by S. M. Beiko
A few houses down from home free, a chill separate from the night skittered up my neck. I stopped and looked over my shoulder. The fox was following a few paces behind me, head lowered, eyes like a guilty younger sibling trailing the elder.
I stared.
“I dunno what you think I’ve got,” I sniffed, walking backwards so I could keep moving while keeping an eye on it. The fox padded after me until it was beside me, keeping pace. It was a real fox, all right, and I couldn’t help but grin.
Then we reached the house. I sighed up at it, the only glow the kitchen light I’d left on. Thankfully, through the crack in the living room curtain, I couldn’t see anyone moving around.
I felt a nudge at my ankle. The fox brushed around me and looked up at the house, tilting its head. It had stopped snowing for once, some of the cloud cover breaking up and letting the knife-gleaming moonlight through. Ice glittered in the fox’s orange fur and white muzzle. It looked up at me, expectant.
“Uh. Okay. Well . . . you’d better head back to . . . whatever it is a fox lives in. A den? A foxhole? No wait, maybe that’s a military thing . . . anyway . . . shoo?”
The fox huffed like I’d insulted it. Then it darted up to the house, hopping through the massive snowdrifts as though they weren’t even there. This time it was me following the fox at a clip, until I stumbled back where I started, the motion light blinking on and throwing the pile of crumbled stone into relief. I sighed and took a quick look around. No fox, stone or otherwise.
I frowned at the remains. Should I clean this up? Deedee would just think I did it. Best to leave it . . . but I bent down and sorted through the rubble and snow. No big shiny. Maybe there hadn’t been one. Maybe I’d been duped. It didn’t matter now; real or not, the stone was gone.
I went in, kick-tapping clots of snow from my boots before throwing them on the rack. I felt a sudden rush of heat at my bare ankles before I closed and locked the door behind me, grateful for the house’s warmth already bringing my flesh back to life.
Back in my room, my digital alarm clock’s bloody letters shone one eighteen a.m., and I groaned. Tomorrow was gonna be rough.
I flicked the light on in my bathroom, the fan humming to life at the same time. I took my eye patch off and left it on the counter, running some more water and splashing it onto my face. I patted it dry and lowered the towel, leaning in, eye-first, towards the mirror. My stomach dropped.
What a sight, yeesh. I looked like I’d been kicked in the face by a horse with a score to settle. The lump just under my bottom eyelid had gone bruise-purple. I felt the panic creeping in and was instantly awake again, starting to think I should wake Deedee to take me to the hospital ASAP.
I pushed my messy hair back, steeled myself, and prodded at the lump. It was pretty much the size, shape, and hardness of a Tootsie Roll.
When my finger connected, I felt the lump shudder. Not my eye, not the swollen parts. The lump itself. I screwed both my eyes shut, because the vibration travelled over my entire face, and I wanted it to stop. When I dared open them again, I leaned closer to the mirror. The lump was shivering in time with my pulse. Undulating. Throbbing. And moving out.
The hyperventilating was sudden and scary. The bathroom light guttered; the fan screeched to a stop. But I didn’t look away from the mirror, not for a second, not even as the lump migrated totally from one end of my eye to the other, and especially not when it started pushing out into the open.
The pain was a knife and I wheeze-screamed. I dug both hands into my eye as I stumbled back, tripping on the bath mat, and landing hard on the tile. Flailing, I threw my hands back up and pressed harder with each new wave of pain, as if the next thing to fall out of my skull would be the eyeball itself.
Then I felt nothing, and I could breathe again.
I tried to calm down, tried to call it a fluke attack, promised myself that I’d go wake Deedee up right the eff now if only it’d be over.
But I felt something wriggling in my hands. Shaking, I lowered them, and saw the bloody lump shuddering and rolling around.
Then it stopped, and unfurled pointed, triangular wings, flexing them as it spread its tiny black feet. It took flight for the flickering bathroom light bulb and fluttered gaily in its aura.
A moth. An extremely real, horrible moth covered in my blood, dancing around the light as if it hadn’t just sprung out of my body. I crawled to the sink and got to my wobbly legs, holding tight to the basin. My muscles felt like they were liquefying, but I forced myself to stay standing and looked up at my reflection.
The swelling had gone down, and there was a Rorschach splatter of blood on my cheek, but I could still feel my heart beating in the socket. And I blinked, for the first time in a long time able to see out of my demon eye without swelling or a filmy caul preventing me.
But in the next moment I wanted my bad eye back, because suddenly the pupil grew enormous, the black bleeding into the white until it was a solid dark marble. My whole body tensed, ready to eject everything under my skin.
I fell backwards through the bathroom door and into my room then, my screams muffled by the stream of moths rushing out of my skull, maybe hundreds of them, maybe every moth in the universe, beating their wings out of my head and around me in a torrential, invertebrate hurricane. I writhed and rolled, my nerves marionette strings as I danced in the waves of wings that carried me up.
When the full litter of grey monsters had left their ocular womb, I finally lost my legs, drowning in wings. The moths lifted me bodily from the ground, pinning me to the ceiling, crawling over each other to get a piece. I struggled weakly, only managing to shake them from my face as the tornado continued whirling in the centre of my room, over my bed. Helpless, I watched the moths below come together in one throbbing shape, one body, and from it emerging their mother, their queen, black eyes devouring me, a hundred spindle hands reaching.
Then suddenly there was rush of orange and a riling snarl. The queen beat her wings and the attacker back. The fox dodged and landed on my bed, with me crashing in a crumpled heap to the floor as my captor-moths swirled to their mother’s defense.
“A grave error to interfere in my dealings, fox,” came a voice like burnt, crinkled paper. “This vessel has been marked, as always. She bears my sigil.”
The fox stood its ground and barked, “A mark that signifies backroom dealings with a demon, Mother Death. I never thought I’d live to call the Moth Queen herself a fool for doing the bidding of a serpent.”
I sat up, hand to my head. The fox had spoken, yes, with authority and anger. A female voice, too. Her hackles were up, lips peeled over yellowed canines, ears pinned back — even in the eye of the moth-storm, she held her ground. And mine.
The Moth Queen, or whatever she was, stood eight feet tall at least, her enormous head brushing the ceiling, cicada body doubling over the fox as though it would crush it in half. She had the arms of a woman, so many arms, and delicate needle fingers. Her wings gaped and flexed, the extent of them lost in the wings of her babies, beating around her like a shivering maelstrom.
It seemed as though the fox and the moth had forgotten about me, until one of those elegant, deadly hands shot out for my throat and pinned me to the wall without a glance.
The Moth Queen surveyed the fox, long face giving nothing away as her leaf-antennae twitched. “Death is no slave. And this is the bidding of the Families, not the Snake. I have been bound to do this thing to maintain the precious Narrative. You were there when the accord was made. You did nothing to stop it then.”
The fox’s snarl deepened. “You will release her.”
“I will take her. As is the due to be paid. It was the mother who interfered with the work, and there will be blood for blood. This is the pact. Take up your grievance with the Owls — this one has had fourteen years to be spared. Feel grateful.” I felt the hand squeeze tighter, felt the moths clos
ing in again. Felt myself disappearing . . .
Then there was extreme heat coming from the bed. A fire, growing bigger. “I wonder,” said the fox amidst the flames, “can Death burn?”
The flames flashed outwards, meteoric, and the fox grew with them, and somehow, in the guttering blaze, I saw what could have been a woman with a fox head, lashing out her nine tails into the torrent of moths, scattering them, attracting them. Killing them.
Had we been devoured by the fire? Had the entire house burned down? I couldn’t tell. But I knew that I was just . . . elsewhere, all of a sudden. I could feel that I still had a body, but that it was less important than it had been a second ago. God, so sleepy, just let me sleep. I wanted to fall backwards into nothing, let my limbs migrate in different directions and scatter the remaining pieces. The less weight I had bearing down on my spirit, the freer I could be.
I was being held possessively by branch-like arms, many hands wrapping me in the loving embrace of a cocoon. These hands would grant all my wishes. And all I wished for was sleep.
“You cannot take her,” said the flaming fox-woman, creature, thing. She was nearby, because I could feel her heat.
“Firefox! Daughter of Deon! You know my purpose. I am Death, and Death is an impartial judge. I take this child so that the others may live. So that the wrath of Zabor will be slaked for the season. This was the deal that was made. You cannot reclaim this sacrifice.” The Moth Queen dug her fingers into my flesh tighter as she wove.
The flames guttered slightly. A laugh. “For the will of a lesser demon, a snake hiding in a riverbed! You do not have to be a slave.”
The Moth Queen seemed to take offense. “I will take the dead from this place until the end times, until the wheels stop turning. I will not stop, even when Sky and Earth come back together, even when this world ends and another begins. You all made this pact with me, while the eyes of Ancient were turned away, in your moment of weakness. It is not with me that the fault lies.”
I felt myself being pushed into shadow, felt the darkness leaking into my bones, but the heat from the fire didn’t fade.
“The River Snake will be driven out. Give the girl to me, and I will set it in motion.”
The blackness submerged me. I was being pushed into the Moth Queen’s body, becoming a part of it. I wanted to be a part of her darkness. By choice or by force.
But I felt the air shift as her wings flickered. Hesitation. “The Five Families did not unite before. Their ignorance will keep this game in play until they are all dead.”
The fox barked flames. “The Families have grown weary of feeding their children to the beast. The girl is key to ending it.”
A pause. A turning of the head. “The River Snake will know she has been denied her quarry. She will unleash her wrath in a deluge greater than the one before. Will you take responsibility for the thousands drowned, my arms full with the burden of their souls?”
I felt the cocoon separating, the threads singeing as the fire brushed against me.
“The Families have protected this world since the beginning. I will not see them punished because Ancient has fallen silent. We will take our salvation for ourselves, as we ought to have done years ago. And Death can be impartial again.”
I was inside the fire, delicately handed over to the arms of it, pressed up to a furred mantle of flames, nine blazing tails spinning behind the fox-woman like a wheel. This place — whatever it was — started undoing itself, and the fear diminished along with it. Their voices followed me home.
“No matter what you do, Zabor will know. And in the spring, she will have a terrible waking. The Families will align only to see this girl die. You and I will see each other very soon, old fox.”
“There is still snow on the ground,” the fires whispered, “and soon I will go gladly into your arms, Mother Death, for I have been waiting a long time.”
The Five Families
Awake. Awake. What a dream. I’d never experienced one that was so . . . real. Maybe I ate something weird before bed, I thought. My body rose and fell as my lungs inhaled oxygen in a healthy rhythm. Sunlight streamed through my window onto my bed, which I was firmly tucked into. I squinted. My alarm hadn’t gone off yet, one pitiful saving grace. I had no idea where a dream like that could have come from — well, okay, maybe I needed to put down the World of Warcraft for a while. I couldn’t remember where the seams of being out in the snow with a fox met with the dream of being eaten by moths shooting out of my eye.
My eye.
My hand flew to it, dabbing and poking to make sure the eye was there. And it was. And there was no pain, no swollen flesh, no moth-body lumps. And craziest of all, I could see clearly, both eyes wide open and facing the world.
I staggered out of bed, but I grabbed the headboard as my legs buckled. Waves of ache flooded my muscles, like I’d been hit by a truck. I hesitated and looked up, swallowing. Hit by a truck, or dropped from the ceiling. I shook my head, and I picked my way, jelly-legged, to the bathroom.
I flicked on the light, and there was my reflection, unfamiliar as it was. My thick hair was all over the place; nothing new. I pulled aside my bangs like a curtain on a mystery door.
My good eye was hazel, and it was the eye I’d seen the most of these past few years. My bad eye had been swollen, bloodshot, weeping, or covered for so long, that I’d almost forgotten about colouring. Still, I was a bit taken aback to see that my left eye was now bright amber. It was clear, though, and when I blinked the pupil shrank in the light. Aside from the colour, it looked normal. I looked normal. Sort of. For once.
There was something else orange in the mirror aside from this new eye, something in the room behind me and sitting on my bed. I whirled around and, still jelly-legged, fell over. The fox sat motionless on my duvet, tilting its head.
I dropped my disbelieving voice to a harsh whisper. “There’s no way you can really be here.”
It blinked those big yellow eyes, ears flicking. “If I’m not here, then why did you fall over?”
I paused, trying to control my face. “Yeah, yeah, smart.” I started crawling over to my dresser, trying to take this in stride. “I didn’t know foxes from the Red River Basin could talk back.”
“Not many of them remember how,” she said, watching me, “but I do.”
“Peachy,” I said, finding a comfortable spot in the corner to draw my knees up to my mouth and rake my quivering fingers through my hair. “Then maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me why my body feels like it’s just been pushed out through a really small drainpipe?”
The fox hopped from my bed and into the sunlight, taking a minute to nip at an itch on her shoulder and shake herself out before looking up at me again. “You were technically dead. It takes time for a body to bounce back from that.”
I had been chewing my fingernail and, at that, pulled my thumb out of my teeth, eyes locked on the fox. Dead. She’d said it so casually, but I believed her, this real-life talking Disney forest creature. Well, that’d do it. I groaned, then buried my face in my knees. “You mean that wasn’t a dream?”
“Mm. Sort of.” The fox clicked her tongue. “But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
This was getting annoying. “Ugh, I seriously cannot handle riddle-speak right now, okay? I think I deserve a straight answer.”
My attitude took the fox aback slightly. I think she even frowned. “Or you could say thank you, you ungrateful pup.”
I frowned as the surreal memories bobbed to the surface. “Oh,” I said dumbly, remembering that it was a fox-turned-warrior-woman who had burned up the moths and pulled me out of the dark. Out of death. I swallowed the rising lump in my throat, looking away. “That was you, huh?” Her face didn’t change. I sniffed. “Well. Thanks.”
I studied my hands from behind my knees, following their creases and lines, not sure what to say or think. I took a hold o
f my wrist and felt my pulse there, a small surge, warm and familiar and forgiving. I remembered everything so clearly, the feeling of letting go, of letting everything slip away, and being all right with it. I wondered if that’s how it was for everyone, if that’s how it was for my parents. I hadn’t meant to think of them just now, but . . . I rubbed away oncoming tears.
When I looked up again, the fox was standing on her hind legs, paws on my windowsill, ears twitching as she considered the neighbourhood below.
“Can I ask what you are?” I said, point-blank.
“I don’t know,” the fox tilted her head at a crow wheeling past the house. “Can you?”
Great. A hallucination well-versed in smartass. I slammed by head to knees. “Just . . . are you a god, or a demon, or a Pokémon, or what?”
She snorted. “I’m clearly a fox. You said so yourself.”
“Well, pardon me for having no friggin’ clue as to what’s going on, Chatty McFurball. I just woke up from an Alien-worthy eyeball-bursting experience, complete with a monster mom that could be defeated only by your super pyrotechnics, all in my bedroom in a rambling house in the freaking Prairies. I’m just looking for some context, here.”
“You’re not very good at telling stories,” the fox admonished, head whipping back to the window.
I sighed, legs flopping as I eased my head into the wall. “Do you have a name, at least?”
She dipped her head down, surveying me. She finally sat down near me. We stared each other down until her black lips curled back in an unmistakable smile. “Sil,” she said finally. “My name is Sil. And your name is Roan. I am a fox. And I have come here for you.”
“Great,” I said, my next thought interrupted by Deidre’s shrill voice.
“I hope you’re at least dressed, Roan — it’s twenty-to!”
I leapt to my feet, losing one of them to pins and needles but getting it back when I stumbled forward. “Oh man, just what I need.” How the hell was I going to bike to school like this?
