Scion of the Fox

by S. M. Beiko

  “You’re really selling it,” he snorted, “but look. I just . . . I need someone to talk to about this stuff, and I think I feel the same way that you do. That these dreams I’ve been having. They’re . . . important, somehow. I thought you’d think I was crazy, but even if we both are, it’s better than being alone in it, right?”

  The warmth of gratitude spread through me, and for a moment I forgot the dead girl. Not alone in my crazy. I’d take it. “Right,” I sighed, partially relieved but still shaken. “I’ve got class until two today. You?”

  We’d arrived at the English classroom door. This was going to be a long, gruelling day, but I owed it to Deedee (and myself) to soldier on and see my school commitments through. After all, if I survived, I still needed to apply to university . . .

  “. . . classes till twelve, and a basketball practice till one thirty, so that works out,” Barton was saying. “We can head back to my place. Take the bus, maybe?”

  I couldn’t help glancing down at his wheelchair, wondering how the logistics would work. He must’ve noticed — must always notice when someone stumbled over the fact that he didn’t have legs from the knee down.

  “I’ve used the bus for most of my life,” he said tensely. “I just live in Wolseley, so it’ll be a short ride.”

  I had my bike, but thankfully buses had bike racks on the front, or else we’d end up blocking the entire aisle.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sounds good.” Going to Barton’s house would prove challenging if we were going to get anything done; his mother would either hover or kick me out, but I hoped we could maybe keep our convo outdoors.

  “Oh, hey, something’s coming out of your bag.” Barton pointed.

  The heat flared from my throat to my cheeks when I discovered the garnet dagger was cutting through what I thought was my sturdiest bag. I shoved it back in and blocked the newly cut hole with my scarf.

  I anxiously checked to see if anyone saw any more than the blade tip. Barton didn’t ask, and as usual, no one noticed me or cared, so I think I was okay. Getting arrested would definitely throw a wrench into things right about now.

  When I finally pulled myself together, Phae was suddenly at the classroom door, and I stiffened. Our gazes met, and I robotically waved. “Hi, Phae!” I tried to sound enthusiastic, like I hadn’t ignored her all weekend. I must’ve made the incorrect facial expression, because she half smiled and hurried past us. My hand fell. I deserved that.

  “Shall we?” I stepped out of Barton’s path. He wheeled in, and I followed, focusing on holding my head high. Even with my eye all better, I knew I’d be grinding the permanent trench of my desk deeper, trying to keep myself under control.

  Luckily my day was cut short. It took only one period for the news to flash through every grade and classroom about the girl found on Wellington Crescent. Police expecting foul play, teenager from the area, not sure if it was a targeted attack or a signal of more to come. And worst of all, she was a student from this school. Mothers, lock up your daughters. For once I agreed. At least until the spring passed . . .

  Panic spread like an infection. Kids (mostly girls) were frantically calling their parents, asking to be picked up like, right now. Everyone was too distracted to focus in class. The principal called an assembly. I knew she was going to cancel classes today, knew she was going to tell everyone it’s okay to be feeling what you are feeling, and you have to be there for one another in this time of crisis, and I didn’t think I could deal with being surrounded by my stricken, tearful classmates, knowing that if I didn’t do my job, it could be any one of them next on the menu.

  As students streamed out of classrooms, talking hysterically, I turned against the flow, trying to swim through and find Barton. Once I did, I led him to the sidelines of the body-deluge.

  “What about the assembly?” Barton snapped his brakes on as we were nearly crushed into the bank of lockers.

  I tried to sound sure of myself, like the leader that I didn’t think I’d ever be. “I just thought we could get a head start on getting back to your place, since we both know class is probably cancelled.” I was already checking exits, feeling more like a bank robber than a fearless hero.

  Barton checked his phone, frowning; sure enough, the coach had sent out a mass text about basketball being cancelled. “You’re right. I guess we’ll find out more on the news tonight, anyway. Let’s bail.”

  We split up, prepared to meet again at the back entrance after we’d retrieved our bags. My chest hummed with anticipation: I expected shadows to spring out and take a chunk out of me at every corner. I kept scolding myself to keep my head, but I wondered if I’d have a choice about that after too long. This was definitely nothing like those Chosen One books, video games, or movies I’d consumed over my entire nerdy existence. I felt too human. And way too vulnerable.

  On the bus, I kept a watchful eye out the window. As we crossed the Assiniboine on the Maryland Bridge, I involuntarily shuddered. I wondered which part of Zabor’s body was lying there in dormant rage, suspended beneath four feet of ice. I wondered if she could smell me, if I had the same scent or taste that my mother did.

  Get out of your head, Roan! I tried commanding myself using Sil’s voice. I wondered where Sil was, if she was okay outside, if she was trailing me. Having her around when I spilled the beans about the not-so-normal circumstances surrounding me (and now girls that looked like me) would’ve been helpful. No one could argue with a talking fox. Believe me, I tried.

  “You okay?” Barton asked again. I’d been too wrapped up in our whirlwind meeting to really get to know him at all yet, and I suddenly felt terrible. Here he was, concerned for me, a potential nutty stranger, and all I could say was, “Yep, I’m fine.”

  “I know what a ‘brave face’ looks like,” he said, flexing his hand on the safety bar as we jerked to a stop. “It’s okay. This thing with that girl. It’s pretty messed up. Do you want to talk about it?”

  Did I ever. The truth would come out soon enough, but I wove carefully around it. “Yeah, it’s just . . .” I leaned in, lowered my voice. “I saw her. Before the cops did, anyway. I saw her on my way to school.”

  Barton’s fuzzy eyebrows looked like they were going to rocket off his head. “What?” he hissed. “And you didn’t tell anyone?”

  There’s a good point. Telling the authorities might have made me feel a bit better, in addition to being the right thing to do, but then again I didn’t want to implicate myself, though I highly doubted city police would connect me to the crime via reasons of paranormal activity. Unless there were Owls on the force, which, now that I thought about it, was pretty likely.

  “I don’t know! I just . . . I panicked! Have you ever seen a dead body before? And there was this weird kid, taking pictures . . . he seemed like the type who had nothing better to do than alert the police.” I looked away and physically tried to rub the guilt off my face.

  Barton was proving way too quick for someone who’d had his Denizen senses cut off. “Roan . . .” he whispered. “You didn’t have anything to do with that girl, did you? With what happened to her?”

  I decided it was best to say nothing as the bus came to our stop. Barton had stuck with me this long, and somehow that revelation wasn’t enough to push him away. I ducked out ahead of him as the ramp came down, reclaiming my bike from the front rack. We crossed to Wolseley Avenue and started walking west.

  The sidewalks were clogged with snow, barely shovelled by the nearby winter-averse homeowners, so we stuck to the roads. “Thank god for snow tires!” I joked, trying to lighten the mood. I think I needed to just shut it. Could wheelchairs have snow tires?

  “Yeah . . .” Barton was elsewhere, I think, trying to collect himself. “I really don’t know where to start with all this. I get the impression that something big is happening. Something beyond just you and me, and maybe having to do with the dead girl. Yes? No?�
��

  “Bingo,” I sighed. We walked two abreast in the oncoming lane, and I did my best to walk, talk, and keep my spirit eye activated, just in case. “Long story short, I asked you about the dreams, because . . . when I first saw you in English class, I saw them. Sort of. A bunch of Rabbits running away from something horrible. Because, um, I’ve got this sort of insight thing. It’s hard to explain.”

  Barton paused for a beat. “Have anything to do with that new eye of yours?”

  I chewed the inside of my cheek. So people had noticed. “Sort of. Yeah.”

  He yanked his collar up higher around his ears as a harsh wind snagged past us. “When I saw you in class for the first time, I didn’t recognize you without the eye patch. Hard to miss, you know.”

  Was I secretly a high school celeb (for totally not-so-nice reasons)? It was the first time anyone had told me I was the centre of strangers’ gossip. “I noticed you around, too,” was all I could say stupidly in return, since it was true. I wondered how many other people talked about me.

  “Let’s just say that miraculously healing body parts are of interest to me.” Barton smiled. I think he was trying to backpedal, to make me feel less self-conscious. “In the dreams, I have legs. They feel so real. I sometimes wake up feeling like they’re there, even though I’ve never had them. They feel just out of reach, but when the scythe comes . . .” He didn’t finish, and I didn’t blame him. “I know I was born without them. But I can feel them. They’re real. And my parents won’t tell me any more than it’s a birth defect, so when I started asking even more questions, my mom just took me to the doctor, said I could use some medicated sleep for a while. That just made me more suspicious.”

  We passed a small lot-sized park whose treeline overlooked the river. “Anyway, this is . . . it’s just nice. I felt like I was going insane. The dreams have been getting worse lately. I’m glad I can talk about it with you without being, you know, accused of being nutso.”

  Preach. It was nice to have an ally for once, someone who was dealing with the same strangeness.

  I shrugged, smiling, letting my guard slightly down. “I’m no expert in anything that’s happening, to be honest. I’m just as much of a newb at all this. A newb with way too much responsibility.”

  That’s when Barton turned and snapped his brakes on right in my path. “Okay, this is the part where you finally reveal what your crazy ESP and this random dead girl have to do with the both of us. Are you in some kind of trouble? With a cult?”

  I stopped short. “I, um . . .” Now I sort of understood Arnas’s compulsive stammer. Sometimes words just failed. “Look there’s . . . there’s all this mythology and spiritual stuff. It’s got a lot to do with death and a demon hiding in the river, waiting to drown us all. Man, I wish my fox-sidekick were here, she’s way better at explaining it than I —”

  A shadow flickered in my periphery. I tried to find where it vanished to, but it was quick. I tightened the grip on my bag and felt my blood leaving my extremities. I noticed too late how close we were to the river.

  “What’s the matter?” Barton twisted in his chair, clicking the brakes free.

  “Shh!” I warned. I didn’t take my eyes off the treeline beyond the park as I settled my bike against a tree then swung my backpack around to produce the garnet blade in one smooth motion. It glinted bruise-purple in the grey and white afternoon.

  Barton tried to follow me, but I waved him off. “You’re really freaking me out, Roan. I can’t believe you brought a machete to school!”

  My knees tensed as I took a defensive stance. “I have a bad feeling that risking expulsion was worth it.”

  I flinched in the direction of a low hiss and the rumbling snarl that followed. Concentrating, I turned my spirit eye into full wakefulness and stiffened when I saw a pair of sharp faces glinting black and oily between the trees. Their eyes were giant vertical slits on either side of their heads, mouths gashes full of uneven teeth, heads bobbing like grinning pythons.

  “Barton,” I said, trying to move my mouth as little as possible. “We have to get out of here right now.”

  “Why?” he asked at full volume. As soon as he spoke, the pack released a terrible chittering, like laughter, their grotesque, lithe bodies undulating as they rose upright to lick the air. “What do you see over there?”

  Oh god, he can’t see them. Maybe that was a consolation, but it wasn’t going to help me any. Where the hell was Sil? Could I even kill these things?

  “Just get the hell out of here!” I shouted, desperate to protect him by putting the monsters’ focus on me. And that’s when the two of them galloped up from the frozen riverbed at full speed, tearing through the snow and reaching out with jagged, splintered hands.

  I dove out of the way, not knowing what else to do, crumpling gracelessly in a heap on the sidewalk. I got a mouthful of dirty snow and whipped up my head just in time to see one of the creatures looming over me, winding up to strike. I stumbled to my feet and ran full tilt towards the river to lead them away from Barton.

  “Hey! Over here!” The two that had been snarling after me looked suddenly displeased and drew up on legs I hadn’t noticed they had. They were at least six feet tall, heads coming to a point and spines flashing along their backs. One of them broke the arm off its partner, and it liquefied, forming itself as a giant ice club. The mutilated hunter didn’t seem to mind.

  “Shit,” I muttered, raising my feeble dagger in a two-handed white-knuckle grip, baseball-style. I was going to lose, but I needed to show them I wasn’t willing to run. Foxes don’t run.

  They came for me in a flash and the first blow hit home, cracking my head back and slamming me into a tree. The second monster was hot on the first’s tail, but I rolled out of the way as it crashed into the tree, ripping it clean out of the ground. It careened towards the ice, and I switched my focus to the club-wielding hunter diving for my legs. I flailed uselessly then remembered I had a weapon and came out swinging. Feeble though it was, my attack caught the hunter in the corner of its lips, ripping its wound of a mouth wider to what was probably its ear. Its keening wail stabbed my eardrums and made me scream.

  “God, what is that?” I heard Barton shout, and I realized he was still here. He couldn’t see the river hunters, but he could hear them? I got to my feet in time to escape the horrifically fast and out-for-blood monster that was gunning for me. I didn’t have time to think as it twisted in an impossible way towards me and its club clanged against the dagger I’d raised above my head to meet the blow. The hunter pressed all its terrible strength into that club, and my legs buckled like an unsteady card table. I heard and saw the blade cracking under the weight — I was finished if it busted apart.

  There was a rush of black. The hunter that had chucked itself over the bank had recovered, and like a bruised bolt of lightning, lunged out of the trees and straight for Barton.

  “No!” I screamed, which broke my hunter’s concentration. Its head cracked in the direction of its cohort, and I took that second to jerk out from under its club, pivot behind it, and stab down into its back. It roared and writhed, the awful pinging noise it made underscoring the fountains of black oil-blood spurting from the wound. It roiled against the blade, and with a pull, half of it broke off inside the monster. My dagger had been reduced to a shiv, and it’d have to do for the second one.

  All this fuss did nothing to stop the other hunter from diving on Barton, knocking him clean out of his wheelchair and into the snow. His glasses flew into the street, and all I could hear was a human howl from under the black beast’s girth as it clawed and snapped.

  With a featherweight quarterback tackle, I launched everything I had on top of the thing, knocking it off and sending the both of us splay-limbed into the road. This one seemed a bit more sluggish than the one I’d just taken down, nice and slow on the recovery, and as I swung out wildly and awkwardly, I finally hit t
he mark and stabbed what was left of the dagger down into its stomach. The blade shard punctured the soft belly, and I got a faceful of black squirted back at me as I drew the shattered dagger out again. The hunter wailed, desperately holding its guts in as it scrambled away. It joined its wounded partner and they hobbled for the river from whence they’d come, leaving trails of blue-black muck-blood in their wake.

  I finally caught my breath, wiping the offal out of my eyes as I twisted around to find Barton. As I got close to him, I tripped on the curb, landing heavily by his side. My mouth felt numb when I looked down at him. The dagger, slippery with blood and almost bladeless, fell out of my hand and into the snow. But I didn’t care. I didn’t need it now.

  I didn’t know what I needed. Barton’s eyes were milky white, and his jacket was ripped open, a wide gash that already looked infected burning past the shredded cotton of his T-shirt. My hand hovered over it, trembling with fading adrenaline.

  “Barton? Barton, can you hear me?” I shook him, but all he did was wheeze, then make a noise like the piercing wail of his attacker. For a second he seemed to see me, faded eyes catching mine as he grabbed my arm.

  “What is it? What is it?” I wanted him to give me detailed instructions, wanted him to tell me exactly what to do. He only took a hard swallow of air in reply before collapsing back to the ground, sightless and unresponsive.

  I let him go and looked around at the suburban street. So many houses, but the sidewalks and driveways were empty. We were alone. There was no help coming. Frantic, I dug through Barton’s pockets until I found his phone, scrolling madly through the contacts until I found Home.

  Mrs. Allen answered, and all I could say through my sobs was, “It’s Barton, oh god, they did something to him, please, I can’t do this. I can’t. Help me.”