Can you guess what happened to all of them? Are you starting to see the pattern?
A Warden falls. The house calls someone new—someone lost or lonely, someone whose home was stolen or sold or who never had a home in the first place. It calls them, and they come, and they are never homeless again.
All it costs is blood. I mean that very literally—Arthur’s notes mention some kind of blood oath （God, that’s embarrassing to say） to become Warden.
But it doesn’t stop there, does it? It takes more blood, and more, until another Warden is dead and some other poor bastard starts to dream of staircases and hallways and locked doors. Again and again, faster and faster.
It sounds okay at first, even sort of noble: a house for the unhoused, a home for all the people whose homes were stolen from them. It’s like a fairy tale, a dream. But then it eats them alive.
In her diary Etsuko called Starling House their “sanctuary.” But it’s not a sanctuary. It’s a grave. And Opal: it won’t be yours.
TWENTY-ONE
The last time I heard a story about Starling House I was sitting inside it. The night pressing at the windows, Arthur’s blood on my hands, his eyes wild on mine. It had all sounded so grand and so terrible, like a modern-day myth.
Told here, sandwiched between the cornfield and the football field in the mean light of noon, it just sounds sad and strange.
Jasper is watching my face closely. “Well?”
“Well, what?” I lift one shoulder and let it fall, showily unconcerned. “I got fired, remember? Haven’t been back since. I appreciate your concern, but this is all extremely old news.”
“Have the dreams stopped?”
I tuck my hair behind my ear. “What dreams?”
Jasper rubs his face so hard it looks like he’s trying to physically mold it into an expression of patience. “There are two more things you should know. The first one is that whatever’s going on in that house is getting worse. I looked at all the dates, went through more newspapers . . .” He rubs his face again, this time like he’s trying to remove something from it. “The Wardens are dying faster.”
My own pulse is suddenly loud in my ears. “Since when?” Screw waiting for a text, I’m going to call Arthur over and over until he picks up, warn him—but then I remember Arthur’s oath to be the last Warden, the pure panic on his face when I mentioned my dreams, and realize: he already knows.
“I don’t know, like the early eighties? But here’s the second thing.” Jasper turns until he’s facing me, his eyes heavy on mine. “All these people, every Warden, had a choice. They chose to act on their dreams, to follow the fucking starlings or whatever. They chose to swear themselves to that place—even Arthur.”
“Maybe.”
“No, not maybe. Look, there was something else tucked in the notes.” For the first time in this conversation, Jasper looks a little guilty. “I know I shouldn’t have read it, because of privacy or whatever, but . . .”
He pulls his Algebra II textbook out of his bag and withdraws a very familiar piece of notebook paper. I recognize the faded blue of the lines, the plain handwriting, the torn edge. But this isn’t the page I found before, the one that ended midsentence: This is your birthright, Arthur. That’s what I told you the night you ran away, isn’t—
This is the other half of the letter. I take it from Jasper without speaking, and read.
it? But—God forgive me, because I doubt you can—I was wrong.
There’s no such thing as a birthright. All you have inherited from us are your cheekbones and your stubbornness. You are free to make your own life, build your own home, fight your own battles. This House has no heirs; the next Warden will be whoever takes up the sword.
I’m sorry. I have loved this place for so long, and fought so hard for it, that I got all confused. I thought I was fighting for a home; I was only ever fighting for you.
Back in North Carolina, the dreams didn’t come to me when the bank took the house away. They didn’t come when we missed rent in the trailer park, either. It was only when I knew you were on the way that I started dreaming of Starling House, because that’s when I decided I needed someplace nobody could take from me.
I chose. So will you.
I love you.
Mom
P.S. Your father wants me to remind you to trim the roses before the last frost and stake the foxgloves by June. I told him you weren’t coming back and he said that’s fine but I should tell you just in case.