Legacy of the Claw (11 page)

BAILEY SAT AWAKE IN one of the broad armchairs in the common room long after Hal and the other Tower boys had gone to bed. He mulled over what Phi had told him earlier, about the fear Carin felt out in the woods. Bailey felt certain there must be a mysterious beast out there, responsible for the gruesome death of the bear.

At the bear's funeral days before, Bailey hadn't wanted to mention the animal he had spotted from the rigomotive. It was clear that even Hal hadn't believed him at the time. But the memory of it crept up often, and the more he thought about it the more he couldn't shake the feeling that whatever was out there was dangerous. Perhaps it even had human kin who were equally as dangerous. The animal he'd spotted from the rigimotive had been the largest thing he'd ever seen. If that beast and its kin had followed them to the school, then Fairmount needed to know.

He was sure that if he went to the administration with talk of a mysterious, ghostly beast, he'd be laughed out of the office. He needed proof—and if Phi's words were any indication, that proof might be closer to the school than he thought.

He made a sudden decision. He'd go out and see what he could find now, tonight.

Bailey was extra quiet as he slunk along the wall of the dorms, after a quick and silent trip to his room to grab a jacket and shoes. He held his breath as he shimmied past the resident assistant's door. A floorboard creaked underneath him, and Bailey froze. He couldn't see anything in the dark hallway. He heard a rustle from a neighboring room, and said a silent prayer to Nature that no one would discover him. He waited for a whole minute, frozen. No one came. He kept moving.

Downstairs, he made his way to the cloakroom, where a smaller side door, less likely to creak noisily, took him outside.

He knew he had to hurry across the grounds. Bindley and his night-vision lens could be just about anywhere, and no one had put myrgwood in his tea tonight. He ran due west, around the back of Treetop, toward the bottom of the vast hill where the Scavage fields sat, its stadium seats illuminated by the moon. The patch of trees that backed up to the fields looked ghostly in this darkness. He veered south, to the path that led into the woods, and to where the bear was found. He took a deep breath, and prepared to enter into the shadows.

“Hey, wait!” a voice called. Bailey spun around, half expecting to see a pack of Bindley's hounds charging after him. But it was Tori, hastening down the hill with a cotton robe thrown over a silky button-up pajama top that looked a few sizes too big for her, and boy's pajama bottoms. She had a hand-powered dynamo lamp in her hand, with a crank that made the lightbulb sputter to life.

“Shh!”
he said.

“What are you doing out here?” Tori asked him as soon as she caught up. She looked excited to see him, as though she'd just been sitting around in her pj's, waiting for an excuse to sneak out of the dorms. Bailey saw the flash of a slim, black snake around her arm.

“What are
you
doing?” Bailey whispered.

“I saw you run past the window,” Tori said. “I wasn't tired, so I followed you.”

Bailey felt anxious all over again.

“You should go back to bed. You don't want to get in trouble. Two people are easier to catch than one.”

“Ants to that!” she exclaimed. “It's so
dull
around here I could scream. I'm dying for a little adventure. Lead on.”

“Fine,” Bailey said, hoping that she'd get bored and turn back before he found evidence of the white beast or its kin—he wasn't ready to share that theory with anyone yet. Then again, he thought, having a witness if they did come across anything would be useful. “Just try to keep quiet, okay?”

Bailey ignored her as she fiddled with her dynamo lamp, which didn't seem to crank properly. “Ants to this thing!” seemed to be Tori's favorite thing to say. Each time she cursed, he shushed her, and they pressed on in the darkness.

A thick line on Bailey's campus map represented the border of the Fairmount grounds. It was drawn at the westernmost edge of the lower cliffs that led down to the waterwheel, and marked the point of the forest where students were not allowed to cross. Bailey had assumed that the line was only symbolic, and that forest wouldn't change from one side to the other. But as he and Tori walked steadily on past the dirt road, the trees grew closer together. The ground became more uneven, and large rocks jutted up between the roots. When Bailey heard the churning and crashing of water in the distance, he knew that they had crossed that thick line drawn on the map, and were no longer on school grounds. As Tori and Bailey stopped to get their bearings, he heard a low hissing that seemed to come from many creatures at the same time. The sound was all around them.

“Is that  …  ?” he began to ask.

“
Thamnophis cyrtopsis
, maybe even a few
Elaphe obsoleta
,” Tori said in an excited whisper. She looked at Bailey, who had no clue what she was talking about. “Snakes.”

“Oh,” he said. No wonder she thought of Ms. Sucrette as a drip—Tori's Latin was already pretty good.

“Where are we?” asked Tori. The tone of her voice made Bailey wonder if, for all her desire to come, she was actually afraid. As excited as she was to find so many of her kin around, Tori must have inferred from them that something was not as it should be. Her black snake crept out of the neck of her pajama top and settled onto her collarbone.

“It's okay,” Bailey said to reassure her, even though he wasn't sure if this was true. “We're out near the low cliffs.”

Tori's eyes widened.

“What in Nature are we doing all the way out here?” Tori began hitting the dynamo light with the flat of her palm, trying to jolt it into working properly. It sputtered, flashed once, and then emitted a beam of dim light. “What are you looking for?”

“I'm not sure yet,” he admitted. He wondered whether telling Tori to watch for signs of a giant predator would help the situation at all. Instead, he crouched low and began scanning the tree trunks around them, hoping that whatever marks he found—if any—were old.

“Everyone's being so secretive lately,” said Tori. Bailey could tell by the slight waver in her voice that she was nervous, but trying to put on a brave front. “Phi's got her super-secret independent study in the tinkering shop, and here you are looking for ‘something, not sure!' in the Dark Woods. I always thought
I
was the mysterious kind  … ”

“What do you mean, about Phi?” Bailey asked. She hadn't mentioned any special classes to him earlier.

Tori shrugged.

“I don't know what it is. But she spends her dinnertime before practice at Tremelo's workshop, and when I asked what they were making, she said she'd show me when the time was right.”

A chilly breeze blew through the woods. Tori pulled her sleeves down, and crossed her arms over her buttoned pajama top. Bailey saw a flash of scarred skin on both her wrists. “It's so quiet out here,” she whispered. “It's positively creepy.”

Bailey had to agree. The hissing had subsided, and the Dark Woods was almost
too
quiet, as if the entire place were holding its breath, waiting for something to happen. He had the strangest feeling, similar to the one he'd felt the night of the rigimotive incident. The feeling of being watched.

“You  …  you don't think there's someone else out here, do you?” Tori whispered, as if she were reading his mind. The skin on Bailey's arms and neck felt shivery.

“I don't,” he lied.

Just then, there was a rustle behind them in the bushes.

Before he could even think, Bailey grabbed Tori's hand as the two of them spun around, their hearts pounding in the almost total silence of the woods. A flash, a darting shape, and Bailey held his breath.

It was only a fox, scurrying past them from behind a boulder.

Bailey sighed with relief, and Tori let out a nervous laugh.

“Sorry,” Bailey said, letting go of her hand.

Tori straightened her pajama top and smiled.

“It's okay.” She exhaled. “I was scared too.” Her snake was practically strangling her, and she tried to disentangle it. “What's wrong with you?” she addressed it impatiently. “It was only a—”

But at that second a giant gray wolf, snarling, jumped out at them from the darkness of the trees. Bailey felt the sharp, wrenching pain in his forearm before he even registered what had happened.

He fell backward, holding his arm. Tori screamed as the creature turned to her. She whirled the faulty dynamo lamp, her only weapon, above her head and brought it crashing down on the wolf's nose. What little light the lamp had provided immediately died. In the darkness the wolf backed away a step, growling.

“Bailey!” Tori yelled, holding the remains of the broken dynamo lamp in one hand. “Are you okay?”

Bailey tried to get up to help her fend off the wolf. He'd fallen hard against the trunk of a tree, and his back was throbbing almost as much as his arm. The wolf was still snarling, showing all its teeth, muscles tense. Tori, moving quickly, grabbed a heavy stone from the forest floor, and chucked it, hitting the wolf in the front leg. It growled and sidestepped. Bailey hauled himself to his feet. The wolf dug its front paws into the ground, and Bailey knew it was preparing to leap at them.

“Tor  … ” he whispered, his hands shaking. He grabbed at her to push her out of the way, but his arm felt so weak.

Suddenly, from behind them, a loud, primal scream rang out—it was a man, his voice so loud, angry, and like the roar of a real animal that the wolf paused. An arrow whooshed by them and hit the tree directly behind the wolf with a loud
twang
.

“Get back!” shouted the man, barreling past Tori and Bailey and approaching the wolf head on.

It was Tremelo. His driving jacket billowed out behind him as he jumped in front of them and leveled a heavy bow made of gears and springs at the attacking wolf. Tremelo pulled a clicking trigger and loosed an arrow that whizzed by the wolf's left ear and sunk with a thud into the same tree. The wolf growled and yelped, then slunk away.

As Bailey watched it disappear into the trees, he thought he saw something that made him catch his breath: the silhouettes of two men standing in the trees. He squinted, trying to force his eyes to adjust to the dark, and the men were gone. But he'd seen them; he knew it. He'd been right.

Tremelo threw the bow over his shoulder and stomped toward Bailey.

“What were you thinking?” he asked, furious.

“There were men,” Bailey said, and he tried to point before a jolt of pain reminded him that his arm was wounded. “Just over there.”

“Come on,” said Tremelo quickly, but not before Bailey recognized a surprised look in the professor's eyes. “We need to get your arm looked after.”

“But, sir. Their kin attacked us, and with the bear attack, what if—”

“There's no one out here,” responded Tremelo curtly. “You're seeing things.”

He grabbed Bailey's good arm with one hand and Tori's arm with the other and began dragging them back through the woods. Bailey began to wonder how Tremelo had simply appeared in the woods with a bow and arrows. Had he been following them? Or was he prowling the woods for his own reasons? Did he really believe that no one was out here, or had he been lying? Bailey's head swam with the possibilities, and he began to wonder what, exactly, Tremelo was doing here at Fairmount.

Tremelo's kin, Fennel, trotted ahead of them. Of course, Bailey thought to himself. We saw her just before the wolf attacked. Tremelo knew we were in danger because of her. But why had the fox been following them in the first place?

Then a terrible thought struck Bailey. He'd been caught. Yes, by Tremelo, who broke the rules just as often as anyone, but he'd been caught nonetheless. If Tremelo chose to report him, Bailey would be expelled. No excuses. No second chances.

As they reached the edge of the forest and could see the Fairmount buildings up on the hill, Tremelo let go of them.

“Sir  … ” Bailey tried to say.

“You say one word begging me not to tell Finch, I'll leave you out here with not a single look back,” Tremelo growled. “What will be done is my decision now, not yours.”

Tori and Bailey looked at each other and stayed silent. Tori looked much paler than usual.

Fennel reached the door of a small stone carriage house that sat tucked among the trees. Tremelo beckoned them over to a low side door and unlocked it. He looked around for lights on in other windows.

Bailey realized that, instead of leading him to the school's infirmary, Tremelo had brought them to his own quarters. He began to feel uneasy.

“What are we doing here?” he asked.

“If you show up in the infirmary with some cock-and-bull story, you'll be out of here faster than you can say
I'm an idiot
,” Tremelo spat as they followed him up the stairs.

Bailey and Tori barely had enough room to stand in Tremelo's messy apartment. They stood back to back in the sitting room as Tremelo squeezed past a towering pile of books and disappeared into a side room. They heard rummaging and the clanking of bottles.

“Don't bleed on my floor, boy,” Tremelo called. Bailey looked down at his wound. There was a lot of blood, but underneath was only a scratch. It wouldn't need stitches—at least, he hoped it wouldn't. Tori elbowed Bailey in the side.

“Are you
seeing
all these books?” she whispered. Bailey craned his neck around to look at the shelves. They were stacked with all kinds of different books, some of them very old. Some of the newer ones were just cheaply printed pamphlets, with titles like
The False King's Power: The Jackal and Parliament,
and
The Parliament's Crimes Against the People.
Many books seemed to be about the Animas bond's history and power. One book that piqued Bailey's interest was called
The Velyn and their Kin: A Study in Transformation
.