“Others?” the Ogeema asked coolly. “I have smelled the cur who travels with you. But what is the other? Some sort of vole?”
“Vole? I’m not a vole,” Dumpster squealed. He and Pang were peering through a broken window next to the cub. “I’m a rat, you stupid underlicker.”
The Ogeema snarled up at him. “Most likely you’ll taste no better than a vole.” He lowered his head and paced down the alley toward Casseomae.
The child rattled the metal, shaking it furiously.
“Pang,” Casseomae called. “Get the cub—” But before she finished, the metal frame that the cub had climbed dropped suddenly. Casseomae ducked as it stopped just above her ears with a clank.
Dumpster shrieked, “Climb, you idiot bear. You can climb that ladder!”
Casseomae hooked her claws on the metal, pulling with all her might as the Ogeema and the pack rushed toward her. With jaws snapping at her haunches, she tugged herself up the groaning metal, the entire structure coming loose under her weight.
The cub disappeared through the window after Pang and Dumpster. Casseomae had just dug her forepaws into the rotten edge of the window when the metal tower broke free, landing on the Ogeema and several of the other wolves, who yelped in pain.
Casseomae hung from the window, then with a kick of her back paws slid through.
Two of the wolves lay motionless under the broken tangle of metal. But the Ogeema stood free of the structure. With blood dripping down his nose, he stared up at Casseomae.
“We will be waiting,” he whispered. “We will be waiting right down here.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The child clung tightly to Casseomae, not wanting to let go. She grunted kindly to him, “I’m all right. Thanks to you and that falling metal thing.”
“The Old Devils called those fire escapes,” Dumpster said. “They would climb them if there was a brush fire. That way they could get above the flames and back into the safety of their dens.”
Pang gave a low whine and looked up at the water-stained ceiling. Despite having only one window, the shadowy den was full of leaves and piles of blown-in debris. Mushrooms grew on an ancient moldy piece of furniture in the corner. A pair of panicked sparrows flapped around in the uppermost corners of the room before finding their way out the window.
Casseomae felt the anger and fear that had propelled her through the night starting to fade. They might have been trapped, but they were safe, at least for the moment. Hunger reclaimed her instincts, and she set off through the building to see if there was anything to eat. Her cub followed her. Pang and Dumpster, their eyes brimming with exhaustion, lay down where they were.
She was used to nosing around in old Skinless dens, but this one felt particularly cramped. As she crawled over piles of debris and wound in and out of mildew-speckled rooms, she heard the sounds of birds. Coming through a doorway into a room filled with morning light, she saw shrubs, vines, and saplings growing thickly where the tall windows had shattered.
Songbirds and starlings gathered by the dozens to feast on berries growing on the shrubs. Casseomae lunged at a goldfinch, but the bird was too fast. Along with the others, it zipped through the window and flew off.
Casseomae began eating the berries. The cub plucked one and sniffed it before nibbling. He seemed to feel that the berries were acceptable and ate several before kneeling down to sip rainwater that had gathered in a broken white relic. Casseomae flopped lazily to the floor, chewing on a cluster of berries and watching the cub.
At some point she slipped into sleep. When she woke the sun was higher but still behind the towering skyscrapers surrounding their building. Her cub was gone and she got up quickly, sniffing after him.
She found him in the next room, a smaller den with only one unbroken window. There were not so many leaves in here. The child sat with his legs crossed, chirping in the softest whisper. Casseomae saw that he was holding something. It was some sort of device, but not a luminous screen like he had carried before. It smelled of plastic, and as her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw the thing looked like a small version of the cub—pink and furless but for a long tuft of sparkly yellow hair sprouting from the top of its head.
The cub happily moved one of its arms up and down. Then he squeezed the thing to his chest before holding it out to continue talking to it.
Casseomae snorted, startling the cub. He stood and tucked the thing behind his back. He grunted at Casseomae, a noise that sounded vaguely to her like he was asking something.
“Leave that alone,” Casseomae said.
The cub held it protectively against his chest.
“No,” she said. “Leave it here. It stinks.”
The cub whimpered but placed the little pink thing on the floor. He spent a moment moving its arms and legs, arranging it, before he came over to nuzzle Casseomae’s neck.
“Are you hungry—” she began to ask, but a violent burst of barking from Pang erupted a few rooms away. Casseomae hurried through the doorway, huffing as she ran to the first room, where she found Pang barking at a hole in the wall.
“What is it?” Casseomae asked. “What’s in there?”
“I don’t know,” the dog said. “I was asleep when I heard his squeak.”
“Whose squeak?” she asked.
“The rat,” Pang answered. “Dumpster. Something got him.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Casseomae sniffed at the hole. It was too small for her to get more than her nose in, too small even for Pang to get his head through. The inside was a shallow tunnel of wood running up behind the wall. She smelled the rat’s panic scent and something else, too: a small vora.
A shrill squeak came from in the wall, followed by a scuffle and the scratching of claws.
“It’s climbing up with him,” Casseomae said.
She rose on her hind legs and brought her forepaws down against the wall. With a few blows, she opened a hole. She tore out chunks of white powdery material with her claws, but the rat and its attacker had already gone higher.
“It’s no good,” Pang said. “It’s carried him up.”
The child seemed to know what to do. He barked at them and ran from the room. Casseomae and Pang followed.
The cub found a nearby set of stairs and started climbing. Pang hurried past Casseomae as she sniffed at the stairs. They were metal, not wood, so she hoped they wouldn’t be rotten. But metal could rust and fall apart too.
With tentative steps, Casseomae ascended to find the cub and Pang in a room full of weeds and broken glass. The dog barked fiercely at a section of moss-covered wall where the child was kicking open a hole.
Something growled inside, shuffling and scratching to get away. The cub kicked again, and suddenly a cat, a slim tabby, leaped out of the wall and sprang across the room toward the door. The cat had Dumpster in its teeth.
Pang, Casseomae, and the cub hurried after the cat as it vaulted up the steps. There were other cats on the stairs, who howled and hissed at the intruders as they chased the cat off the stairs and into a darkened room.
The cat slunk back, his teeth locked on Dumpster’s neck. Other cats—sleek black ones, fluffy ones of filthy white, calicos and grays and tabbies—poured into the room after them, slinking against the walls and hiding around the rotten furniture. Dumpster cursed venomously and wriggled to get free of the tabby’s jaws.
Pang barked, “Let him go, you vile puss, before I tear you to pieces!”
The dog darted forward, and the tabby dropped Dumpster. The rat staggered free as Pang stood over him, bringing his vicious jaws around to warn off the other cats.
Dumpster staggered back against Pang’s leg, blood on the fur at the top of his neck.
“I want him, dears,” a black-and-white cat hissed.
“No, he’s mine,” the tabby called out. “I found him first.”
“You lost him, coward fangs,” another spat from atop a ledge of wood. “He belongs to us all now.”
“Yours!�
� Dumpster said in disbelief. “I don’t belong to any of you.”
“But you do, my dear,” a gray growled. “You are our gift. From the queen. Mother Death brought you for us.”
Glowing eyes surrounded them, hungry deep-throated growls filling the room.
“You clowder of underlickers are crazy,” Dumpster said. “Get back, before my friends—”
“The queen will have your friends,” a long-haired white said. “They belong to her. But you, my little dear … you are ours.”
“Nobody is eating anybody,” Casseomae said, “so you cats might as well clear out.”
“That is not how her queendom works,” a cat said. “She provides us with prey. Viand birds. Crawly viands. Creeping viands. Micey viands.”
“I’m not a mouse, you hairball!” Dumpster said.
“But you are a present,” the tabby said. “I didn’t get any of the others of your kind. You should have been mine.”
Dumpster looked as if his eyes might burst. “Others of my kind?”
“We thought we’d eaten all the Vorago speakers,” one of the cats said. “Then more arrived not a few suns ago.”
“My mischief!” the rat said. “What did you do to them?”
“We ate as many as we could catch before she decided her gift had been too generous.”
Dumpster looked faint again. He staggered a step, mumbling, “My … my mischief … no.”
“Which of you is the queen?” Pang barked. “Who rules here?”
The cats drew back against the walls, hiding under furniture and debris. “Mother Death is not here,” one said. “You would already be hers, cur, if she was.”
Casseomae huffed. “No puss hunts a dog.”
“She will have you too, old bear,” the tabby answered with a malicious glint in his eyes. “Mother Death has eaten bigger bears than you.”
“And she is fond of the apes as well,” a cat added, looking at the cub. “Even a strange hairless one like your friend there. She will be glad to know there are more about the city.”
An ape? Casseomae had no idea what sort of creature that was. Dumpster was right; there was something mad about this clowder.
The child knelt down to inspect Dumpster, touching the wounds on his back.
“I’m fine,” the rat said, leaping onto the cub’s arm and scuttling up onto his shoulder.
“We’re leaving,” Casseomae said, moving to the door. Pang and the child followed behind her. “Tell your queen she’ll have to find another present.”
The mob watched them go, tails lashing. “You can tell her yourself, old bear,” one of the cats called, “when you meet her.”
At the staircase, Pang said, “I’m really not liking this.”
Casseomae started up the stairs. “Let’s go look for those towers the Auspectres told us about.”
The climb was long, but after seemingly endless sets of steps, the stairs ended at a door. The cub worked something on the door’s face and then opened it with a faint squeak of rust. They came out into bright sunlight on the top of the skyscraper. The city with its towers of vine-coated concrete spread out below them.
Pang slunk flat to the ground. “Don’t go too close to the edge,” he whined. “You’ll tip the building over and we’ll fall.”
“If this thing hasn’t collapsed yet,” Dumpster said from the cub’s shoulder, “it probably won’t today.”
Pang lay whimpering as Casseomae and the cub walked slowly to the edge of the roof. When they got there, the child gasped and backed away. But the height did not bother Casseomae. She poked her nose over the edge and peered down, thinking it must be like what a bird sees. The trees and buildings below were tiny. She could just make out the wolves waiting for them. How would she ever fight her way through them all? She snorted. They would simply have to find the best time, possibly when the wolves were sleeping or out hunting.
Grasping the cub’s hair with his forelegs to steady himself, Dumpster stood on his hind legs and peered into the distance. “What’s out there?” he said.
Casseomae knew her eyesight was not as good as a vulture’s, but it was better than Dumpster’s at seeing distances. In the direction where the sun rose, the city gave way to the Forest, a rolling haze of green oaks and poplars and hickories. The river that bordered the city cut through the woods, winding toward the horizon, where a silver flatness shimmered. The Wide Waters, she realized. And just before that silver shimmer, at the most distant edge of the Forest, strange forms rose above the treetops.
“I see towers,” she said.
Pang stood tentatively. “They don’t look like lick-trick city towers.”
“What do they look like?” Dumpster asked.
Casseomae narrowed her small eyes. The dog was right. They were not like the skeletal framework of the Auspectres’ towers or the fallen tower they had used to cross over the river. They rose smooth and gray like the trunk of a lightning-struck pine. There were three of them. At the tops, flat fins revolved in lazy circles.
“It looks like they have wings,” she said.
“Wings?” the rat squeaked. “The spinning trees!”
“Just as the Auspectres said,” Pang added, coming up beside them. “And look there, Cass. Can you see in the middle? It looks like each has a red glowing eye.”
Dumpster lashed his tail. “Glowing?”
“Yes, I think he’s right,” Casseomae said. “Each has a light.”
“Lights!” Dumpster clawed around on the child’s shoulder, and the cub picked him off, holding him gently in his hand. “But how can that be?”
Behind them they heard a trembling growl, like the cats’ but much deeper. Casseomae turned, her nose filling with a strange new scent. In the darkness of the doorway, a pair of large golden eyes watched them. A head emerged from the shadows. It was a cat, but far larger than any puss, larger even than the cougar.
It padded slowly onto the roof, a massive orange cat with black stripes like scars raked across its body. Casseomae had no doubt that it was at least twice the weight of the largest bear in her sloth. But what cat grew this large?
Pang snarled as the cub huddled behind Casseomae.
“Those pusses,” Dumpster said. “They really weren’t crazy. That’s their queen, isn’t it?”
Mother Death rumbled.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Casseomae drew her claws across the concrete roof, popping her jaws threateningly.
Mother Death said something with a throaty laugh, but whatever language she was speaking, it was not Vorago. It was no language of the Forest.
“You can’t fight her, Cass!” Dumpster said.
“Pang, get ready,” Casseomae said. “You’ve got to get the cub back inside.”
Casseomae hit the roof with a heavy swipe, then sidled to her left, leading the cat farther from the doorway.
Mother Death laughed again as she closed in on Casseomae. She had no fear in her scent and seemed to be enjoying this moment of toying with her prey.
Casseomae charged, clashing with the cat with all her weight. The blow would have sent a cougar end over end, but Mother Death hardly budged. She sank her fangs into Casseomae’s shoulder, teeth reaching bone.
With a surge of anger, Casseomae burst onto her hind legs, knocking the cat off her before swiping her claws against Mother Death’s throat. The blow drew blood and ripped free a clump of feathery white fur.
The cat circled away, a clever fighter who would manage how many injuries she would take before she went in for the kill. But she had opened up even more space between herself and the door.
Pang nipped the cub’s fingers, then ran. The child followed with Dumpster cupped in his hand. Mother Death started after them, but Casseomae feigned a charge, driving the cat back. Before she reached her, Casseomae twisted deftly and raced back through the doorway.
“Go!” she bellowed, seeing her cub waiting for her. “Run!”
The cub didn’t obey. As soon as Casseomae was inside, he
grabbed the door and pulled it shut. An instant later the door rocked in its frame as Mother Death threw all her weight against it. She roared in frustration.
“Come on,” Casseomae said, nudging the child ahead of her. Together they hurried down the stairs toward Pang’s echoing whines.
The cats huddled and spat from the corners as they passed. “All that enter the city belong to Mother Death!” they cried. “She will have you, dears. She is coming for you!”
Casseomae could no longer hear the enormous cat tearing at the door, but she knew they were right. Mother Death would break the door apart before long, and she would have no trouble following them.
It seemed to take longer going down the stairs than it had taken to climb them, especially to Casseomae, whose wounded shoulder burned terribly. At long last, they reached the bottom.
A throaty roar echoed down the stairwell.
“She’s free,” Pang said, tail tucked and shaking with fright.
“Come on,” Casseomae said. The four ran to the room where Casseomae had come through the window. The wolves milled about in the alley below.
“I almost wish you’d left me to those crazed pusses!” Dumpster squeaked.
Casseomae surveyed the alley. Down a little way was the metal dumpster that blocked one end. It was filled to the top with rainwater and floating debris. On the other side, the alley continued to the far end of the building, where sunlight illuminated the empty street beyond.
The cub cried out. Casseomae turned, half expecting to see the enormous cat. But the child was waving a hand at her from the hallway.
“What’s he saying?” Pang asked.
“No idea,” Casseomae said. She ran toward him as the cub pushed open a wide pair of doors.
Mother Death roared from the stairwell, nearly to the bottom.
The child hurried through the doors with Pang at his heels. Casseomae lunged after them. A few paces ahead was a ledge with a short section of broken stairs—the ones Casseomae had collapsed when they’d first entered the building.
Mother Death landed in the hallway as the child slammed the doors shut. Her weight cracked the doors’ frame, but for the moment the doors held.
The Prince Who Fell from the Sky Page 14
