Scion of the Fox

by S. M. Beiko

  She sees Roan’s distant face, eyes clouded and looking to a place that she won’t share with Deidre. When she catches her aunt looking, she hides behind an empty smile, an I’m okay, and a rush off to school, to see her friends. A practised gesture. They’ve shared nothing since she sheared her hair and her eye changed.

  Her husband has been worse — nervous and preoccupied and waiting for the hammer to fall, the worst he’s been in the last year. Of course, he too shares nothing with Deidre, but the shock of it is much colder. He shies away from her reassuring touch, flying from fear to rage in a breath. He looks at her like she is a stranger and treats her like one, too. He’s moved permanently to the guest room, has abandoned his freelance work, and seems to spend his days behind that door, eating little and growing more emaciated and drawn. Haunted.

  Her work and focus at her job has faltered. Her superiors, showing concern, have suggested an intervention — to perhaps get the police involved, maybe even psychiatrists. But that would be admitting that Deidre’s control is slipping . . . She examines her finger — the bleeding has stopped, but her nail is ugly. They all are. She balls them up into a fist. What are they hiding from me? The tears well up and she sobs freely, alone in this enormous house of strangers.

  When she came home tonight, the stillness was deafening. And she knew, with the exception of their unconscious host upstairs, she was on her own. Roan had at least texted her: “I’m going over to Phae’s for a bit. I’ll be back by six.” But six had come and gone. And when she’d gone to check on Arnas, his room was abandoned, the door wide open. No note, no message. Just silence.

  Arnas must be in trouble, she thinks as she washes her hands. He acts like he’s being watched, or chased, like his life is in danger. . . Or else he’s done something terrible, and Deidre doesn’t dare entertain that thought further. Arnas isn’t capable of that. No.

  But there are probably a hundred things she doesn’t know. She splashes water onto her face, trying to wash away the desperation. Her resolve is already cracking. How long until she herself does something rash? For all their sakes? Her suitcase is still flung open and half packed on the bed she once shared with Arnas. But if she leaves, where does that leave Roan? She’s already been having issues in her graduate year. Would it only make things worse? Could Deidre survive with a plastered-on smile until the end of the semester? She gives a sidelong glance to the suitcase. If only Roan would answer her recent texts . . .

  As she replaces the towel on the rack by the sink, she hears the front door open. Certain and relieved that it’s Roan, Deidre starts for the living room.

  “Roan?” she calls. Her phone goes off in her pocket, and she pauses in the hallway to check the screen. Texts from a co-worker. Are you watching the news right now?! I think Roan is on it!! Something really crazy is going on at the Osborne Bridge . . .

  Phae Das lives in Osborne Village. Deidre’s heart catches.

  “Deidre? Are you there?” The voice that carries clear as a bell from the front door stops her at the foyer. It is not Roan.

  Arnas stands silhouetted in the open doorway. It’s snowing out, and the wind that sneaks around him chills her synapses. He smiles, pivoting with unfamiliar grace as he closes the door behind him. His eyes never leave her.

  “Arnas . . . where were you? Are you all right?”

  Concern overwhelms her desire to yell or throw things at him for all his absences in recent months — absence from their home, their marriage, their confidence. But he looks so utterly changed — spine erect, stance relaxed but confident. Skin waxy and glowing as the smile disappears from his mouth. He looks like an impression of himself.

  “I’ve never felt better. You mustn’t worry — everything is going to be fine now.” He holds out his arms to her. She steps back and away. He is visibly displeased by this.

  She is shaking now, and it is not from the cold. “Arnas . . . you haven’t been honest with me in months. And I’ve had enough.” Her ruined nails bite into the flesh of her hand. “You’ll tell me what’s going on right now, or I’m leaving. And I’m taking Roan with me.” Seeing him like this steels her resolve.

  His eyes change, and she covers her mouth. The irises and the pupils seem to rotate, focused and cutting. “Roan,” he says. “Roan.” The word is a curse in the air. His head tilts and bobs, and he steps closer to her. All at once she is sure that this is not her husband.

  “Stay away from me!” she screams, backing into the table by the stairs.

  “It’s not me you should be afraid of,” says this thing with her husband’s voice. He clasps her by the arms. “It’s Roan, don’t you see? It’s all her doing. If she had only died like she was supposed to, none of this would’ve happened. No one would be dead. And we would not have to suffer.”

  He raises an arm and flicks his wrist at the television screen in the entertainment room beyond the foyer. It turns to the news, showing repeated footage of a standoff between a man and a woman on the Osborne Bridge. No, a girl. The camera zooms, pictures flash, and a photo she recognizes from last Christmas, a photo she took with her phone, aligns with the panning view of multiple car collisions and fleeing people. And in a loop, the girl falling off the bridge and into the open ice below.

  Roan. Her name is plastered alongside Terrorist Attack and Possible Link to the Dead Red River Girls?

  Deidre has nothing. Her words are gone. She turns back to Arnas, but he is inches from her, and his bony hand is already around her neck. Not tight, just a gentle threat.

  “She’s dangerous,” the anti-Arnas assures. Deidre’s tears return. For a moment, she is sure she can see the real Arnas behind this horrible stranger’s eyes. He’s trying to get out. But he’s losing.

  “Dangerous,” he hisses, the fingers closing. “She has to be stopped. And we tried to, today. But she’s persistent. She is selfish. And she could still be out there. We must be vigilant.”

  “Arnas,” Deidre whispers, vocal cords straining against his hand. “If you’re in there. Please. Don’t let them hurt her.”

  The head bobs and tilts again. “And what of your life?”

  “Don’t let anything happen to her,” she repeats. “She’s all you have left of your brother.”

  For a moment, the grip falters. The eyes seem to be trying very hard to stay focused. She is certain she’s reached into him, that there’s hope.

  “She will die,” he says. And in a squeeze, Deidre’s world goes dark.

  *

  The stars are beautiful in the land of the dead. They wink at you mockingly, pinpricks in the great black. You are dead, after all. The Great Joke.

  Ugh. Why am I bothering being petty now? Just enjoy the scenery, you bodiless, stupid consciousness. You belong in a primordial mire with the stars laughing at you because you’re a dumbass and you got beaten and this is what you get for thinking you could do otherwise.

  Something bumped against me in the sluggish swamp of the dead. A bolt of sharp lightning pinballed through my neurons and, against rationality, I realized I definitely had a body. I wanted to scream the stars out of the sky, but all I could get out was an ughhh.

  The stars were obscured by the cloud of my breath — my hot, stinking, living breath. I tasted blood. I was in a lot of pain but I couldn’t move at all. I felt numb. I was alive, but had I broken my spine? Was I still in jeopardy? Had the Owl — Eli or whatever — continued his righteous rampage against my friends? Were they all dead and now it was too late?

  I started to panic, as the recently dead are wont to do.

  “Whoa, whoa!” someone said, bumping into the prostrate pain-sack that was my body. I groaned and coughed, the pain thick.

  “You gotta calm down, eh?” the someone grunted. It was hard enough concentrating on anything but the pain, let alone trying to make out my captor in the dark. I’d decided he and anyone else making an appearance near me must be a badd
ie, because I was vulnerable and cranky, all things considered.

  “G-get away!” I rasped with zero menace. My throat was raw. And there was another taste in it, one I only faintly recognized. It was black and bitter, bile mixed with putrid river water and . . .

  My captor had pulled a flashlight out of the pack he’d been rifling in. He held it in his mouth, and when I looked down, I saw that I was wrapped tightly in some ratty blankets lashed with old jumper cables and belts. He started undoing these, but as each came free, the pleasure of free movement never seemed to come.

  “You ’otta s’op ’at,” he said around the flashlight in his teeth. “You shoul’n’t moo’ righ’ now, ish not gooh.”

  My futile struggling and sudden resurrection had straight-up exhausted me. I tried taking note of this guy’s appearance in the dim circle of light: overweight, ponderous in a parka, cheeks burnt flush. Couldn’t make out much else, and I wasn’t in the mood. All I knew was Pain bad, thinking hard. Need to go home.

  Then the blankets were fully loose, and I saw why I couldn’t move. I was encased from the neck down in a solid block of ice, woolly-mammoth style.

  “The hell?!” I gargled, stupidly trying to get free. What I first thought was futile led me to think that maybe I was on to something; steam issued from the block as I struggled, a warmth spreading into my limbs as the ice melted . . . which only made the pain worse.

  “Don’t!” my captor cried, like I was a dog that was caught peeing on the carpet midstream. The flashlight fell out of his mouth with the exclamation, and he groaned over me. “You gotta stop that, okay? You broke a lot of stuff. No good moving around and makin’ it worse.”

  In the dark I could tell he’d taken off his gloves, blowing into his palms before resting the weight of his hands against my frozen confinement. Whatever I’d melted in my struggles solidified back into place, and I actually felt the pain slide back, wayward, swollen limbs amply supported. I felt insulated rather than cold and marvelled at my surprising comfort. I relaxed; it was all I could do.

  My captor’s hood slid off, and a tangle of ripe-smelling hair tumbled out as he bent over me to retrieve the flashlight. The shine guttered, and he flipped it at his face, smacking it with an open hand. I realized my captor wasn’t a he, but a she — around my age, maybe younger. And my spirit eye woke up to tell me she was also a Seal, wet coal eyes shining enormous in her round face.

  “Who are you?” I rasped bluntly as she clumsily shoved her hair back into her hood, human face swimming into a grimace.

  “Natti Fontaine,” she grunted, hitching her pants up, and retying all the jump cords and belts. “We gotta long way to go still, Fox-girl, so get comfy.” There was a scarf wrapped around my head, too, which she retightened. She followed that with a slap to my bundled body, and when I didn’t issue a moan, she seemed satisfied and went around behind me.

  “Hey, wait, what are you . . .” Then we started moving again, snow shushing and ice scraping under me. “Wait, am . . . am I frozen to a sled?”

  “Yup,” she said, pulling me along as my personal sled dog. “Good thing you’re skinny.” And so we plowed along like this, and I didn’t have the energy to protest.

  “Are you taking me to the Owls?” I sighed, resigned to my fate and getting frustrated that the longer I survived the more this whole thing would drag on and on. Either let me die or leave me alone, already.

  Natti just laughed. “Man, I woulda just left you back there if I wanted you dead. Less work. I’m takin’ you to my aunty. She wants to talk to you.”

  She was probably lying. But at this point, I didn’t care.

  My eyes adjusted to the darkness, and my spirit eye filled in what night obscured: We were on a wide-open plain, banks of snow bookending us. It was a familiar place. I swallowed the pain as the sled bumped over an uneven surface and gagged when I realized we were actually still on the river. Far from Osborne Village, though, and the horror show I’d left in my wake; the traffic sounds around us were dim, with few lights in the distance save the odd street lamp seen through the bracken of winter-stripped trees. We were somewhere near the Exchange District, or the Alexander Docks, but I didn’t think too seriously about way-finding. Flashes of being torpedoed down under inescapable ice shuddered through my mind lockstep with my heartbeat. God, my head hurt.

  “You remember anything?” Natti asked as she pulled me along seemingly without effort.

  I was silent for a bit, weighing my options. Could I trust her? Then again, what else was I doing? At this point, I didn’t much care for restraint.

  “I was dead,” I said. Then I scoffed. “Again.”

  “Close but no cigar.” She snorted, Clydesdale-esque. “You wouldn’ta made much of a snake snack. Nearly did, though. That Owl guy got you good.”

  My body remembered each car it had smashed against, glancing off bumpers and hoods like roadkill. Good way to immobilize someone before sending them to a watery grave, I guess. But what if I get thawed, and I am as good as dead anyway?

  I looked down. “Do you know . . . how bad . . . ?”

  “Nothin’ your Deer friend can’t fix up.” I could hear the grin in her voice. “So I thought puttin’ ya on ice was better than leavin’ you as is. Better to avoid the hospitals. I’m sure the whole bridge thing is all over the news now, along with your face.”

  I blinked in the darkness. “Why are you helping me?” I blurted. Her lack of murderous intent was unsettling.

  She snorted again. “Heard you needed a Seal on your side. And nothin’ makes me happier than to piss off the Owls. They told everyone not to go near you. So I went lookin’ for you, naturally.” She pulled me deftly over a small snowbank, the rush of the air past my face a temporary relief to my headache. “They’ll think you’re dead for now. It’ll buy us some time.”

  Time. Something I didn’t have enough of. Instead, I had an abundance of people that I owed my life to. The Moth Queen kept reaching out to me, and so many people kept pulling me back. Made a girl feel wanted, at least.

  “I remember . . . water,” I coughed, the images a jumble. I turned my spirit eye inward and bade it to find all I’d forgotten. “The water was moving so fast. And . . . the ice . . .” Suddenly, I was there again, overcome by the suffocating feeling of my body being pulled up, dragged along the underside of the ice. There was nothing I could grab hold of, no strength to stop myself, and no fire left. It was endless black under there, but I could perceive glinting things rushing along beside me. Hunters. Hundreds of them. Their red, terrible eyes raked the water like bloody boat lights. I remember wondering when my lungs would explode as they filled with the Assiniboine, but I finally stopped moving, body grasped in the claws of the hunters, teeth gnashing. They dragged me down, down, down against the current.

  To her. To a body coiled tight as a threat. To the face enormous, upturned, jaws yet unopened. Slit nostrils flaring, scenting me, the meal she’d been denied. The giant eyes opened, white and unawake. No recognition in them, just raw hunger. I felt my world blackening as the maw split, the heart of the maelstrom from my nightmares now real.

  Then a different torrent snagged me — a fist of water, powerful and determined. The penetrating, submerged screams that came after still echoed in my memory. I thought my ears would burst from the pressure of the sound and the fury. The water-fist ripped me away, pulled me back, smashed me up and through the ice.

  I cried out, a new wave of fresh pain crashing in my skull with the impact of a baseball bat. The last image that flickered was a looming shape — a person standing over me, hands taking my broken body up and draining the water from my lungs. I gasped, both in the memory and outside of it, as familiar hands bound me up in an icy cushion. I knew this person was Natti without seeing her face in the memory. I must’ve finally succumbed to the dark after that, locked in dreams that assured me I was dead.

  But I wasn’t. Nat
ti had saved my life with her power — an element whose strength could rival the destruction of mine.

  And she wasn’t done yet.

  My gratitude was lost in a sudden flurry — the sled cracked against a horn of ice, and something rattled on the skis under me.

  Natti righted me but stopped. The rattling turned desperate. “What’s that?” I asked, my range of motion compromised so I could barely tilt my head. The rattling became banging, and Natti dove around me as a box sprang free from the sled.

  “Shit.” She grabbed for the box just as the lid strained against the jumper cord holding it closed.

  Then the cord broke, and the river hunter inside burst forward, howling its agonizing horror cry at us with its vertical mouth. Part of it was still in the box, and it raged to get free.

  “Why the hell do you have one of those things in a beer cooler?!” I screeched. I was definitely going to be zero help in this situation.

  “You musta thawed it when you got all microwave back there!” Natti barked, hands twitching. The hunter gave up trying to get the cooler off its back end, reduced to a clumsy Coors hermit crab now, and under other circumstances I would’ve laughed.

  It was small, but probably just as dangerous as its brothers, and it focused on us and snarled. Just as it lunged murderously, propelled by its scrabbling claws, Natti reeled back like a major-league pitcher. Her hands spun water from the moisture in the air and locked the hunter in a sphere of ice. It crashed heavily into the snow a foot away from us.

  I shuddered out the breath I’d been holding. Natti went to the ice ball and pressed her hands into it; the sphere compressed neatly to the body of the hunter, and she manipulated the shape until it fit back into the box. Evil genie, begone!

  “What are you carrying it around for?” I asked. She seemed to know what she was doing. “Why don’t you just kill it?”

  She gave me a hard look as she carried the box back over and secured it to the sled again. “You in the habit of killin’ stuff for no reason?”