Cloak (YA Fantasy) (27 page)

“It’s kind of freaky. Cool, but freaky.” Will held the fang up to see the light filter through the hollow bone.

“I thought you’d like it. Well, put it on. Go on, go on.” Mars snatched the chain from Will and looped it around his neck.

Will looked in the mirror.

“So?”

“It’s awesome, Mars. Thanks. And thank Berko for me too.”

Mars beamed. “Don’t thank us, you earned it. Just call it your insanity trophy. Fangs, choco-bombs, stampedes—you win.”

“You heard about the stampede?”

“I kind of
overheard
about it. I was eavesdropping on Liska, the red witch. Rumor is that you walked away without a bruise.”

“Wait, how did Liska know that?”

“She got a text or something. All I know is I heard a ping when she was running to the herbivore cafeteria. She pulled out some sort of phone, then told her ISPA jerks that you were unharmed and being taken to your room. She also said she thinks you probably started the stampede with your Builder accomplices. I really hate that lady.”

Mars sniffed her studded black jacket and hands. “Aw, man, this stink is never coming off. What do you have 
stench-in-a-can
 for anyway?”

Will shifted. “Well, I just…”

“Wait minute, how did you know where I was? I heard Rizz tell you to put in your enhancer. Are you a…no way!” Mars stepped back, wide-eyed, and slapped her hand to her forehead, causing a strand of purple hair to fall across her face. She took a deep breath and then shrieked.

The sound was so shrill Will covered his hears. “Ouch! What are you doing?”

“Proving my theory,” grinned Mars. “You’re no gerbilchant, Stinky.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I always thought you were different. You’re in here for allergies, but you’re not allergic to anything. You know nothing about enchants. You have bodyguards. Then you barely get an enhancer and suddenly you can hear in super high def?”

“What? Who says?”

“You did.”

“Me?”

“Yep.”

“When?”

“Right now,” she giggled. “I’m talking like five octaves above normal enchant hearing and you keep answering. And my highest radar scream just about knocked you over.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘Oh.’ Not to mention that you have a can of instant gerbil funk and right now your musk stench is pretty weak. You must have sweated it off and forgotten to restink yourself. Will, Noctua raised me. Don’t you think I’ve heard every one of his theories? The doc is obsessed.”

She was getting excited now—flapping her wings as she poked Will in the chest with a finger. “You’re not a gerbilchant, Stinky; you’re not even an enchant. You’re an 
Immune.”

“I…”

Mars held up a hand. “Yeah. Don’t even try to deny it. You’re a horrible liar. I can hear your heart doing the jitterbug already.”

Will realized he was caught and sank to the edge of his bed. “Okay. But you can’t say anything to anybody, nobody, not a soul.”

“Promise.” Mars crossed her heart and kissed her fingers. “But now that I know, you have to tell me everything that’s going on around here, or I’ll spill the beans to everybody and their grandmother.”

Will knew she wasn’t bluffing. “Fine, but if you tell anybody—”

“May my wing fall off and I lose my sight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. Now start talking. I want details.”

Will filled Mars in on his real past. Being a bubble boy, meeting Dr. Noctua, the wolf attack, his relocation to St. Grimm’s, the enhancers, naturalization, and what just happened in that cafeteria. It felt good to unload his secrets, although he didn’t mention the Builder with the red stripe, or how he had communicated by some sort of weird scent-speaking-mind-reading.

As Will spoke, Mars paced up the walls and across the desk. She ended up hanging from the ceiling by her feet with her arms crossed, chewing on her lip. “Wow. So some wolfchant hunter is after you? Cylus and his crew hate you, Liska thinks you’re in league with the Builders, and the Builders are probably trying to kill you?”

“Well, it sounds a lot worse when you say it like that.”

“This is awesome!” Mars rubbed her palms together.

“How is this 
awesome
 in any way?” Will put his head in his hands.

“Are you kidding?” She fluttered to the floor. “It’s like a real-life crime drama. Intrigue. Murderers. Villains. This place can get so boring, but now we’re going to have something to do.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Isn’t it obvious? We’re going to solve a case.”

“What case?”

“I don’t know yet, but with so many enchants after you, something bad is totally going to happen and we’ll be right there to figure out who did it.”

“That’s a horrible idea.”

“Why, Stinky? I thought you’d be excited.”

“You want me to get excited about investigating my own murder?”

“I didn’t say it was going to be a murder. It might just be a mauling or a kidnapping or something.”

“Oh, that would be a lot better,” grumbled Will.

“Hey, all I’m saying is that it’s gonna be cool to be friends with an Immune…
the
 Immune.” She punched Will in the shoulder.

“So, I guess this means you can’t call me 
Stinky
 anymore, huh?”

“Whatever. You’ll always be Stinky to me. And besides, I wouldn’t want to blow your cover.” Mars flitted back up to the ceiling, where she gripped a wooden beam with her feet.

“Gee, thanks.” Will fingered the fang around his neck and glanced up.

Mars was insane and completely neurotic, but at the end of the day, Will knew the crazy, purple-haired bat-girl hanging from the ceiling was a friend he could trust. He’d bet his life on it. And in a way, he just had.

23

Sequestered Secrets

I
t was six a.m. Rizz stood in Will’s doorway, covered in mud and looking exhausted. “We found her.”

“Kaya? Is she okay?” asked Will.

Rizz rubbed his neck and shrugged. “The doc’s not sure. We found her up in the mountains above the tree line. It looks like she ran until she collapsed from exhaustion. She has severe hypothermia and pneumonia.” Rizz dropped his eyes. “We’ll know more in a day or two.”

“But why’d she change like that?”

“Noctua thinks something on those jackal enchants infected her. Dervis is testing samples of the jackals’ fur.” Rizz cleared his throat. “Or it might have been something—or someone—else entirely. When we found her, she was mumbling the same thing over and over again.”

“What?”

Rizz scratched his arm. “It’s not important.”

“Rizz. What did she say?”

“She kept saying she had to get away. From you.” He eyed Will.

“Wait. You think I had something to do with why she acted that way?”

“No.” Rizz hesitated. “I don’t know. It’s just that you seem to be in the middle of a lot of aggression lately. First the wolf, then the Builders, Cylus, the stampede. Now this thing with Kaya. Will, those jackals were the same two you tagged in the lobby yesterday. It just seems too connected to be coincidence. The only thing that links it all together is…”

“Me.” Will dropped into a chair. “You think I’m making this happen?”

“Not on purpose. I don’t know. Maybe there’s something about being an Immune that sets carnivores off or something.”

Will stared at the floor.

“Look, kid, this is just me being overly cautious, and I don’t want you to take it personally, but we’re all going to take it easy for a few days. You’re gonna stay put and we’ll have Nurse Starr bring your food in here. Let’s just relax and enjoy some downtime.”

“So now I’m under house arrest?”

“No. It’s nothing like that. We just want to keep you on the down-low for a day or two, just to see what happens.”

“Keep me quarantined to see if the attacks stop?” He thought about the way he’d somehow communicated with the Builder. Maybe Rizz was right. Maybe he was causing these attacks. His shoulders slumped. “Fine. If you think it will help, I’ll go along with it. I was a bubble boy for thirteen years, what’s a couple more days?”

Rizz flashed a tired smile. “Thanks. We’ll get this all straightened out. I promise.”

It wasn’t the confinement. That was nothing new. It was the two days of seclusion that tortured Will. He missed the Special Branch team. They stood guard outside the door but kept him at a distance. It was like he was a prisoner awaiting a verdict.

Rizz had confiscated the enhancers. “We don’t want you tempted to sneak out. It’ll be easier if you don’t hear what’s going on outside your room.”

Will suspected it was so he couldn’t use the enhancers to communicate with Mars and Berko.

Lonely and bored, Will spent the first day reading and updating his yellow allergy journal. He cataloged every new food he’d tasted, new enchants he’d met, and new places he’d been. But by the evening, he had written down everything he could remember.

The next day, he tried reading the antique copy of
Grimm’s History
that Dr. Noctua had given him in New York, but its weighty, old-fashioned language kept making him nod off. He sifted through a stack of history books he was supposed to study for his naturalization test.

The Rise and Fall of the Dodochant
explained the reasons dodo birds and dodochants died out at about the same time—a lack of fear, a tendency to taunt carnivores, and choosing to nest in floodplains.
Under Wraps: The Abridged History of Cloak
mentioned that the inventor of Cloak was an owl enchant named Vincent Beauchamp. The book,
Double Life: Enchant Athletes Who Made it in the Nep Leagues,
told how enchants were forced to drop from the Olympic games thirty years ago after a horse enchant tested positive for horse hormones.

At the bottom of the stack, Will found two books he had never seen before. One was a children’s book from the 1930s—
The Beginner’s Book of Scent-Speaking: A Guide to Communicating with Builders.
The cover had an illustration of a rabbit enchant and a young Builder playing a game of hop-scotch. The word BANNED had been stamped on the front and back. Will read through pages full of tips on how to communicate with a new Builder friend, like using hand signals and smiling.

The first chapter was “Scent-Speaking Lesson One—Scent Extremes.” It taught that since scent-speaking is based on feelings, you have to be able to recognize the emotion pheromone of the speaker.

“The four basic emotion pheromones are: Love, Hate, Joy, and Despair. Emotions are the building blocks of scent-speak, just like vowels are for English.”

There was a cartoon of four emotional mailmen taking letters from the Builder to the rabbit enchant.

Will paused. Builders hadn’t always been hated. This book taught how to reach out to them. Even though it did say learning scent-speak was almost impossible, the book taught that it was important to understand how Builders communicate so they could be publicly accepted. He closed the cover and ran his fingers over the ugly BANNED stamp.

The other book was thick and red with a black title:
The Builder Uprising and the End of the Immune.
Just inside the front cover, Will saw the words:
This is not truthful. Do not be deceived.
The blocky handwriting looked like it had been written by a child.

Will began with Chapter One: THE BUILDER THREAT.

The Builders described were nothing like the children’s textbook. Here, it spoke of unthinking creatures without sympathy or emotion of any kind.

Will read for hours, barely noticing when Nurse Starr dropped off his lunch, then dinner. He was too engrossed in the accounts of Builders appearing out of nowhere, invading offices, burning homes, spiriting away Immunes, and sweeping through the City of New Wik like a great plague. Builders attacked the enchant seat of government, The Chambers of Wik. Six Senior Wik Councilmen were killed as Builders stormed The Chambers.

The book told how Xavier B. Noctua had organized a defense, keeping the Builders at bay long enough for the rest of the Council of Wik to escape. The fight left him injured, but the Council of Wik intact. Dr. Noctua was called the greatest living enchant hero, solely responsible for the survival of enchant government.