Moonlight Brigade Page 10

  The crow caught the token in his beak, set it on the counter, and studied it. Other crows gathered around to look, as crows like nothing more than a gift, especially an antique.

  “Bye, Brother Crawley!” Kit called, and turned to leave the booth. He didn’t want the crow to see him cry.

  “What are you doing?” Eeni asked Kit. “That was your mom’s! Why’d you give it away? And you didn’t even take a prize!”

  “Like Mr. Timinson said,” Kit told her. “The crows can be generous birds, when generosity is shown to them.”

  Mr. Timinson chuckled. “You’re gambling on your teacher’s wisdom, Kit,” he said.

  “Seems a safe bet,” Kit replied. “Anyway, sometimes you have to lose something you want to make room for something you need.”

  “A philosopher raccoon.” Mr. Timinson smiled.

  Kit shrugged. “Just a guy who’s lost a lot and lived to learn from it.”

  “Wait!” Crawley called out as he fluttered down in front of Kit.

  “You gave this beautiful token without demanding anything in return,” Crawley said, bowing. “Even after your favor was denied to you.”

  Kit shrugged. “My mom always told me generosity isn’t about who deserves it, but about who’s able to give it.”

  Crawley nodded, let out a high screech, and suddenly another crow in a blue apron fluttered down beside him, the leash and collar in his beak.

  “I will treasure the gift you have given me,” the crow said. “And I would like to give you this gift. Not in return, but in appreciation.”

  The other crow set the leash and collar down on the ground.

  Kit picked it up and bowed his head to the crow.

  “Thank you, gentle crow,” he said.

  “The blessings of the high winds and clear skies upon you, son of Azban,” said Crawley, then bowed to Eeni. “And to you, daughter of the Great Mother Rat.” He gave a sly look to Mr. Timinson, but didn’t bow. He and the other crow simply flew back to their gaming booth and began their ballyhoo again, trying to rope in more customers to their game.

  Thanks, Ma, Kit thought to himself. Thanks for being there, even when you’re not.

  “I can’t believe that worked,” said Eeni.

  The class gathered around their teacher. “All of One Paw,” said Mr. Timinson. “You see now, how knowing something about all sorts of creatures can give you an advantage? Kit has demonstrated this well tonight. Your next assignment is simple. Find your own way home.” He gave Kit a raised-eyebrow look. “Without getting crushed beneath a Rumbler.”

  Eeni took Kit’s paw. “I’ll get him across the street alive.”

  “Very good,” said Mr. Timinson. “Until tomorrow night, then.”

  “Tomorrow night’s the coyote’s deadline,” said Kit.

  “I am aware,” said Mr. Timinson. His whiskers twitched, and his yellow eyes watched Kit closely.

  “So . . . uh . . . ,” Kit thought aloud. “I’m not sure I can come to school.”

  “Because you have to save the alley?” the fox asked.

  “That’s right,” Kit said.

  “All by yourself?”

  “I made the deal,” Kit told him.

  The fox shook his head. “All of One Paw,” he said mysteriously, and trotted off without another word to the class.

  Kit set the leash and collar down and dipped his paws in a puddle to wash them in the cold water. He stared down at his reflection. The raccoon looking back up at him looked heroic enough. He took off his hat and smoothed the fur between his ears.

  He had a plan now, but it was dangerous and it could go wrong in more ways than a tree had leaves. But it was his plan, and it was clever and brave as any the First Raccoon ever came up with in the stories of the Moonlight Brigade.

  “What do you need that leash and collar for?” Fergus asked him. The snot bubble on his nose popped. The others gathered around behind him.

  “What’s the difference between us and the Flealess?” Kit asked them in return.

  “We’re free,” Matteo said. “And those spoiled pets live in luxury as prisoners of their People.”

  “Just a bunch of leash lovers, they are,” Dax added.

  “Exactly,” said Kit. “They’ve got leashes and we don’t. Except—”

  “Now we do!” Matteo finished his thought. “So you’re gonna pretend to be some Person’s pet?”

  Kit nodded.

  “That is a crazy plan.”

  “I really hope you know what you’re doing,” Eeni said, picking up the prize to study it.

  He carefully took it from her paws.

  He really hoped he did too. Everything depended on him and him alone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  WHAT DOES THE FOX SAY?

  HE’S doing well,” Mr. Timinson whispered into the shadow of the water tower on the school rooftop, watching the sky turn red with the sunrise. “But he has not realized the truth of the Moonlight Brigade yet.”

  “You did well guiding him,” a voice in the shadows responded, a voice that seemed to be young and old, high and deep, male and female, a hundred voices in one voice. Beneath the sound of its words, there was a gnawing sound, like a thousand teeth chewing at once. The rising light caused two hundred eyes to shine like stars, before the creature recoiled deeper into darkness. “But you mustn’t let him think you will be there to help him again.”

  “But what if he needs help?” said one rat voice in the tangle of rats that made the Rat King.

  “He will have to learn to ask for it,” said another.

  “We’ve given him all the help he needs already,” said a third. “He simply has to notice it.”

  “If the plural of foot is feet, why isn’t the plural of root, reet?” wondered a fourth.

  The fox waited patiently for the Rat King to finish arguing with itself.

  One of the difficulties of being the Rat King was that its thoughts were the conversation among the individual rats who comprised it, so anyone standing near the Rat King could hear what they were thinking all the time. That was one of the reasons that Rat King liked to be alone. Anyone would sound crazy if they had to say every passing thought they had out loud.

  “But time is short and we need to be ready,” the Rat King said at last.

  “Are we perhaps expecting too much from a raccoon his age?” the fox asked. “Perhaps your vision is clouded by . . .” The fox stopped himself.

  “By what do you think our vision is clouded?” the Rat King hissed.

  “By sentimentality,” the fox said. “We know your relationship to Eeni.”

  “We have no relationship to Eeni,” the Rat King answered, though the fox could detect a certain hesitation in the tone of voice. “When a rat joins us, she forswears all previous ties to friends and family, vows to serve only the wild. And so our love for Eeni is no different from our love for any other free creature.”

  The fox would not argue with the Rat King, but his eyes searched the shadowy mass of entangled rats for the one who had been Eeni’s mother.

  Clever as he was, he still couldn’t tell which she was.

  “Will you stay in hiding until this is over?” he asked the Rat King.

  “We must,” the Rat King answered. “The owls are hunting us. Coyote was clever to bring them.”

  “It is a dangerous game we’re making Kit play,” Mr. Timinson said. “We told Coyote about the First Frost Festival. We knew he would come. Perhaps we shouldn’t have brought someone so dangerous?”

  “It was the only way to know if this was the time for the Moonlight Brigade to return,” the Rat King said. “Greatness does not reveal itself without great challenge.”

  “But what if he does not succeed? What if we are wrong?”

  “Then he will be beyond worry,” said the Rat King. “
Because he will have surely been eaten. But we have faith.”

  “And you can live with that?” Mr. Timinson asked. “You can gamble the destruction of an innocent raccoon and of all the creatures of Ankle Snap Alley on a little faith?”

  “Did you hear that?” one rat said.

  “He called Kit innocent?” another said.

  “Not that,” said a third. “He called it a little faith?”

  The Rat King’s voice spoke once more as one. “There is nothing little about faith,” it declared, and then fell silent.

  The fox crept forward and climbed into the water tower. It was empty. The Rat King had gone. The air still hung heavy with their scent of the city and the sewers and the hungry breath of a hundred rats.

  Alone in the rooftop water tower, he found himself speaking aloud the very words that were, at that moment, echoing through Kit’s thoughts in his uncle’s empty apartment back in Ankle Snap Alley: “I really hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  DANGER TOES

  WHAT am I doing? Kit asked himself.

  He had stayed up all day with Uncle Rik’s thick books, reading from the moment the sun came up until it began to sink again, putting together all the details of the trick he was going to pull. Eeni’d fallen asleep curled in his tail and she was snoring quietly in the dim light of dusk.

  Uncle Rik was a historian, and he had volumes and volumes of books in his house, books Kit had never bothered to read before. They were written in the tiny writing of the mice and had titles like

  Tales of Azban in the Age of the New(ish) Moon, as told to the Mice of Hedgerow Parish.

  Mousekind Saves the City: True Tales of Heroic Rodents by Rev. H. H. Musculus Jr.

  A History of Dogs: Why They Sniff, Snore, and Snarl by Brother Mesrick M. Mawmouth, the Fourth.

  Kit spent the final moments of the day studying the dog book, memorizing every scrap of information he could. He couldn’t solve his problems with brute strength, not against Coyote and not against the Flealess. He had to use his smarts, which meant he had to get more smarts quickly, and like his uncle said, “Reading a book is like stealing the smarts of the author. It’s the fastest way to lift a lifetime of learning without leaving your seat.”

  Except Kit had to leave his seat now. He slipped quietly from his bed of moss and feather and soft scraps of paper, easing his tail out from under Eeni and yawning so wide he could have swallowed her whole. But sleep would have to wait. He crept to the window, pulling aside the tattered sash and peering into Ankle Snap Alley, where the creatures had begun to stir for the night.

  There was, as ever, a line in front of Possum Ansel’s, but the possum himself, with Otis at his side, was in the midst of shooing the creatures away, explaining he had nothing to sell them, that the otters had ransacked his business and taken everything.

  The story was the same all over. The coyote’s gang had stolen every scrap they could carry. They’d tossed furniture into the thoroughfare, tossed the church mice’s printing press into the Dumpster, and even tossed the seats from the van where the Rabid Rascals lived.

  The Blacktail brothers had gone with the otters, and no one else had the heart to take their place running a scam on the corner. It was a sad day in Ankle Snap Alley when even the gambling and cheating came to a stop. The coyote hadn’t just stolen their seeds and nuts; he’d stolen the mischievous spark that made the place special. He’d stolen its pride.

  “The neighborhood’s a mess,” Eeni said, surprising Kit at his side. At its best Ankle Snap Alley had been a ragged place, but now it was barely fit for living things. When the real cold of winter came, there’d be no way to live in it. The thought gave Kit a chill.

  “They’re all counting on me,” he said.

  Eeni grunted.

  “What?” Kit whirled on her. “Why are you so mad at me?”

  “You keep talking about yourself!” she said. “You keep talking about what you have to do, and what plans you have to save everyone.”

  “Yeah,” snapped Kit. “I made the deal with Coyote. It’s my responsibility.”

  “You keep saying that,” Eeni told him. “But for a fella who wants to do well in school, you sure don’t pay attention.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You still haven’t figured it out? What All of One Paw means? Why it was the motto of the Moonlight Brigade?”

  Kit shrugged. He hadn’t really thought about it since the first night of school.

  “It means as long as you walk this earth with your paws underneath you, you ain’t alone,” Eeni snapped.

  “I am, though!” Kit snapped back at her. “I got my uncle into this trouble. Coyote came to the alley because of me! He said so himself. I can’t ask anyone else to risk their hides for me anymore.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” said Eeni. “Anyway, if I stuck my head under a rock every time you roped me into trouble, I’d have a snout full stones by now.”

  “I won’t let anyone else get hurt,” said Kit. “It’s bad enough what I put Uncle Rik through. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I’m not afraid of danger. I chew the toes off danger.”

  “Danger has toes?”

  “It’s just a saying,” said Eeni.

  “I’ve never heard that saying before,” said Kit.

  “I just said it!”

  Kit set his jaw and told her, “I have to do this myself. I have to be the hero. I owe it to—”

  “You don’t owe it to anyone,” Eeni cut him off. “Not to Mr. Timinson or to Uncle Rik, not even to your mother!”

  “Yes, I do!” Kit yelled back.

  “She’s gone!” Eeni yelled at him.

  “At least she didn’t abandon me!”

  Kit knew he’d gone too far. So did Eeni. Their words had hit each other harder than a punch in the snout. No one could hurt you the way your friends could, and Kit really wished he could unsay what he’d said. But that wasn’t how words worked. You can’t ungrowl a growl. What gets barked, stays barked.

  “I’m sorry, Eeni,” Kit whispered. “But I do owe it to my mother. She died saving me so that I could do something great with my life. Being a hero like the Moonlight Brigade is exactly what I need to do.”

  Eeni bit her lip. She ground her teeth. She looked like she was about to say something, then stopped herself. Outside, the cloud of bats started to swirl above the darkening sky, swooping in to pick the kids up for school.

  “You should go to school,” Kit said. “No reason for both of us to miss.”

  Eeni let out a sigh. “And what’ll you be doing?” She was still whispering, like the air around them was fragile as the frost on a leaf and too loud a noise might crack it. But they both knew it wasn’t the air that was fragile right then. It was their feelings. It was their friendship.

  “I’ll be sneaking into a Flealess house,” Kit told her. “And pulling off a trick that’ll save our alley.”

  “All alone?”

  “All alone,” said Kit.

  Eeni shook her head. “You may be a great trickster,” she said, “but you’re still a rube.” She grabbed her vest and put it on, stomping out the door.

  “Eeni, wait!” Kit called after her.

  She raised her paws, and the bats hoisted her into the sky.

  “Eeni!” Kit shouted. “Don’t be mad at me! I’m trying to protect you!”

  She didn’t answer him, and he was all alone.

  Friends were so confusing. She was mad at him because he didn’t want her to get hurt? What kind of sense did that make?

  Kit shook his head as he closed the door and took off his jacket. He couldn’t worry about Eeni right now. He had work to do.

  He had a heist to pull.

  Chapter Nineteen

  AN INSIDE JOB

  THE
sun had set and the disk of the moon cast its milky light over the city. Kit scurried across the streets outside of Ankle Snap Alley, running to the doorway of the last house where a raccoon like himself would be welcome.

  The leash trailed behind him like a deflated snake nipping at his neck. The collar made him itch, and he fought the urge to tear it off. The Flealess were comfortable in their collars, and he needed to look like one of them. He arrived at the front steps that led from the sidewalk to a tall blue door. There was a shining metal knocker and little hole above it for People to peep out from.

  As he climbed the steps, he thought how little he really knew about People and their house pets but how much of his trick depended on them doing what he thought they would do. He found himself wishing he could ask his uncle for advice. Danger felt so much less scary when there was someone waiting for you to come home at the end of it.

  But his home was empty, and if he was going to have a home to come back to, he had stay brave.

  “Quick of Paw and Slick of Tongue, Brave of Heart, Afraid of None,” he whispered to himself. “A Friend to All in Need of One.”

  He stood up on his back paws and stretched as high as he could. With his front claws, he scratched on the door, making as much noise as possible. There was a quiet moment. He scratched again to make sure whoever was inside heard him.

  And then the barking erupted.

  “WHO’S THERE? SOMEONE’S THERE! GET THE DOOR, GET THE DOOR, GET THE DOOR!” the dog inside yelled. Kit heard the People say something and the barking stopped. The door swung open, and one of the giant People stood in front of him, looking around over his head. The Person said something and then looked down and saw Kit. The Person nearly jumped out of its hairless skin at the sight. Kit immediately made the most pitiful face he could make and held his leash up in in his paws. “I’m lost,” he said. “I lost my People.”

  Of course, the Person didn’t speak his language, just like he didn’t speak the Person’s. He decided to make whatever sad noises he could think of, all while shoving the leash up at the Person. The leash was his message. The leash was his plea. The Person had to believe the leash or else Kit would never get inside the house. As much as he wanted to tear off the collar and throw the leash into the dirt, screaming his freedom with a mighty growl, he couldn’t.