“So what are you still doing here?”
He straightens and opens his eyes, but can’t seem to look me in the face. His gaze lands to my left, where my hair corkscrews past my ear, and his face twists with that awful guilt. “I have . . . responsibilities.”
It’s a statement that would have been obnoxiously cryptic before I saw him bloodied and beaten, brought to his knees but still trying desperately to protect me from a creature that shouldn’t exist at all. The memory of it—the unwavering line of his spine, the way he glared up at the Beast as if he would fight it with his bare teeth before he let it past him—does something painful to my lungs. “I . . . thanks. Thank you.”
“You should go. Please,go.” His voice has none of the snarling, theatrical fury it did when he told me to run earlier. This isn’t a command or a scare tactic or a show; it’s a plea, weary and sincere, which any decent person would honor.
I laugh in his face. “Absolutely the fuck not.”
“Miss Opal—”
“If you call me that again, I will do you a harm.”
That treacherous not-quite-a-dimple crimps the corner of his mouth. “You wouldn’t hurt an injured man.”
“I would change your ringtone to Kid Rock and call you every day at dawn for a decade. My hand to God.”
“I would simply turn it off.”
I tilt my head. “Would you?”
His eyes move to mine, then away, dimple vanishing. “No,” he says quietly. “God, just go home. Please”—his throat moves—“Opal.”
I settle on the other side of the couch and pull my feet up on the cushions. “Number one, I don’t have a home.” I wonder suddenly if that’s still true, if the Gravely name could change more than my past. I imagine squashing that thought into a grocery bag and shoving it very deep under my bed. “And number two, I’m not leaving until you explain.”
“Explain what?” he asks, which is weak even for him.
I gesture at the sword lying on the floor, the bloodied rags, the mad, impossible house all around us. “Everything.”
He looks like he’s planning to say no. To tell me that he can’t, or it’s none of my business, or make some snide comment perfectly calculated to send me storming out of the house. I can tell by the set of his jaw that he won’t be swayed by lies or wiles or charming smiles.
So I tell him the truth. “Look, both of us almost died tonight and I don’t know why or how. I’m sure you’ve got your reasons for keeping secrets and God knows I’m not trustworthy, but I’m pretty freaked out right now. I’m confused and angry and”—admitting it feels like calling my own bluff, like laying out a pair of sevens after talking a big game—“scared.”
A ripple moves through his limbs. The hellcat extends her claws. Arthur places his hands carefully on the cushion, palms down. “I’m sorry.” He slants me a look of such grievous bafflement that I almost laugh. “You know, usually when people are scared, they leave. Why won’t you? Why haven’t you?”
“Because . . .” Because the money is good. Because I had to, for Jasper’s sake.
The answers come to me quick and easy, but then, lying always has.
The truth is harder: Because I dreamed of Starling House long before I ever saw it. Because sometimes when the light slants soft through the west windows and turns the dust motes into tiny golden fireflies I like to pretend the house belongs to me, or that I belong to it. Because Arthur Starling gave me a coat when I was cold and a truck when I was tired and he uses way too much punctuation in his texts.
I hitch a smile at him, too crooked to be charming. “Because I’m a meathead, I guess.”
He looks at my mouth, then away. “Alright.” He sighs for a very long time. “Alright. How much do you know already?”
“I’ve done some googling, heard some stories.” The narratives run together in my head like a song sung in the round, different words to the same tune. Starlings and Boones and—the melody sours in my head—Gravelys. “I’d like to hear yours.”
“I’m sick of stories.” Arthur’s voice is distant, a little dry. “My . . . antecessors were obsessed with them. Myths and fairy tales, folklore, parables. What I’ve been studying—what I’ve been assembling—is history. The facts.”
“So give me the facts.”
“Oh, it’s not—” He fidgets, looking suddenly like Jasper when I ask to see the first draft of an essay. “There are still some gaps, and I haven’t got it all organized yet—” He’s interrupted by the drawer of the end table beside the couch, which has suddenly fallen open at his elbow. A stack of folders rests neatly inside. There’s a thick yellow pad of paper on top, covered in Arthur’s precise handwriting.