Arthur tries to hold his body away from mine and I elbow him. “Don’t be weird, just do it.” His protest strikes me as half-hearted.
We lurch together into Starling House, the sword point striking sparks against the stone. The front steps are somehow only two or three stairs long and the front door swings open before I can touch it. I stroke the frame as we pass and the wood creaks worriedly at me. The carved symbols are still very slightly luminescent, like glow sticks the day after a sleepover.
I don’t know where we’re headed or which of us is steering, but the first room we stumble into is the cozy parlor with the squashy couch. I dump Arthur on the cushions and his palm skims the back of my arm as we part. I walk away without looking at him.
There are an unlikely number of freshly laundered washcloths in the kitchen. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet is already open, displaying a slightly frantic array of antibiotics and disinfectants. “It’s alright,” I say. “He’ll be okay.” The ceiling shudders.
Arthur does a very unconvincing I-don’t-need-you-I-can-do-this-myself act when I return to the parlor, but his skin is the color of old mushrooms and his pupils are swollen and shocky and there are bruises blooming beneath his tattoos. The hellcat ends the argument by materializing on his lap and curling into a ball, like a furry land mine.
I slap Arthur’s hand away from my stack of washcloths and shove him back against the couch. Maybe I should be a little gentler but he did recently kiss me with ardent desperation before suffering a sudden change of heart andapologizingfor it, so the way I see it he’s lucky I’m not scrubbing salt in his wounds.
I begin roughly, sitting on the coffee table while I swipe ruthlessly at dirt and blood, wringing gory brown water back into the bowl. Arthur bears it with perfect stoicism, his breath barely hitching even when I drag the cloth over the tattered skin of his throat. The only time he flinches is when my knuckles brush the underside of his jaw.
“Sorry,” I say, not meaning it. He makes a hoarse, wordless sound and tilts his head against the couch with his eyes firmly closed. His pulse is quick and uneven beneath the rag.
Under the blood I find other, older marks. Scars, jagged and knotted; yellowed bruises and lines of scabs like scattered ellipses; tattoos he inked himself, the lines shaky over the bones, where it must have stung most. There’s a crooked cross visible beneath his torn collar, a constellation on his left shoulder, an open eye where his collarbones meet. That one must have hurt. All of it must have hurt: his skin is a map of suffering, a litany of pain. I’m plenty familiar with pain, with scars that never heal quite right and still ache sometimes on misty nights, but at least I’ve always had Jasper. At least I’ve always had a reason.
My hands are slowing, gentling against my will. “Jesus, Arthur. What have you done to yourself?” He doesn’t answer. I want to shake him, hold him, touch him. I unscrew the cap on the hydrogen peroxide instead. “Why don’t youleave?”
“I did, once.” He’s speaking to the ceiling, eyes still closed as I dab peroxide on his throat. It hisses and bubbles, foaming pink. “I came back. Not that I don’t dream about selling this place and getting an apartment in Phoenix.” The curtains give a small, offended huff.
“Phoenix?”
He must hear the laugh in my voice because he shrugs defensively. “It seems nice. Hot, dry. Bet there’s never any fog.”
“So what are you still doing here?”
He straightens and opens his eyes, but can’t seem to look me in the face. His gaze lands to my left, where my hair corkscrews past my ear, and his face twists with that awful guilt. “I have . . . responsibilities.”
It’s a statement that would have been obnoxiously cryptic before I saw him bloodied and beaten, brought to his knees but still trying desperately to protect me from a creature that shouldn’t exist at all. The memory of it—the unwavering line of his spine, the way he glared up at the Beast as if he would fight it with his bare teeth before he let it past him—does something painful to my lungs. “I . . . thanks. Thank you.”
“You should go.Please,go.” His voice has none of the snarling, theatrical fury it did when he told me to run earlier. This isn’t a command or a scare tactic or a show; it’s a plea, weary and sincere, which any decent person would honor.
I laugh in his face. “Absolutely the fuck not.”
“Miss Opal—”
“If you call me that again, I will do you a harm.”
That treacherous not-quite-a-dimple crimps the corner of his mouth. “You wouldn’t hurt an injured man.”
“I would change your ringtone to Kid Rock and call you every day at dawn for a decade. My hand to God.”
“I would simply turn it off.”
I tilt my head. “Would you?”
His eyes move to mine, then away, dimple vanishing. “No,” he says quietly. “God, just gohome.Please”—his throat moves—“Opal.”
I settle on the other side of the couch and pull my feet up on the cushions. “Number one, I don’t have a home.” I wonder suddenly if that’s still true, if the Gravely name could change more than my past. I imagine squashing that thought into a grocery bag and shoving it very deep under my bed. “And number two, I’m not leaving until you explain.”
“Explain what?” he asks, which is weak even for him.
I gesture at the sword lying on the floor, the bloodied rags, the mad, impossible house all around us. “Everything.”
He looks like he’s planning to say no. To tell me that he can’t, or it’s none of my business, or make some snide comment perfectly calculated to send me storming out of the house. I can tell by the set of his jaw that he won’t be swayed by lies or wiles or charming smiles.
So I tell him the truth. “Look, both of us almost died tonight and I don’t know why or how. I’m sure you’ve got your reasons for keeping secrets and God knows I’m not trustworthy, but I’m pretty freaked out right now. I’m confused and angry and”—admitting it feels like calling my own bluff, like laying out a pair of sevens after talking a big game—“scared.”
