clever beasts,” Asil told her as he began climbing into the room. “As smart as dogs.”
“I don’t want to talk about rats while we are crawling among them. Please?” she said. “And the way to the kids’ room is down the hallway to the right of the fridge.”
He smiled, mostly in relief that she seemed to be settling back into Tami for both he and his wolf, instead of witch. He noticed that there seemed to be a trail of compacted rubbish that led in the direction she had indicated. They crunched and climbed past two doors nearly covered to the top of the doorframe and then slid downhill to a small area that had been cleared of stuff all the way down to a hardwood floor. An area that looked as though it had been bigger until very recently.
The boy had told Tami there had been an avalanche, and that’s what it looked like, too. A full-sized metal desk of the sort ubiquitously found in government offices after World War II was the main bulk of it, but there were bags and boxes—cardboard and clear plastic—scattered around. The fall had left a divot in the mass just beyond the cleaned space.
Asil’s eyes narrowed grimly. He might not be able to pick out the scent of the creature right now, but there was an intent to the way in which the desk had fallen that made him certain he’d been right about the danger.
There was an enemy here, and his first task was to remove the innocents from danger. That was not as easy a task as it initially appeared. As with digging a tunnel or shoveling snow—the hardest part was figuring out where to put the material you were removing.
He couldn’t just put the desk where it had come from. That pile was now unstable—and there was no room to set it where they stood and still open the door.
He was not as interested in preserving the structure of the house as he had been before he understood what they faced. So he picked up the desk and slammed it into the exposed wall on the opposite side of the children’s room.
It broke through the lath and plaster and into the room beyond. That room, now visible through the hole he had made, was not nearly as packed as the hall. Probably because the door to it had been buried before it could be filled to the top.
After one almost-incoherent protest, Tami simply started grabbing bags and boxes and sending them through the hole after the desk. It took them nearly fifteen minutes to clear a stable space that allowed the door to swing open and stay that way because the mound where the desk had fallen from kept spilling more bags and boxes at them.
Eventually, Tami was able to open the door.
The room was tiny for the three bodies it held. Two small children and a boy just entering manhood. Asil presumed this was Joshua. The boy had a pierced lip and tattoos inked by unskilled hands—and he looked with horror at the wall with the hole in it where Asil had put the debris from the hall.
“Mama is going to blow a cog,” said the oldest of the girls.
The fear in her voice made Asil’s old wolf rise.
You’ll get a battle today, old wolf, Asil assured the bloodthirsty creature. But for now we must get these children clear of the danger.
Content for the moment, the wolf retreated.
“Out first,” said Tami. “All of you. Worry about the wall later.”
“It is a good thing,” said Asil softly, “that the desk fell when Joshua was here with his cell phone to call for help.”
Joshua, who had grabbed a bag and was shoving clothes for the girls into it, paused. He looked again at the hole in the wall.
“It’s time for the girls to get away from this permanently,” he said. “Can they come to my apartment?”
Tami nodded. “That’s the best place, at least for now. We’ll talk to your mother tomorrow—if we don’t see her tonight. Then we will look for a more permanent solution.”
You will see