Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar (23 page)

His ears, reaching for the sounds of normalcy picked up marching. Marching feet. His fur rose in hackles on his neck. Marching footsteps came from farther up the lane. He stopped. Then darted into the nearest alley.

“What the—” someone said, near him.

Panicked, Ree spun to the unexpected voice. A hulking shape loomed out of the blackness as the marching feet grew closer.

A hand closed around his neck. Ree’s claws came out. He squirmed, scratching out with hands and feet to make the human in the army uniform let go. He had to. He had to defend himself, to force the human to leave him be. He somehow wrapped his body around an arm that seemed thicker than his chest, his feet kicking at the man’s neck.

The hand let go. Ree tumbled to the ground, gasping. The dead weight of his attacker fell on him. Almost flattened him. Was the man dead? Had Ree killed him? There was a trickle of something warm-soft onto his neck, some liquid.

Oh, he could smell well enough the sharp, metallic tang of blood. But he didn’t want it to be blood. He didn’t want to have killed someone.

Oh, not the first time. Never the first time. But Ree didn’t want to kill. He didn’t want . . . Every time he killed someone, every time his instincts—no, the rat’s instincts, or the cat’s, took over and killed a human, Ree felt that he’d become a little less human. Eventually, his humanity would be all gone. Drained away.

He had lost too much humanity already.

Blood trickled onto his neck, draining away the man’s life, and Ree wanted to stand, to squirm, to flee. But the marching steps approached and he held his breath and hoped, hoped they would pass without pausing.

Closer, he could hear their breaths, and smell the individual men. Not moving, Ree felt blood fall on him, felt the man shudder, stop breathing.

Along the main alley, the marching steps passed away. Slowly, slowly. Ree remained still. Holding his breath.

When the silence had lasted long enough, Ree dug his claws into the mud of the alley and pulled himself from beneath his attacker. His muscles seemed to have gone to water. His movement was too slow. Too slow.

Pulling away from beneath the dead weight, he took deep breaths. His nostrils filled with the smell of blood and filth. He stared at the man he had killed, shaking as he realized what it meant.

Dangerous hobgoblin. They’ll hunt me down and kill me.
There could be no doubt the dead man had been killed by a hobgoblin. Human murderers did not leave claw marks clear across their victims’ throats.

He heard a sound. A breath. It came from behind him.

He paused, shocked. He was not alone.

Ree froze, terror rising to choke him. Someone had seen him kill the man. He felt as if his lungs filled with freezing air.

Someone. There was someone. The person would call for help, and he would be killed like an animal. Like the animal he was. He’d killed someone with his claws, with his . . . He’d killed out of sheer panic.

The soft, muffled sound came from deeper in the alley.

For a moment, Ree trembled on the edge of fleeing, then he recognized the smell that lurked beneath the blood and worse.
Aw, crap. Not that.
He turned slowly, half dreading what he would see, half expecting it.

He stumbled in the direction of the breathing, in the direction of the smell.

The boy lay in the muck. It was hard to say how old he would be: younger than Ree, but not by much. He was all human, but he had the hollow, young-old look all the street rats got sooner or later.

Seen too much,
Ree thought.
Felt too much.

It was the gag and the way he had been tied up with his ragged pants that made Ree’s gut churn.
Aw, crap. You poor thing.

He fell to his knees besides the boy. He saw the momentary panic in the youth’s eyes, and then an odd sort of relaxation, resignation, as if he’d given up the fight and consigned himself to anything fate wished to throw at him. As if the worst possible thing the boy could imagine had happened—and now something worse loomed.

Ree could well imagine what he looked like to this stranger, this shocked stranger. How would he have felt, in the old days, if a monstrosity with rat fur and broad, green cat’s eyes knelt by him . . . touched him.

Gently, Ree reached for the knots. Just the knots, every movement deliberate and slow. Still, the boy closed his eyes and tensed.

The knots were so tight it hurt Ree’s hands to work them free. He would not use his claws to tear through the thin fabric: likely these were the only pants the boy owned. The gag was a little easier, although when Ree’s eyes adjusted and he saw the bloody marks from a beating—probably administered with a rough-edged belt—etched on the boy’s shoulders and face his claws nearly came out anyway. He stifled a hiss.

The boy opened his eyes. They were very large and sky blue, and looked at Ree with startled surprise. Slowly, the boy reached down and gingerly touched his wrist with his other hand.

He blinked at Ree. “What—” he started and swallowed and his expression changed to one of gratitude.

Ree felt queasy. He hadn’t killed the man to rescue the boy. He had killed in an animal panic.

Gently, Ree held out the boy’s clothes. But the boy was swaying on his feet and looked dazed, and Ree sighed. He dressed the boy as if he were a small child. And the boy let him.

By the time the boy was dressed, Ree realized he couldn’t leave him here. Not like this. Not alone and dazed and hurt. But Ree had nowhere to go. And if anyone saw him . . . Especially with the dead man in the alley. The dead man killed by a hobgoblin.

If the boy refused to turn Ree in, they would hurt him. They would hurt him more.

Ree swallowed. “You know this part of town?” he asked.

The boy nodded. “I squat three blocks down—” He hesitated, as though he wanted to give Ree some kind of title.

“Call me Ree. And let’s go. You gotta rest up, and we don’t want no one finding us.”

 

As they approached a rickety tenement building, the boy looked over his shoulder at Ree. “I live there,” he said. “In the attic.”

Ree nodded, not knowing what else to say.

The boy looked longer, as if waiting for an answer. “My name is Jem,” he said.

“Jem,” Ree repeated.

And Jem smiled, a brief, startling smile that made him look, of a sudden, much younger and much too old.

He turned away and walked fast, ahead of Ree, a new spring in his step. He took Ree up a steep, crooked staircase that climbed partway outside the building. Then he climbed up to the attic, a space made usable by some enterprising street rat. Jem’s meager belongings sat in a neat pile by the hole in the roof Jem had used as an entry.

Despite his injuries, despite being human, he climbed nearly as well as Ree. Ree bit his lip. No point feeling jealous.

Jem was all human. He could do odd jobs for a copper coin, or get himself ration chits. Ree had no such advantages. But it was Ree who was unhurt and Jem who was ready to pass out.

“Get yourself down, so’s I can clean you up,” he said.

Jem nodded. His eyes, too big for his thin face, never once left Ree’s face as he lay down. But there was no mistrust in that look. No fear.

“I ain’t going to hurt you any more’n I can help,” Ree said roughly. “That big bastard cut you up good, and it’s gotta get cleaned up or you’ll get sick.” He had seen what happened to wounds that were not cleaned. He knew the putrid wounds, the fever. No one deserved to die like that.

Jem swallowed, but he still watched as Ree dipped a rag into the water bucket. When Ree touched the rag to one of Jem’s bloody welts, the boy gasped, and clenched his fists into his hair.

Ree supposed that hurt less. He tried to be gentle, but he had never tried to mend anyone’s hurts before. He was better at killing.

He flinched from the thought, but looking at Jem’s wounds, he could not summon up as much regret as he wished. He just hoped the big bastard had not torn Jem up too bad inside.

 

But Jem still got sick. His fever rose till he burned to the touch, and he twisted and talked in his sleep.

Ree stayed with him. The rat part—the animal part—wanted to go away. There was a horror of disease. Of death. Death and disease both attracted predators.

The human part of Ree was scared, too. How could it not be? He held onto Jem’s hand through the day, and tried to quiet his screams, his mumbles. Tried to still his panics. And hoped no one heard. No one came.

What would people think if they found a hobgoblin and a human youth?

Ree talked to him through the day. Told him silly things. Sang to him, ballads he barely remembered hearing—in his mother’s house, long ago. And Jem looked at him with wondering, blue eyes.

And never showed fear. Never fear. A twinge of fear from Jem, a twinge of horror at Ree’s strangeness, and Ree would have been free to leave, free to go in search of a new hideout. Free to become a wild creature again. To forget he’d ever been human.

But Jem looked at him with confidence and trust and, in his brief moments of lucidity, grinned at Ree’s jokes, smiled at them. Or reached for Ree’s hand for reassurance.

So Ree stayed. And when he went out at night to refill the water bucket and steal food for them both, he always came back. Perhaps he was fooling himself. Perhaps he was using Jem to make himself feel human.

But he could not possibly live knowing how Jem would feel if he didn’t come back. The idea of Jem’s betrayal and disappointment was more than Ree could bear. It would have stripped Ree’s soul bare of what humanity remained.

So he went and he came back. Sometimes, he caught rats. One good, fat rat made a meal when he skinned it and cooked it over a tiny fire.

In the past, Ree had eaten it raw. But Jem would have been shocked, scared. For the sake of Jem, Ree had to be human and eat with human manners, as he hadn’t since the night the magic had changed him.

And each time, each time out, Ree feared he would be caught. Not just for his death, but because Jem might think he’d been abandoned.

There were more patrols now, and searches. Patrols that came too close for his liking talked about the killer hobgoblin, the one who’d killed the soldier, and how Emperor Melles himself was offering a whole gold piece for the hobgoblin’s hide.

The thought made his stomach go all queasy. Not all those soldiers would make sure he was dead before they started skinning him. And there were worse things . . .

Jacona had become a rat trap. Holding Jem’s hand, as Jem slowly became stronger and more confident, Ree realized he could not stay in the city. Like his warehouse, it had become a trap.

The problem was, he did not know how he was to escape. The work gangs had not just hauled water to cisterns and replaced all the work that used to be done with magic. They had built a new wall around the city, to keep the hobgoblins out. The wall went all the way to Crag Castle, Ree had heard, and soldiers guarded it all the time. Jacona was a fortified rat trap.

No matter how busy the roads were, everyone who went through one of the gates was inspected. Ree had seen the frozen dangling corpse of a merchant who had tried to smuggle his son-turned-hobgoblin out of the city. He did not know if the man had died of the hanging or if he had frozen to death. Ree shuddered at the thought of what the patrols would do to Jem if they found them together.

He did not want to think about it. But he had to escape. It would be safer for Jem if he was just another human, with no rat boy to make him a criminal. Safer for Jem to be alone again. And safer for Ree, even though he had no idea what lay beyond the walls of Jacona.

Oh, he knew there were farms, and farmers, and roads that went to other cities. And he had heard there were wild places where a rat boy might be able to live without humans always hunting him. But he had never seen anything outside Jacona, never been beyond the tenements and warehouses of the poorest districts.

How could he escape?

The aqueducts had been broken by the winter storms after the magic began to die. The sections near the city walls had been knocked down by the work gangs who built the wall.

Ree had heard that no one knew when—or even
if
—magic was going to come back, so there had been no reason to keep something that would not be useful without magic. He had wondered sometimes if he would eventually change back without magic, but that did not seem likely.

As for the drains . . . Ree shuddered. The patrols would not go there. That was where the Changerats and the even weirder hobgoblins had gone. The ones that were all teeth, claws, and poison. Like the patrols, Ree did not want to know what had become of them. And yet, it might be his only chance. A slim chance at life, as opposed to the sure death that would come to him if they found him in Jacona. And to Jem if they found him sheltering Ree.

But first he had to wait for Jem to be well, for Jem to be well enough to survive on his own.

 

“You’re leaving?” Jem asked. He managed to look about two years old and very confused.

Ree nodded. Jem had stood up two days ago and he looked strong enough to survive, strong enough to do whatever he had done before meeting Ree. Why was it that Ree could not meet his eyes, and found himself looking at the floor as he said, “Stay away from the soldiers, Jem. You are—” He stopped short of saying that Jem was too pretty to be safe. He had not thought it, not thought it at all the whole time they had been together. Not consciously. Not with his rational mind. He had not. Jem was just . . . Jem. Ree looked up and caught a disturbing glimpse of broad blue eyes, like a summer sky. Threatening rain. “They are not . . . They do not have the restraints of the local patrols. They answer to no one.