The wolf held her great paw down delicately on the pigeon’s tail. He was trying to waddle back to Charlie but couldn’t get out of her grip. “Don’t be unwise, little one.” The white wolf looked up with a flash of her icy blue eyes and pointed her nose at Biscuits, who growled, low and hoarse, her tail thrashing against Charlie’s ankles. Bertie was frantic, launching himself into the air and down again, over and over, until Charlie grabbed him for fear he would fly at the wolf.
“Please.” Charlie’s voice rattled in his throat. “Please let him go. He’s just confused.”
“You have been noticed, sweet one,” said the wolf, looking up at Charlie even as she sniffed at Pudge, her breath leaving frost on the pigeon’s lavender feathers. “An impressive feat in and of itself.”
“I wanted—” Charlie had to clear his throat until his voice came out right. “I was hoping you could tell me how to get to the War Room. So I could talk with you—with the leaders.”
“You were hoping? Darling boy, didn’t anyone warn you about that? It makes the heart so much sweeter.”
“Please,” Charlie repeated. Pudge squeaked and flapped his bad wing. Bertie struggled harder in Charlie’s grip, and he held on tighter, afraid to break those tiny hollow bones but even more afraid to let go.
“They called us both Remembrance once, my twin sister and I,” the white wolf said. “But now my sweet sister goes by Regret, and I call myself Remorse.” She cocked her head at a strange angle, as if listening to something only she could hear. “Or the other way around. I find I quite forget. Ironic, really.” And she bared her teeth in a grin, the corners of which seemed to stretch back, back, back across her cheeks to meet somewhere behind her ears. Her teeth were like marble, and as sharp and spotless as scalpels.
“Can you—” He couldn’t breathe right, the air wouldn’t go back out of his lungs each time he breathed in. “Can you tell me how—” Breathe out, breathe out, breathe out, just breathe out. “How do I get through that door back down there? Please. Please, I’m begging you.”
“Oh, sweet boy, that is not a place for you. Ask for something else.”
“No, please. I’m begging you, I need to get inside, it’s the only way.”
“Who sent such a tender creature as you to look for it? Who would send you out into the dark?”
“Another war wolf, Dishonor, he—he said maybe the wolves in the War Room could give me my brother’s heart back. If I could find them.”
“Ah.” Remorse’s razor-sharp smile spread, somehow, even wider. Charlie half imagined he could hear it creaking with the effort, a sound like cold metal gears turning, turning, turning. “Naturally. No doubt he was drunk on the flattery of being noticed. Of course, even if you do find a way inside, you’ll still need to deal with the ones there. The ones who never leave, or never have to. But even so.” She stretched back on her legs and her claws sank just a bit into Pudge’s feathers. Biscuits wailed. After that, it was silent for a moment, their breath cloudy in the starlight, until Remorse spoke again.
“I can help you on your quest. For a price. Capitalism is the true marker of an advanced society, yes?”
“What do you want?” Charlie asked, but he already knew it didn’t matter what she said. It wasn’t as if he had any other options.
“A taste.”
“A taste of what? Of my heart?” Charlie was already shaking his head, stepping back, and Bertie flapped his wings in panic. Never. He could never let a wolf get even a tooth into him, not willingly. His heart had scars already. If it was eaten, who would save Theo?
But Remorse just smiled, her tongue lolling slightly out of the side of her wide mouth. “Oh, no. Each of us deals in our own currency. You’ll see. Do you accept?”
He could still say no. No one could blame him, surely, for not making a deal with a monster he met in the night, like some terrifying bedtime story. He could say he’d changed his mind, run away, forget about the wolves. And he would forget, he was almost sure of it. That the memory of them would begin to blur and melt until it slipped through the fingers of his mind entirely. And he would forget that there was anything he could have done to save Theo. And Theo would never get any better, not with a missing heart, and Charlie wouldn’t remember why. He would just watching his brother slip through his fingers, too.
He drew in a shaky breath.
“I accept.”
Remorse threw back her lovely, awful white head and howled so loud and so long that Charlie’s vision blurred with it, his knees buckled and then gave way, his blood trying to crawl its way out of him and away from the sound.
It was like looking at the world through a sheet of warped glass, or a jarful of honey. Everything was blurred and tilted just a little. Everything was just a bit too bright or a bit too dark to see.
It was a year and a half ago. Charlie was sitting on Theo’s bed. He looked up into Theo’s face, but it wasn’t Theo. Or at least, it wasn’t the real Theo, not Theo way he was now.
His brother tied on his uniform boots, his enlistment papers burning bright holes in his back pocket. “You have to be the man of the house now, Charlie. You have to look after Mum and Grandpa Fitz. They’ll think they’re looking after you, but you and I know better, yeah? You have to be tough for them, okay? But it won’t be forever. Just till I get back, and then I promise you won’t have to worry about anything worse than which kind of candy to filch from the corner store, all right? I promise.”
The light changed or the world slanted too far in one direction and toppled over. Now it was three years earlier. He was in the kitchen, at home. It was late afternoon or early evening, bright orange sunlight spilling in sideways through the windows.
“Don’t worry, Charlie, I’m going to take care of us. All of us. Everything’s going to be all right, you’ll see.”
Theo was in Dad’s black suit because Dad was going to be buried in his blue one because it was the least nice. (“Never did believe in a waste, did Rob,” Grandpa Fitz had said, sad but approving.) The cuffs hung down over Theo’s wrists and shoes, but the shoulders mostly fit.
“Say it back to me, Charlie. Say, ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ and it will. It’s like a witch’s spell, I promise. Okay? I promise.”
“Everything’s going to be all right,” Charlie whispered. Charlie knew now what he hadn’t known then, when he said the spell: it was a lie.
It was a week before that and Mum wouldn’t get out of bed. She was holding Dad’s sweater and sobbing into his pillow.
“Mum?” Charlie tried shaking her shoulder, but it was like she couldn’t see him. “Mum, please!” She wouldn’t get up, she wouldn’t get up, she wouldn’t get up.
The world shook itself like a snow globe. Charlie closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he was kneeling in the rubble, his pajamas wet with snow and his cheeks wet with tears.
Charlie choked out a sob past the thick stone wedged in his throat, past the lumps of ice he must have swallowed whole, past every word he he’d had to eat down like a bruised, stale, rationed potato. Like ash.
“Please. Please don’t take him away.”
Remorse or Regret or Remembrance or whoever she was smiled her impossibly wide smile again and padded over to him on creamy paws, leaving Pudge to scurry free. She dropped her great, lovely head even with his—and lapped up every one of his tears, closing her eyes to savor each and every drop. Biscuits howled and spat and tried to leap at the wolf, and Charlie caught her more by instinct than intention, clutching her tight even as her claws scratched sharp lines of pain across his chest.
“Oh, you’ve been distilling that for a while, haven’t you, my dear? I can taste it. Let my brothers and sister have their hearts and eat their fill—this is the only liqueur I need.” Her soft tongue washed his eyelashes dry, thorough and greedy. “Oh, sweet boy, for that I’ll give you all you need and more.” And she winked an ice-blue eye at him. “I promise.”
He didn’t want to cry even one
more tear for Remorse to swallow, but he couldn’t stop them.
After what felt like hours, he managed to breathe past the choked-off feeling in his throat and he scrubbed hard at his face with a sleeve while glaring at the wolf, half daring her to stop him and half afraid she would. But Remorse just wagged her tail, once, before letting her tongue loll out of her mouth like dripping caramel before she gave three hacking, choked-off coughs and spat something out onto the ground, where it fell with a metallic clink.
A key.
“You’ll need that before the end. And two more just like it. Or at least, of a kin to it. Siblings, if not exactly twins.”
“Keys?” Charlie croaked. “One for each lock in that door down there, is that what you mean?”
“Quite so, my dear one. And next, I think, you should visit St. Paul’s. So many hearts were broken into little bite-sized pieces there, it might as well be a confectionary. Trust your fear and your sweet heart to guide you. Be on time, but don’t worry: you are expected, darling boy.”
“By who?”
“Oh, I won’t ruin the surprise.” Remorse winked her other eye and gave each cheek one more lavish wash of silky tongue. Then she turned away and trotted into the darkness on nimble paws, where she seemed to blur into the snow or the snow blurred into her, and then he was alone.
It took much longer to get back home than it had to run away from it. Bertie led the way, sweeping around corners and chirping the all clear while Biscuits brought up the rear. Every time the little clicks of her claws against the cobblestones were muffled by snow or mud, Charlie spun around, Pudge tucked into his shirt, to make sure she was still there. He was so cold. He tucked the hand not supporting Pudge under his arm to thaw his fingers out a bit, switching hands every few streets. He could just feel his toes, and they hurt. Soon it was all he could do to force each foot to take one more step, one more step, one more step. Little pinpricks of pain sparkled in his vision with each footfall.
He was quite unprepared when Pudge struggled out of his grasp and flopped with great inelegance down to the street and waddled at high speed away from Charlie. Bertie rocketed past Charlie’s head and after the other pigeon.
Were they giving up? Abandoning him to find his own way or freeze trying? A sob was halfway out of Charlie’s mouth when he saw the birds alight on a familiar bench, with a familiar lump of blankets and newspaper in the center of it. Charlie waded into the sea of sleeping pigeons and reached out to shake Mellie awake. She gave a little shiver in her sleep and his fingers stilled just shy of her bony shoulder.
Charlie drew back and shrugged off his Sunday jacket. It was far too small for him now—he seemed to have grown quite a bit recently—but it was just the right size for Mellie’s thin shoulders and bony arms. He tucked it around her while she slept. Her pigeons cooed sleepily around her, and Mellie sighed in her sleep. Charlie picked Biscuits up (she had politely ignored the pigeons) and continued walking.
The cold sliced through his pajamas and it drove him the last few steps down the street to his front door. The house seemed to be in conspiracy with him—the front door opened without so much as a squeak, and not even the tricky floorboards by Mum’s door gave their usual groan of complaint at being trod upon.
Safe in his room, Charlie stripped off his damp socks, put on his thickest, scratchiest wool ones, and pulled on two jumpers over his pajamas. Then he pulled the key Remorse had given him out of his pocket, his fingers trembling, from chill or fear or both.
The key was a bright nickel color and icy cold to the touch. Frost rimmed around Charlie’s fingers where the skin touched the metal. He dropped it on the bedside table and he stopped shivering quite so badly.
Biscuits was already burrowed under the covers when he crawled into bed, not bothering even to change out of his wet pajamas, and he curled himself around her.
He found he still had a few tears left for Remorse after all.
20
HE DID NOT SLEEP, NOT EXACTLY. SOMETIMES HIS thoughts would drift, go a bit fuzzy, and he would think that maybe some time had passed. But mostly he stayed shivering in the darkness of his room, familiar and unfamiliar all at once, until the sky turned blue enough that he could pretend that it was morning. His pajamas, when he swung his legs out of bed, had dried mud caked to their cuffs and were still a little damp at the knees. And sitting on his nightstand, its shine dulled by the morning haze outside, was the key.
It was smaller than he remembered, just barely as long as his little finger and quite a bit thinner. It looked like one of those little keys to open music and jewelry boxes. There was a lacy pattern of frost on the wood of the nightstand around the key. Charlie didn’t want to touch it, but neither did he want to leave it there.
A bit of twine he dug out of the nightstand drawer sufficed as a makeshift necklace. He held the key with the edge of his pajama shirt to keep it from touching his skin as he threaded the twine through the top of it. Only when he was fully dressed in fresh, dry clothes did he pull the twine necklace over his head, careful to always keep at least one layer between the cold, bright metal and his skin.
He only noticed Biscuits was gone when he went to pick her up to carry her downstairs. It was silly, probably, to feel a stab of panic at her absence. And it was probably even sillier to want his cat like little kids wanted their blankets or stuffed toys. But he didn’t care. He was scared and sore and his heart hurt. That wasn’t silly.
Bone-tired, Grandpa Fitz liked to say, and Charlie had always thought he’d known what he meant, but he hadn’t. He was bone-tired now.
He went downstairs and into the kitchen and told himself quite sternly that he wasn’t embarrassed by the way he could breathe again at the sight of a familiar white-and-marmalade shape standing guard in front of the door. Biscuits chirped to let him know she’d heard his approach but didn’t move her clear green-gold eyes from the door.
Charlie glanced out the window into the street, still shadowy in the earliest light of morning. A pair of lights, just about the same height as a pair of wolf eyes, blinked. But instead of being scared, Charlie just felt tired.
“Dishonor?” he said, his voice hoarse and scratched raw in the empty kitchen, the sound bouncing off the walls in too-loud echoes that hurt his head. “Please just leave. Just go away and leave us alone.”
The lights, whatever they were, vanished. Biscuits, declaring the danger past, sat up and stretched with elaborate slowness, first her front end and then her back, culminating in a silent yawn. She rubbed her whole furry length up against his shin to say good morning, then searched around for a warm spot of rug to nap upon. She’d had a long night, too, after all. Charlie left her to her beauty sleep while he mixed hot water and just a tiny bit of milk in a deep pan for porridge. He stirred and the warm steam woke him up a bit with each rotation of the spoon round the pan. And the more he woke up, the more the fear and the pain seemed to wake up, too.
He spooned his share of the porridge (he didn’t like porridge anyway) into a coffee mug, taking the rest of it off the burner and putting a plate on top of the pan to keep the warm in. He tugged on his boots, still damp from last night. Had it really only been last night? It seemed very far away now, like it had happened to someone else, someone much smaller than he. He went for his Sunday jacket, and then remembered it was gone. His fingers hesitated at the large coat hung up at the very end of the line of coat hooks.
Dad’s coat was heavy navy wool and the sleeves hung down past Charlie’s hands when he pulled it on. He turned his nose to the collar and the faint smell of pipe tobacco punched Charlie’s still-sore heart, hard enough to sting his eyes a bit. He rubbed at his face with the sleeves and then rolled up the cuffs so his hands were free.
Biscuits followed him out the door into the chill morning. The city was just starting to wake up, lights slowly turning on in houses and apartments, and smoke beginning to curl up from chimneys. A paperboy on a fast, thin bike nearly collided with Biscuits as they turned the corner
towards Mellie’s favorite bench, and the boy tipped his cap to her in apology.
Charlie, who had forgotten his scarf, turned up the collar of Dad’s coat against the cold and another pang of earthy tobacco smell wrapped around him. He shoved the hand not clutching the mug of porridge deep into a pocket (he had forgotten mittens as well), and worried a hole in the lining with a fingernail. He was thinking that he should mend it so he wouldn’t make the hole any worse when Biscuits gave a very particular yowl and streaked off down an alley across the street, narrowly avoiding a truck filled with construction debris. The truck honked first at Biscuits, then at Charlie as he chased after her past a ruined building that looked like a carcass being slowly picked clean. Men in hard hats were crawling all over the soot-black ribs of an old restaurant and pulling out buckets of debris like scorched bits of fat. Everything on the street looked dead this morning. Everything looked lost and done-for.
He could feel the ache and scratch of the tooth marks on his heart. His chest and throat felt too tight and seemed to burn, almost. His hand went to rub at his neck, but instead his fingers closed on the key around his throat. The icy metal burned his fingertips numb and he saw the red flash of rats’ eyes in the deepest shadows of the building’s corpse.
“Go away!” he screamed, his voice brittle and cracking as his numb fingertips sought and found a hunk of brick to fling at the little dark shapes. They scattered and re-formed like a school of fish.
One of the men in the hard hats shouted something back at Charlie, but he couldn’t make it out over his own gasping breath. There was a loud chirp and flutter of wings right next to his face, and then a bundle of feathers and bright black eyes was settled on his shoulder.
Bertie. Charlie could have cried.
“What on earth have you gotten my birds into, Charlie?”
“Mellie!” Charlie yelped in relief. Pudge was cradled in one of Mellie’s gnarled hands, fluffed up and content. “Pudge and Bertie found me last night and we went to the hospital, and a trolley car, and an air raid shelter, and we found a war wolf and she licked me—”
Hollow Chest Page 15