I lean against the door, hoping I look nonchalant rather than very close to passing out. “Did you really think I would leave the last picante chicken in plain sight? I have my own supply.”
“Opal—”
“I’ll never tell you where. Death first.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing! I just jogged home.”
“You . . . jogged . . . home.” He stretches the word “jogged” into three skeptical syllables. I shrug. He gives me a long, pursed-lip stare, then looks pointedly at the floor beside me. “And I guess that’s ketchup you’re dripping all over the carpet?”
“Nah.” I shove my treacherous left hand in my hoodie pocket and dive for the bathroom. “Sriracha.”
Jasper thumps and hollers and issues vague threats against my person, but I turn on the overhead fan and the shower until he gives up. I sag onto the toilet seat and let the shakes move from my legs to my shoulders to my fingertips. I should probably feel panicky or pissed or at least confused, but all I can summon is the dull, aggrieved sense of having been fucked with and not liking it much.
The effort of actually undressing and getting into the shower overwhelms me, so I skin out of my hoodie and hold my hand under the spray until the water runs mostly clear down the drain. It isn’t as deep as I’d thought, actually: just a ragged line slicing ominously across my life and love lines. （I don’t go in for palmistry, but Mom ate all that shit with a spoon. She couldn’t remember court dates or parent-teacher meetings, but she knew our star charts by heart.）
I dump half a bottle of peroxide over the cut and fish around for a Band-Aid that could conceivably cover it. I wind up tearing strips off an old sheet and wrapping them around my hand, like I did the year Jasper went as a mummy for Halloween.
By the time I open the door the room is dark, the walls tiger-striped by the shine of parking lot lights through the blinds. Jasper is in bed but not actually asleep—his asthma makes him snore—but I creep into my twin as if he were.
I lie listening to him listening to me, trying not to notice the throb of my own pulse in my hand or remember the black of those eyes boring into mine.
“Are you okay?” Jasper’s voice has a wobble to it that makes me want to crawl into his bed and sleep spine-to-spine, the way we used to back when there were still three of us and only two beds. And later, after the dreams started.
I shrug at the ceiling instead. “I’m always okay.”
The polyester sighs as he rolls to face the wall. “You’re a pretty good liar”—I’m a fantastic liar—“but that’s for everybody else. Not family.”
The innocence of it makes me want to laugh, or maybe cry. The biggest lies are always for the ones you love the most. I’ll take care of you. It’ll be fine. Everything’s okay.
I swallow hard. “Everything’s okay.” His disbelief is palpable, a chill emanating from the other side of the room. “Anyway, it’s over.” I don’t know if he believes it, but I do.
Until the dream.
It isn’t like the others. The others had a soft, sepia light to them, like old home movies or fond memories you’ve half forgotten. This one is like diving into cold water on a hot day, crossing from one world to another.
I’m back at the gates of Starling House, but this time the padlock falls open and the gates swing wide before me. I walk down the dark throat of the drive, thorns tugging at my sleeves, trees tangling their fingers in my hair. Starling House emerges from the dark like a vast animal from its den: a gabled spine, wings of pale stone, a tower with a single amber eye. Steep steps curl like a tail around its feet.
The front door is unlocked, too. I sweep across the threshold into a maze of mirrors and windows, halls that branch and split and switchback, staircases that end in empty walls or closed doors. I walk faster and faster, shoving through each door and rushing to the next as if there is something I want desperately to find.
The air grows colder and wetter as I go deeper. A pale mist seeps up from the floorboards, coiling around my ankles. At some point, I realize I am running.
I stumble through a trapdoor, down the stone stairs, down and down. Roots crawl like veins across the floor, and I have the confused thought that they must belong to the house itself, as if dead lumber and nails could come alive given enough time.
I shouldn’t be able to see anything in the darkness, but I see the stairs end abruptly in a door. A crude stone door crisscrossed with silver chains. Another padlock dangles from the chains. The lock is open. The door is cracked.