The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [153]
I nodded, clapping a hand over my mouth. “He was ready to take orders for the Master Builder’s seminary to make it stop.”
“You know,” Cal said abruptly, “I have plenty of hearth mates in my nest. We grew together, we learned to hunt together—hunt humans together—and Toby is my twin.” He lowered his head. “But I never had a friend until I met you.”
The fear ebbed. That was Cal talking, even if his face was strange.
“I didn’t even have that,” I said after a moment. “I grew up in group homes. Conrad and I …” I trailed off, hoping he’d understand.
“Survival doesn’t make for fast friendships,” Cal agreed. “The goddess Hecate teaches us that any one of us might die on any hunt. Her faces are the Huntress and the Hunger. She forbids frivolity. Friendship and love make the ghul weak.”
“People, too,” I said. Cal reached for me, then realized there was no way we could clasp hands with his elongated digits, and pulled his paw away.
“Don’t say that, Aoife. You showed me yourself it isn’t always true.”
We came to a junction in the tunnel. Toby stood on his hind legs and scented the air, making himself a head taller than I was. I backed up.
“We’re alone,” Toby said. “We can head for home. If you still insist on bringing the meat.”
“I do! And stop calling them meat,” Cal growled.
Toby gave a wet sniff. “Whatever you say. They’re your problem.”
He scampered down the left-hand tunnel, and Cal padded after him, mumbling under his breath. I followed, glad that I was bringing up the rear with Dean, where nothing could surprise me.
The tunnel widened into a disused water main. Old clay crumbled under my feet. I watched my tread, and nearly plowed into Cal when he stopped abruptly.
Cal pointed to a glow in the distance, where three massive mains made a junction half collapsed from age and disuse. “Up there. It’s home.”
The Gift of the Ghouls
THE GHOUL NEST crouched under the junction like a giant spider, the long fibrous ribbons of the nest tunnels clinging to the ancient drainage main that swept debris from old Lovecraft south and out to the river.
“Go slow,” Cal said. “Let them smell you and see that you’re not hostile.”
I had no desire to rush into the heart of the city’s worst nightmare, and I stopped a few yards from the waist-high hole that was the nest’s entrance.
The ghoul nest was woven from snatches of metal and leather, canvas and fabric, humped tents clustered around a central hub wafting gentle smoke that smelled of char and something richer and darker. An old, old memory, of a madhouse surgery after my mother broke her mirror into a knifelike shard, called back to me. I was smelling blood.
An ancient jitney, so old it still bore the seal of the Massachusetts Transit Authority rather than the City seal, contained a horde of ghoul pups, all jockeying for position at the windows. They bared their teeth, pocketknives instead of wicked blades, but still sharp enough to eat me.
“Ever feel like an entrée?” Dean muttered. “All we need is a little drawn butter.”
“Mother!” Toby called, dropping onto all four limbs so he could pass easily into the nest. “We’re home. We’re all home!”
“Your mother lives in there?” I said, then realized I sounded as spoiled as any typical Uptown princess. “I mean, of course she does.”
Cal looked to me. “This is what Draven said he’d come and burn to ashes.” His eyes begged me to understand.
A female ghoul half my height came forth, an ivory-handled walking stick in her grasp. Though she limped on two legs, her hair was only half silver, and twisted into gypsy braids, and her arms and legs were banded with iron muscle. There was a scar across her smushed nose, and unlike Cal, nothing human glinted in her gaze. “We?” she demanded. “I sent you out for a simple errand, October, and you return with—”
Cal lifted one paw. “It’s me, Mother. I came back.”
The woman’s walking stick clattered out of her grasp, and she let out a sound that was half shriek and half sob. “Carver!” she gasped. “I thought we’d next see you in the hunting