“Aw, some old warehouse, from the old days. These ain’t been used since the days of the Sextet.”

“Good place to hide out in.”

“Yeah, that’s for sure.”

“C’mon, keep lookin’ for ’im.”

Rachel glanced up at the man between her and Michael; he was staring into open space, a look of abject horror on his face. His hands, held firmly at his sides, were trembling, and his breath came in quiet, quick pulses of his chest.

“I see a bunch of old cans here, like old soup cans,” said one of the stevedores.

“Some hobo livin’ ’ere or somethin’?”

“Nah. Ain’t nobody livin’ out ’ere. We’da seen ’em comin’ and goin’. Plus, them dogs’d get ’em before we ever did.”

A voice came from some distance off; the other voices quieted to listen. “Let’s move it! ’E must’ve gotten past us. We got other places to check.”

One of the voices above the trapdoor grumbled audibly. “Boss ain’t gonna be happy ’bout this.”

“Well, we tell ’em the dogs got to ’im. Nothin’ left to bring back.”

“Yeah, good idea.”

Another symphony of footsteps rang out above the Unadoptables’ heads, and before long, the room descended back to its usual silence.

The subbasement, a modest concrete box that smelled of damp moss, barely contained the seventy-five anxious children, and when Michael signaled the all clear, the room burst abuzz with frantic voices. The black-bereted man on the middle of the stepladder, his attention drawn for the first time away from what was happening above him, followed the sound of the kids’ voices, a stunned look coming over his face.

“W-who are you?” he stammered.

“Good question,” said Michael. “Maybe I’d ask you the same thing.”

The man looked down at Rachel, who was staring at him intently. “We’ve been here for two months. That was the first time any stevedore set foot in this place,” she said. She pushed him, jostling his foot on his ladder rung. “Not. Remotely. Cool.”

The man fidgeted nervously. “It’s a little, I don’t know, stifling in here. Is the coast clear? Can we climb out now?”

“One second,” said Michael. He propped open the trapdoor, gave a quick survey of the warehouse, and climbed out, letting the door fall back closed behind him. He returned some short moments later with a long spool of rope, which he tossed casually down to Rachel. “Tie him up,” he instructed. “Then we’ll climb out of here.”

After the last Unadoptable had been ushered from the hidden room below the warehouse floor and the last child had been given an opportunity to walk by the hog-tied form of their intruder, bound as he wa

s to a rickety wooden chair, the room grew quiet as the interrogation began. A young girl was standing off to the side, wearing the man’s black beret and entertaining the crowd with a kind of jackbooted dance; a boy sat at the man’s side, holding the machete Excalibur and doing his best to sneer menacingly. The man in the chair wore a very chagrined expression as Michael, standing in front of him, began to pepper him with questions.

“Who are you?” the boy said. “And what were you doing all the way out here?”

“Listen,” the man said. “I’m not a threat to you guys. I’m on your side!”

“Quiet,” said Michael. “Answer the question.”

The man took a deep breath and said: “Name’s Nico. Nico Posholsky.” He glanced at the children, as if weighing the discretion of saying the next words. “I’m part of the Chapeaux Noirs.”

“The what?” asked Elsie, who’d pushed up to the front of the crowd and was standing at her sister’s side. She looked at her neighbors, saying, “What did he say?”

“I think it’s Polish,” said one of the Unadoptables.

“It’s French,” corrected Rachel, who’d taken first-year French in high school.

“Aaaaaah,” sighed the impressed crowd.

“It means black cake,” Rachel continued, smiling knowingly.

Tags: Colin Meloy Wildwood Chronicles Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net