“You can’t just cut me out—”
I hold up a hand. “The places I’m going, nobody’s going to want to see you. Nobody’s going to talk to you.”
“What is with you people? Ever since Josh became a Wildling, you’re being high and mighty, acting all mysterious. You, Marina …” Her voice trails off and she studies me for a moment before she adds, “You’re one, too, aren’t you?”
I have to laugh. “I wish, dude. But yeah, we’ve got secrets and they’re none of your business.”
The warning bell rings. The halls are empty except for a few stragglers. We’re all supposed to be in class now.
“Go,” I tell her. Then I throw her a bone. “I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”
“But—”
“Seriously.”
Before she can argue anymore, I duck into the boys’ washroom. I half expect her to follow me in, but maybe she thinks I actually have to use it. I wait a few moments, the weight of Donalita’s pebble heavy in my pocket. When I think the halls must be empty, I slip out and head for a side door.
For once, my luck actually holds. Nobody stops me to ask to see the hall pass I don’t have. There’s no one around at all. I smile when I heave the door open and step out into the hot sun. Free. I mean, it’s not great why I’m skipping classes, but I can’t help but feel a lift in my heart all the same. My only worry is Marina. I hope she’s just out catching waves.
I check around to make sure no one’s watching before I take the pebble out of my pocket. It would be hard to believe that Donalita’s inside this thing, except my double vision still sees her curled up in a ball at the same time as I see the pebble.
“Okay,” I say. “So, um, here goes …”
I tap the pebble against the side of the school. For a long moment nothing happens. I’m about to tap it again when the pebble goes weirdly soft in my fingers. I wasn’t expecting that and it drops out of my hand. I start to grab for it at the same time as Donalita shifts into her normal shape and suddenly I’ve got an armful of girl. I stagger back against the wall under the unexpected weight. She drapes her arms around my neck, bringing her face inches from mine.
“Hi, dude,” she says and kisses the tip of my nose. “But shouldn’t we be doing this somewhere else?”
I have to laugh as I set her on her feet.
“This is serious,” I say. “I need your help.”
But before I get the chance to explain, the door beside us opens and there’s Mr. Goss glaring at us. He’s so hard line when it comes to rules that everybody calls him Mr. Boss. This is, like, the last thing I need right now.
“To the office, Wilson,” he says in a sharp voice. “Right now. And you, young lady—”
I don’t get to hear what he was going to add. Donalita scoops me up in her arms and takes off at Wildling speed. We’re a block away between one breath and the next.
“Dude,” I say as she puts me down.
“That was okay, right?” she asks. “We didn’t want to be there, did we?”
I can’t believe this little girl just carried me like a baby—talk about crushing my studly rep—but I can’t stop grinning, either. What a rush. My blood is pumping. I felt like we were the Road Runner just going at batshit crazy speed and leaving Coyote in our dust.
“That was awesome,” I tell her. “I would’ve killed to have seen Goss’s face when you took off like that, even though I’m going to pay for it later.” I laugh. “Let’s just pray that no one else in school was looking out a classroom window. I’ll never live it down, dude.”
Donalita’s laughing too, but this time she’s the one to bring us down to earth.
“Why do you need my help?” she asks.
“It’s Marina,” I say. “If even her bitch sister from hell is starting to worry about her, then it’s serious. We need to find her.”
“Where would she go?”
“I don’t know, dude. Can’t you use some witchy Wildling power to track her down?”
“No,” she says. “But Auntie Min probably could. She could get every lizard and bird in town out looking for her.”
“Then we need to go see Auntie Min. Donalita?” I add when she doesn’t respond.
She nods, but she’s looking down the street, her body language stiff. When I follow her gaze, all I see is a rangy barrio mutt sniffing at the base of a palm.
“What is it?” I ask.
“That dog’s a cousin,” she says.
“Yeah, so?”
“There’s something off about her.”
I take another look, but I can’t see whatever it is that Donalita does, except the dog’s maybe taller than most that roam loose in the barrio.
“Off how?” I ask.
She shrugs, then swivels to look the other way down the street. There’s another dog sitting at the far end of the block. This one’s not pretending to do anything but look at us.
“Okay,” I say. “This isn’t good, is it?”
Her only response is to hook her fingers together and offer them to me as a step, though a step up to what, I don’t know. We’re standing on the sidewalk under a tall palm. There’s nothing else around.
I look up—way up—to where the broad fronds stick out like the tree’s got bad bed hair.
“Dude,” I say. “What are you thinking?”
She gives her hands an impatient shake. “Step in—and be ready to grab yourself a perch.”
“Dude, you can’t be serious.”
“Now!”
The word jumps out with such an authoritarian crack that I’m putting my foot in her hands before I even realize what I’m doing.
“Keep your body straight,” she says.
“Seriously, I don’t think this is such a good—”
I don’t get to finish. She snaps me up like a kid playing with an action figure. And I mean up. Like fifteen, twenty feet. I think I’m going to shoot right over the top of the palm, but I manage to grab hold of a spray of fronds and haul myself to relative safety in the branches, with only a few cuts on my hands from the sharp edges of the leaves. I hardly get there before a coatimundi pushes through the crest of big fronds to join me.
“Are you out of your freaking mind?” I yell at her. “You almost sent me to the moon!”
The coati shifts into Donalita’s familiar features.
“Don’t be such a baby,” she says.
“It’s not being a baby when—”
“Look,” she breaks in. “We might have stood a chance against one of them. But two? Not as much. And three …”
“What three?”
“There’s another one across the street.”
I hold on tight and lean over to have a look, trying to ignore the vertigo fluttering in my stomach. Sure enough, there’s a third dog crossing the street. By the time I get settled again, all three are at the base of the palm.
“If they’re cousins,” I say, “can’t they just shift into human shape and climb up?”
She nods. “But here, we have the advantage. We can knock them down before they ever get close.”
“What do they want with us?”
“I don’t know. And as long as we’re stuck up here, we’re not going to find out, either.”
I sigh. “So now what do we do?”
Donalita pulls a phone out of her pocket.
“Now, dude,” she says with a smile. “We call for help.”
“My pardon, sir,” the rabbit man says, standing stock-still with his partner. “We meant no offence.”
I smell their fright. They’re about to take off. It’s like coming suddenly upon an animal. First they freeze, then they bolt.
“What are you talking about?” I say. “You didn’t offend me.”
“If you say so, sir. We just came for a picnic. We didn’t know you’d already claimed this place for your own. If we had, we would never have intruded on your privacy.”
“You can stop calling me ‘sir.’ I’m probably half your age.”
/>
“Yes, sir. But you’re Mountain Lion Clan, though, pardon me, I don’t know which one.”
“So?”
He looks at the ground, to the side, anywhere but at me.
Then the woman nudges him. “It’s him,” she whispers. Her voice is soft as a breath, but I hear her clearly with the mountain lion’s ears.
The man raises his gaze to my face. He doesn’t seem as scared or even nervous anymore. He looks at me with awe.
“It is,” he murmurs as though I’m not standing right there in front of him.
Then he catches himself.
He lets go of his companion’s hand and sets his bag on the ground before giving me a formal bow. The woman bows as well. Then he stands ramrod straight and meets my gaze with steady eyes.
“Young lord,” he says, “I am Manuel de Padilla of the Long Mountain Hare Clan and this is my mate, Lara.”
I’m not sure what to do, so I say, “And I’m, um, Josh Saunders from Southern California.”
“You do us a great honour in allowing us to speak with you.”
I shake my head. “Guys, you’ve got me confused with someone else.”
Manuel smiles. “I don’t think so. Might I ask with which Mountain Lion Clan you are affiliated?”
“I’m not part of any clan.”
He gives me a puzzled look.
“I’m not like you,” I explain. “I wasn’t born into a, you know, clan or anything. One day I just got a mountain lion living under my skin.”
Lara lays a hand upon her breast. “A miracle.”
“I guess that’s one way to look at it.”
“It isn’t my intention to instruct you,” Manuel says, “but you do know that you and the mountain lion are one and the same? There is no end to one and beginning to the other.”
I nod. “Yeah, I know that. Intellectually. I just find it helps me cope to think of him as a spirit living under my skin.”
They look at me without comprehension.
“Forget it,” I say. “So how do you know about me?”
“Every cousin has heard the story by now,” Manuel says.
“How the Thunders sent the seed of the animal clans into a group of five-fingered kits and one of them grew into the spirit of one of the old clans.”
“And do the stories say why this happened?” I ask.
Manuel smiles. “We are only small cousins. Why would the Thunders explain themselves to such as us?”
“But it means something,” Lara says. “It whispers in our hearts.”
This kind of throws me. “What does your heart say?” I ask. She exchanges a glance with Manuel and something passes between them. It’s like when Marina and Des and I are in the zone, and we can communicate without speaking: an abrupt shift into another song during practice, all of us hitting the mark on the same beat. A look across the hall at school that tells a story nobody else can read. Riding our boards, the three of us turning sharp the way a flock of starlings do, all at the exact same time.
“That something’s going to change,” Lara answers, “and when it does, it’ll be better for everyone.”
I’m not sure what that means.
“And you think I’m a part of this?” I ask.
Another glance at her mate.
“We know you are,” she says.
I don’t believe her any more than I do anybody else who’s tried to tell me what my destiny is, but I don’t tell her that. There’s something so earnest about her, as though she thinks some big prophecy is coming true.
I guess they read the disbelief in my face.
“If we’ve offended you …” Manuel begins.
I wave that off. “It’s not that,” I tell him. “I just wish I knew what’s going on with as much conviction.”
He nods. “Destiny is a knife with two blades and no handle. There’s no easy way to hold it. Some might say it’s better not to try to pick it up at all. But destiny doesn’t care what you think or believe. It will carve out your life for you regardless.”
There’s a pleasant thought. But I don’t let it change the good feeling I get from these two.
“Why don’t you stay and talk for a bit?” I ask. “You could go ahead with your picnic.”
“We would be honoured to visit with you, sir, but we will wait until later to eat—unless you care to share our food?”
I sigh. “No thanks. Any chance you could dial the ‘sirs’ down a little? I mean, I’m grateful for your respect and everything, but it’s nothing I earned. I’m just a kid with a big lion under his skin who’s trying to figure out what it all means.”
Lara puts a hand to her lips. I can’t tell if she’s shocked or hiding a smile.
“We can try,” Manuel tells me, but he can’t hide the reverence in his eyes.
I lead them over to our camp area. They stare at the two beds, two backpacks. Their noses are working, reading the scent trails in the air.
“We have intruded,” Manuel says.
“No, it’s cool. Really. My friend and I are trying to wake up this map thing in my head, but he’s off taking a break.”
I give a vague wave around the campsite. “Grab yourselves a seat,” I say.
As the dog man lifts his horn again, I know I can’t let him send a warning to his friends. I don’t even think before I act. I just sweep my length of pipe in an arc and whack him across the back of the leg. I don’t have the room to put any real power behind the blow, but it’s enough to make his knee buckle. The horn drops as he goes down. Still on automatic, I give him a hard tap on the top of his head and he collapses.
Time seems to stop as I look at him lying there. Blood trickles from the gash on his head and he’s not moving at all.
I think I might have killed him.
I feel sick.
The raggedy man doesn’t share my concern. I turn to find him holding a big chunk of rock. When I realize that he plans to bash it on the dog man’s head, I get between them.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“He’s still breathing.”
“Well, thank God for that.”
He gives me a puzzled look, but at least he lowers the rock.
“You know he wouldn’t give you the same mercy,” he says.
“I don’t know any such thing. I just know that if we start bashing in their heads when they’re already unconscious and
can’t hurt us … well, we’ll be no better than them.”
“But we’ll be alive.”
“We’re alive right now,” I tell him.
“For the moment.”
I refuse to move. His strange eyes study me for a long beat.
“Fine,” he says finally and puts the rock aside. Then he nods.
“You’re probably right. If we’ve only hurt him, they’ll be angry and looking for settlement of the wrong, but they won’t make it their life’s work. If we finish him off, they’ll never stop until they’ve hunted us down and killed us.”
“Thanks,” I say.
I dust myself off and pick up the pipe again. I might not want to kill anybody, but I’m not stupid.
“I need to go back,” I start to say, but the hunting horns sound again.
“It’s too dangerous at the moment,” he says. “Right now we need to find a better place to hide.”
I think about the mark I scratched on the road where I arrived. I think I can still find it, but if I follow him now, will I get too turned around?
The horns sound once more. Closer.
The raggedy man sets off at a quick jog. I have no choice but to fall into step behind him.
It’s another hour of winding through the streets of this ruined city before the raggedy man deems it’s safe enough for us to rest. He leads me up to the third floor of some kind of old warehouse building, most of which is still standing, although the whole north wall is missing. It’s a huge cavernous place. We sit near the missing wall, which gives us a good view of the city. There’s dirt here—three floors up—with w
eeds growing out of it. Vines trail down the sides of the building where the missing wall would have connected to it.
A cool breeze blows in, fresh and clean compared to the closer air in the streets below. This So-Cal girl isn’t used to the humidity.
When I look out over the view, I can’t believe how huge this place is—as big as New York City, I’m sure. The ruins seem to go on forever. The buildings are taller here than they were where I first arrived, but nature’s also reclaimed them. We haven’t seen anybody. Just birds and animals. We haven’t heard the horns for the past half hour. The last time we did, they were faint and distant.
The raggedy man pulls something wrapped in cloth from his pocket. It proves to be flatbread and cheese. He breaks each in two and offers me half.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
He smiles. “Go ahead.”
I was just being polite. Truth is, I’m starving. I can’t remember the last time I ate. The raggedy man also shares water from a metal flask. I can see it’s supposed to have a screw-on top, but I guess he lost it because he’s using a chunk of wood as a cork instead.
“Now, aren’t you interesting,” he says when we’ve finished.
Me? Has he never looked in a mirror?
“Why do you say that?” I ask.
He shrugs. “You feel like a cousin in here.” He touches a fingertip to his temple, by which I suppose he’s referring to his own version of the ping that I get in my head whenever I’m near a Wildling or cousin.
“But you seem to be newly born,” he goes on. “As though you’re only months old, rather than years. So, who are you?”
“Just a displaced girl who wants to go home. Who are you?” He brushes the question off with a wave of his hand, but I can’t help but be curious. What he really reminds me of is one of the dwarves from those Lord of the Rings movies that Des and Josh have made me watch way too many times.
“Okay,” I say. “Can you at least tell me where we are?”
He gets a puzzled look. “You should know. I saw you arrive.
No one brought you.”
“I didn’t come here on purpose.”
“There’s that,” he agrees. “No one comes here on purpose.” He scratches his beard, then adds, “It’s called Dainnan—the city, I mean.”
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