He takes his hand away from her side. The air chills several degrees. A floor nail worries itself loose from the wood and jabs into his right knee. Arthur relishes it. “Opal.” He says her name slowly, savoring it the way you might linger over a last meal. “Here’s what’s going to happen: I am going to explain about the Beasts, about me, and then you are going to run. And this time you will not come back.”
“Well, third time’s the charm,” she says. She is looking down at him with fond exasperation, as if he is a child who has announced, once again, that he’s running away from home.
Arthur closes his eyes. He has to make her understand, but surely he doesn’t have to see her face when she does.
He hammers his voice flat. “When those Beasts get past the walls—when I fail to stop them—they run until they find someone else to hurt. Only Starlings can see them, but anyone can suffer.” He thinks of generations of newspaper clippings and journal entries, all those fires and floods and freak accidents, sudden deaths and strange disappearances, centuries of sin mistaken as bad luck. “And certain people . . . draw them.”
“Which people?”
“The Gravelys. Above everyone else, they’ll go after Gravely blood. I don’t know why.”
Opal goes very, very still, then. Arthur is grateful.
“The night my parents died was the night the turbine blew at the power plant. Four people died.” Arthur had torn the story from the paper with clumsy fingers, understanding for the first time that his life did not belong to him, that even his tragedies were not entirely his own. “I was so careful after that. I kept up the wards and patrolled the halls. For a whole year, I was vigilant, attentive. Until I wasn’t.”
It was Christmas that got him, the first one since he buried his parents. The House produced a few sad clumps of tinsel and mistletoe, but he ripped it all down in a fit of petulant grief. After that he had locked the sword in an old trunk, ordered a case of cheap whiskey using his father’s ID, and spent a week on the run from his own conscience. He found that, if he began drinking straight after breakfast, he could achieve a weightless, careless state by midday, and complete unconsciousness by dinner.
And then one night he’d woken up with his forehead smeared against his mother’s grave and tear-tracks frozen on his cheeks, feeling dramatic and slightly ashamed and extremely sick to his stomach. It took him far too long to notice the mist had risen.
He doesn’t tell Opal any of this; he doesn’t want to temper her fury with pity. “I saw the Beast rise. It looked at me, right at me, and I . . .” He’d looked straight back into its eyes, a pair of open wounds teeming with terror and fury and barren grief. He hadn’t been scared. How could he be scared of the eyes he saw in the bathroom mirror every morning?
Arthur doesn’t tell her that, either. “I didn’t even try to stop it. I just let it go. I ran after it, once I’d realized what I’d done. Through the gates, across the old railroad bridge. But I was too late. There were tire tracks running off the road, headed down the riverbank . . .” Arthur swallows, savoring this last moment before she hates him, before she knows what his cowardice cost her. “It was New Year’s Day.”
Her breath stops. He wonders if she is feeling the water close over her head again.
“I saw in the paper they said she drove into the river on purpose. But I knew it wasn’t her fault.”
Opal is breathing now, hitched and jagged.
Arthur keeps his eyes screwed shut. His voice scrapes out of his throat. “It was mine.”
Silence, thick and cold. Arthur thinks of food congealing on a plate.
He doesn’t expect Opal to speak to him again—what is there to say, after all, to the man who murdered your mother?—but she does. “You should know. Eleanor dedicated her book to ‘every child who needs a way into Underland.’”
Opal has puked on him and kissed him and told him to go fuck himself more than once, but she’s never spoken to him like this: cool and distant, perfectly detached. “She said to befriend the Beasts and follow them down. Maybe you should try it.” Her voice betrays her on the last sentence, a fatal, furious shake.
Arthur doesn’t know what she’s trying to tell him or why; he’s expending all his attention on keeping his eyes shut and his hands still.
He hears the couch creak, followed by a metallic clink and then, finally, the slap of bare feet on wood floors.
When Arthur opens his eyes several minutes later, his gate key is lying on the floor in front of him, and he is alone. She has run from him a third time, and God, he regrets everything.