yard long after midnight, his shirt misbuttoned, one sock missing, wielding a sword against nothing at all—and he does, but the kind of fool that breaks your heart. I don’t know what he’s fighting or why, but I know he’s losing.
“Arthur?” I say his name softly, carefully, remembering the chill of his blade passing inches away from my face.
His spine goes rigid. His head lifts, turns very slowly toward me. I expect him to be angry—I have, after all, trespassed on his property twice in one night, this time while wearing gym shorts and an undershirt—but he looks closer to despairing.
“No.” He says it very firmly, like he thinks I’m an apparition he might banish with sufficient effort.
“Look, I know I shouldn’t have come, but I had this dream and I thought—is that blood?” One of his sleeves is blotted black, the fabric clinging to his flesh. There’s more of it shining down one temple, matting his hair, slicking his hands around the hilt.
“Opal, you have to go now—” His sword tip wavers as he says it, sagging slightly.
That’s when it happens. A sudden, invisible strike, an attack from nowhere that sends him staggering to one knee. A fresh wound appears in its wake, four deep scores dug across his throat. Blood floods down his neck, a black sheet that soaks his shirt and pools in the hollow between his collarbones.
The sword makes a dull clatter as it hits the gravel. Arthur follows it, his body folding gently, his eyes on mine.
I think I must be screaming, but I can’t hear it over the wild moaning of Starling House. It’s as if every loose floorboard has creaked at once, as if every joist and rafter warped themselves against the grain. Shingles hit the ground like fists beating uselessly against the earth.
I am abruptly aware that my knees are studded with stones. That my hands are snarled in cotton, wet and warm. That I’m saying silly, useless things like “no, no” and “hey, come on” and his name, over and over.
I haul him onto his back and he blinks up at me, eyes fogged and faraway. One of his hands lifts sluggishly into the air and comes to rest against the tangled nest of my hair. He says, in a voice like a rusted saw blade, “Thought I told you to run.” Surely, if he were truly dying, he could not manage to sound so profoundly exasperated with me.
I cover his hand with mine, turning my face in to the heat of his palm, aware that I am completely and permanently blowing my cover as a disinterested housekeeper but unable in this moment to care. “I did.” I push harder against his hand, pressing our skin together. “You goddamn fool.”
“Thought . . . never come back . . . was implied.”
I shift so that I’m holding his hand in mine, our thumbs hooked around each other’s wrists. The salt of his blood stings my scraped palms, but I don’t let go. “You’re coming too. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but—”
I stop talking, because something strange is happening to me. It begins in my palm, at the precise place where my blood mingles with Arthur’s: a spreading chill, a deadening cold. It flows up my wrist, laps across my sternum. I feel like I’m walking slowly into a cold river, the water rising fast.
Arthur is saying something, pulling weakly at my shoulders. I hardly hear him. I’m too busy staring at the mist that surrounds us, which is suddenly much more than mist. Somewhere beneath the terror I feel a distant, childish disappointment; I’d always thought Eleanor Starling was a writer of pure imagination, a liar of the highest order, just like me.