Fox Trap

by Jayne Fury

  “I have fulfilled my honor bond. I killed him because he fed on our kind. My family.” Davin’s voice choked. “My brothers…” It changed again, back to the menacing tenor. ” What he should have been doing was feeding on her kind.”

  Just as he spoke the words, there was a “thwipppp”. Blaine felt a burning in his thigh, followed by a numbness that threw him off balance and jerked him back. Amidst his knees buckling, he got off a wild shot at Davin.

  Elly’s gun went off, too. Blaine didn’t see what happened after that. He only saw the light of Ghael grow dim through the trees above.

  Elly woke up a headache. A huge mother of a headache. During the entire weird encounter with Davin-not-Ysbal, she stood there in the Sanguinary thrall unable to shoot or even lift her rifle to harm the man on the rock until Blaine’s gun shook her out of the stupor..

  She vaguely remembered turning around. A dark figure swung from the overhead trees knocking her off balance and flipping her onto her back.

  Now she was in a room, somewhere, chained and bound to a floor, weak like a kit. She tried to force a shift to canidiform. Nothing. She felt like a dead battery, spent and empty.

  The room she was in was large but sparse. It was well kept with dark wood floors, spare rugs, and overstuffed couches. She figured Davin had probably eaten the actual inhabitants. The realization of her situation forced steel into her will. She calmed herself. Thinking. Scenting. Listening.

  The room’s windows were shuttered; no outside scents permeated. A tiny white slit of light let her know it was probably daytime.

  Elly tried to determine her whereabouts from the scents in the room and sounds from outside. With any luck, Davin didn’t know what she could do, besides shift. Or how her hearing worked even when in human form. Dungsucker.

  So she listened. She heard a tea kettle whistling. How civilized. Elly heard him singing a little ditty. It wasn’t the drunken fox song the bloodsucking bag of bones sang to her earlier. Earlier?

  She listened again. Songbirds. It was definitely daytime. And she still wasn’t dead.

  Why not?

  Why was she a prisoner when he had killed the others? She was sore though, and felt horribly weak. A bandage was tight around her right arm from wrist to elbow and her neck throbbed. Neck? Like the old tales that the den crones told to scare the little ones in the nursery? What stories would she tell to scare the kits when she grew old? Would she grow old? Was this the end?

  “Awake, my little foxkin?” Davin poked his head into her prison room. She snarled up at him. “How delightful. Now don’t try to change… of course you probably can’t, the way I drained you, you probably can barely crawl. But those bonds will tighten around you so you can’t get away.”

  “Why are you keeping me here?” She groaned her response, trying to stand but her bones were like water. She could only crawl. Barely.

  “Because my little pure blood… your blood will power my army. My children, my lich children.”

  “Leach?” she looked up into his daring blue eyes, there was a calmness there.

  “No, lich. Walking sentient dead.”

  “Like zombies?” He wasn’t making any sense. Zombies? Another legend like vampires that was meant to scare the kits into not wandering off from the den.

  “My Lichkin are not zombies. They don’t need to eat brains. They don’t need to eat. They are animated. Beautifully perfect and obedient. My babies are still growing. Thanks to your blood…”

  That explained everything. He was bonkers. “You’re killing people then shoving my blood into them to reanimate them?”

  “In a way, yes. But you know the blood of the Sanguinary is a healing blood.”

  No. She didn’t know that. Ellie scowled at him.

  “How did you even…”

  “My father’s work was very well catalogued.”

  “Your father, the guy you ate?”

  Davin’s crisp tenor was a laugh that crackled through her spine sending a jolt of adrenaline, and in turn twisting her stomach roiling it with a tide of nausea. Elly curled her knees to her chest. The wall behind her holding her upright. Bile threatened a hasty retreat. She bit down and swallowed hard.

  Davin’s voice softened to a soothing lullaby cadence. “Little Elly, Elly-fox…I didn’t eat him for pleasure. I fed. Your kind I eat for pleasure and power.” His smile was so dazzling she became once again in his thrall, forgetting he just drained her of most of her blood. His tutoring tone hushed the pounding of her heart. “Ysbal’s blood contained the blood of my brothers. Why waste their blood sacrifice when I could take the next step that he couldn’t.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Shhhhh now. Rest. The children’s next feeding is almost nigh.”

  Nigh. Did anyone still talk like that? He was absolutely bat scat.

  Blaine blinked his eyes in the darkness. In the darkened room, Blaine woke up with a raging hangover. The kind you get after partying all night. Only he had all the bad and no good memories or a warm body next to him.

  Blaine breathed the air around him, trying to pick up her scent. He knew, could smell it out of a dozen foxkin, had followed it to the playing field. She was distinct. Clean. Like purple heaths on hillsides, green lakeside lawns, and mountain streams. She smelled wild and windswept. Was that what Davin wanted? Her wild blood?

  She was near.

  So was someone else. Someone that wasn’t Davin.

  Blaine heard a shallow breath behind him. When he turned the shadowy sight confounded and filled him with sinister foreboding. Its eyes were closed, its hands were limp, and though the darkness obscured his true sight, the irregular outlines of the skin changes led him to the conclusion that the skin was mottled and bruised. What was that putrid thing? It smelled not quite rotten, not quite Sanguinary, and a lot of Elly.

  It was alive but it smelled dead.

  Elly! He had to get free of the bindings. He could barely feel his toes. The ones at his wrist, tight around his back, were no better. The detective tried to move but as he did, the ‘thing’ behind him growled.

  "You my guard or am I your dinner?" Blaine said. He growled back.

  “Oh, silly Blaine.” It was Davin's voice from somewhere beyond the shadows. “This is my newest child.”

  "Davin, you can't be serious… You can’t do this.”

  “I think you’re wrong, Blaine. I’m already doing it.” Davin stepped into his view. He looked almost exactly like Ysbal. Body type, hair, face… just as he, Blaine, was the mirror image of Patriarch Solblaine, his father.

  “But Ysbal was a Patriarch. The rules of the Brotherhood apply. The laws. Honor above all.”

  “I honor my brothers,” Davin spat and turned around. “It’s always about your honor, your truth. But you had a chance to kill Ysbal before he killed the rest of my family. You made the choice. How have you been living with that, Blaine?”

  Blaine’s mouth worked invisible words. The circular logic, made his head swim. If he had saved the others, Davin would be dead. If he hadn’t saved Davin, he wouldn’t be standing in front of him, blaming him for saving him. Just kill me now and save me from your delusional platitudes.

  “Don’t you worry, Blaine. You will be one of my children and I will set you free.”

  Ten

  Mappwood

  He struggled with his bonds, anyway. It didn’t matter to him if the beast went after him. He had a weapon. A weapon known only to the Brotherhood. Even if Davin knew about it through his father, he wouldn’t have know that Blaine had been enhanced for this mission.

  When he first joined the constabulary force, the true nature of the Sanguinary was made clear to him. The blood of others worked with their blood, strengthened it. When he took the daily dose of the inhibitor, it worked with his body and blood to draw from the things around him and add their nature to his. But there was a heavy price. One he chose to pay. Life for life.

  Other than the ‘thing’ nearby that he did NOT want to draw from
, were trees. The trees would make him stiffer but it would also make him more resistant to bites and scratches. It would make him less vulnerable. But it would also make him slower.

  He sought the trees.

  In his belly—deep within—a hunger grew, a hunger for life. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the taste of petrichor in the forest. He felt the ancient blood grow stronger in him, combining, swelling, stealing the life from the tree outside the window. Sucking its life forces into his own. Strength.

  Within himself, he heard the tree talking in a speech that he understood through flashes of color. The seasons that the mappwood tree had seen and lived: Bare branches, frozen rains, dark gray skies. A slow, deep voice rumbled. Commingling consciousness with his, the voice like a vine, wrapped itself around his will. Roots planted firmly. If he wasn’t careful, the tree itself would take over and he would lose this fight for dominion.

  The image of termites gnawing into the bark of a tree branch flashed as the mappwood came into his head filled with the loamy scent of the earth. The tree’s will grabbed him around the throat, constricting his muscles. Blaine’s eyes bugged as he struggled for breath.

  “To save innocent lives.” He tried to picture saplings and seeds: the mappwood’s newsboy cap covered oval nuts buried safe in the bed of the soil. He imagined the first growth of the seeds pushing their way up through the fertile earth. The pride of the tree for its progeny shone like the blazing gas giant that gave it life. Then Blaine imagined rain. He thought of rain and of being sated and of coolness and green. When he felt the tree loosen its grip on his breathing he kept up the image of green leaves and new spring shoots pushing their way up through the ground. Fecund and filled with life.

  A feeling of contentment spread over him. Inexplicably, he wanted to bury his toes in the ground and imagined them elongating into roots. There was approval. Acceptance.

  And a question… So Blaine imagined a fox. Blaine felt something like a root, taking its hold within him, anchoring him. He reran the memory of Elly changing shape from human to fox as he had seen in the light of the gas giant. An image of a mappwood bowing in the wind was the return. It understood.

  Then, he showed the blood and the tail on the pitch goal post. Roots stretching, it was trying to understand, asking for more details. It did not see death of the foxkin as unnatural. So he imagined dry parched land and young saplings drying up: a bowing tree. He moved on with the imagery, showing what he needed for the tree to do, in order to save the fox. To save many foxes. He closed his eyes again, envisioning a den of them, young, beneath a tree and the symbiosis of the den and the tree together. Again, Blaine repeated the image of dry earth.

  More roots stretched.

  Visualizing a scythe cutting down the sapling got the reaction he needed. The mappwood returned the flashes of what seemed like a memory. From above he saw fox kits peeking out from a den and a large feline with teeth, jumping down from an upper branch where it had been waiting. Silently, it leaped, digging its claws into the limb. The wildcat and landed at the foot of the tree. Teeth, sharp and white snapped. It grabbed a kit while the others screeched and ran back into the tiny hole, scrambling over each other. The dark brown cat, about the size of a large canine, had a long white line of fur that stretched from its tail up to its nose. Blaine didn’t recognize the species. It reached out with a free hand and grabbed at the back of the pack, dragging in another kit towards it. Meanwhile its face was buried in the bloody remains of the first kit. The feline took the other kit in its maw and lifted its regal head, and shook the kit back and forth, snapping its neck.

  Yes! Blaine visualized himself saving the kits before the cat jumped from the tree.

  Blaine could simply take the tree’s life but he would not, it wasn’t right. Instead, he imagined sunshine and buds on trees, a hole filled with a new tree in the soil, placed in where the old one would now leave its dead husk.

  In his mind, the tree bowed.

  The reaction was immediate. He shook, his bones nearly rattling from the confines of his skin, his mouth locking closed, as the ancient power of the tree surged through him.

  His clothes shredded in screeching rents until they hung in tatters on his back and around his waist. His skin toughened a hard bark, yet stayed supple enough for movement.

  The restraints that held him before grew into his skin, his new skin. The life force of the rope, what was left of life within it, combined and bonded with the tree’s own, dissipating into the river of the commingling DNA.

  Fear and delight shot through him. But the tree’s life force calmed him. Held him in its slowness and wisdom. Nurtured him.

  He, no they, had to stop Davin.

  There was a great splintering of wood and spine as they combined. He grew stiffer. Limbs spreading, growing out, and sweeping the half living human aside.

  The zombie construct was in torture, pain. Blaine’s will and the mappwood tree’s combined to form a clear conviction. They stomped on it with the merged fleshy wooden leg. It spattered like an insect.

  He was too large to pass through the doorway, so he smashed it aside with one blow. Creaking echoed through the house as the foundation sagged.

  A shriek of anger. Davin flew like a night raven towards Blaine’s stiff body, then swerved away at the last moment. The scream was horrified and fascinated at the same time. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You fool!”

  Blaine’s lips wouldn’t work. His vocal cords solid as the mappwood that was melded into him. He walked stiff-legged and half bent through the hallway of the house, limb-like arms extended.

  The thought oozed like sap through across the amalgam of his woody brain. He could no longer smell Elly. That was one of the prices to pay.

  Silence. Then a scream. Elly.

  His stiff-legged hobble was encumbered further by his hunched body. Part of the dead-but-not-dead body he had crushed still clung to the bottom of one foot, as he dragged the darkened bloody mass with him. Foot-root sloshed when each step hit the dark wood floors.

  A cloud of smoke billowed through the hallway at the back of the house. Dark black smoke. Crackling. His hearing, now encumbered by the wooden amalgamation, could not hear it clearly at first.

  But the tree-brain knew. Fire. Death bringer.

  Mappwood retreated, leaving Blaine to take charge of the shared body. He lumbered forward, crashing into walls, between steps he tried to listen for Elly’s muffled screams.

  He saw her then, through the window, Davin dragging her by her long thick hair, trussed like dinner fowl, bumping over the grassy knots in back of the house, towards the woods.

  Blaine pushed through the mappwood treebrain panic to think past the entrapment of the burning house. The more he let oxygen in, the worse the fire would get. But he could not go forward because that would mean going through the fire.

  To his left a door was ajar. A door similar in size to the one he had been locked behind. Blaine, the Sanguinary tree hulk, kicked it open with a flopping rooty foot, smearing black blood of the unlamented dead on the door jamb. He smashed his way through the threshold, splintering it, and himself. Parts of his wooden body shredded as he forced himself through.

  Next stop, through the wall.

  This is going to hurt.

  He made for the shuttered window, bent over, and with all his monstrous strength, pushed, shoulder first, as though going through a door. Blaine crashed his way through, shattering the glass, splintering the sash, pushing the frame out, and taking part of the drywall and siding with him.

  He stepped out into the air and heard the trees in his head, whispering in the wind. Showing him where his quarry had gone.

  It was sluggish progress. Blaine dragged himself up over the hills. He thought about shifting back, but it would leave him spent and done. No, it was better for him to stay in this arboreal form for as long as he could, until he could get Davin.

  Saving one person, Elly, would bring him to another choice. He had a law of N
umina to uphold, not save her but find him and bring him back to his moon for the Patriarchs to mete out justice. Justice was not his to dispense.

  Even as a constable, deadly force was unheard of. Ever. The Brotherhood demanded no murder. Even Ysbal, the mass murdering perpetrator of atrocities was held in the chamber as an example to others. Law breakers did not die, they lived as an example.

  But that justice hadn’t worked for Numina, had it? Davin had only grown to hate his father and so formulate this horrible, twisted plan. And Blaine had been a part of it, not killing Ysbal when he had the chance.

  Still they’d sent him for one purpose to get Ysbal. But Ysbal was dead. Blaine’s duty was satisfied. He had no business in interfering with the jurisdiction of Ballylock or the Seannach. Bringing Davin back to Numina would interfere with local law.

  That was utter … what did Elly call it? Scat.

  Was that what he was supposed to do? Apprehend Davin and then what? Bring him back so that his crime, preying on a secret kindred was exposed? Where was the protecting of the innocent in that?

  Blaine trudged forward, working himself up for the task. Facing the flaw of the law’s logic. His entire life all he wanted to do was hold up the light and never hide the facts. But the Patriarchs had shrouded the truth in order to protect the innocent. Didn’t they?

  Davin had left him no choice.

  Blaine lumbered, his breath did not falter. The power of the tree within him strengthened Blaine as a mighty hammer would strike folded glowing metal to temper a sword.

  Through his link with the mappwood the told him of the unnatural rock that was hidden beneath the leaves and branches. It vibrated in waves as when the two legs dug trenches and laid the trunks beneath them or built their own trees. Metal. The word came to him. A ship.

  He had to get to Davin before he took off to who knows where next? Another moon of Ghael?

  Would it hold more secrets, too?