Chapter 10

Chapter 10

VEE

T heir clubhouse had rats.

Vee had seen one the other week, chewing on a bag of chips one of the new strays had left out. It had been a massive thing, bigger than her hand, and it had glared at her when it saw her as though daring her to do something about it. Daring her to stop it.

There were Rat Shifters in the middle octants, Vee had heard once. She sometimes wondered if there were any actually living in the city. Even if there were, though, this wasn’t one of them, she was sure of that. This was just an ordinary rat, hungry and skinny, like the rest of the strays they’d collected in their clubhouse over the years.

Vee preferred to spend her time on the clubhouse roof, but once she’d seen the rat, she’d wanted to investigate it a little more. So, she had left out little bits of food, like bait, on the main floor of the warehouse they all called home. A cracker here, a piece of cheese there, and then she’d waited and waited, until skit skit skit , they had come crawling out of the walls to investigate.

She was good at holding still, at pretending to be nonthreatening. She’d had a lot of practice over the years.

The first rat to investigate her bait was the same one she’d seen before, the first time she’d noticed them. He was missing a part of his ear, but it moved just as well as the other one when he twitched it, listening for predators before venturing out of the wall and scampering to the piece of cheese.

Vee let him have it, let him enjoy his victory before she took control of him.

Rats had remarkably fast heartbeats. Compared to Witches and Shifters, anyway. It beat quickly enough to make her dizzy, and it made controlling them with Blood Magic difficult.

That was a problem. She could command their blood, make them move and obey her, but she had to keep the heart beating. Had to keep that blood flowing through their system, or they ran out of oxygen and just… well… died.

That was the first lesson she’d learned, with those three men who had attacked her and Jayce in that alley all those years ago, when she’d first discovered this power. Hold the blood in place for too long and oops! Dead as the old Witch queen! She could still move them, afterwards, still manipulate their bodies, but what was the point? They were just puppets with broken strings.

Corpses weren’t nearly as entertaining as live victims.

After that, Vee learned to keep the hearts beating. They lasted longer that way. And it was way more fun.

The rat had almost finished his piece of cheese when Vee moved, twitching her finger and reaching out with that pulse of power that filled her. She captured it mid-bite, and the rat’s body froze—stiff and immobile in her mental grasp.

With rats, you had to be delicate, too. They might seem big, especially when you’re not expecting to see one and then… there it is! Eating the chips you were going to eat! But they’re smaller than you’d expect. Their bones are tiny, and some of them are so incredibly fragile, almost as thin as eggshells. You needed to remember that when you made them move.

Vee didn’t want to hurt them. They were just innocent creatures trying to get by. Just like her. Just like the strays.

Not like the people she did hurt.

With another flick of her finger, the rat dropped the food. His forearms jerked as she made him move, the movement unnatural and stilted. That was another thing that was difficult with small animals—it was so hard to get the movements to look right. It just didn’t seem natural, the way they moved when she controlled them.

The rat walked to her, standing on his hind legs, forearms curled against his chest. She made him stand there, at attention, while she waited for the next one to come out and investigate the bait.

And the next.

And the next.

In a little over two hours, she managed to find seven rats living in their clubhouse. It wasn’t a surprise to her that there were so many. They were all lax with food here, now that food was plentiful, and their clubhouse had been an old warehouse before it had been abandoned and the strays had started congregating here. There were probably already rat nests in the walls from years and years ago, and all these guys were doing was taking up new residences in abandoned nests.

Vee hummed aloud as she made them all line up, feeling each of their heartbeats individually. Seven was a lot to control at one time, but she didn’t feel like she was overextending herself. Not even close. If there had been more rats, she probably could have handled them easily as well. But seven was all there was, so that was all she had to work with.

Humming louder, Vee tapped her fingers against the floor, marking a beat. One by one, the rats joined her, tapping their hind paws, then their tails.

One by one, they twisted, bending to one side, then the other. Then she added the arms, synchronizing the movements, first one side and then the other.

One, two, bend, bend, three, four, left, right.

By the time she’d mastered it, and had all seven rats dancing before her, their movements a grotesque, jerky, and unsteady mockery of a jig she’d once seen, Vee was laughing so hard her sides felt like they might split open.