CHAPTER 26
Emma settled into the rhythm of life at the House of Foxes.
She still scoured the Library stacks for any mention of a way through the veil between the Night City and the mortal realm.
But she was coming to think that a small delay in the Night City might not be so bad.
She had the messenger’s task, for one. If she discovered something to help the City break the Turnbulls’ bargain, that would damage them much more deeply than anything she’d manage as a mere mortal girl.
Whatever the Turnbulls had bargained her for, it had to be important.
And she was far better able to hunt out their secrets as a fox maiden, with the protection of invisibility around mortals, and the promise of fox form to help her.
But it would not do to wait too long to escape, however useful her new powers might be.
She was afraid of what might happen if she stayed too long in the Night City.
There was something deeply disturbing about her new home.
She had seen it in the fox maidens. There was an apathy that chilled her, and seemed worse the longer they had been in the City.
They seemed not to care about escape. If she asked about their plans for when they were mortal again, or whether they ever thought about crossing between the worlds, they mostly shrugged.
Said vaguely that they wanted to be free, but somehow they had stopped thinking about it.
Emma sickened at the idea that the same might happen to her, with enough time.
The other fox maidens tried to explain it to her. Memories faded, they said. At first, it was like looking at a picture through a glass pane. Then the years passed, and the glass became dirtier and dirtier, until it was hard to see the shapes beneath.
“Unless you go to the water hag,” Saskia muttered. Despite the chatter around the rest of the dining table, she was nose-deep in a volume on theories of shadow.
Frances drew in a sharp breath. There was a flutter among the other fox maidens. Emma leaned in. There was a secret here.
Saskia let her book fall, looking absurdly guilty. “Sorry. Best not to mention in polite company, I forgot.”
“Oh, it’s only an old legend.” Nancy grinned across the table and tipped a platter of crisp, salty bacon onto her plate. “The water hag’s a whispered monster in these parts, Emma. Supposed to do dark spells for the Lower Houses, to help them remember their old lives.”
“To really feel the memories again, with the same fire you had when you were mortal.” Selina leaned her chin on her hand. “It would be nice.”
“Not for the water hag’s victims, it wasn’t,” Nancy teased.
“How did it go? She’d do her wicked ceremony using something of yours.
A personal item, that was it. One that held the memory.
But after she was done, that memory became hers, not yours.
Forever. As if it never happened to you.
Poor trade, I’d say. If she ever existed, she’s gone now.
‘Seeing the water hag’ is for drunks and fools. ”
Emma scented something. “Then people still see her?”
Nancy snorted. “Oh, I’ve no doubt someone’s dressed up in a parcel of reeds and riverweed, to take honest folks’ good coin for a magic ceremony that don’t exist. I’ve not come across them, but then I’ve no leisure to be gulled.
” Nancy nibbled a rasher thoughtfully. “Pr’aps it’s a con we could run ourselves.
Invent a nice scary mother vixen, with the power to make you taste your dreams, or summat just as useless.
Doll up Saskia with a shaggy coat and a mop handle for a scepter, and charge a tidy sum. ”
The others shouted with laughter.
Quiet Frances shook her head. “You miss the point of the tale. The water hag speaks of the fear we all carry, we who have come to the Night City. That in enjoying its wonders, we lose ourselves. The feelings and memories that made us. And that once lost, they cannot be regained.”
The table was silent. Her sisters’ faces had become bleak. And it cut Emma to the heart.
“Then you should remember,” Emma said. She had tried so hard not to get involved.
To keep herself separate, ready to leave them all behind.
But she could not bear their sadness. She looked round at each of them in turn, willing her strength into them.
“You could fight the fading of your memories. Do it together. We can tell each other of who we were, and what mattered to us. Remind ourselves how we felt. How we can feel.”
“Share our memories.” Frances nodded. “And keep them thus alive.”
Nancy brought out her firefly brandy. And as the night wore into dawn, her sisters told stories.
The ones Emma had wondered about. She learned that the fox maidens came from as many decades as they did backgrounds.
Even Saskia unbent enough to tell an anecdote, which made Emma laugh until she snorted brandy from her nose, about her dive into the 1980s punk wave, and how horrified the students had been when she arrived in halls for her first year, Mohawked and leathered to the wrists.
She had been a scholarship student, Emma was able to gather.
The only one from a state school in her entire college.
Wordless Gertie turned out to be a fortune-teller: once a mayor’s daughter, until she ran away to join the circus. Selina had been a nightclub dancer, whose furs and teddy-boy beaus barely concealed the traces of Mattie, the scared evacuee who had arrived on a train with a label around her neck.
Every story ended in the Room of Choosing: facing the imp, picking the amber claw.
But her sisters’ paths had differed from Emma’s in one key way.
Many had made bargains in desperation, as Emma had.
For safety, for freedom. But their shape had not changed with those bargains.
Only when they became fox maidens did they transform.
Emma alone had been pulled from human into fox form before then.
The reasons for their bargains varied. Loss. Betrayal. Senseless violence. But the sadness of them did not. Emma found a fullness in her heart. Her sisters could understand pain. Even hers. The loneliness that had wrapped around her from the moment she arrived in the Night City began to recede.
Emma noticed that not all of them shared their stories.
Frances spoke only of a particular flower she had loved as a child, then folded her hands.
Nancy seemed conveniently called to tidy plates whenever the conversation turned her way.
In turn, none of them pressed Emma to talk about Jasper or the Turnbulls.
They were content to accept her as she was, with whatever she had to share.
The candles wore down. They finished the last of the brandy. Only Gertie, seeming to float upright in her chair among her veils, looked even halfway sober. Selina propped her feet on Emma’s lap. “So, what are we all wearing to the Beasts’ Ball?”
“Something appropriate,” said Frances firmly.
Selina giggled. “I suppose you don’t think my pink number with the feathers is appropriate.”
“Appropriate has never been in the same room as that pink dress.” Saskia snorted.
“You would look so elegant with a pair of gloves.” Frances sighed. “A young lady should always wear gloves to a ball. Gertie agrees with me, is that not right?”
Gertie looked up from her tarot cards and pushed back her veil to grin, waving hands encased in black satin.
“Oh, I know, darling, they look divine on you,” said Selina. “But Midwinter’s so close. We’ve not enough time for me to order a whole new outfit, which I’d need to go with the gloves, of course…”
“What’ll you be wearing, Emma?” Nancy said absently, trying to tease a snarl from one of the twins’ hair.
“This, I suppose.” Emma looked down at her brown dress from the Court tailor.
It had been ugly enough when it was new.
Now it was smeared with Sara’s ointment and Library dust. Though she knew it shouldn’t matter, not against her escape and her business with the Turnbulls, Emma’s cheeks heated at the thought of wearing it into a ballroom.
Her sisters exchanged looks.
“Your face will shine the lovelier in a plain setting.” Frances patted her hand with sympathy, which made Emma feel worse.
“You are going to look smashing, darling.” Emma was pulled into a cloud of platinum curls and Shalimar. Selina’s enthusiasm was so overwhelming, it sometimes sounded downright threatening. “Trust me.”
“Is it time to go?” Saskia set down her book, seemingly bored by the talk of ball adornments. The other fox maidens fluttered to their feet.
Soon only Emma was left helping Nancy clear the table. She heard her sisters call farewells from the hall. The front door slammed.
“Where are they going?”
“To hunt,” Nancy replied.
Emma’s gaze dropped to her feet. She had not been on a single hunt.
The thought of it made her stomach clench.
Despite the fox maidens assuring her that they drained only the smallest sip of energy from a mortal.
That it barely hurt the mortals, or not so badly they couldn’t get over it in a few days.
Their defenses only made Emma feel worse.
Because they wouldn’t call it a hunt if someone wasn’t about to become prey.
“What if—if I don’t want to hunt mortals?” Emma stammered.
“Emma, it’s not just ball gowns and frippery we buy.
The meals we eat, the warmth of this house?
It’s all paid for by our hunts,” Nancy said gently.
“The City doesn’t give them for free. All those costs add to our debt, which means more years of service.
Why do you think Frances has been here so long, or Gertie?
More’n a hundred years, both of them. We’ve all been covering your costs till now, love—and happy to do it—but it’s time for you to try. ”
Shame flooded Emma’s cheeks. “I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t think you did.” Nancy patted her hand.
“Hunting’s also part of your contract with the Night City, so you’d be getting a mighty unpleasant visit from the Boars if your dues aren’t paid.
When you’re ready, just ask one of us take you to hunt.
Best have fox form ready for that.” She took in Emma’s face.
“You have transformed back into a fox, haven’t you? ”
Emma grimaced. “I tried reaching down into my mind, where I feel the fox, and—nothing. Managed to switch my fingernails for claws, but that’s it.”
“Hmm. And what did you feel, when the change started?”
“It was like drowning. I—I couldn’t breathe.” Even remembering it, Emma felt that same awful vise around her chest. “I heard the fox inside me.” The taunting whisper, so close to the surface.
we are the hunt
prey hung limp in dripping jaws
teeth so sharp to rip the meat
“And I was afraid—am afraid,” Emma corrected. “If I shift, she could devour me, all there is of me. I’ll be stuck, just like before.”
“Ah, the fear. That would do it. Magic is a force of will, like Saskia says. All in the mind. Fear can throw it off in funny ways. You can choose to believe it.” Nancy held Emma’s gaze.
“Or you could sit with the fear, breathe through it. See what’s on the other side.
And if you don’t want to be lost to the fox, then don’t be.
Up there, maybe you were what other people decided.
But here, you can be what you believe yourself to be. You decide.”
“I decide,” Emma repeated. She had not been good at that as a mortal, she realized. At saying who she was, or what she wanted.
She had hated moving around with her mother.
Losing her friends, her home, over and over.
But however much she had wanted to stay, it had never seemed like it mattered.
Not when her mother needed to move for her next big academic chance.
As a child, she had never stopped to consider whether her pain at leaving her home might ever outweigh the damage to her mother’s career.
Whether what she wanted was important, even if it hurt someone else. Perhaps here, she could be different.
Nancy heaved another stack of plates with a sigh. “Now, let’s get this lot into the kitchen. It’s my turn to watch over Sara later, but I’ve enough time to hear more about your mother’s tree-home.”
“Research station,” Emma corrected, with a laugh.
“Right enough, love. And tell me again of the snake-tailed striped beast—lemur, did you call it?”
Emma’s mind had split in two. She agonized over it in the Library; in long night watches over Sara; curled in her claw-marked bed at the House of Foxes.
The longer she refused to hunt, the more she betrayed the other fox maidens.
She could not let them keep paying for her from their own earnings.
But if she went hunting, she would become someone she didn’t recognize.
The real Emma, the mortal one, never hurt anything.
She freed the spiders in the bathroom rather than killing them.
When it rained, she walked with her eyes trained on the ground to avoid stepping on snails.
Going hunting would feel like giving up on that Emma.
It admitted the possibility that she might never return: that there would be no escape from the Night City. It was too hard let her old self go.
Then, days before Midwinter, Emma trailed in from the Library.
She was weary and sore, smudged with sweat and dust from another fruitless book search.
But her bedroom was not as she had left it.
There was something on the bed. A ball gown, silver-white and glimmering, like a dress of morning mist. And beside it, a note:
Should be your size, darling. We all chose it. Call it a Midwinter gift.
I said you’d look smashing at the ball, didn’t I?
Love from us all
(and especially Selina)
Another gift. Another kindness. The dress shimmered up at her, lovely as moonlight.
And something shifted within Emma. Since the tailor’s trick at the Court, the Sister’s warning had blared in her mind: City dwellers do not give.
A gift they offer will be a bargain in disguise. And the worse for it.
But Emma had become so focused on looking for hidden spite, she had missed what was in front of her.
Not everything in the Night City was a trick.
The fox maidens were offering true friendship.
Emma ran gentle fingers over the dress, feeling tears prick her eyes.
She was among people who cared for her. She was part of the House of Foxes.
The old Emma might not have known what to do with that. But the new Emma did.
She could afford to change. It was time to stop being so afraid of the Night City, and what she might become within it. After all, she had her sisters at her back now, and the Turnbulls to bring down. She could try being fierce. And the Beasts’ Ball would be the perfect place to start.