Claws (9780545469678) (12 page)

The ratters weren't sure what to make of her, Emma realized. Her claws were out, ready to strike. She could attack now, surprise them. No. She retracted her claws and held up her hands. “I just want to talk,” she said, hoping she didn't sound as small and pathetic as the Toe-Chewer had. “I'm looking for someone, and I thought you could help me. I wasn't going to steal anything.”

“Thieves always say such things when we find them creeping and slinking, and cats only open their mouths to bite and lie,” said the ratter with the headset.

The cats were done talking.

Fat Leon sprang forward and clawed at the leader's face. Jack leaped at another ratter, hissing and yowling as he scratched and bit. And the Toe-Chewer darted back and forth, swiping at the ratters' feet.

But there were too many of them. Emma saw the ratters swarm over the cats, then one of them gripped her arms with its clawed fists, and she felt something hot wrap around her neck. A ratter tail. Her skin burned. Not just where the tail touched her, but all over. It was like being stung by a thousand wasps.

This was all wrong. Her cats should be hunting down the ratters, not being swatted away like flies. And how dare they attack a Pride-Heart? Emma felt her tears turn to anger, and a surge of something — perhaps confidence or power — flowing through her body. She felt the Heart's Blood inside her.
The magic is here,
it said.
Use it.

She had to do something. But all she seemed able to do was scream.

She screamed as the ratters tugged on her arms.

She screamed as her cats tugged at the magic inside her.

She screamed as a ratter bit down on one of her legs . . .

And then her scream turned into a high-pitched squeaking that went on and on and on . . .

The tail around Emma's neck flicked away, releasing her. The rat-hands gripping her arms let her go. She fell to the floor of the tunnel where she curled into a ball. Shaking, she ran a hand over her mouth. It felt . . . fuzzy. She felt her arms, her face, her legs. Then she opened her eyes and looked at her hands.

She had clawed ratter hands covered with dark brown fur.

The ratters stared down at her.

The Toe-Chewer was still hissing as he hung from a ratter's claws by the scruff of his neck. Fat Leon and Jack had been backed into a corner.

“Turning yourself into a ratter wasn't quite what I had in mind,” Jack said. He sounded amused. “But I was right. Look at the progress you've made.”

“Clever cat trick,” whispered the lead ratter. But he seemed uncertain.

“We've never seen a cat turn into one of us before,” one of the other ratters said. “It even smells right. And look at its tail!”

Emma found herself turning until she faced completely backward and was peering down at her own furry butt. There was the tail, long and pink, stretched out behind her.

“Cat and human and now ratter. The ratterking will want her secrets,” she heard a ratter say. “Let's take her to him.” Clawed hands were grabbing her again, gripping her hands and feet and lifting her up above their heads to carry her. She tried to scratch them, but her arms and legs weren't the same length anymore, her claws not as sharp. She didn't know how to move in this body.
I should have bitten them,
she thought, feeling massive front teeth with the tip of her tongue.

“Why will the ratterking want me?” she tried to say. “What are you going to do with my cats?” But she didn't know how to talk with her new mouth, and the words came out mumbled and squeaky.

She didn't want to be a ratter. She didn't want to be in the sewers under the forest. What if she never got out of this place? What if she just disappeared like Helena?

The ratters moved quickly. Emma couldn't follow all of the twists and turns they made as they scampered through the sewer tunnels.
We must be right under Old Downtown now,
she thought as they passed through a disused underground parking lot. Eventually they came to a wide basement of gray stone. There, the cables from the tunnel running along the ceiling and snaking every which way over the floor, fed into what looked like a hundred computers. A mass of ratters crouched over the keyboards, their black eyes bright from the glow of flatscreen monitors and flashing LEDs. They glanced at her, pointing and whispering among themselves.

The ratter with the headset stepped forward. “Do all the members of the ratterking agree?”

“Of course. They want to find out what she knows. She is of interest,” barked a new voice. “Be quick, before she gets her senses back!”

Emma turned to catch sight of this new ratter, but as she moved an odd smell caught her attention. It was more than the smell of ratter. It was a mysterious, secret kind of scent, and it was everywhere — on the computers, on the ratters, on the walls, in the cables.

“Hurry! She smells our secrets,” came the second voice again, urgent and hungry. “Quickly, do it now!”

Emma felt ratter hands on her tail, rough and unpleasant, twisting it painfully. A shudder ran up her spine. She struggled, but she was held by a ratter on each side and she couldn't get free. It felt as if they were tying her tail in knots.

“What are you doing? Get off me!” she yelled. Her words were clearer now, though her voice still wasn't her own. “Where are my cats? I'll claw your faces off!”

They lowered her purposefully to the ground and backed off slowly, watching.

She sprang forward, ready to run as fast as she could, but her tail was caught fast. A sharp pain shot up her body and she landed flat on her face.

Emma stopped struggling and looked up. She was standing with a group of ratters in the center of a huge U-shaped table, the kind she'd seen in offices on TV. Like every table in the room, it was covered with a mass of computers, and at each keyboard was a ratter. But their tails tied and twisted until they were somehow fused together. It was impossible to tell where one ratter's tail ended and another began.

She'd read about this on CragWiki. It was a ratterking, a bunch of ratters tied together that acted as the king of a ratter nest. Hardly any humans had ever even seen one. At least, hardly any humans had seen one and told someone about it afterward.

All this Emma remembered in the moment before she looked down to see her own tail knotted together with the pink mass of tails. She was part of the ratterking.

CRAG FACT OF THE DAY:

“Not much is known about cat magic, as curious researchers have an unfortunate habit of turning into mice.”

CragWiki.org

I
t doesn't matter,
Emma thought, staring at the place where her tail vanished.
I'm not really a ratter. All I have to do is turn myself back into a human and then I can get out of here.

But she didn't know how. Emma didn't even know what she'd done to turn herself into a ratter in the first place. She looked around. Most of the ratters that were part of the ratterking were ignoring her, tapping delicately at their keyboards with long pink claws. But the brown-and-white ratter closest to her was watching her, swiveling his head from side to side.

“Hello, Pride-Heart human-cat,” he said, his voice echoing in her head in a hundred ratter voices. “Now ours, a ratter always. Be calm now, not too much fear. Safe, very safe among friends.”

She could hear the noise of the ratterking now, chattering away just at the edge of her mind. There were so many voices. It was like a dream she couldn't quite remember. Or a nightmare, constantly filling her mind with quiet whispers.

“Gets better with time,” the ratter said in a gentle voice. “Easier. Not so confused and loud.”

“What do you want from me?” Emma managed to say.

“Same as you want from us. Secrets. Knowings. We have important work to do.”

“What work? What use could my secrets be to you?”

The ratter made a high-pitched chirping noise that Emma knew was laughter. “That would be telling.”

Emma looked away from him and down at her tail. She took a deep breath to steady herself, then grabbed it with both hands, wrapping her long ratter fingers around it.

She gripped tight and pulled.

The pain made her squeak, and her cry was mimicked by the rest of the ratterking. It felt like the skin of her tail had been superglued to the other. She couldn't pull it free without losing half her skin. Or half her tail. She couldn't do it; it hurt too much. She let her tail drop and sat back on her haunches.

“No, no, Pride-Heart human-cat. You have to stay and give up your knowings. Then you'll be one of us.”

“I can't stay here,” Emma said, sniffing. Her eyes burned, but no tears came. “I'm not a ratter, or a cat. I just want to find my sister.”

“Ah, a sister. What sister is that? Cat or human?” asked another ratter.

She didn't want to let them into her head, but if she did maybe they'd help her and let her go . . .

“Help us search and smell,” the ratter went on. “If she's hiding we can find her.” He waved at the computers and the ratters working at them. “See? All human secrets belong to us now.”

“And then you'll help me get her back?” Emma asked.

The ratter swiveled his head from side to side again. “Why do anything? The knowing is enough. The knowing is the sweetest part.”

“No, no,” another ratter insisted. “The sweetest part is when others know we know. Then we have power. All secrets belonging to the ratterking. All knowings. Human, crag, faerie.”

She smelled something. A secret, sharp and bitter in her nose.
Not just a secret.
The ratterking knew something it didn't want to tell her. But she was part of the ratterking now. They couldn't keep it from her.

A man had come to the ratterking. He was blindfolded. She couldn't see him clearly; the ratters' eyes weren't good. But they remembered his smell, and it was familiar to her. Her dad.

“Please, I'm trying to find my daughter,”
he'd said.

And while he was talking, ratters had hacked into Helena's e-mail and her HangOut page, searching for useful secrets.

Helena had logged in twice the week after she disappeared, each time from a different library. After that, nothing. No online activity, no e-mail or HangOut, no sign of her at all. Then one quick blip on her HangOut account two months later, using a phone that belonged to some girl Emma didn't know.

The girl had posted some photos on her own HangOut page, but they weren't very interesting. They were shot in some kind of club or party. There were people dressed in fancy clothes, an empty stage, but the pictures were blurry and had been taken down from the HangOut page after just an hour. Emma wondered why. After Helena used the phone, the other girl hadn't used it again, nor had she used her HangOut account or her e-mail. It was like she'd disappeared, too. Who was she? Had anyone reported her missing?

And why had the ratters sent her dad away without telling him any of this? Worst of all, they'd kept looking, sniffing out secrets, and had tracked the phone to a building in the heart of New Downtown, a building full of secrets they wanted to uncover — and missing kids were only the smallest of them.

* * *

“You already looked for Helena,” Emma said. “You found where she'd used that phone. But why didn't you tell my dad?”

“He had no secrets we wanted,” the brown-and-white ratter said. “But you do. You are useful, cat-girl. Help us find more knowings.”

“I can't stay here.” Emma felt suddenly desperate. “I'm not a ratter.”

“But you're part of the ratterking now,” said the ratter. “Why would you go?”

“Please,” Emma said. “What if I accidentally turn you into mice?”

But the ratter just twitched his nose at her. “You can't even turn back into a girl. Stay. Safe with us.”

Safe. Safe was everything Jack wasn't, everything the cats weren't. Her parents couldn't keep her safe, just like they couldn't keep Helena safe.
A cat afraid of her own claws
. . . No wonder Jack had dragged her here hoping to make her kill something.

She wasn't a killer. She wasn't the Pride-Heart the cats, and Jack, wanted her to be. She wasn't the old Emma anymore, either. But if she was going to be anything but one of the ratterking's tails, she needed to figure out what she was, quick.

“I don't want to be safe,” Emma said slowly, as if speaking too fast might scare away the feeling growing in her chest. “Safe isn't going to bring Helena back. Safe is just hiding because I'm scared.”

“Ah, Helena. Yes, she has interesting secrets . . .”

But Emma wasn't listening to the ratter anymore. She was listening to the Heart's Blood. She closed her eyes, and this time when she thought about turning back into a girl, she imagined herself with claws, with night vision, with a pride. A tough girl with cat magic running through her. A Pride-Heart.