Chapter 139 Rat's Castle
POV: Isla Reid | Beneath the Rookeries
The shelter volunteers called it the Underneath, which was accurate and not enough. The Rookeries itself was already below the surface of the city that most people saw, the wrong side of the Veil, the wrong side of every economic line that had ever been drawn across East London. But there was a level below that, and Isla knew she was in it the moment the stairs ran out and the tunnel floor leveled beneath her boots.
She'd brought two people with her: Kira, who was the fastest healer among the shelter volunteers, and an older packless wolf named Doran who had been born in this part of the city and knew its geography the way other people knew their own kitchens. Doran had tried to talk her out of coming twice on the walk over and had stopped trying after the second time because he recognized the particular quality of Isla's stubbornness by now.
The smell hit first. It was the smell of bodies that had stopped maintaining themselves, of fur and blood and something underneath both of those things that wasn't quite physical, the smell of minds that had let something go.
Doran said, quietly, "Stay close to me."
The tunnel opened into a space that must have been a Victorian sewer chamber once, thirty feet across and domed at the ceiling, with alcoves carved into the walls where the stone had been worked rather than natural. In those alcoves, and on the floor, and in the shallow trenches along the walls, there were wolves.
Thirty of them at least. Maybe more. It was hard to count because several were partially transformed, bodies stuck between shapes the way a fever holds a body between states, neither here nor there. Some were sleeping. Some were watching Isla with the fixed attention of animals that hadn't decided yet whether she was a threat or food.
This was Rat's Castle.
She had heard about it for months. Everyone in the Rookeries had. The place where wolves went when they were too far gone for the shelters, too feral for community, not feral enough to be put down by Parliament's hunters. A liminal space for people caught between lives.
She opened her medical bag and started taking stock of what she could see without moving closer. Untreated wounds. Malnutrition. Two wolves near the far wall with the silver-gray fur and shaking flanks that meant silver poisoning in an advanced stage. One wolf in the closest alcove with a wound in its side that had been healing wrong for weeks, she could tell by the way the scar tissue had formed over an underlying infection.
She moved toward the nearest case. Kira followed. Doran stayed at the tunnel entrance with his back to the wall.
Nobody attacked them. That was something.
She worked for two hours. She cleaned wounds, administered antibiotics from her bag, wrapped the silver poisoning cases in copper-threaded bandages that drew the contamination slowly, gave pain management to the wolf with the infected side wound who couldn't afford to fully transform to heal it. Most of the wolves she treated didn't speak. A few growled low in their throats and then let her work anyway, which she'd learned to read as consent.
The oldest one watched her from the far side of the chamber the entire time.
He was in a permanent partial transformation, which meant he'd stopped being able to fully shift back years ago. His face was human enough to read but his hands were claws and his spine was wrong under the tattered shirt he still wore, arched into a shape that human spines weren't built for. His eyes were clear, though. That was the thing that caught her. Among all of this, his eyes were completely clear.
She went to him last.
She crouched a few feet away and didn't touch him, just looked at him steadily and waited.
"You're the nurse," he said. His voice was rougher than it should have been but the words were precise. "From the shelters."
"Isla Reid."
"I know who you are." He shifted, slowly, adjusting his crooked spine against the wall. "They call me King Rat down here. I didn't choose it. Names stick."
"How long have you been here?"
"In this form? Four years. In this city?" He made a sound that might have been a laugh. "Longer than you've been alive."
She asked if she could examine the partial transformation, assess whether anything could be done for the spine. He let her, watching her hands while she worked. There wasn't much she could do. The damage was too old, the joints too set. She told him honestly and he nodded like he'd already known.
"Tell Callum Brennan something for me," he said, while she was closing her bag.
"I can do that."
He looked at her with those clear, undamaged eyes.
"His brother isn't the only one planning revenge."