For Miles Episode 5

My nose lifted, the whiskers at the end of my snout twitching. Following the scents around the side of her fence, the tree in the back corner, I hesitated at the familiar, sharp cold.

I’d dropped her off after dinner and, instead of going back to the den house, I’d parked in Mom’s driveway, stepped just onto the screened front porch with the dog door, and shifted into my fox skin. The relief it caused—the release of my wilder, less contained self, the one that grieved and loved and felt openly and without the inhibitions of social niceties—made me shiver. But being a fox in a sprawling suburban environment wouldn’t be comfortable long, even in this neighborhood where half the residents were shifters.

I’d darted from Mom’s house to Hannah’s in the dark, and begun the work of investigating her property. Here, toward the back, was that same signature. The energy from the coffee shop. From the presence that had bounced off the boundary wards at the den.

In this body, I didn’t need blood and salt for liminal magic. Foxes, crows, and owls were spirit-seeing, keepers of the line between the living and the dead. Between magic and the mundane. I slipped between worlds as easily as between my human and fox skins. And the mind of my fox was much less clouded than the human one. He felt, scented, tasted a magic that did not belong to my mate here, a magic that had been shadowing her. Time to mark his territory and chase it away.

Pressing his nose against the tree, he began marking the perimeter—rubbing his body along the fence, digging, and so on—leaving his scent all over. With it, the spider-silk threads of a boundary began to weave themselves around and over Hannah’s property, until slowly it was fully surrounded, every square foot, in a neat dome of fox magic.

When he had finished, my fox shifted his presence backward just enough to let me see his work, to observe the way he cared for our mate. Sensing my approval, he began a slow walk around, scenting closer to the house, waiting to see if any foreign presence revealed itself. When nothing came—dissolved, stirred from hiding, or ejected by our magic—he relaxed. That set aside, satisfied, he began to hunt for signs of Hannah. Though he hadn’t been roused from his grief by her arrival in our life, his draw to her was no less potent than mine.

There were a few lights on in the house. Carefully peeking into each one, we spotted her in the kitchen, sitting at the table with papers in front of her. The trays from her kouign-amann were set on the dish rack to dry, her space pristine if out-of-date in a charming way that spoke of lived-in warmth. My fox had no desire to inhabit a human space, but the smells of food and Hannah’s magic everywhere compelled him to move closer. He found a place to settle us outside the window, just outside where the light would give us away, and watched her shift through the paperwork on the table.

We didn’t feel the cold, chin resting on our paws, golden eyes fixed on her. Slowly, the soothing scent of our mate with the sensation of our magic surrounding the property began to wrap us in a soft, heavy kind of fatigue. It had been a grief-loaded day, full of activity, and this was our first moment of stillness, lying there quietly in the dark outside the window. My fox’s eyes began to drift shut, and he settled into a light doze, blanketing my human mind in a soft, warm fuzz. Lulled by what was right, safe, and good, we slept beneath a shrub outside Hannah’s kitchen window.

The feeling of something touching the boundary jerked us from sleep, the legs of a fly or perhaps a beetle against the side of a glass. Something skittered across the web of our magic, and, as my fox came to his feet bristling in tense alertness, the first invasive push came—and the invader was caught. We raced from our hiding place, window now dark as Hannah had gone to bed sometime while we drowsed, to where we felt the intrusion at the back-right corner of the property, the one butted up against a park behind the fence, trees running the perimeter.

Something thrashed wildly in the dark, aggressively trying to free itself from the sticky threads of magic. It was cold and sharp, and didn’t seem aware of me at first as I drew closer to investigate. The energy signature from this thing was utterly Other, something wild and primeval. Shadows concealed it, making its shape incomprehensible to me as I peered at it through the darkness. Even my fox’s eyes that could pierce the Veil between worlds couldn’t make it out.

Cautious, we drew closer, sniffing. The cold burned our nose. It was the darkest night of the year, and this thing was darker.

One step too close, my fox hesitated. The thing caught in our boundary lashed out, sensing us and reacting with a quick, vicious movement that struck our right foreleg. The flesh tore, burning with something unnatural, and as we shrieked in pain, the thing’s struggles grew more violent and unhinged, until it tore itself free at last from our magic and fled into the night, the ripples of its escape leaving us dizzy and disoriented.

Limping, wobbling, my fox huffed and whined as the pain spread up our leg. Unable to bear it, foggy and confused, he gave up our body and we shifted into my human skin there in the yard, where I sucked in a breath and gritted my teeth against the pain as blood pumped from my right arm.

The shift should have knitted the torn flesh back together. Alarmed, hypervigilant, with adrenaline flooding my naked body in the cold and dark, I stumbled from the yard and back toward Mom’s.

It wouldn’t come back. Not tonight.

But I needed to stop the bleeding.

All the way back to my childhood home, I squeezed the gaping tear in my arm, trying to stem the flow of blood. My hand grew numb with the pressure and the cold of my blood freezing on my skin.

Inside Mom’s house, I collapsed in the kitchen, the overstocked medical kit Mom had saved—half the supplies expired—set on the floor at my feet. Jaw clenched until my facial muscles twitched and ached, I moved my shaking hands through each step of cleaning and bandaging the cut, butterfly stitches pulling the raw edges together. I poured peroxide over it, the fizz doing nothing to drive away the chill magic that infected it.

The bleeding slowed, and stopped.

A wave of fatigue washed over me as I lay naked on the floor, sticky with blood, feet filthy with dirt and grass and leaves. In spite of the pain, I almost dozed again right there.

Groggy, I dragged myself onto my feet, abandoning the medical kit and wrappers and peroxide bottle on the floor, and took myself up the stairs to my room.

I slid beneath the blankets, ignoring the dirt on my body, and shivered beneath them until eventually, my teeth stopped chattering, and darkness took me, my fox huddled in the back of my mind, golden eyes peering out from his hiding place—aware, as a wounded animal, that the danger was still lurking.

It wouldn’t come back tonight.

But it would come back.