Uly was surprised he’d survived as long as he did. He remembered the king snake flashing from the crack, sinking its fangs into Ava’s haunch. It should have been him who’d been bitten that day. Then his mom wouldn’t have had to choose between him and his sisters.
He stared up, up, up, toward the pool’s distant surface. At least he’d spent his last few days with a friend. Or someone who acted like one, at least …
His heart sank when he realized he’d never warned Mia to stay away from cracks. He’d been too afraid to tell her his story, worried she’d think he was worthless, and now the kit who’d cleaned him and fed him and even come back for him after he’d been mean didn’t know about the snakes that lurked in dark places.
He had to get back and warn her.
Uly struggled against the teeth that held his paw, jerking to break free. But he was no match for the stony jaws of the Golgathursh, which dragged him deeper and deeper into the crystalline darkness.
He was about to give up forever when a light flashed from above. The red star beamed through the murky water … and Uly saw the Golgathursh. The whole thing. It filled the pool—a whirlwind of scaly limbs circling up through the water.
He saw the monster for what it really was. Not one creature with many mouths and limbs, but many creatures that looked like giant lizards. And Uly realized his sisters had lied to him.
He looked down at the thing that held his paw. It was more than just a crooked grin. He saw its giant eye—mottled and yellow with a sharpened pupil—and he kicked at it. The eye was soft and flinched at the sharpness of his claws. Its teeth clenched tighter, and he kicked again.
The jaws rolled, and Uly flipped through the water, turning and tumbling. The night sky whirled beneath him, and the pool’s bottom spun overhead, blurring together. Uly swallowed more water. He thought he might throw up. He thought he might pass out. He thought he might drown if he swallowed one more drop …
But there came a snap, and he was free. With his hind paws, he pushed up off the scaly snout that had held him and swam up through the great whirlwind of limbs and mouths and eyes. He paddled toward the red star, kicking off the giant lizards’ many spiny limbs, keeping away from their toothy ends, as he propelled himself upward.
A couple of tails from the surface, a mouth opened beneath him. Uly made himself flat, spreading his paws wide, barely catching either end of the snout that struck his belly as it roared out of the water and launched him into the air.
He landed on the bank with a splat and scrambled across the muck as the great mouth rattled and then sank back into the pool, empty.
SIX
ULY FOUND MIA hiding among the leaves, staring back toward the pool.
She whimpered and pawstepped, waiting to see if he would resurface. It was such a nice sight that he decided to sit and watch for a minute while his heart pumped some feeling back into his limbs.
Mia, still watching the water, drew in a breath and held it. When the air burst out of her, she drew in another. It burst out, and she did it again.
“You’re gonna make yourself light-headed,” Uly said.
Mia jumped. Her nose jerked toward him, and a smile burst across her face. “Uly!”
She romped over to nip and lick at his ears. He didn’t mind it so much this time.
“You’re not drowned!” she said. “You’re not eaten! You’re—you’re—you’re okay!”
“Yeah,” Uly said. “I guess I am.”
She squinted as he shook himself dry, showering her in droplets.
“Holy squip,” she said when he was finished. “How’d you make it out in one piece?”
“Oh, um”—he looked at his chest—“I didn’t.”
Mia’s jaw fell open. “It got your paw!”
It was true. Uly’s withered foreleg was gone. Taken.
She gave the remaining stump a sniff. “It snipped clean off! There’s no blood or anything!”
“Maybe that’s why it never worked so good,” he said. “Not enough blood.” He sighed. “At least now I don’t have to carry it around anymore.”
“Ha! That’s the first joke I’ve heard you make!” She shook her muzzle in disbelief. “You don’t seem scared or anything.”
The feeling was still tingling back into Uly’s limbs. “I … don’t know what I am.”
He remembered that he hadn’t apologized to Mia yet. Only to a raccoon’s butt.
“I’m sorry, Mia,” he said. “Sorry for saying that stuff about your brothers and sister. Whenever my sisters told me stories—even true ones—they always did it to hurt me. And I … I don’t want to be like them.” He looked into her eyes. “I don’t know what happened to your siblings. Really.”
Mia’s mouth twitched. “How about let’s talk about it later and get out of this place?”
Uly gave her a lopsided smile. “Sounds good.”
They continued north, side by side, away from the red star.
“So what was that thing?” she asked. “Was it really the Gurg—Grog—Gorg—”
“Yep.”
“And all those limbs were part of the same—”
“Uh-huh.”
“And it had a thousand—”
“More than that maybe.”
“Wow,” Mia said.
He decided not to tell her what he’d realized in the belly of the swamp—that the Golgathursh was nothing but a bunch of big lizards and that all he’d had to do was scratch one of their eyes to escape. That didn’t sound nearly as scary as it had been.
He leapt over a stone and remembered something important. “Oh, um … don’t jump over any cracks, okay?”
“Huh?” she said.
“Just, if you see a crack, let me jump over it first. I’ll let you know if it’s safe.”
Mia giggled. “You got it, weirdo.”
They continued out of the swamp and back into the forest, steering clear of even the smallest of puddles.
A SHRIEK CUT through the Antler Wood.
The little one’s heart leapt, and her paws almost followed. But then the shriek ended in a snort, and she realized her sister had only been laughing.
“Lizards?” the third kit said, still giggling. “Everyone knows there are no lizards that big! This story is so dumb.”
“Uhhh,” the beta said. “We’ve got some bad news for you, Iffy.”
“There are lizards that big,” the alpha said. “They’re called alligators.”
“What?” the third kit said and scoffed. “Nooooo.”
She looked at the little one, who slowly nodded.
“But…,” the third kit said. “But I’ve eaten lizards. And if there are ones out there as big as logs, with mouths as long as me, then…”
She gulped. Her ears folded, and her whiskers sank as she slunk back toward the den.
Three little foxes.
The eyes in the cavern gleamed with moonlight. “Mia and Uly had found their way out of the swamp. They continued north until they were clear of the forest. But the kits were not safe. Not by a season.”
The little one curled her tail around herself. She hadn’t thought they were.
“In fact,” the storyteller continued, “the fox kits might have remained in the forest if they knew what horrors awaited them on the other side…”
THE LILAC KINGDOM
ONE
THE MOMENT THE trees cleared, Mia took off across bronze hills, leaves trailing in her wake. The ground moved swiftly beneath her paws. The weeds that would have tripped her up a few weeks ago now only brushed her underbelly. Stones were cleared in a single leap. Mia had seen her mom bound across the Eavey Wood as if feathers sprouted from her paws. Now that freedom was Mia’s.
She sprinted to the top of a grassy hill, lifted a paw, and sniffed. She ran to the top of another and sniffed again. Her nose searched the grasses for her mom’s apple-scented fur. But all she could smell was the tart scent of blushing leaves. Chill breezes loosed them from the branches, whirling and tumbling t
hem into great rustling piles of yellow and orange.
Autumn was even more beautiful than she’d hoped. It filled Mia’s senses with more smells and colors than she’d dreamed possible. But her heart couldn’t quite feel it. There was a bite in the air. The sun no longer warmed her fur. Her Golden-Eyed Day was only weeks away—the day she would have left the Eavey Wood to start a life of her own.
She wasn’t ready.
Mia checked the mouth of the forest, where Uly was just now hopping out. He’d shed his second coat, and his fur was growing bright red. She turned her nose northward and sniffed one last time. The air was itchy with leaf dust. But it was foxless.
She returned to the forest’s edge.
“What’s your mom smell like?” Uly asked, nibbling a burr from one of his hind paws.
“Like me, I guess,” Mia said.
Uly sniffed the breeze while she stifled a whimper.
Her mom had told her to travel to the far side of the forest. But her mom wasn’t there. Had she been captured by another trap? Mia swallowed. Had she gone to the baby-bush to find a new kit? She shook the thought away, reminding herself that baby-bushes weren’t real.
Mia scanned the hills stretching to the horizon, wondering where to search next.
“Where’s your home?” she asked Uly.
“Oh, um—a … achoo!”
He sneezed but didn’t answer. Not for the first time, Mia suspected that he hadn’t told her everything about how he’d come to be lost in the forest. Then again, she hadn’t told him that her mom thought she was dead. She couldn’t get her mouth to say the words.
She turned her attention to the horizon. Her mom had told her to find a den just like the one they’d had in the Eavey Wood. With sandy loam and a sipping creek and good cover for the entrance. If Mia could find a place that had all of those things, she might find her mom.
She sniffed until her nose caught a drying channel tucked between the hills. “Let’s go through there. It’ll keep us hidden from predators while we head north.”
Uly sniffed too. “Oh. Oh yeah. That’s the way I need to go anyway.”
The channel led them to a rocky scramble. Mia leapt up easily, pausing every so often to check on Uly, who was having trouble keeping his balance on the teetering rocks.
“You got this!” she called to him.
He nodded, panting, and made another small hop.
After a long, difficult climb, the sky reddened with dusk, and they arrived at the craggy shadow of a cliff that blocked their way northward.
“Welp,” Mia said, sniffing up and up, “that’s inconvenient.”
Uly hopped next to her, out of breath. “It’s a cliff.”
“Y’know,” she said as kindly as she could. “I think you might be right. Wait here.”
She bounded up a slope that rose steeply to the east and sniffed the wide expanse of rolling hills. There were two ways they could go. Northwest, along a rocky path that curved around the base of the cliffs. Or east, down a clear trail that wove between the hills.
The way east looked more manageable for Uly’s foreleg. But when Mia sniffed the hills, she caught a scent that made her eyes water. Gray wisps curled against the horizon, choking the sky with ash. Mia squinted through the haze and found great sections of hill cut with black pathways.
Roads.
She bounded back to the channel.
“This way,” she said as she passed Uly, following the cliff face west. “Fast.”
“What is it?” Uly said. “What’d you see?”
“Humans.”
He followed without any more questions.
* * *
Clouds swept overhead, extinguishing the sunset.
“We should find somewhere to sleep,” Uly said.
Mia nodded. Over the past few weeks, they’d become experts at finding safe hovels in the forest. But this land was open and had few places to hide. The most promising spots were thick with animal scent.
As the sky faded from gray to rumbling black, they continued along the cliff’s base as it gradually shrank into the ground, opening onto a scraggly hill. At the top of the hill, great violet clouds billowed, silhouetting black stones that towered toward the sky.
“Pretty,” Mia said, her whiskers electric.
The clouds flashed lightning teeth, and the sky cracked so loudly it seemed it might split in two.
Uly’s ears folded. “That’s pretty to you?”
“Yeah! In a spooky sorta way.” Mia bounded up the hill as raindrops started to fall. “Come on! We can hide in that rock pile until the rain passes.”
Uly hesitated. “I … can’t really do hills.”
“Sure you can!” she called back. “It’s just like the swamp. One paw at a time.”
Uly made a determined face and followed, climbing the hill in zigzags. Mia bounded up a few foxtails and then turned to watch her friend.
“Almost there!” she sang brightly through the drizzle.
Uly stopped to pant. “Are you kidding? We’re not even close!”
“True … But we’re almost there to partway there!”
Mia ignored Uly’s grumbling and gazed through the rain, beyond the hilltop to where the black stones speared the sky. She sniffed, hoping for a whiff of apple. But instead she caught a smooth, intoxicating scent. She breathed deep, letting it stir her whiskers and make her fur stand on end. The sky rippled with thunder.
“Do you smell that?” Mia called down the hill. “It’s like—”
“Don’t say peaches and centipedes,” Uly said, taking another miserable hop. “It didn’t work the first time, and it’s not gonna—”
“No, really!” Snff snff. “It’s like flowers! Like”—snfffff—“lilac!”
Uly stopped climbing. He turned back and began his slow zigzags down the hill.
“Wait!” Mia cried. “Where are you going?”
He kept descending.
“Uly, stop!”
He looked over his shoulder, eyebrows trembling. “That’s Mr. Scratch’s scent.”
Mia perked her ears. She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right through the rain.
“Who the squip is Mr. Scratch?”
“He’s…,” Uly said. “He’s my dad.”
Mia quirked her head. “That’s a good thing, right?”
Uly shook his head.
Mia’s own father was a hazy memory—a musty scent that brought fresh kills to her and her siblings every morning when they were babies.
She sniffed toward the top of the hill again, catching the lilac.
Foxes mark the borders of their kingdoms using their family’s scent, Miss Vix had told her and her siblings. The smell is meant as a warning for other foxes: Keep away, or else …
Mia also remembered what her teacher had said about staying away from strangers. But it was different when they were related to you, wasn’t it? What dad would try to kill his own kit? No dad. That was who.
“Uly, we have to go this way,” she called through the rain. “My mom wouldn’t have gone anywhere near the humans and their roads.”
The sky shuddered. The rain grew heavier. Uly couldn’t stop shaking.
Mia furrowed her brow. She could understand being afraid of a Golgathursh. But not of a dad. She wanted to grab Uly by the scruff and drag him up the hill. But that hadn’t gone over very well in the swamp. She needed a different approach.
She descended until she was just uphill of him. “Your dad might have food for us. You love food.”
Uly’s muzzle trembled. “You don’t know him.”
Mia started to walk. “What did he do that was so bad?”
He hopped alongside her, searching the ground, as if debating something. “He … he bit my sister.”
“Ah, that’s no big deal,” Mia said, angling her paws ever so slightly uphill. “I bit my siblings all the time.”
Uly stopped. “It—it was worse than that. I don’t know. I’m not as good at telling scary stories as my sisters.�
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“You mean to tell me,” Mia said, spinning around and continuing to climb backward, “you’re more afraid of your dad than you are a Gurglethork?”
Uly scowled and hopped to catch up. “Golgathursh.”
“That’s what I said. Geekathirst. That thing was way scarier. But we made it through together, right?” She flipped around and continued at a trot. “We’ll be reeeaaaal sneaky. Your dad can’t catch both of us. Besides, look! You’re almost to the top.”
Uly scowled when he realized she had led him in a diagonal up the hill. He flipped around and started hopping back down.
A snarl rose in Mia’s throat. “Humans are that way!”
He stopped and hung his head.
“You think your dad is bad?” she snapped. “Miss Potter broke my mom’s paw. She boiled off a fox’s skin, then replaced his eyes with shiny rocks and stuffed him full of grass. That’s what humans do.”
Uly shivered, rain dampening his coat. Thunder rumbled overhead.
“Uly,” Mia said softly. “Please. I can’t go back to the cage again.”
He met her eyes. “And I can’t face my dad again.”
They stared at each other. Raindrops dripped from their noses.
Mia’s heart made a tumble. “So I guess this is goodbye, then?”
Lightning clawed the sky, and Uly saw something behind her. His expression changed from shame to horror. Mia turned around.
At first, all she could make out was a skull floating in the darkness. But then the shadows of its sockets crinkled.
“Its sweat will only serve as spice,” the skull grumbled.
Lightning flashed again, illuminating the creature’s eyes, the slick black hair of its paws, its back a mound of fur and muscle. Badger. Mia had only ever seen one from a distance, when Miss Vix had chased it away from the den. Its jaws could pop a kit’s skull as easily as a gooseberry.
The badger sucked rain through its gray teeth. “Yes, a long climb it’s made, but its sweat will only spice its meat.”
Scary Stories for Young Foxes Page 12
