“Arthur,” I tell him, and if my voice trips over the shape of his name, I’m sure it’s just the effort of holding the sword in the air. “Shut up.”
Arthur shuts up. I hear his breath behind me, ragged and uneven.
Maybe, if I’d had more than a half second to think about it, I’d have chickened out. Maybe I would have remembered that I have one list with one name on it, which sure as hell isn’t Arthur Starling. Maybe that cold thing inside me would’ve won, and sent me running.
But the Beast strikes before I can even brace my feet. One limb unfurls, snakelike, obscenely fast, and I’m flung sideways. My face scrapes damp grass. The sword spins away from me, skidding far out of reach.
I look up and see nothing but teeth, white and wicked, and a single eye so filled with malice that my heart seizes. It’s the kind of hate no natural animal has ever felt, a mad, howling, frothing fury, the kind that only comes from unrighted wrongs and unpunished sins.
The maw opens wide above me. There are claws on either side of my body, and the putrid, fungal smell of dead grass. Someone is screaming, a hoarse, grieving sound, as if they’ve seen this movie before and know how exactly how it ends.
I’m flailing, scrabbling, reaching, still hoping, somehow, to live. The ground ripples weirdly beneath me, and my fingers close around cold iron. It’s not the sword, but it’s good enough for me. I twist the metal between my knuckles without thinking, the same way I do when I walk alone across a dark parking lot or shout back at catcallers.
The Beast strikes again, except this time it’s a killing blow, teeth heading straight for my sternum. And this time I roll aside at the last moment, and punch the gate key three inches into the black pulp of its eye.
There’s no blood, no thrashing, no animal screaming. The Beast simply comes undone, disintegrates back into lifeless mist and leaves me lying bruised and alone on the cold earth, still stubbornly alive.
I spend the following seconds reveling in the itch of grass on the back of my neck, the smeared shine of the stars, the miraculous rise and fall of my own chest. I don’t remember crawling out of the river that night—nothing but clay in my fingernails and heat against my back—but I remember this feeling, the quiet delirium that comes from not dying when you absolutely should have.
Normal night sounds return: spring peepers, crickets, a couple of chuck-will’s-widows chirping brainlessly to one another. And an awful, racking sobbing from somewhere nearby.
“Arthur?” The sobbing stops.
There’s a pause, followed by a thrashing, dragging sound, and then Arthur Starling’s face is hovering inches above mine, blotting out the stars. His skin has gone a sickly, waxy white and his hair is matted with gore and sweat. His collar has stiffened into ragged black peaks beneath the oozing wounds of his throat, and his eyes are ringed in wild white.
He looks like a werewolf that turned accidentally back into a man, mid-meal. He looks like a character invented during a late-night back-porch ghost story, a human collage of every dark thing anyone has ever whispered about the Starlings.
He looks like shit, so I say, laughing a little, unreasonably delighted by the shape he makes against the sky, “You look like shit.”
He makes a small, harassed sound. Then he kisses me.
If I had ever imagined Arthur Starling kissing me (I have), I would have thought it would be quick and awkward: a passionless, pent-up affair that would leave me irritable for a week but otherwise cold. This is, after all, a man who put his fist through a window rather than have an emotion about me.
At first, going by the taut lines of his face, I think I’m right. But then his hands find the sides of my face and his lips crush into mine with a bruising, furious heat, almost cruel in its intensity, and I think:I should have known.I should have known that he would only touch me if he’d come to the end of all his tight-held restraint. I should have known there would be no sparks between us, only a conflagration.
I could stop it. I probably should, rather than go up in flames—but it feels so good and both of us are so beautifully, absurdly alive and I don’t know who I am or where I come from but I know, right now, what I want. I push toward him instead, just as hard, twice as hungry.
His hands tighten, fingers fisting in my hair, pulling right at the raw edge of pain—I gasp—
And he breaks away, panting, wild-eyed. “Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m—” He straightens, burying his hands in his own hair and pulling hard. “It’s just—I thought you were—just likethem—” His sentence falters beneath the weight of em dashes.
“No, it’s . . .” My lips sting. I press them together, hard. “I’m okay.”
I am not okay. I have rarely been less okay in my life. I just found out my family name and fought an imaginary creature with a magic sword and I am very, very close to grabbing Arthur by the collar and sinking my teeth into his bottom lip. “I mean like in general you should probablyaskfirst, but . . .” I give him a lazy, devilish smile, as if this is nothing to either of us, as if my pulse is not pounding in my ears.
He scowls at me. “Stop that. It’s not—I can’t—” He tugs harder at his hair, looking thoroughly wretched, and I cannot honestly believe I am harboring any feelings at all for someone this absurd.
I fold my smile away. “Okay, whatever. Let’s get inside, get you cleaned up. Do you have your phone on you? It’s so dark—” Before I can finish there’s a faint, electric snap and the lights of Starling House flick on all at once. The windows cast long bars of gold across the drive, burning through the last wisps of fog. I observe, conversationally, “You know, somebody told me once the house was never hooked up to the grid.”
Arthur is still shaking, but his fingers have unwound from his hair. “It wasn’t.” He gives a jerky shrug. “Light switches started turning up sometime in the early fifties, my mother told me, and an electric stove. Just like the plumbing did in the thirties.”
I should probably freak out. I should have at least one small crisis about the existence of actual, honest-to-Jesus magic in the world, but I’m really tired and the sword is still glowing faintly in the grass, and anyway it’s not like I thought Starling House abided strictly by the laws of reality. So I just say, in a carrying voice, “Any house that can grow its own light bulbs shouldn’t need a housekeeper.”
The windows flicker, like rolled eyes.
“I think it just likes the attention,” Arthur mutters. I nearly laugh, and he nearly smiles, but the motion wrenches the torn flesh of his throat. He winces instead.
“Alright, come on.” Standing up hurts more than it should. There’s something messed up in my left side, a splintery sharpness that makes me swear as I haul Arthur to his feet. He tries to pull his hand away from mine but I pull it over my shoulders instead, ignoring the silent shriek of my ribs.
