Claws (9780545469678) (22 page)

L
ights gleamed in the darkness as they made their way into the Deep Forest. Some flickered like distant bonfires, others glowed steadily like streetlights.

“What are they?” Emma asked the hag.

But it was Jack who answered. “Wisps. They lead you off your path until you're lost, then they vanish. It's easy to get lost here.”

Emma didn't doubt that for a moment. Though the moonlight was unnaturally bright, a thick fog seemed to lie between the looming trees, and beyond them was only a hazy, impenetrable blackness.

There was a tension in the air, like the Deep Forest was waiting for something. Somewhere far away a horn blew, and there was the distant sound of hooves thumping on the ground. A wolf howled, and others picked up the sound. Was that what the hag meant by howlers? Branches seemed to appear suddenly out of the darkness, scratching at Emma's arms and face, pulling at her hair. She knocked one of the branches away, and there was a flutter of leathery wings. Then they were gone.

She paused. She smelled something different. Musk and damp fur. The hag seemed to sense it, too, for she stopped abruptly and sniffed.

“What is that?” Emma whispered.

“Howlers,” the hag said, and she shrank back into the forest shadows.

A pair of red eyes appeared among the trees. It was almost impossible not to stare at them. Then Emma heard a growl. The sound reverberated in her chest and made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Her pride hissed and pulled magic from her, and their hissing turned into roaring as they became large cats.

More red eyes appeared, drawing closer, and Emma could make out the howlers now: saber-toothed wolves, as big as any of the huge cats behind her. Emma's heart pounded as she scanned the trees, trying to figure out some clever magic that might prevent a bloody fight.

Then one of the wolves stood up on two legs. Reaching up with its paws — no, they were hands — it grabbed the fur of its head and pulled. The wolf's neck split apart, and a man's head came free. Yet even as it hung there the wolf-head still breathed, the red eyes staring at her.

Emma gasped and stumbled backward. The big cats around her growled, but she felt their fear. The hag was nowhere to be seen.

The man's head was bald, his face hairless and lined. When he opened his mouth and spoke, it was a harsh, snarling language Emma had never heard before. The sound echoed strangely among the trees, changing, then turning into words she understood.

“What sort of cat wears a human skin and travels with shadows?” the echoes said.

“I'm Emma,” she said, and her voice, too, echoed among the trees. “I'm a girl and a Pride-Heart. We just want to pass.”

“This is our hunting ground,” the man said, and as he moved his mouth, the wolf's mouth moved as well. “Cats are not welcome here.”

A few of her cats spat at this, but Emma held up a hand to calm them. She made sure her claws were retracted. “Then let us through. You won't see us again. I'm only here at all because the faeries stole my sister. They stole someone from you, too, I think. I saw a wolf in their zoo, in a glass cage.”

The man and the wolf-head stared at her; the man nodded. “It is so. But she roamed far outside our lands. No faerie would trespass among our trees to steal from us.”

“I'm not here to steal, either,” Emma said.

He sniffed the air and leaned forward. “You're lucky. Today is High Spring, Ostara, the end of a long sleep. A day of hunger and of hunting. To kill a human Pride-Heart would attract attention from beasts more dangerous than us. The forest has woken, as it does on this day every year, and you would be wise to stick to the path.” The wolf-skin's lips pulled back in a snarl. “My pack will not trouble you, but other creatures may decide differently. Do not hunt in the moonlight. Do not kill among the trees. You have been warned.”

He pulled the wolf-skin back over his head, and then only a large, red-eyed wolf remained where the man had been. It dropped back on all fours, watching her a moment longer, then turned away and disappeared into the trees, the rest of the pack following.

Emma stood still for what seemed like a long time, trembling. Even her cats, for all their strength, had gathered close. They began to shrink to their normal sizes once more.

“What did he mean about the Deep Forest being awake tonight?” Emma asked.

The air seemed to swallow her words, and the trees rustled and creaked even though there was no wind.

“Tonight the Deep Forest is alive, hungry,” whispered Fat Leon. “Hungrier than usual for High Spring, I think. Can't you feel it in the air?”

“If the faeries are using the forest's High Spring magic to change your sister, we can't have much time left,” Jack said.

A shadow emerged, became solid. The hag was still there. “Faeries not far,” she sang. “Listen.”

Emma concentrated. Perhaps she could hear something in the distance. Wind chimes. Bells. Faerie voices. There was a brightness up ahead, an even stronger blue moonlight. They walked toward the light only to find the way blocked by trees. Low-hanging branches intertwined as if they had always been that way, though the path had seemed clear before. The spaces between the tree trunks were choked with hanging vines and thick, thorn-covered rose bushes.

“Faeries only wants invited humans,” the hag said.

“We can squeeze through,” Jack said. “Just try harder.”

Emma pushed at the vines and tried to crawl through the bushes. Her pride followed. But it was no use. The thorns scratched her. Brambles stuck to her clothes and tangled in her hair. And everything seemed to be positioned in just the right way to snag at her feet or scratch her face. She could hear her cats yowling in pain.

Above her the rustling of the trees seemed to become a whisper.
You're not welcome here
.
You shouldn't be here. You want to go back. You want to run away.
Was this the faeries' way of keeping her out? A part of her would have been glad to do exactly what the whispers said. When she turned to look back, the trees were spaced far apart, giving her plenty of room to walk through them.

“I'm not leaving without my sister,” she hissed, cutting at the vines and brambles with her claws.

She could leave
, the trees whispered,
but she wants to stay. They all want to stay.

“She'll come with me. I know she will!” Emma said. This wasn't going to be like Nissa's eye-puppet Jen. This was Helena. Once Helena realized what was happening, what the faeries were going to do to her, she'd want to go home. Pieces of vine and branch and rosebush fell away from her claws.

We will not let you take her. Only those that want to leave can pass.

“Fine,” Emma spat, and then, with a last effort, she managed to climb through the tangle, stumbling onto clear forest floor. The hag was already waiting for her, shadowy and insubstantial. The pride hissed and spat as they finished clawing their way through to stand beside her.

“Easy,” Jack said, licking at a scratch on his side.

“Yeah, right,” Emma said. “Easy.”

“Shut up,” Cricket hissed. “There's someone coming.”

Emma ducked down behind a tree and sniffed the air. There was a sharp chemical scent that wasn't at all like the forest. Definitely something human. Shampoo or deodorant.

“I heard voices,” came a boy's voice. “Should we go back and tell them someone's out here?”

A girl answered. “Doesn't matter what you hear. Corbin thinks someone's trying to sneak in, and he wants to see who. That means we have to see it or we'll be no good to the lords and ladies. Without our eyes they won't know what's going on.”

“Well, hurry up, I don't want to miss the ceremony! Who knows when they'll let us up on the twenty-seventh floor again?”

“I'm going as fast as I can. You think it's easy walking on soft ground wearing heels?”

They were crashing through the forest, loud and obvious and definitely human.

Emma found Fat Leon crouching nearby and put a finger to her mouth for silence. He tilted his head at her slightly, as if to say,
You're telling us?
Emma waited until she was sure the boy and girl had passed, then she inched carefully around the tree.

She could see now that the trees ended abruptly ahead of them and that beyond them was a clearing, bright with that unnatural moonlight. Tall LED lamps slowly changed from yellow and red to white to green, casting the nearby leaves first in autumn colors, then winter, then spring and summer. A faerie in designer sunglasses sat at a foldout table at the edge of the clearing, fiddling with a laptop computer. Soft, mystical music — bells and wind chimes and flutes — flowed from huge speakers positioned around the clearing. A portable generator hummed nearby, cables spewing out of it and snaking through the grass, powering the lights and speakers.

At the far end of the clearing a spotlit wooden stage had been erected next to an impossibly tall tree that reached up into the sky until it seemed as though it would touch the stars themselves. In front of the stage were the faeries Emma had seen in the nightclub — the honeysuckle and spiderweb faeries — and more, although she didn't see Nissa. They were surrounded by a crowd of young people in elaborate outfits, watching both the stage and the faeries, and chattering excitedly.

An enormous screen was suspended from one of the tree's branches, showing a live shot of an empty stage. Only the stage wasn't empty. A shiver ran up Emma's spine as she saw the faerie standing center stage. It was the toadlike one who'd been with Helena at the nightclub. Corbin. His glamour was tall and broad-shouldered, his skin a warm olive brown, and his hair a wavy, sun-bleached chestnut shade. His brown eyes were bright and deep. The kind of eyes Helena's magazines would have called “intense.”

He was holding a microphone, and a deep, smooth voice poured out of the speakers over the music.

“Welcome, friends and guests and worshippers! I hope you've all enjoyed yourselves so far, but now the real celebration begins. Tonight is a special night, my friends. Ostara. The Deep Forest is awake, and there is power in the earth and in the trees.”

A hush fell over the audience as the faerie talked. It was as if he was lulling them, hypnotizing them almost. Even Emma had to shake her head to keep from nodding along excitedly. “Is Helena here?” she whispered to the hag.

The hag sniffed the air. “Close, now, and coming closer. I smell her. Afraid and excited both. Runaways smells like that, too, when they're still fresh. Best to finds them quick before there's only fear left to taste.”

Corbin was still talking. “It's been a year since our last cele-bration, but there is only one night when we can borrow the Deep Forest's magic and perform our miracle. The transformation of humans into faeries. Only tonight. And only four chosen.”

The captive audience breathed an exultant sigh, and then began to clap and cheer. A few of them were wiping away tears.

Then there came a loud
ding!
Emma glanced to her right and saw an elevator rising up out of the ground, the same one she had taken to the roof of the faerie nightclub. The doors slid open.

“And here they are now! Welcome to the Twenty-Seventh Floor!” Corbin called out.

Everyone turned to look as the four teens filed out of the elevator, led by Nissa and her eye-puppet Jen. At the front of the line was Helena, wearing the same blue-and-red dress she'd worn at the club. And she was smiling.

CRAG FACT OF THE DAY:

“Ratters have a knack for finding out things that are supposed to be secret, and have been known to work as journalists and detectives as well as spies.”

CragWiki.org

T
he hag sniffed the air once more and nodded. “I've done as I promised. Good luck, little cat.”

“Wait, can't you just —”

But the hag slid away into the forest, muttering to herself as she disappeared into the dark. Emma turned back to the stage.

“Have no fear, future brothers and sisters,” the faerie Corbin was saying. “Come forward to embrace the forest.”

Helena and the three other teenagers walked past the audience and climbed up onto the stage. Corbin took Helena's hand and smiled. The music changed from bells and flutes to a low drum and a singer, crying out in a language Emma didn't recognize.

“What do we do?” she said.

“Just get out there,” Jack replied. “That'll get their attention quick enough.”

Emma looked nervously at all the faeries and humans. “What if he runs off with her again? Farther into the forest?”

“Then we'll track her down,” Cricket said.

“You're wasting time!” Jack spat. His eye was brighter than ever in the moonlight, and he was fidgeting with some emotion Emma couldn't quite read.

“Place your hands on the sacred tree,” murmured Corbin, “and become that which you desire most.”