Ekaterina Sedia: Bewere the Night

She can taste him, even after a day and a night, she can taste him. He tastes like the sky, like the wind and the stars. He tastes like freedom.

With a suddenness that stuns her, Ani understands. It’s no wonder the Crow Lords look down on her kind. The entire world is a blanket spread beneath them. They speak with the dead; they know each current of air by its secret name. Humans read their flight to auger the future, and everything that walks the earth, or swims the seas must look up to them.

Ani understands, and she hates the understanding. She wants to vomit up his shadow—feathers beak and all—and force him to take it back, covered in her bile. But she can’t. It’s in her blood; it beats in her heart. It is part of her.

“You took something from me first,” she says, thinking of the stone and her name.

“You walked into our house.” Light shines in his eyes. Is he the one who placed the stone on her tongue? All Crow Lords look the same.

“He is my brother.” The Crow Lord reads her mind. “All Crow Lords are brothers.”

As all fox-girls are sisters, she thinks. But she is different now. There is crow-shadow in her blood; she has no name—or rather she has a name given to her by a human man.

She is part anger, part defiance, as she was when she walked into the Crow Lords’ tower. Yet now she is something more. She has tasted crow-shadow and human blood. She looks at the jagged shadow on the ground.

“I could eat more,” she says.

The Crow Lord’s eyes widen. The memory of shadow tastes of power, his power. She wants to turn away, but emptiness gnaws in the pit of her stomach—a craving for freedom. The world has been still too long, crows above, foxes below, and men somewhere in between. She growls, a low animal sound.

The Crow Lord doesn’t move. She catches his scent—cold wind, silver stars, and empty sky as black as her fur.

She threads fingers through the Crow Lord’s hair—dark as feathers—and pulls his face close. She kisses him, lip bruising lip in a hungry kiss. It tastes like freedom.

Sharp, white teeth nip fragile skin. The Crow Lord tries to pull back, but the fox-girl holds him tight, licking his broken lip with her long tongue before she lets go. Her eyes glow, fox-fire bright in the dark, and she whispers, “I could eat more.”

Yuki brings her white rice and strips of cooked meat, which Ani wishes he had left raw. There is something so earnest and sweet about Yuki. She thought she understood the world of men, but he is different. The more she doesn’t ask of him, the more he gives. In time, will he learn to read her mind? Will he feed her meat, bloody and raw, and let her lick red juices from his fingertips, flavored with salt from his skin?

He watches her as she eats rice and meat with her bare hands, looking for someone beneath her skin. Ani—the name comes back to her, weighing heavy in the air between them.

“Tell me about her,” the fox-girl says.

Yuki looks up, startled. His eyes are the color of good, clear tea, shining in the sunlight falling through the window. For a moment Ani wants to taste them. She imagines Yuki’s tears would be just like that hot, strong drink. She imagines they could wash away even the taste of shadows and oil and blood.

Ani sees the question of how she knew to ask about a girl die on Yuki’s tongue. He shakes his head and turns away, looking out the window at the glittering tower rising above the waking city.

“Her name was Ani,” he says, which she already knew.

The fox-girl looks at the tower, reflected in Yuki’s gaze. The thousand glass eyes that make up its infinite sides are formed of all the things that people have lost, left behind, and given up by going inside.

“She worked in the tower. When they ordered food, she was always the one who met me at the door to take the delivery. She smiled at me, every time. Sometimes, when she gave me my tip, I think she put in a little extra, even if her co-workers were cheap, so it would seem like more. It’s stupid, but I thought I was in love with her.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know.” Yuki sighs. “She called me … the last time she called, she sounded scared. She didn’t order any food. She couldn’t catch her breath, and it sounded like she was crying. I think her hands were shaking, because the phone kept moving away from her lips and back, her voice going in and out like the wind.

“Then she was gone. The people in the tower stopped ordering food. I called every number in their directory and asked about her, but every person I talked to told me they’d never heard of her. I’m afraid she might be dead.”

Ani can’t bear to tell him that the name of the girl he thought he loved tasted like ghosts when he first spoke it aloud. She sets aside the empty bowl and picks up the plastic chip marked by her teeth and stained with her blood. She traces the frozen quicksilver patterns.

A memory shivers across her skin, fleeting and quick. In a moment of stillness, she might even catch it.

“If I could get you inside the tower to look for her, would you go?” she asks.

“Yes.” Yuki looks like he might cry, spilling good, hot tea down his cheeks. “But how could you get me inside?”

Ani grins. “I’m a fox-girl.”

Ani sits on Yuki’s pallet, while he sleeps on the floor. Her knees are drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around them, her mind seeking after the fragment of memory buried under her skin.

Yuki’s dreaming helps. He is dreaming his Ani, dreams strong enough to conjure her into the room. Fox-Ani remembers the girl, remembers where she has seen her before. She looks at the rising spire of glass through Yuki’s window, and remembers being inside.

She remembers.

The city’s nighttime glow falls through a thousand panes of glass. It patterns the floor so she walks through pieces of light, like fallen leaves. Her bare feet pad, silent as paws. The hallways are empty; all the humans have gone home for the night. They are so confident, or so few, that they don’t even bother to leave guards behind.

The fox-girl winds along the hall until she find a door leading deeper into the tower’s insides. She drops four paws onto the ground for a moment before rising on her hind legs and bracing her front feet against the door. She puts her muzzle to the lock, licks it once to bind it to her, and calls a high, sharp yip into the keyhole. Crow Lords may know the secret name of the winds, but fox-girls know the way to make any door open.

She changes again, two feet on the ground, and twists the knob. She steps into one of the few rooms inside the tower without windows. The room is lit by the glow of machinery, the salvaged scraps of humanity’s one-time glory. Some screens shed an eerie luminescence. Others are cracked, broken, long fallen into disuse and disrepair. Outside, the tower is beautiful. At its heart, it is rotten and sad.

A shadowed form moves, illuminated by the half light. It is a woman with long, black hair. The fox-girl has stayed so quiet that the woman doesn’t hear her, doesn’t turn.

From the set of the woman’s shoulders, hunched protectively forward, the fox-girl recognizes a kindred spirit. This woman is a thief, too, creeping through the shadows after dark, snooping where she shouldn’t. The fox-girl slips up behind her, places her teeth next to the woman’s throat, and breathes hot against her skin. Even in girl form she could tear through this soft, human throat before the woman could scream.

“Hello,” the fox-girl whispers.

The woman doesn’t scream, but she goes tense, her rigid against the fox-girl’s naked flesh.

“Who are you?” The woman’s voice is almost steady. There is only the faintest tremor, matched by the faintest whiff of fear sweat prickling her skin. The woman’s fingers tense on the keyboard in front of her, skritching softly. Now that she has been caught out, the fox-girl wonders, will the woman fight or flee?