“Is that how she picked Jasper’s name, too?”
His name runs through me in a dark current, tensing my jaw, curling my fingers into fists. When I open my eyes Baine is smiling again. This one says:Bingo.“There’s no need to be alarmed. We’re a research group. We just did our research.” Her tone is soothing, hands palm up. “And we were hoping you would help us do a little more.”
“I don’t un-understand.” My tongue feels foreign in my mouth, a wet muscle fumbling against my teeth.
Baine slides the tablet off my knees and swipes through several screens very quickly. “It won’t take much of your time. We just want to know more about your employer and his residence. If you could just answer a few questions for us, keep in touch—maybe send a few pictures, tell us if you see anything interesting—we would be very grateful.” On the word “grateful” she shows me the tablet again. The URL blurs unpleasantly in my vision, but I’m pretty sure I’m looking at my own PayPal account, except there’s an extra comma in the balance. My stomach coils tight.
I don’t know what she wants, but I already know what I’m going to say. When somebody turns up in a fancy car and knows way too much about you—where you work and how your mother died and your little brother’s given name—you say whatever will get them to leave you the hell alone.
It shouldn’t even be hard. What do I care if some out-of-towners get pictures of Starling House? What do I owe Arthur, other than forty hours a week of housecleaning?
But the answer gets lost somewhere between my brain and my tongue, caught in my throat. His coat feels very heavy on my shoulders.
Baine takes her tablet back. “Oh, and if you bring anything else off the property, we’d like to purchase it from you.” The gate key burns cold against my breastbone. I’m careful not to reach for it. “There will be no need for Jasper to list anything else on eBay. Stonewood has very high standards of behavior, after all.” Her voice is delicate, almost apologetic, as if she dislikes the game she is playing but is obliged to win it anyway.
Somewhere beneath the haze of panic and fury, I almost admire her efficiency. She might be a doctor reading an X-ray of my innards, pointing precisely to each wound and fissure. My answer comes out soft and easy, then. “Okay.”
Baine pats my knee. Hal pulls over near the front gates and idles while I tell them everything I’ve seen or thought or guessed about Starling House. I do a pretty shitty job of it—telling things out of order and doubling back, stumbling over my consonants and trailing off, my thoughts derailed by the sour taste of betrayal and fake apple flavoring—but they don’t seem to care. A little red light winks at me from the tablet.
Eventually I run out of words and sit swaying and blinking in the sickly heat. Baine reaches across me to open the door. “Thank you, Opal. We’ll talk more soon.” I scrabble back into the clean winter light, feeling the air like cold hands cupping my face.
The trees shiver above me. A cloud of birds rises from the branches, scatters, coalesces, screams down at us.
Baine leans out the window, watching.
“They do it to evade predators, apparently.” I cannot, in that moment, imagine what she could be talking about. “The way they flock. We brought in an ornithologist, and he said these are a genetically distinct population, but not a remarkable one. Except that they do this”—a nod at the sky, where the starlings twist and wheel like smoke in the wind—“more often than is typical, given the low number of natural predators nearby.”
I blink at her, swaying. “So?”
Her eyes move finally away from the sky to land on me. I can still see the dark, wild shape of the birds reflected in her sclera. “So we’d very much like to know if they have any unnatural predators.” Baine gives me a false, concerned frown as the window glides up. “You don’t look well. Take it easy, okay?”
I watch the car disappear over the crest of a hill. I try to count to ten in my head, but the numbers won’t stay where they belong, so I give up and pull the key out from under my collar. It rests heavy in my hand.
The driveway feels shorter today, a quick twist through the woods that leaves me dizzy and panting on the front steps. I raise my fist to knock, but the door whips open before my knuckles land.
Arthur glowers down at me, heavy-browed and sullen, even more hunched-up than usual. There’s a bruise yellowing along his jaw and a burst blood vessel in one eye. He gives me an insolent once-over, mouth twisting. “You’re late.”
The idea of him skulking on the other side of the door, waiting for me to show up just so he can give me shit about it, strikes me as very funny, so I laugh at him.
Then I puke across his shoes.
Arthur didn’t sleep the night before. The mist had risen for the second time in a single week—an unsettling coincidence which had happened more and more often these last few years—and he’d spent hours stalking the halls, blade held high, listening hard for the sound of something that shouldn’t exist: the susurration of scales against wallpaper, the tap-tap of claws across hardwood floors. He found it on the spiral stairs, still half-formed and weak, lost in the clever maze of the House, and sent it scattering into nothing once more.
After that he’d sagged onto his mother’s couch, watched by all the Wardens that came before him, and waited for the sun to rise. For Opal to arrive with her overloud knock and her overbright smile, for the House to fill with her relentless humming.
The sun came, wan but warm; Opal did not.
He supposes it’s possible that she’s grown tired of wasting her days with housekeeping and petty theft, that she’d waltzed out the door the previous evening with her paycheck and her crooked teeth, never intending to return. This is, of course, his dearest ambition, and does not distress him in the least.
He begins to pace, glaring out windows, scratching at the scabbed lines of the Gorgoneion. The House is restless, too, settling and shifting beneath his feet. The fire won’t stay lit and the forks clink tunelessly in their drawers. The light in the kitchen pops as he passes beneath it, the bulb staring down at him like a mournful gray eye.
He finds himself staring out a third-floor window, scowling at the horizon. A black rush of birds startles into the sky near the road, just above the gates. Arthur knows just by the shape of them, the outraged pattern they make against the gray, and that those people must have come back.
He’s felt them circling, watching, buzzing like flies against the property lines. He’s seen the vehicles idling at the gates and ripped out the sensors and wires they leave behind. He’s found the elegant business cards wedged in the front gates and received the bland corporate letters, and he’s burned them both.
Arthur has read enough records from the previous Wardens to know they aren’t the first outsiders to come calling. There have been explorers and journalists, cultists and spies, generations of Gravelys and their damn lawyers. All of them want the same thing: to exploit, to extract, to profit, to throw open doors that should remain closed. So they followed the stories and starlings to his front gates.
They’ve never gotten any farther. Part of the duty of the Warden is to ward the walls, to feed the land a few drops of blood, fresh and hot, so that it never forgets who is and isn’t a Starling.15Elizabeth Baine will never set foot on his property, unless she is much cleverer than she seems.
