by Rosie Best
There was no pain, and no time to investigate. I lashed out with the plant pot again. This time there was a sick clonk and the pigeon slapped down on the steps. The fox pounced, snarling, but the pigeon half-rolled, half-flapped out of its reach and managed to take off. I jabbed at it with the spiky cactus fronds sticking out of the pot, and the pigeon flew off, dipping and reeling in the air until it disappeared over the roof of the house opposite.
I ran my tongue around my mouth but didn’t find anything bleeding. Something trickled down behind my ear, though. I reached up and my fingers came away wet and red. The wound was small, when I found it – a single violent peck under the nest of my hair.
I looked down at the fox. It shook itself out, like a dog, and panted up at me.
“The Skulk,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else. The fox nodded again, jerked its head – a weirdly human movement – and looked away down the street.
I glanced back into the house. Amazingly, nobody had heard or seen the fight on the front step. The sounds of politicians chatting drunkenly wafted out to me, the sound of wine glasses clinking and my mother planning both her prime ministerial campaign and my wedding to Hipster Dick.
“Give me two seconds.”
The fox nodded again.
I put down the plant pot, ducked inside and into the small toilet under the stairs. I peeled off the necklace, the shoes, the sausage dress and my underwear, bundled it all up and shoved it down behind the cistern. When I came back, if I could just get inside the house I’d be able to change back and nobody would be any the wiser. It’d be just like Superman or something.
It was a crap plan, but it was better than leaving my clothes in a mysterious pile in the street.
I changed curled up on the bathroom floor. There was the skin-prickle of fur bursting out all over me, the stretch and suck of everything inside me shrinking and rearranging... the weird too-bright moment of painful perfection where the sharp edges and scents of everything crowded in on me all at once...
In that moment, just for a moment, I scented something bizarre. It was like the fog, that smell-feeling of fizzing in my muzzle, but this was bigger – like a million sherbert lemons bursting in the back of my throat all at once.
Then the change had finished, and the strange scent had gone.
I twitched all over and got to my paws, half-blinded by the fluorescent pink stink of scented bleach with an overlay of something differently chemical that made me sneeze. Someone at the party had been doing lines of cocaine off the back of the toilet seat. My money was on Warren. As I trotted out of the door, I fervently hoped Mum would find out and chuck him out on his ear.
The fox was at the bottom of the steps now. She turned to look at me. “You coming or what?”
“Um, yes, I’m coming.” I bounded down the steps, but before I could reach her she’d turned and raced down the street. I put on a burst of speed and drew level. She twitched her ears at me as we ran around the corner.
“You live here?”
“Yep. I’m Meg,” I added, feeling we’d missed a step somewhere. “What’s your name?”
The fox hesitated for a few seconds. She led me down an alley, around an obstacle course of recycling bins.
“Addie,” she said.
“Nice to meet you.”
She huffed again.
“What happened back there? Are pigeons always like that?”
“I dunno. I dunno if that was a pigeon.”
“What? I mean, what was it then? Another shapeshifter?”
“No. Ain’t no pigeon shifters. Didn’t smell like a pigeon, though. It stank of, like... rotting meat. And blood.”
I thought of the taste of blood in the air, after it’d hit me. A shiver rippled through my fur and my ears twitched back. Could I have been smelling blood on the pigeon – even in human form?
“Well, that’s incredibly creepy,” I said.
Addie didn’t seem to want to talk about it. We ran for another five or ten minutes in silence. I tried to relax and let it all wash over me – the scents of the city, the night time air rushing coolly through my fur, the way I already felt steadier on my paws than last time. Pigeon-attack aside, I already felt more comfortable in this skin than I had in my human one for the last few hours. Addie’s scent moved along beside me, almost like a warm creature independent of her fox shape. I could smell dirt and dust and concrete on her, and a musty dampness like mouldy fabric. There was a spicy food-scent too, a bit like the smell of a kebab shop.
I wondered what she’d smell on me.
“So where are we going?” I asked eventually, though as long as it was away from the house and the party – and the pigeon – it was fine by me.
“To the Skulk,” Addie said.
“And, er... what is that?”
“Us, innit? Fox shifters. You’ll see.” She seemed like she was going to go silent again, but then she said, “We meet up Willesden Junction, on the siding, every week.”
We stopped on a dark street lined with small shops and she stopped to scratch behind her ear. I got my first really good look at her, up close. There was a wide scar over her forehead and she had fleas; I could half-see and half-scent them moving around on her. She was noticeably smaller than me, when we sat side by side, and I could smell... something that wasn’t so much a smell but a feeling of tension and energy moving through her.
She was young, I realised. Younger than me – but not a pup. Not actually a child. Maybe fourteen, in human years?
I realised I was staring at her, but I figured it was probably OK since she was staring at me, too. I hadn’t thought to wonder what I looked like as a fox, before.
“That boy,” she said suddenly. “With the wet trousers. He called you a frigid bitch. He feel you up, yeah?”
I sat back on my haunches, surprised. Was it that obvious?
“Yeah,” I said.
Addie’s tail lashed against the pavement. “You batter him?”
“No, I – I threw a vase of flowers at him.”
She made a low growling sound in her throat and huffed more air through her muzzle. I was right, it was a laugh.
“You’re OK,” she said, and turned a wide, canine grin at me, then got to her feet and trotted off again. “Even if you are a princess.”
‘I’m not a princess,” I said, trailing after her.
“What, living in one of them big houses? Whatever, Princess,” said Addie.
“No really. I should know. My friend Jewel is a princess, a real one.”
Addie’s tongue lolled out of her jaws. “You are shitting me!”
“Nope. Her second cousin’s the King of Bahrain.”
“Oh my days. Does she know the Queen? Does she live in a palace?”
“They’ve met. Actually, she lives in an apartment building near Hyde Park, not that far from here.” We’d turned a corner and suddenly come out onto a wide main road. I recognised the huge towering trees and boutique shops. Instead of darting across the road and back into the shadows, Addie turned left and we headed along the pavement.
“Don is going to flip his shit when he meets you,” Addie said. “A real princess!”
“Who’s Don?” I asked.
“Well, we haven’t got a leader, cause we don’t, but like... Don knows the rules.”
“So how many of you… us, I mean...”
“Six. Same with the others.”
This threw me. “Er, others?”
“Yeah, you know. Oh right, you don’t. Other shifters.”
“Spiders, by any chance?”
“Yeah, and rats, ravens and butterflies.”
One of those things seemed kind of out of place to me. “Butterflies? Really?”
“The Rabble.” Addie ran off the main road into a parking garage under a hotel. I followed her around and underneath the cars, through the labyrinth of metal and rubber. “You know like we’re the Skulk? Butterfly shifters are the Rabble. Bunch of posers, think they’re so superio
r just cause they’ve all got pretty wings. That’s what Don says.”
I was starting to look forward to meeting Don. He certainly seemed to know what was going on. Maybe he’d know about what happened to the other fox shifter – and what I ought to do with the blue stone that was still buried in my school playground.
My nose twitched as Addie led me through a cloud of petrol scent, out through the back of the parking garage and onto a thin walkway beside a main road. I thought we were heading north again, but I was starting to lose my bearings.
“Then there’s the Horde – rats. We hate them,” said Addie. “And they hate us. They live down the old Aldwych tube station. Fran caught one coming into our meeting place once; bit it so hard on the tail, half of it fell off.”
Fran. I filed the name away and let Addie go on talking. She seemed to be enjoying the chance to impart her knowledge to someone.
“And the Cluster are the spiders. Take my word, don’t trust the spiders. They’re always watching.”
“I think there’s a spider following me,” I blurted out. “I keep seeing it – it was at school, and then in my house...”
“Yeah, sounds like the Cluster.” Addie shuddered, her fur rippling along her bony shoulders like bright orange water. “They’re probably interested in you cause you’re new. And cause you’re young and pretty. Perverts.”
I choked. “Really?”
“Don says,” Addie shrugged.
“And the ravens?” I prompted.
“The Conspiracy,” said Addie. “Only, you’ll never see a raven shifter. Never come out of their tower, do they?”
“Wait!” I actually skidded to a halt on the side of the road. Cars roared past, stirring up tidal waves of hot-dirt-metal-dust-mud-rubber that washed over us. “The ravens in the tower? Not the Tower?”
“Of London,” said Addie. “Innit.”
“They’re shapeshifters?”
“Six of them, yeah. The rest’re just creepy old birds. Come on, it’s a way yet and Don’ll think I’ve lost you.”
I managed to put one paw in front of the other again, as fast as I could go without tripping over something.
“There are always six?” I said. “How come?”
“I dunno. Not even Don knows. We just know shifting passes on when you die. That’s how we knew... about Ben.”
There was an awkward silence. I felt it was my responsibility to break it.
“Um. Did you know him well?”
“Fairly.”
“I’m really sorry. That he died. Do–”
“Save it,” Addie snapped, not looking at me. “Till we’re with the others,” she added.
We ran underneath a huge flyover, past a yard full of scrap metal that gleamed in the light from cars passing overhead, past a trailer park and a community sports centre. Addie bore left and we made our way alongside a train track in silence for a while, then climbed back up the bank to a small road crowded with grimy shops.
Addie stopped dead in front of me, sniffing the air.
“Fancy some dinner?” she asked. I sniffed. I could smell fried food. My mouth filled with drool and I instinctively opened my jaws to taste the air. It was delicious. My stomach rumbled. I guess it shouldn’t have done, I had had dinner – but every fibre of my fox-being told me this was different, an opportunity not to be missed.
Addie led me into an alley beside a fried chicken shop. Its red and yellow and white lights shone out into the dark like the place was on fire. Addie and I shrank back into the alley between two shops as a pair of humans walked past, their legs rustling in baggy black tracksuit bottoms. One of them dumped a cardboard packet into a street bin.
An acrid, smoky smell followed them, but as it faded I could taste an amazing, juicy, meaty scent coming from the bin. There were chicken bones in that packet. I could practically see them, dripping and crunchy and gorgeous...
Addie darted forwards, reared up with her paws on the edge of the bin and thrust her muzzle deep inside. She drew back, her teeth clamped down on a bundle of bones, ran back into the alley and dumped them triumphantly in front of me.
My human brain did try to kick in, but I felt a rush of animal instinct and the next thing I knew I was digging in, crunching the bone and sucking out the marrow and chewing up the leftover peelings of skin and flesh.
It sounds rank, I realise that – but it just wasn’t. Everything about me was fox, now. The smell from inside the bin, which I knew should’ve been foul, was actually like walking into a busy restaurant kitchen, or sniffing a bag of sweets. A mix of smells and flavours, not all yummy, and not all food, but all really interesting.
The chicken bone was one of the most delicious things I’d ever tasted. Not quite up there with Chef Duchamel’s famous plate of international chocolate puddings, three of which I’d gleefully wolfed down under Mum’s disapproving glare at my last birthday dinner. But pretty damn good.
I licked my lips, my large dark tongue flicking over sharp fangs and tickling on the fur at the edge of my mouth.
If my body-obsessive, food-fascist mother knew I was turning into an animal and eating out of a bin...
She’d probably strangle me with her bare hands.
But she doesn’t know, and she never will. This is my life.
I crunched up the bone and sucked out the marrow, savouring every last greasy bin-scented bite.
CHAPTER SEVEN
We squeezed under a tall metal fence, around the back of Willesden Junction station, and I found myself at the top of a steep overgrown bank. It was covered in weeds, thistles and rubbish. For a second I couldn’t see a way down. Then Addie led the way around a blackened tree-stump and I followed her through a tunnel in the weeds, between discarded beer cans and thorny branches that pulled on my fur when I got too close. A violent roar and a burst of hot air buffeted us as a train hurtled past.
The tunnel opened onto a scrubby clearing surrounded by dark trees and tall bushes. Three foxes – the rest of the Skulk – turned to stare as Addie and I emerged.
“I found her,” said Addie. “This is Meg.”
“Hello.” I stopped on the edge of the clearing, suddenly shy.
Two of the other foxes were male, and one was female. One of the males was larger than the rest, his fur a vivid dark red flecked with white. He stalked towards me. Instinct flattened my ears against my head and I shrank back, pushing my front haunches down. Everything about him was dominant, intimidating. His scent was sort of spicy, and full of male and power and a sort of... prime. His eyes glinted yellow as he fixed them on me, and he was growling, almost too low and quiet to hear. I looked at Addie, but she had stepped back.
Over the large fox’s shoulder, the other two watched. The other male was smaller, wiry, and almost all grey. The female looked sleek and poised, and had a white patch running down her muzzle.
“My name is Don Olaye,” said the large fox. “This is the Skulk. You are the girl who took the shift from Ben Cohen.”
“Um, yes.”
He lowered his head till it was level with mine and his lips drew back.
“You will tell us what you saw,” he snarled.
“Oi,” the other male fox snapped. “There’s no need for that.”
Don didn’t move his gaze from me. “One of the Skulk is dead, Randhir, don’t you think we ought to question the only person who was there?”
“It could’ve been an accident. How did Fran get her shift? How did I? She’s just a teenager!” The other male – Randhir – trotted up to us. He didn’t quite get between Don and me, but he sat close enough that Don couldn’t fail to acknowledge his presence. The larger fox’s body language shifted and he drew himself up, looking imperiously down his nose at me.
“I’m Rand, love,” said Randhir. “And that’s Francesca. You’ve met Addie. And James.”
Don’s top lip peeled back and his ears pointed down and towards me, anger and disapproval coming off him in waves.
“Answer my question please,
” he interrupted. “What happened to Ben Cohen?”
“We want to welcome you here,” Fran put in, padding up to stand on Don’s right. “We just need to know what happened to our friend. Can you tell us about it?”
I glanced at Addie. I’d rather talk to her than either of these two – Don was still looming over me and Fran was talking like a nurse trying to coax a child to explain how the Lego block got up its nose. Rand sat back and scratched himself behind the ear with his hind paw.
“It was a couple of days ago – about three in the morning. I was at school.”
“Why?” Don demanded.
“I... I was...” I hesitated. But then a mutinous streak flared up in me. What was the harm in telling the truth? What was he going to do to me? He wasn’t my mother, or my head teacher. And I didn’t want this part of my life to be built on lies, like everything else I did. “I was painting graffiti on the wall,” I said. My heart raced. I’d never told anyone straight out like that before – other than on the internet, which hardly counted. Don growled, deep in his chest, but Fran nudged him and he quieted. I stole a look at Addie. Her head quirked to one side.
“What happened then?” she asked.
“I turned around and there was this fox, and it was hurt – and I wanted to see if I could help, except... then it turned into a man, right in front of me. He’d been hurt. Stabbed, I think, in the chest. He died, and I ran away. He didn’t tell me anything about this – I didn’t know what was going on till the next night. I was out with some friends and I got mugged and turned into a fox by accident.”
“Where’d you say your school was, love?” Rand asked.
“I didn’t – I mean, it’s in Kensington,” I said.
“She’s a princess,” Addie put in helpfully.
“I am not–” I snapped, and then caught the look in Addie’s eyes.