Or, he supposes, simply patient. She would have to wait until Arthur has found a way past that final door, the one that has no key. Until he’s descended into the dark and done what none of the previous Wardens have ever managed. The gate would swing wide for her then, but it wouldn’t matter, because the House would be only a house, with nothing beneath it but worms and wisteria roots.
The starlings settle back into the branches. The car is gone.
A moment later, Arthur feels the gates open. He presses his forehead hard against the glass.
A figure emerges from the woods, a scrawny shape swallowed by the black square of his coat, her face white beneath the red blaze of her hair. The sight strikes him as entirely and dangerously correct, as if she should always be wearing his clothes, walking toward his House. It’s difficult to tell, but he thinks her face might be tilted up toward his; the possibility makes all his scars itch.
It’s not an itch, of course. It’s that tedious, boyish hunger, which he hasn’t indulged since he returned from school. Luke sent a few letters, but Arthur burned them unopened. Luke had always been too soft, too sweet; after an hour in Starling House he would have run screaming and never come back.
He watches Opal walk closer and thinks, inanely:She keeps coming back.
The House sighs around him. He raps his knuckles against the sill hard enough to sting, unsure which of them he’s trying to reprimand.
He tries to make himself as forbidding and unpleasant as possible when he opens the door, but Opal doesn’t notice. She looks up at him with her eyes gone odd and dark, her freckles stark against bloodless cheeks. She laughs at him. And then—
Arthur stares down at his shoes, spattered with stringy bile.
Opal wipes her mouth on her sleeve, swaying a little, and whispers, hoarsely, “Sorry.”
He gestures her wordlessly into the hall. She stumbles a little over the threshold and his hands give a traitorous twitch. “Bathroom?” His voice is indifferent. She nods, lips white.
Her footsteps are usually light and furtive, like those of an animal ready to bolt, but now she walks heavily, bones loose, shoes scuffing. Arthur’s arm hovers at her back, not quite touching her.
“Sorry man. I mean Arthur. I mean Mr. Starling. About your shoes I didn’t mean to.” Her sentences run in a strange, flat rhythm, as if someone shook the punctuation out of them. “I’ll clean it up just give me a sec.”
There’s an anxious note in her voice that makes his stomach twist with guilt. As if he cares about the state of the House, as if he hasn’t purposefully overfilled the tub when it annoyed him, watching the water drip through the ceiling with black delight.
In the bathroom he settles her on the closed lid of the toilet and hands her a cup of tap water. She drinks and he kneels awkwardly on the tile, close enough to catch the sugary, chemical scent on her clothes. The room is much smaller than he remembers it; he grinds an elbow surreptitiously into the wall. It takes no notice.
“Thanks. Sorry about the mess. I’ll take care of—”
He makes an embarrassed grimace. “Don’t worry about it.”
She nods sloppily, sloshing water. “Okay. Okay sure.” Her forehead is sheened with sweat, her throat flushed.
“May I take your coat? Here.” Arthur reaches up for the top button, but Opal jerks back so hard she rocks the porcelain tank behind her.
“No.It’s mine.” She frowns down at him, blinking as if she can’t quite focus on his features. Up close her eyes look wrong, her pupils swollen and glassy, her irises reduced to slim rings of silver.
“Are you—are youhigh?” Arthur is almost relieved; so few of his problems are mundane.
She blinks, then she laughs again. It echoes off the tile, hollow and brittle, and leaves her panting. “Oh, go to hell Arthur Starling.” She swallows hard. “Sorry sorry don’t fire me I’m just a little carsick or something because Hal is a shitty driver and I had to read all those headlines. Which is funny because most of the bad luck in this town never even makes it into the headlines. In third grade the ceiling collapsed like three feet from Jasper’s desk16and the last time I went swimming I got my foot caught in an old trotline and nearly drowned and—” She’s forced to pause for air. “—and I never looked at any pictures of the accident before—it was anaccident,Constable Mayhew can gofuckhimself—” She pinches her own lips together, hard.
Acid guilt rises from Arthur’s stomach to his throat. There are no accidents in Eden.
Opal unpinches her lips. “I’m not feeling great. And I didn’t really want to spend the morning playing twenty questions about you and your creepy-ass house.”
The pipes whine in the walls and Opal pats the cast-iron lip of the bathtub in absent-minded apology. Arthur pretends not to notice.
He takes the cup from her hands and says, mildly, “Someone was asking about me?”
“Yeah. I was walking along and this corporate lady pulls up in a nice car with a cheap air freshener and tells me—”
“You were walking?”
Opal gives him another unsteady frown. “I just said that.”
“Why were you walking?” He doesn’t know where she and her brother live, but the nearest house is at least a mile away, and it was chilly this morning.
