Chapter 39

Chapter 39

VEE

“ H ey… Vee? You doing ok?”

Vee didn’t bother looking up at Jayce. She frowned harder, watching the rat in front of her. It rose clumsily on two legs, jerking and spasming, as though her command required too much effort.

“Yeah,” she answered. “I’m just thinking, is all.”

The rat shuddered. It stood like she told it to, but it was… unnatural. Wrong. She furrowed her brow.

“ Dance ,” she commanded.

The rat shuddered again but didn’t move.

“ DANCE !” she said louder, pushing all her power into the word. The rat twitched and bent under the command, but still just stood there.

Disappointed, Vee sighed.

“I don’t understand why it’s not working,” she said, putting her face in her hands and rubbing at her eyes. She was tired. She’d been spending too many nights at the palace, too many early mornings here at their clubhouse. Eventually someone was going to notice she wasn’t at Nan’s, wasn’t where she was meant to be. But she would solve this problem today. She could get the rats to dance—easily really—when she was orchestrating the moves herself. Why couldn’t they do it when she commanded it?

Why wouldn’t they just do what they were told?

One of Jayce’s strays looked up, glancing between her and the rat.

“Rats don’t dance,” he said helpfully.

Vee’s lip curled. Stupid fucking boys. “I know rats don’t dance,” she said mockingly. The boy flinched away from her. “I’m not an idiot like you. But?—”

She stopped. Stopped and thought about what he’d said.

Rats don’t dance…

Watching the rat under her control, Vee frowned, considering what that really meant. Was it really that simple? That obvious?

She stared at the rat and released the hold she had on his hind legs that kept him standing. The rat dropped to four feet, shaking off her influence like a dog shaking off water. He twitched his whiskers in irritation but didn’t run.

None of them ran anymore. They learned quickly they couldn’t escape her. Now, they tolerated her toying with them. Some with more annoyance than others.

“ Groom ,” she commanded.

He obeyed instantly. Sitting up on his haunches, the rat began to clean himself, running his front paws over the fur of his face and ears. It was frantic, much faster than their usual grooming. But it was what she’d asked for.

“ Stop ,” Vee commanded, and the rat froze, completely still.

Vee’s heart leapt in excitement.

“Rats don’t dance…” she repeated, a smile blossoming over her face. She turned to look at the stray who had said it. “What’s your name?”

“Paul,” he answered nervously. “My name is Paul.”

“You’re not as dumb as you look, Paul,” Vee said with a smile.

“Uh… thanks?”

“You’re very welcome. Rats don’t dance. So… what do rats do?” Vee looked around at the pack of boys lounging in the clubhouse around her. “Well?”

“They like to chew,” one boy offered hopefully. “That’s why they’re such a nuisance, right? They’ll chew through anything, even if it’s not food.”

Vee nodded.

“ Chew ,” she commanded the rat.

Influencing a creature’s mind was infinitely harder than controlling their body, Vee was starting to realize. And every time she’d thought she’d gotten the hang of it, something had gone wrong. She could make her rats dance, moving their limbs herself and pulling their strings, but she couldn’t convince them to dance. She could make them run, but they wouldn’t strut.

Was it really this simple? Vee wondered, as the rat grabbed the corner of the poster he stood on and began gnawing on the paper with abandon. He chewed the material like a glutton, ripping and tearing with sharp teeth. Vee didn’t care that he destroyed it, didn’t care as he bit through the photo of Fey’s face and the words written underneath it. They had plenty of them, after all. And it didn’t matter how many times they had to put them up around the city, replacing the ones that kept getting torn down, they could always print more…

“I can’t convince them to dance, because rats don’t dance,” Vee said excitedly. “They don’t have a concept of dancing. I can’t ask them to do something they don’t know how to do. Something they don’t understand.”

Paul was nodding, sycophant that he was. “That makes sense, yeah,” he said.

But Jayce shook his head. That’s why she kept him around. That’s why he had so much more power in their gang than the rest of the strays, why he was her second in command. He stood up to her, didn’t just automatically agree with everything she said. He made her think, challenged her, and sometimes she needed someone who was willing to do that.

“How do you know, though?” he asked. He was the only one who ever questioned her. She didn’t mind, most of the time. After all, she’d known him the longest. He’d earned it. “It’s just one rat… how can you tell if that’s why it won’t dance?”

Vee considered this.

“We need to test it. And we need a bigger target,” she said, finally. “Something with more range. Something that can dance, that can do whatever I tell them to do, with no limits…”

When the idea hit her, Vee smiled widely. It was perfect, a perfect way to kill two birds with one stone.

Or one Lion at least.

“I think I know the perfect test subject.”