Fox Trap

by Jayne Fury

  There was a long pause as she heard him take in a long open mouthed breath, tasting her scent. “Oooooh, yes. You’re even more foxy than that one, aren’t you? Full-blood are you? Full full full of pure-blood… SEANNACH! I want you. You are mine.” The Sanguinary was like lightning when he grabbed for her.

  His voice was so… beautiful. Lyrical. Soothing. Mesmerizing.

  Her body rebelled. It wanted to respond and leap into his arms. Elly’s legs pumped, she jumped back, her will winning over the compulsion. Jerking midair, she leaped to the side, barely missing his double-armed snatch.

  That’s right. She remembered now. It was such a beautiful sound that all she wanted to do was listen to him. So, that was how she ended up naked in the alley unable to fully change? And why didn’t she remember that until now?

  Clouds were forming overhead. She could taste the rain on the wind. Though the light of Ghael was strong, even at night, the clouds thickened and darkened the field. The shadows elongated, concealing his face but not his intent.

  “Why do they hide you all from us? Is it because you’re so deliciously tasty? How did we not know how very, very powerful your blood is to eat? You’re so different from other kin. I tasted the lizards ones, not as good. You pixies… No foxes. You’re foxkin. Not pixies. Yes. You’re like … candy. Only better. Like sex. Only better. The power in your blood has been denied to us and we were made to eat you.” Ysbal threw his head back and cackled.

  All the while she wanted to move. Wanted to leap, rip his throat out with her canid teeth. Scratch the eyes from their sockets. Kill it. But she was rooted to the spot, her body unable to respond as he tapped her canidiform snout. “You will be mine, little foxy fox. All mine.”

  He stooped to gather her into his arms but stood, suddenly. Alert lit his freakish eyes. “Oh… the reaping of a thousand suns, there he is!”

  The blood hungry Sanguinary swerved, his feet seeming to fall but ably danced back to upright in a drunken ballet.

  “Oh, Blaine. Poor Blaine. The Council didn’t tell you how lovely the scent a of a Seannach in heat is?” He called, heckling the figure moving towards them, fast.

  Elly felt the thrall dissipate as his focus turned towards Blaine.

  The Sanguinary detective was still far off, far enough that he couldn’t see her in canidiform, at least that’s what she hoped. Please.

  Blaine shouted. “Ysbal! You’re coming back with me!” He was met with derisive laughter.

  By sheer force of will she began to transform back into human form as he spoke to Blaine. Through the crunching of her bones and reorganizing of her structure she could hear him laughing. Then, just as he had done before, he took off faster than Elly had ever seen anything move, save possibly for a racing skimmer.

  She was fully into her human form now. Naked. Again. Mostly. She moved the neckline of her dress up from her waistline over her shoulders, squeezing her arms in, one at a time and retightened the jacket arms still cinched around her waist.

  In the dim light of the playing field, Elly stared at the space where the Sanguinary stood seconds before, hiding her view of the goal.

  Beneath the crossbeam where the Amery’s tail hung were his gnarled remains.

  Bait.

  “Amery… oh Amery.” Elly gulped for fresh air and found only the taste of blood and terror. It was thick and viscous in her nose and over her tongue. She spat the taste to the ground and blinked back the tears that threatened. As tough a vixen as Elly was, nothing prepared her for this. She stood, backing away from the rent body.

  Nausea roiled. She raised her arm and brought the back of her hand to her mouth.

  In the dim cloud covered shadow, she stooped to touch Amery’s disembodied and blood spattered hand.

  Among the shredded remains was a skull, but no eyes, no tongue, very little left of his cheeks. The body was worse, torn and rendered as though ripped apart by great claws. Elly stumbled, her feet barely registering the cool grass beneath them. Tears clouded her eyes. Guilt trickled like acid, burning a line across the neutrality she’d long ago honed as a detective. Guilt for using Amery. Worse, not caring, almost as a punishment for being unfettered by commitment and free to propagate at will in Seannach society.

  “By loam and moss…” she prayed, then covered her mouth again as the taste of bile, not hers, but the scattered and ribboned remains of Amery’s bowels brought an overwhelming stink. Elly’s body swayed. The foxtail became a blur.

  Even before he turned back from chasing Ysbal, she could smell Blaine’s frustration, like wet wool. It trickled in over the earthiness of the pitch and seeped through the stink of the bile. The detective joined her, chest heaving, winded. “I… I…tried to follow,” Blaine choked out. He bent over, hands on his knees, drawing great gulps of air. “No sign of him...”

  “Why did you go ahead, without me?”

  Elly shook her head, unanswering. Slowly, slowly, as though surfacing from a slime filled pond, Elly began to process through the guilt and fear to recall the blood-drunk words of her taunter. Words he’d said before but she hadn’t connected. Foxy foxes. If Ysbal knew, did Blaine know, too?

  Seven

  Blood on the Pitch

  He knew she’d run off. She did. Of course.

  As a constabulary, he had sworn to uphold the law. As a Sanguinary, he had an honor oath to protect all the kin of Ghael. No matter how stupid they were, running off on their own… He tracked her the distinctive scent of Elinor Morgan. It was like the forest floor loam and moss, lush and green. But when she was excited or agitated it was the scent he picked up in the tea shop: boggy peat. He had let his nose lead him. All the while, dreading what he might find. Terrified of what he might find. Once again, the encounter with Ysbal Fortier and the haunting choice. “Davin, come to papa…”

  In the distance all he had seen was the drunken flailing of his quarry. When he returned to the scene, Elly was in her human form, wobbling, the scent of death filled the air. Elly sank to her knees to the blood soaked ground.

  “Rank meat.” He uttered the epithet and shook his head.

  “What?” There was a catch in her voice. She turned her head up to him. Her eyes narrowed, turning to slits to match the thin line of her lips.

  “It’s normal to be upset. This was a friend, right?” Blaine asked.

  “It’s my fault… I chose Amery because… because he was a bit of a jerk last night, wanting back into my pants. Ysbal saw me with him. That was before you and I met in the alley.” she hesitated. He saw her mouth work as if more words wanted to come but there was a hesitation. Was it anger? At him?

  Whatever Ysbal said to her, she wasn’t going to tell him. Did Ysbal know? The lies between them were stopping up the dam of truth, all because of that pesky Seannach secrecy pact .

  “Hey.” He patted her shoulder, trying for comfort and to cross the bridge between them. If she could just trust him. But what could he possibly do? “It’s not your fault, if not Amery, another man or woman. But I am feeling like you’re a lot more aware of how close you came to this last night.”

  Her head bowed, hair shaking, her body joined in.

  An agonized sob escaped. Elly’s lips trembled as she spoke. “He tore Amery to shreds… didn’t even bother with the blood sucking bit, just tore him apart.”

  No, he ate a few organs. Blaine wisely kept that to himself, for now. “A waste of a life,” Blaine said instead. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Elly watch as he got down on his knees and examined the ribboned parts of Amery more closely, paying attention to where the shreds in the skin were.

  “What is it?” she stifled a sob though she didn’t get any closer to the body.

  “I don’t want to upset you further.”

  “Please, I’m not going to sit here being the blubbering helpless female, give me something to get angry about.” Her voice growled towards the end as she rubbed her eyes with a jerk.

  Blaine allowed a small smile at the toughness of this foxki
n. He bared his teeth. “You got it.”

  Schooling his face back to a deadpan he looked away from the body to her. “He did take a little time with the blood, actually. I’m pretty sure. And I don’t quite know how he’s tearing the skin. I’m going to have to get some pictures and samples.” Blaine pulled an evidence bag out of his pocket.

  “I know how… he changes. His jaw unhinges, it becomes a grotesque—”

  Blaine sat up and stared at her. “He’s not…that’s not a normal Brotherhood transformation. Something’s very not right. What else?”

  “Claws, massive claws.”

  Blaine stared at her, watching her sit up, curiosity in her eyes.

  “That’s not normal for one of you?”

  “No, that’s not normal. We have… we don’t use claws. Our jaws don’t unhinge. Our bodies stay the same save for our teeth which elongate for, for…”

  “Drinking blood?” she looked angrier by the second.

  “Basically, it enables us to take the nutrients from flesh, yes. But Ysbal’s got another issue going on. Right now, I couldn’t tell you what it is.”

  She was staring at him now, the intelligence in her eyes reflected Ghael’s light behind him. Elly’s anger had, as she predicted, brought her from her grief. He could almost see the wheels turning in her head.

  “Elly, you can’t take him on by yourself.” She nodded back at him. It was almost an absent-minded gesture, acknowledging him while her mind was working on something else. He’d seen that look in many a detective.

  In silence, Blaine wondered how Ysbal had undergone Guardian transmogrification. Only Guardians, designees of the Lunar Council, could take on other forms other than their own. He stared again at Elly. “And you’ve never seen that form before?”

  “Form?”

  “Elly, have you ever been off of your moon? To any of the other moons of Ghael?”

  He watched as her shoulders straightened, her head canted a little, examining him with those foxlike eyes of golden brown. “No. Is there something I need to know?”

  “Lots,” he said.

  Elly snapped to her feet. “Well, scat. That’s just a fine smoking pile of scat. Why the hollow earth? I mean… there’s… I…” She wanted to tell Blaine everything that Ysbal said to her but it was against the code.. Circular logic and lies. Did he know? If he knew what could she tell him? Seannach lies were a swarm of flies, buzzing in her face, in her way, and always out of reach from being swatted away.

  She stood, rooted to the ground, stymied by her own indecision, her oath, and the need to tell the truth.

  Truth. Scat-sucking nasty tar-covered truth.

  As the thoughts buzzed, a little lazy ladybug of one settled in her mind. What are Blaine’s truths? Perhaps his would give her the courage to run through the swarm of lies and tell him everything. She plucked out one of his terms that had been bugging her.

  “You call yourselves the “brotherhood”. What does that even mean?”

  “It means just that, all Sanguinary are male. The gene is carried on through the males of our kindred.”

  “So wait, you… there’s no female bloodsuckers?”

  “No. Well, it’s extremely rare. And… don’t call me that. Though, I can see how you’d call Ysbal one.”

  Elly grunted. “Fine. Sanguinary. Why did you ask me if I’d been offworld?”

  He leaned his head, eyes not leaving her, “Because it occurred to me that other Ghaelers, other than ones like me from Numina, might never have met a Sanguinary before… or any of the other human hybrids.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “So… no, then.”

  “No.” She felt a frown creasing her face and tried to take in everything he’d just dropped. “Are you saying there’s other Sanguinary types?”

  “Yes. There are many kinds of kin,” Blaine said. She heard a halting stutter, almost indiscernible. “I’ve only ever been to Gilead and that’s what made me think. Gilead has sort of lizard hybrid humans on it. You never knew that?”

  “Wh-what?” Pieces started to click into place, the jaw unhinging like a snake. The elongated claws that extended like a mole’s digging claws.

  “We don’t have time for a history lesson of the Forebearers of Ghael… but if we survive this night…”

  He handed her the constabulary link. “Call in a team, would you? I need to take these samples for myself, first.”

  “I still don’t understand.” Numbly, she took the link and tapped in the address and the crime codes for their situation, codes she still knew, embedded in her memory from her life before leaving the force. Elly stood up and walked away, link in hand. In her bare feet, soaking in the earth, she let her actions and the soil’s energy percolate through her, from her feet to her head. Calm washed over her. With a mental shove, she pushed all of her questions into a box and labeled it “later”. Elly kept her back to the carnage and tried to find a solid thought to reorient herself. Her mission to stop Ysbal had to come first.

  It was fleeting, this piece of normal, but Elly’s instinct told her that they both needed to pretend. For now they both had to concentrate on the killer and not that they were staring at Amery’s dismembered body, blood soaking through to the earth beneath. This was business. A murderer was on the loose. This team didn’t have any more time; it was slipping away.

  “Tell them to bring a full rig for evidence collecting,” he ordered. While Blaine gathered evidence and Elly called in the locals, Blaine let his mind revisit what he had seen in the dim light as he followed Elly. Bodies changing shapes. First human to animal then animal to human. She… The fox… Ran. Her jacket arms flapping like an extra set of legs. Her reddish brown hair faded into the shadows. As she ran her hair had streamed down her back and looked, from afar, as though it became one with her body.

  Curious at first, he watched her pull the stretchy dress down over her slim hips. Mortification followed as Elly’s exposed breasts, pointed and perfect, caught the light of the planetary glow. She was beautiful in both forms.

  Blaine banished the thought and squashed the attraction into the admiration that was developing since meeting Elly. Strong, lean, muscular, and gritty… this whatever-she-was was tough as iron.

  As he collected evidence, he noticed an oddity. There was both human and fox mixed, at least the hair of a fox and the tail. When would she realize that he had seen both? Then after she realized, when the shock wore off, what would she do? Would she report him to the Seannach ruling body, the Assembly? The conversation with Solblaine ricocheted through his brain. Would Elly kill him if she had to? To carry out the Seannach law?

  He didn’t hear what the crazed killer was yelling or even comprehend why Ysbal didn’t attack her in either form, feed on her as he’d obviously done to the blond foxkin reynard.

  The blood stupor looked to him like Ysbal was drunk or high on narcotics. The way he danced around, weaving and bobbing at the edge of gravity’s pull, not falling. Blaine had to know. His finger reached out to touch the blood. He put it to his nose at first, smelling it. It smelled like honeyed fruit. His mouth watered.

  He tasted it. Immediately the tip of his tongue went numb. Narcotic? Before he could react, he heard a long low keening from far off in the distance..

  He heard her react with a cry, deep in her throat, a reply of the keening followed by others from where the original came from.

  “Elly? What is that?”

  “That’s an ancient death wail, Blaine!” She whirled back to him and tossed him the link.

  He popped up onto his feet, snatching the constabulary call-link out of midair. The energy of that one drop of blood, mixed with his inhibitors, was starting a war in his mind. It was as though his body was stretching away from him.

  She was still talking as he dropped the evidence bag for the local constabulary. He stared, filtering through the facts and not finding the answer. He struggled against the clouding of his logic. Strings of logical thought were jumbling. One dr
op. Just one drop. “A death wail?”

  “It’s how the people of Ballylock mourn. It can’t be coincidence. It’s in the direction Ysbal went.”

  Blaine knew his head was nodding, but it was as though he wasn’t attached.

  “We have to stop him. He’s killing them all. Blaine. BLAINE!”

  Eight

  The Shield of the Patriarchs

  “Now. Blaine. Now!” She started to run, but this time she went back towards her skimmer.

  Blaine followed her, at a good pace. He watched as she stooped to catch her shoes in her fingers as she passed the gutter where they had skittered. She must have kicked them off earlier.

  Elly had the red skimmer running lights on when he jumped into the cloth-covered bucket seats all warm from the evening swelter. Top down, heads up, they both took in a long breath of the air. The scents of smallsummer, pristine and fresh, commingled with blood scent that followed Ysbal wherever he went.

  Blaine had a full nose of it. It looked as if she did, too. Her face was set in grim determination as she pressed the accelerator.

  Blaine jerked back in his seat as the skimmer took off. He felt the wind waking him from the heady rush of the one drop of blood he had tasted. Together, they flew over the streets, zig-zagging through the quiet parts of the city.

  “Why isn’t Ysbal attacking you, I wonder?” Blaine said. Silence.

  He wanted to ask another question but he felt like he had lost control and Elly was not only steering the car, but how the lies between them would be revealed. Her body looked relaxed, holding back like a good cop. She was letting him process through it. Allowing him time to find his way. Despite her outward cool, he knew she was angry, not just about the lies that he had told her, but about the violation of trust: he had withheld information and she knew it. Her body language practically sang it to him. Or maybe he was just projecting. Damn, she was good.