Chapter 11

At last, when they had left the old rail station behind and crossed over the Fort Point Channel into South Boston, Cordelia and Gregory stopped to catch their breath, hands on their knees, gulping in deep lungfuls of thin air. Cordelia’s thighs ached from the effort of slogging through the snow. All around them, the streets were concealed underneath a thick layer of powder, as though the world had been frosted overnight. Cordelia’s and Gregory’s footsteps—and Cabal’s, plunging alongside them—were the only markings in the otherwise pristine surface of white.

“What are we going to do?” Gregory asked, jogging Icky a little higher on his back. He toed a bit of snow with his old leather boot. “Fat chance of tracking the monsters through this fluff.”

With a sinking feeling, Cordelia realized that the snow had completely buried the track they’d been pursuing. If any further evidence of her father and the monsters existed, it was lost to them now, concealed under four inches of new powder. The wind whipped snow down the empty street.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “We’ve lost the trail.”

“We’re lost, period,” Gregory pointed out.

So they picked a direction at random and started walking. With each minute, the anxiety in Cordelia’s stomach grew. The sun had risen behind the gray veil of the sky; the city was coming awake. At least the storm was keeping everyone indoors, dawdling in their heated rooms. But although it was possible to keep to the side streets and alleyways, she knew they could not travel for long without being seen.

The neighborhood grew dingier with every passing block. They skirted a House of Corrections, where all the grimy windows were encased in iron bars. In the distance, a steamer bellied up to the Commonwealth dock. A crowd of new arrivals, exhausted, filthy, and thin from the journey, shuffled down the gangplank toward the inspection checkpoint, which had no windows at all. A newsboy was pacing the corner, huffing on his hands to keep warm. Cordelia and Gregory veered in the opposite direction.

Age-darkened textile factories blackened the sky with smoke. Foul-smelling fumes rose from the chimneys, and Cordelia heard the rattle and cough of distant machinery. She had the sense of eyes watching her from every smoke-clotted window.

They entered a narrow street where the buildings were so close together they squeezed the daylight to a fine, narrow shaft. Cordelia felt a chill move up her neck that had nothing to do with the cold.

“Cordelia?” Gregory said, in a low voice. “You ever feel like you’re being watched?” She opened her mouth to say yes. But before she could answer, there was a shout behind them.

“There they are, Crunch! The filthy runners. The scummy filches! Get them!”

Cordelia’s heart stopped. It was the man from the station. He had followed them all this way.

“Run!” Gregory shouted, and sprinted down the street with Icky, terrified, clinging tightly to his shoulders. Cordelia grabbed Cabal by the scruff of his neck and careened after him, her heart jigging in her throat. Behind her, Crunch was baying furiously, hungry, eager; she heard the continued roar of his owner’s voice—“Get ’em! Get ’em, boy!”—like the noise of a distant ocean.

Gregory had already turned the corner at the end of the street. Cordelia was falling behind. It was her stupid boots—too big for her feet, they risked slipping off at every step. Her lungs and thighs were burning. She skidded around the corner just in time to see Gregory dart down an alleyway.

“Come on, Cordelia!” His voice floated back to her.

She risked a single glance behind her and her heart seized up. Crunch was only twenty—no, fifteen—no, ten—feet behind her, spattering black saliva, his dark gums drawn back to reveal razor-sharp teeth. Even the growrks hadn’t looked so terrible.

Cordelia’s father had always taught her that no creature was all bad, even the most fearsome-looking ones. Remember, Cordelia, he would say, fear is the only true monster.

But her father had never seen Crunch. She hurtled around the corner and instantly knew it was a mistake. The alleyway dead-ended at a high brick wall less than forty feet ahead of her. The buildings on either side of her were plastered with flyers and old advertisements, the paper whispering quietly, as if expressing condolences. I’m sorry, they seemed to be saying.

Gregory had reached the end of the alleyway already and was trying unsuccessfully to scale the wall. Cordelia wanted to scream his name, but the word was frozen in her throat. There was nowhere to go. She kept running, even though she knew it was useless.

They were trapped.

Crunch slid around the corner, snarling, and snapped at the air just three feet behind Cordelia’s heels. She could feel the hot blast of his breath. Gregory, she saw, was now trying to wrestle open the door to a shuttered Print Works. The wood splintered and groaned, and she felt a surge of hope. If she could just make it—just a dozen more feet—if they could just get inside, behind that heavy door—

She slipped. One second she was upright, and the next second she felt her foot fold in the big rubber boot and she was toppling forward. She reached out to steady herself on a wall but managed only to tear away a paper flyer. Then she was plunging face forward into the snow, and Cabal went spinning out of her grip, tumbling a deep channel through the snow before coming to rest near Gregory’s feet.

Cordelia tasted blood and realized she must have bitten the inside of her cheek.

Everything hurt. Gregory was shouting to her, but her brain felt fuzzy and she couldn’t make out what he was saying. She tried to push herself onto her hands and knees, but a sudden clamping pain went all the way from her foot to her knee, and she sprawled back into the snow. She twisted around to look and felt a white-hot spark of terror.

Crunch had her by the foot. Even through the thick rubber, she could feel the sharp points of his teeth, and Cordelia knew that if it weren’t for her boot, he would have sunk his jaw straight through her tendons.

Panic fueled her, cleared her mind. Now she knew what Gregory had been yelling so frantically: Look out! Look out!

Gregory was shouting, “Get off her! Leave her alone, you big brute!”

She managed to flip herself onto her back and was blasted by the stench of the dog’s breath, like the butcher’s shop in mid-July. She didn’t want to think about what he’d been eating. She aimed a kick at Crunch’s nose with her free foot. But the angle was wrong, and she barely made contact. He kept gnawing at her boot, wrestling it off with his mouth. She felt it slipping . . . slipping . . .

A large white blur soared over her head. Cabal. The loyal zuppy launched himself on Crunch’s back, claws out, howling with outrage. But Crunch shook him off easily, as if he were no larger than a fly. Cabal landed a few feet away, somersaulting through the snow, until he thunked nose-first against the wall. He stood up, dazed, and collapsed again.

“Cabal!” Cordelia tried to reach for him but Crunch yanked her, hard, and she thudded onto her back as pain ripped through her. Her boot slipped off, taking her sock with it, so Cordelia’s bare toes were left wiggling in the air. Crunch tossed the boot away, grinning raggedly, his mouth dripping dark slobber on the snow. Cordelia’s heart stopped: it was over.

Crunch lunged. Instinctively, Cordelia closed her eyes. She would be gobbled up like a dog biscuit. Crunch would chew her from her ankles to her eyeballs.

“Leave . . . her . . . alone!”

She heard a loud thwack, followed by a whimper. When she felt no thick fangs sinking into her thigh—when she heard no bones snap—she opened her eyes. Crunch had drawn back, shaking snow from his whiskers. As she watched, a second snowball whizzed past her shoulders and whacked Crunch directly between the eyes.

“Hurry, Cordelia!” Gregory bent down and straightened up in one fluid motion, and let loose another volley of snow, his arm moving so fast it was a blur.

Cordelia grabbed her boot, from which her sock was still dangling limply, and scooped up the still-dazed Cabal. Floundering through the heavy powder, snowballs still whipping past her face, she dashed toward the door to the old print works, which Gregory had managed to open. She hurtled in through the darkness of the doorway. Icky was perched on a piece of old machinery, gnashing his teeth, chittering agitatedly. Gregory plunged in after her.

They slammed the door and Cordelia collapsed against it. A second later, she felt the wood shudder, as though punched from outside by a giant fist. She could hear Crunch snarling on the other side of the door. There was a pause, and then the frame rattled again and nearly sent Cordelia sprawling.

Crunch was trying to break through the door.

“A little help, Gregory?” she shrieked, as the door flexed behind her again and wood splintered and showered her with sawdust.

“Give me a second.” Gregory had disappeared into the dark. There was a tremendous creaking and the groan of something heavy on the floorboards, and a moment later he reappeared, pushing one of the vast metal printing presses, his face beaded with sweat. With Cordelia’s help, he shoved the iron machine against the door. Almost instantly, the wood stopped rattling. Cordelia could finally breathe. They could still hear Crunch growling and snarling outside, but she knew there was no way he could make it past the door now.

“This way,” Gregory whispered, taking the hand that wasn’t holding her boot. They threaded through the old print shop, past a network of rusted machinery, hunched like slumbering beasts in the dark. A bit of light filtered in through cracks in the ceiling, illuminating old tools encased in cobwebs and paper trampled to pulp on the ground. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust, so their footsteps were muffled.

At the back of the shop was a creaky spiral staircase that wound up into a narrow, musty attic. There, Gregory located a small trapdoor in the ceiling. Balancing on a trunk, and using a broken broom handle for leverage, he managed to pry the door open, revealing a drop-down ladder, a soft white square of pale sky, and the brick peak of a nearby chimney. Snow drifted gently through the opening and landed on Cordelia’s cheeks like individual kisses. She suddenly felt so happy, she wanted to shout.

Icky, a natural climber, was up the ladder first. Gregory followed him, holding tight to a whimpering Cabal. Cordelia pulled on her sock, now soaking wet, and wiggled her foot into her boot. She tucked the dragon deeper into her pocket before making the climb to the roof.

Now, a vast portion of Boston was spread out in front of them, dazzling inside a fine white blanket. Cordelia could see the entirety of South Boston, bracketed by two harbors, and the narrow Fort Point Channel that separated their spit of land from Back Bay. Horses trudged carriages sluggishly through the snowy streets. Smoke threaded the air from hundreds of chimneys. The snow was at last letting up, and long fingers of sunlight broke through the clouds in the east.

Gregory let out a long crow of satisfaction. “Yahooo!” His voice bounced from roof to chimney and back. He started trudging toward the edge of the roof, which closely abutted its neighbor. They could make it across the whole of Boston without once touching the ground.

When Cordelia removed the dragon from her pocket, her fingers brushed against the flyer she had accidentally ripped from the wall. She must have unconsciously stuffed it in her pocket. Now, smoothing out the page, she saw the words emblazoned in red across the top of the page. Suddenly, she felt as if she’d opened her mouth and swallowed a snowball.

COME SEE SERGEI’S
NEW AND IMPROVED
WORLD-FAMOUS MONSTER CIRCUS,
FEATURING THE WORLD’S MOST HORRIFIC
AND HORRIFYING MONSTERS!!

AFFORDABLE FAMILY FUN!
UNION SQUARE PARK, NEW YORK CITY, 8 P.M.
EVERY DAY BUT SUNDAY
NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN UNDER AGE SEVEN
(PLEASE DO NOT FEED OR TICKLE THE MONSTERS.)
**NO PUBLIC TOILETS**

“Gregory, look.” Cordelia read the advertisement aloud, placing particular emphasis on the words Monster Circus. Gregory’s eyes grew wide.

“Do you think . . . ?” he asked, in a hushed voice.

Cordelia read the words over and over, as if her father’s face might come floating out of them. She had never heard of anyone else keeping any monsters, much less enough monsters to make up a circus. Could the circus have stolen them from her father, eager for a new moneymaking attraction?

It was the best lead they had. The only lead they had. She took a deep breath. “It can’t be a coincidence,” she said. “The trail led us here.”

Gregory let out a long whistle. “Well, then,” he said, pivoting his hat to the right, “I guess we’re going to New York.”