The Big Kitty

Third of November, 1825. Harrow, E., age 6. Taken from the garden at dusk. Lynx. Returned unharmed at the Ring by the eldest Harrow. No further action.

(Returned BY the eldest. Not found. Returned. Like a trade. I hate this book. I hate that I copied this one onto my arm in Sharpie before I gave it to the twins. — K.)

Elias ran like the ground owed him something.

I want to be clear that I am a runner. I have done the Brooklyn Half. I have outrun a guy selling mixtapes the full length of the Union Square platform. None of that meant anything out there. The Greywood at one in the morning isn't a place you run through. It's a place that lets you through, sometimes, if it's in the mood, and every root in it wanted my ankles.

He stopped so fast I slammed into his back. He was warm, absurdly warm, like a radiator in a prewar walk-up, and he didn't even flinch.

"Light down," he said.

I pointed the Maglite at the dirt. A pink barrette with a plastic unicorn on it. Bea's. Next to it, in the soft black mud by a creek I didn't know existed, the print. The same one from the kitchen. Big as my hand spread wide.

And beside it, small and bare, five little toes.

She'd been walking next to it. Not dragged. Walking.

"She said it was friendly," I said. My voice did something weird. "Since August. 'The big kitty's nice, Katie, he sits by the tomatoes.' I told her it was a raccoon. I told her raccoons are New York's official mascot and she should respect them from a distance."

Elias crouched and touched the print. His knuckles had gone pale under the moon.

"It's young," he said. "Whoever this is. Light on its feet. It's not one of my uncle's soldiers."

"So it's a kid."

He didn't answer, which was an answer.

Behind us the woods started filling up with noise. Branches, voices, a flashlight beam swinging wild, and then my mother, in Dad's barn coat over pajama pants with tiny avocados on them, barreling out of the dark with a fireplace poker in her fist like she'd done this before.

"Where is she," Mom said. Not to me. To Elias. "Where is my baby."

Then it all came at once. Owen behind her with his gaming headset around his neck and three walkie-talkies clipped to his hoodie, because apparently my thirteen-year-old brother had been sitting on a full tactical comms setup this entire time. Lucy holding the Register against her chest like a shield, reading glasses crooked, a penlight in her teeth. Max and Mia, and with them a pale, sharp-boned girl I'd seen exactly once at the Ring party, Wren, and a broad shouldered boy with Ronan's jaw. Tobias. Holding my sister's hand.

Cool. Great. Love that for us.

"Channel two is Juniper," Owen said, handing me a walkie. "She's at the road with her aunt's truck. She says if anybody tells her to go home she'll scream."

"Tell her I love her and she's insane."

"She can hear you. It's open mic."

The walkie crackled. "Love you too. Find the baby."

And then Dad.

He came out of the trees last and slowest, no flashlight, no coat, just a T-shirt and the left hand held a little away from his body like it hurt. The scar was bright, not white. Red. Lit up from inside like a stovetop coil.

I'd been ready for this for weeks. I'd rehearsed it in the shower. Every word I was going to say to him when he finally got caught.

What I said was: "Your hand."

"It does that," Dad said, "when the Ring wakes up." He looked at the barrette in the mud. His face went somewhere I'd never seen it go. "Katie. She's at the Ring. They want a Harrow there."

"Then let's go get her."

"No," he said. "I'm going."

We went together anyway, because Harrows apparently can't be told anything, which, in fairness, I learned from him.

Ronan found us halfway. One second there was dark between the pines and the next there was a gray wolf the size of a Smart car, and then there was Ronan on his knees on the needles, breathing hard, shirt somehow still on, gray eyes catching the flashlight like coins. I'd stopped asking about the shirt thing.

Caspian dropped out of the sky a minute later. Literally. A raven hit the low branch over my head, and Caspian stood under it buttoning his coat, blood on his lip that hadn't been there an hour ago.

"My father talked," he said. "Eventually."

"And?"

He looked at Dad, then at me, and something in his face folded shut. "Varek doesn't want the father."

Dad was already walking.

The Ring came up out of the dark the way it had at the party, except nobody had strung fairy lights on it tonight, and nobody was blasting anything off a Bluetooth speaker, and the fallen stones looked less like a hangout and more like teeth. Moonlight had pooled in the middle. Cold so sharp it smelled like metal. Pine and wet stone and something under both, musk and old blood, thick at the back of my throat.

Bea was sitting cross-legged in the center of it.

She was in her Bluey nightgown. She was not crying. Curled around her, tail wrapped over her feet like a blanket, was a lynx. Gray and silver, ear-tufts black, enormous paws. Young, Elias had said, and you could see it in how thin it was in the shoulders.

Its eyes were wet. It was shaking.

"Katie!" Bea waved. "The kitty's sad. I told him it's okay."

In the shadows past the stones, other eyes. Six pairs. Eight. Gold and patient.

The voice came from the trees, and it was so calm and so pleasant I wanted to throw up. Like a concierge at a hotel you can't afford.

"Daniel. You came home. I did tell your father you would."

Dad stepped to the edge of the Ring. He held up his burning hand. "Take me. Whatever you need, it's in the blood. I'm the Harrow who signed last. Let her go."

"You signed nothing," Varek said. "You ran. You were eighteen and you ran so fast the Ring forgot your name." A pause, almost fond. "She didn't run. She stole my Register and walked into my woods in a pink hoodie."

"It's white," I said. "With a heart. You can't read it in the dark, that's on you."

Ronan made a sound that might have been a laugh or a growl.

"The father is a closed door," Varek said. "The daughter is an open one. She comes into the Ring, and she tells it no, and the little one walks home with her mother. That's all. One word."

Dad turned around. His face was wet. I had never seen my father cry, not at Grandma's funeral, not when he lost the firm job, not ever.

"I brought you here," he said. "I thought if I got back in time I could stand in front of it. I thought I could be enough. I'm sorry, Kit. I'm so sorry."

Nobody had called me Kit since I was eight.

I put my hand on his wrist, the bad one, and the scar was so hot it hurt my palm, and I didn't let go.

"Later," I said. "You can be sorry later. I'm holding you to the whole speech."

Then the princes started fighting, because of course they did.

"She doesn't go in," Ronan said, low and flat, already half-turned toward the gold eyes in the trees. "I go in. My people are ten minutes out. We take the stones."

"And Bea dies in the first ten seconds," Caspian snapped. "Brilliant, very wolf. She goes in. She stalls. She says nothing, she chooses nothing, and I get my father's flight over the north line before—"

"Your father watched them kill people."

"And now he'll watch them die. I'm trying, Holt."

Elias hadn't said a word. He was staring at the young lynx around my sister.

"That's my cousin," he said finally. "Sela. She's fourteen. He told her if she brought the baby, he'd let her mother out." He looked at me, and his eyes were all gold now, no boy left at the edges. "If you go in, he won't keep his word. He never has. Don't go in."

"Then what do I do," I said. "Seriously. Somebody. Pitch me."

Ronan grabbed my arm. Not hard. Just there, his hand all the way around it, heat soaking through the sleeve. "You stay behind me."

Caspian's hand found my other wrist. Cooler. Lighter. "You stay alive."

Elias didn't touch me. He just stepped in front of me, between me and the Ring, which was somehow worse.

For one stupid second I stood there in a forest at one-thirty in the morning with three boys holding on to me like I was the last train out of Penn Station, and I thought, oh. Oh, no.

Then Bea said, small and clear across the stones, "Katie? The kitty says he's going to hurt me if you don't come."

I took my arms back.

Ronan let go first. That surprised me. Caspian's fingers slid off my wrist slow. Elias didn't move, so I went around him.

"Katie," Mom said. Just my name. She said it like a prayer and an order at the same time, and Dad caught her by the shoulders and held on.

I stepped over the first fallen stone.

The cold hit me like opening a freezer door at a bodega in July, except it didn't stop at my skin. It went in. The scar on Dad's hand flared so bright I could see it over my shoulder, a red star in the dark. Sela flattened her ears. Bea held up her arms to me.

I knelt in the moonlight and pulled my sister into the hoodie and zipped it up around both of us.

The gold eyes in the trees came closer. Every one of them. And from all the way across the Ring, Varek's voice dropped the concierge act completely.

"Say it, Katie Harrow."

I opened my mouth.

Out in the Greywood, everything stopped. No wind. No creek. No breath from the boys on the other side of the stones, no static from Owen's walkie, no sound from my mother at all.

Bea's heart beat against my chest, fast as a rabbit's, and I held on, and I didn't say anything.