The Apothecary Page 0,40

tie and walked around the corner.

The three of us left our trees and flew after him, keeping our distance, and Danby walked to the end of the block. He stopped outside a boxy-looking building, turned a key in the door, and vanished inside.

There was a large tree that looked like a sycamore outside the building, and I landed on a leafy, low branch beside Benjamin and Pip. I didn’t know what the building might be, but I was sure it was where they were keeping Benjamin’s father.

We couldn’t communicate in speech, but I knew that Benjamin wanted to fly in as a skylark as soon as someone opened the door, and I knew Pip thought it was a bad idea. I can’t explain now exactly how I knew all of that, but it was clear in their eyes and in the movement of their heads and their wings.

At some point during this avian battle of wills, a stealthy orange tabby cat must have been climbing our tree. We were oblivious, thinking only about the locked door and the question of whether to go in.

Then a man pushed open the bunker’s door and came outside. Benjamin spread his wings to fly in the open door, but Pip chirped and fluttered to stop him. And then the giant tabby reached our branch and pounced on Benjamin’s back. Benjamin screeched, in his thin bird’s voice, and tried to fly away, but she had him in her claws.

I was paralysed with fear, but Pip wasn’t. He flew straight at the cat’s huge yellow eyes with his sharp beak. She yowled in pain, dropping Benjamin to the ground. Then she swiped at Pip with her paw, pinning him to the branch.

The man leaving the bunker stopped to watch the commotion for a moment, but it was only a cat after a couple of birds in a tree, and he walked away, lighting a cigarette inside a cupped hand.

I grabbed the cat’s soft ear with my talons just as she took Pip’s neck in her sharp white teeth. I squeezed her ear, and her yowl of pain turned to one of surprise as Pip started to grow, right under her claws. He lost his feathers and grew clothes, and suddenly the cat had a full-sized boy in her clutches, crouching precariously on the branch.

The cat scrambled back in a panic and fell out of the tree. I watched her twist in midair and land heavily on her feet. She didn’t stop to contemplate what had gone wrong, but raced off down the street, an orange streak.

Benjamin, too, had become a boy again, and was sitting on the ground. Pip lowered himself by his arms off the branch, then dropped the remaining distance. They both seemed a little dazed, and Pip was rubbing the back of his neck, where he had four small puncture wounds from the cat’s teeth. I thought the stress of the attack must have caused the boys’ bodies to change back. I hadn’t changed yet, but I had become a bird last and I hadn’t been seized by a cat. I flew down to the grass, where Benjamin felt his legs. “No broken bones,” he said. “I don’t think.”

“That cat put holes in me!” Pip said.

I flew to his shoulder to look. Benjamin peered at them, too. “They’re tiny.”

“Says you!”

“We still have to get inside that building,” Benjamin said. “Janie could fly in, when that man comes back.”

“She can’t!” Pip said. “I’ve been tryin’ to tell you, it’s a secret bunker. She’ll get caught if she turns human, and she can’t carry your da out with her little wings.”

Benjamin stared at him. “It’s a secret bunker?”

“Sure. It’s a military bomb shelter, underground. For Churchill and that lot, if there’s another war.”

“How do you know that?” Benjamin asked.

Pip shrugged his narrow shoulders, nearly dislodging me. “Everybody knows. To put a bloody enormous bunker right under Bethnal Green, you need builders, right? And the builders all say the job’s top secret, mind your business, till they get a few pints in ’em. Then they spill it. They swear all the barmaids to secrecy, like.”

“How big is it?”

“The whole block, underground.”

I had an idea, but I couldn’t speak. Then the idea was interrupted by a strange sensation coming over me. It came in a wave, and I couldn’t control it. I hopped off Pip’s shoulder as my heartbeat started to slow, and my arms prickled in a thousand places where the feathers were disappearing, retracting back