Bewere the Night

THE THIEF OF PRECIOUS THINGS by A.C. Wise

Their shadows are crows.

They are two men, standing at the mouth of an alleyway, watching the night with dark, guarded eyes. Their long, black coats flap in the wind, and their shadows have wings. They have feathers and beaks and claws.

When the moon reaches the apex of the sky, they crush their cigarettes against the bricks. Their shadows break into a dozen birds each and take flight.

They have been waiting for her.

She is a fox-girl, running swift over the close rooftops. Up here, the world smells of dust and feathers. Fresh-washed laundry hangs from obsolete radio relays, satellite dishes, and cell phone towers, which sprout like mushrooms atop every building. Sheets and shirts flap in the wind, flags to mark her passing.

Her paws—black as burnt wood—fly over shingle, tile, brick and tar. The birds follow, floating on silent, star-lined wings. She stole something from them, something precious. They want it back.

When the roof ends, there is nowhere else to run. She jumps, changes in mid-air, and lands on two feet on the cracked pavement. The smells between the buildings are wet—all puddles, garbage, and food left to rot. She longs for the dry smells of the world near the sky. Neon turns the alley the color of blood. She is on four paws again, running.

The fox-girl can almost remember what she stole. She remembers a stone on her tongue. Images tumble through her mind: an unearthly blue glow, a chair, leather straps around her wrists, a needle in her arm. There was a woman, a human woman, and she buried something under the fox-girl’s skin. It burns.

Sheltering against the side of a dumpster, she snaps fox-teeth at her own flank, tastes blood, and spits fur and flesh onto the wet ground. Something catches the light, gleaming in the patch of bitten-free skin. It is a small square of plastic, patterned with silver.

She stole it from the men in the tower; she can almost remember why. The crows want it, the humans want it; it is precious. She picks it up between careful teeth, and tucks it in her cheek.

A door opens onto the alleyway, spilling yellow light and the scent of noodles and cooked vegetables. A young man stands framed against the light, holding a bulging, plastic bag full of wasted food. Her eyes meet his, but before he can speak, four and twenty black birds fall from the sky.

The crows fold their wings tight, diving for her eyes. She whirls, snapping and snarling at the storm of feathers. The precious plastic thing scrapes her gums raw. She leaps, twists—a war dance. She is all fox now, her animal heart beating hard inside a cage of burning bones, wrapped in fur the color of coal.

“Hey! Leave it alone!”

Amidst the chaos of wings, she hears the young man drop the swollen bag of trash. It splits, spilling new scents into the alley—meat and sauce, cooling in the night air.

He runs to her side, arms beating the feathered whirlwind. She could slip away, now that the birds’ attention is divided. A sharp beak draws blood from his arm, and he cries out. He is nothing to her, this young human, but she stays.

The crows are distracted, and she leaps, snatching a bird from the air. Her jaws close, crunching hollow bones. Liquid shadow slides down her throat, tasting of primordial tar, tasting of the decayed flesh of a million dead things from the beginning of time.

Twenty three birds lift, wheeling in the sky. They scream, and fall together again at the far end of the alley, coalescing into shadows where two men wait and watch with hard, dark eyes.

One man is missing a piece of the ragged blackness spread beneath him, cast by the alley’s light. His eyes meet hers, full of pain and surprise. He limps as he and his brother walk away.

A hand touches her back. The young man’s voice is soft. “Are you okay?”

She’s still postured to fight. Instinct snaps her teeth; the man yelps and pulls away. She tastes blood—his and hers—mingled with the lingering taste of crow-shadow oil.

She changes and lifts her head. She is a woman now, naked, crouched on blood-colored pavement that remembers the rain. She is bleeding, shaking, and tired to the bone.

The young man stares at her, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, cradling his wounded hand. She tries to speak, fails, and spits blood and plastic into her palm before trying again.

“Sorry,” she says.

She collapses, but not before closing the precious, stolen thing that the crows and the humans want tightly in her hand.

She wakes on a pallet in a strange room. The scent of noodles, cooked meat, and vegetables, has sunk deep into the walls. A thin blanket lies draped over her. When she shifts, its rough weave catches on her torn skin.

The young man from the alleyway enters carrying a tray holding a bowl of water, a bowl of soup, and a roll of gauze. He sets the tray down and backs away. His hand is wrapped; two spots of crimson have soaked through the white.

He could have run, too. He could have left her in the alley on the blood-colored ground. Why bring her here? Perhaps she reminds him of someone.

She sits up, letting the blanket fall, and reaches for the gauze. He watches, wide-eyed, as she licks the wounds she can reach with her tongue, and cleans the ones she can’t with water from the bowl. The young man is too frightened, too stunned, to look away.

After she wraps the last of the bandages, he shakes himself and hands her a shirt from a pile draped over the back of a chair. She catches his scent—sweat, laced with pheromones, but mostly with fear.

The shirt is clean. It reminds her of the wind on the rooftops. She pulls it on. Only now that she has covered herself does the young man blush, as though his skin has just remembered shame. He looks away.

She reaches for the soup and drinks, swallowing until she almost washes away the taste of crow-oil and shadows and blood. The young man looks back at her as she sets the bowl down; she smiles—a fox-grin.

“What’s your name?” he asks. He watches her as though he believes she will bite him again, or worse.

“I don’t know.” As she speaks them, the fox-girl realizes the words are true. “I don’t remember.”

She lifts the plastic square, which she held tight even as she slept, letting the young man see.

“I stole this. Do you know what this is?”

Fear flickers through his eyes. “I think so.”

He perches on the edge of the pallet, rigid. He doesn’t meet her fox-eyes straight on, but looks at her from the side.

“My name is Yuki. If you don’t have a name, what should I call you?”

She shrugs. She isn’t interested in names, only the patterned plastic in her hand.

“Ani. I’ll call you Ani.”

The way he speaks the name makes her look up. He holds the name on his tongue like it’s a precious thing, one he’s afraid of breaking. The name has a physical weight; it changes the air in the room and leaves it tasting of ghosts. That he has given her this name frightens her. Once she had a name that meant something. Names have power, and this heavy name, fallen from his lips and soaking into her skin, might change her if she lets it. Maybe it already has.

She pushes the thought away. “Tell me about this.” She holds up the stolen plastic again.

“It’s a computer chip, from before the war. Everyone used to have them, but now they only exist in tower.” He points to the window. “I used to deliver food there, but not anymore.”

Ani looks. The tower glitters. A thousand windows catch the setting sun and turn it into a column of living light twisting up from the scrub-brush of the city surrounding it.

“I carried a stone on my tongue,” she says.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” She closes fox-eyes. “Except sometimes, I do.”

She remembers.

Before the glass tower there was a tower of stone. It is nothing like the glittering tower outside Yuki’s window. It has no windows, but it is open to the sky, and it rustles with the sound of restless wings.

In the central courtyard, a line of men with cold, hard eyes stand on a raised platform. If the fox looks straight ahead, she can only see their shoes. Even if she changed, they would still look down on her. She is less than nothing in the Crow Lords’ eyes—all foxes are. So she stands with her head held high, just to show them she can.

Above the hard-eyed men, hundreds of crows line the tower’s edge. The fox-girl holds her tail erect; she does not show her throat; she does not bow.

“Why are you here?” one of the Crow Lords asks.

“I’ve heard you need a thief. I’m the best there is.”

She meets their eyes, bird and human both. Her tongue lolls, a fox-grin. She speaks truth.

Powerful and ancient as they are, there are places no Crow Lord can go. They were tricksters once, but they’ve forgotten the old ways, or let them go. Fox-girls were born to steal, and no fox-girl is quicker or cleverer than she.

“Cocky child.” Another Crow Lord speaks, and the fox-girl turns to him. His eyes are cold, harder than those of his brothers, filled with contempt.

“You must learn your place,” the Crow Lord continues. “I will take your name to teach you respect.”

Every fox-girl earns her name. It is a battle, hard-won with teeth and claws, with wit, and cunning, and quickness. But with a thought the Crow Lord rips her name away, leaving a hole where a thing she can’t even remember anymore used to be. The hole fills with ice; it slows her blood and threatens to stop her breath. She shivers as though at winter’s deepest cold.

The Crow Lord steps down from the platform and crouches. She could reach his throat, tear it out. The cold spreading from the place where her name used to be keeps her from doing anything at all. He laughs—a sound like rustling wings.

He grabs her muzzle, forcing open her jaws. Her needle-sharp teeth are so close to his skin, but she cannot close them while he holds her.

“I could snap your neck,” he says in a voice like feathers brushed against fur. “I could rip your lower jaw from your skull and leave you broken and bleeding on the floor.”

With his free hand the Crow Lord takes a smooth stone from the pocket of his long, black coat. He places it on her tongue. She expects it to be cold—and maybe it is—but it also burns.

“Your name belongs to me until the moment I choose to return it, if I ever do.”

He lets her go. She wants to retch. She wants to whimper and yip, but she won’t give him the satisfaction. He watches her with hard, empty eyes. She does not look away. The shadow of a smile lifts the edges of the Crow Lord’s mouth.

She knew when she walked into the Crow Lords’ hall that this could happen, but she came anyway, because no other fox-girl would. When the Crow Lords fly, her sisters lower their eyes. They keep their places, the places the Crow Lords give them. They whine and show their bellies. And if the Crow Lords’ sharp beaks seek their lights and their livers, they hold their teeth, and whimper as they die.

So for the sake of her sisters, she refuses to look down. She needs to show the crows that at least one fox-girl is not afraid. She bares her teeth, trapping a growl at the back of her throat. A name is a small price to pay.

“What would you have me steal?” she asks, and she does not say, my lord.

“The humans in the tower are trying to resurrect their old magic, their circuits and wires. This time they are trying to infuse it with Crow Lord magic. They have forgotten their old ways, and they have forgotten their place in the world. They seek to steal from the oldest and the highest. We would have you steal from them what they stole from us first.”

“Then it is done.” The fox-girl grins, showing sharp teeth.

She will steal this precious thing for them, not because they asked her to, not for their favor, but because she can.

Ani wakes with the moon and stars still bright in the sky. Even now, shadows and oil linger on her tongue. She slips from the bed, and tiptoes past Yuki, who lies snoring on the floor.

The night air is cold, raising goose bumps. It hardens her nipples, making them stand out against the fabric of her borrowed shirt, fabric so thin that it shows the thatch of hair between her legs—dark as burnt wood.

A man waits beside the dumpster with its peeling paint. The chill in the air dampens the smell of rotting food. A rat squeaks its fear at Ani’s approach, turning tail and running. Ani faces the hard-eyed man, waiting for him to speak.

“You took something from me,” the Crow Lord says.

There is pain in his voice where she expected cold anger. She meets his eyes, which are crow-black and hard, but not as hard as before. The moonlight throws his shadow over the cracked pavement. Ani sees the jagged hole where her teeth tore part of that shadow away.

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?

“I have no name, not anymore. I came here to steal what you stole from the Crow Lords,” the fox-girl says. She sees no harm in honesty; there is nothing the woman can do to stop her.

The woman surprises her with a sound like laughter. The fox-girl can only see part of the woman’s face, a half-moon, tinted blue in the monitor-light.

“If I turn around, will you bite me?”

The fox-girl steps back, and lets the woman turn. The woman looks at her, takes in the fox-girl’s nakedness, and the corners of her lips lift in a bemused smile. She shakes her head, as if at a wayward child. The fox-girl suddenly feels young, foolish, and she bares her teeth. But she holds her ground, waiting for the human woman to speak.

“Do you really think we could steal from the Crow Lords?” the woman asks. “Think about it, and look at this place. We’re just starting to rebuild, re-learn everything we’ve lost. How could we take anything from them? We have no magic of our own. That’s why we built all this.” She waves her hand at the machines around them. “And look where it got us.”

War. The fox-girl nods, but says nothing aloud. The tower, beautiful on the outside, isn’t a stronghold. It’s only the gathering place where the shattered remnants of humanity have come to try to put back together what their greed tore apart.

The fox-girl sees now what she should have seen the moment she walked into the Crow Lord’s tower. The Crow Lords, tricksters still, are playing a long game, setting humanity and the fox-girls against each other in the hopes they will wipe each other out. They didn’t send her here to steal; they sent her hoping she would be captured, tortured, broken, the secrets of fox-girl magic ripped from her skin. They sent her here to make her less, and make the humans more, tipping the balance just enough to start another war.

“What were you doing here?” The fox-girl points at the monitors behind the woman, speaking to hide her shame.

“Trying to wipe out the old programs before our people can unravel them. These machines did us no good the first time. I don’t want to see she same mistakes made again.”

The fox-girl grins, sudden and quick in the half-light.

“I think I can help you. Can you get me the chip out of one of those?”

The woman looks at her askance, but after a moment she turns and opens a panel beneath the desk. As the woman digs within the machine, nimble fingers working, the fox-girl wonders if her trust is bravery or stupidity. She decides on bravery, holding on to the image of the woman as a kindred spirit, a fellow thief.

“What’s your name?” the fox-girl asks. She doesn’t think humans earn their names the way fox-girls do, but she would still like to know.

“Ani.”

The woman straightens and holds up the thing she has dug out from the heart of the machine. Blue radiance slides across a pattern of frozen quicksilver printed on a small square of plastic. She holds it out to the fox-girl, but the fox-girl shakes her head.

“I want you to cut me open and stitch it up inside my skin.”

Yuki turns, snorting in his sleep before moving on to another dream. The fox-girl remembers the chafe of leather against her wrists, the prick of the needle going into her skin. She remembers the look of fear and doubt in Ani’s eyes, the salt-tang scent of fox blood, a moment of hot pain, then drifting into the dark.

She glances down at the chip in her hand, flecked with rust-colored flakes. She remembers everything now. She meant to change the programming, re-write it with her being, imprint her memory on its quick-silver patterns and give it back to Ani: a fox-girl virus, thief quick, spreading throughout the human machines and bringing the tower crashing down.

She meant to infect the humans themselves, instilling them with defiance against the Crow Lords, starting a war of her own. She turns the chip, studying it in the light. But now, she is different. The fox-girl she was, all cocky anger and defiance, lives only in the chip. The self that came out of the tower has changed, gentled by eyes like tea, illuminated by a human thief in a tower, and darkened by a crow shadow that tastes like oil on her tongue.

Something brushes against the window, a feathered wing. Ani opens the window and leans out. The sloped roof isn’t so far that she can’t catch hold as she turns her back to the tower and wiggles out into the cold night air. She pulls herself up, nails scrabbling on the tile, and then she stands on four paws on the roof. Eleven crows circle against the stars before dropping to join the shadow of a man whose eyes are no longer as hollow and hard as they used to be.

The light in his gaze speaks of fear. He doesn’t belong with his brothers anymore, as she no longer belongs with her sisters.

“You took something from me.” He echoes his words from the night before. “I want it back.”

Ani cocks her head, ears alert, eyes bright.

“Give it back!” He lunges for her. His voice breaks, becoming a crow’s call.

She sidesteps, and eleven ragged birds rise into the air, maddened by pain. His shadow swarms, but doesn’t dive, doesn’t strike. His birds beat at her with their wings, and she feels the answering stir of shadow-slick feathers under her skin. She tastes oil at the back of her throat. She can read his mind now, a Crow Lord trick.

He wants her to take away the pain, and he hates himself for wanting it. He wants to roll, like her sisters, whine and show his belly. He hates what he has become, but even more, he hates what he has been. He wants—he needs—to feel her teeth in his skin.

Ani jumps, catching a shadowed bird. She holds it gently between her jaws, a precious thing. He doesn’t fight her. Above her, ten crows scream their confusion and speak their divided minds. She bites down, exquisite needle teeth piercing feathers, bone and skin. The shadow slides down her throat. She savors it—Crow Lord power running through her veins.

A truth beats in time with her heart, one half-felt in the moment she tasted the first piece of his shadow, but fully realized now. She owns him. This Crow Lord is hers, and it doesn’t matter that she is on all fours on the ground; he can’t look down on her, not anymore.

Ten birds coalesce beneath the man crouching on the red roof tile, holding himself against the pain. He looks up, and his eyes aren’t hollow, and they never will be again. They shine, heavy with tears.

Ani pads forward, burnt-black paws hushing over the tile. The Crow Lord doesn’t move. He whines a little in the back of his throat; he raises his head, baring skin. It is not a crow gesture; it is a fox gesture—submission.

She licks his throat, but doesn’t nip. He lowers his face. Her long tongue cleans his cheeks, tasting his tears. Salt mingles with the shadows and blood as she swallows them down. When he stops crying, she sits back on her haunches and looks up at him.

“I’m going into the tower,” she says. “Tomorrow. Tonight, I’m going hunting.”

She turns, tail blurring in the moonlight. She jumps, changing before she hits the ground. Two feet land, then four paws run over the broken asphalt. She glances back, grinning, tongue lolling, devouring the night air.

“There’s blood on your mouth,” Yuki says, waking her.

Ani looks up. Yuki stands over the pallet with a tray of plain rice and steamed vegetables. She sits up and the sheet slides away, revealing naked skin. She pushes a hand through her tangled hair, and then licks her lips clean. Blood flakes onto her tongue, cold and dry.

Yuki looks at her sadly, but he doesn’t turn away anymore. She isn’t his Ani, and it breaks his heart.

“I could be,” Ani says, reading his thoughts. “I could be her.” She rises, and takes the tray from him, setting it down. She takes his hand. His skin is cool, and she presses it to her breast, over her heart. Her nipple is hard beneath his palm.

“There,” she whispers. “Can you feel it? She’s inside my skin.”

Ani is hungry. The fox in her, the crow in her, she struggles to hold onto to them, because part of her knows she is still changing. Before Yuki can pull away, she digs her nails into his hand, holding it against her sleep-warm flesh. She catches his hair with her other hand, pulls him close. She tastes his mouth. Unlike the Crow Lord, he doesn’t respond. Like the Crow Lord, she tastes his tears. They taste just as she imagined.

Ani lets go. Yuki’s eyes are infinitely sad.

“What do you want from me?” Yuki’s voice is hoarse, heavy with salt.

She reads his mind again. He is thinking about the old tales of fox-maidens seducing young men and stealing their souls. Like the fox-girls who roll over for the crows, Yuki is ready to roll over for her. He thinks he has lost everything that matters, and that there is nothing left to care about anymore. He tried to help her, and she threw it back in his face—taking the last thing that was his, the last thing that matters, his kind heart.

“I’m sorry.” Fox-Ani means the words, and they surprise her. She is a fox, a thief. She bows to no one, not even the Crow Lords. She takes what she wants because she can, but looking at Yuki, all she wants to do is give.

“I’m sorry. I’ll take you into the tower, if you still want me to. Then you’ll never have to see me again.” She smiles—a true smile. Strangely, she doesn’t feel weak, laying her words at his feet, showing her throat. She feels strong.

“Put on some clothes,” Yuki says. “Let’s go.”

Inside, darkness swallows the stairwell. A scent pulls her up, a thread of pain. Fox-Ani changes, shedding clothes like skin. Four paws hit the ground, and she sprints up the cold metal steps, her nails clicking as she runs. Yuki’s labored breath follows behind.

She stops in front of a metal door, halfway up the tower, and presses her paws to either side of the lock. She speaks her fox-word, a high, eerie sound that echoes in the silence, then she changes again, standing to open the door with human hands. She hears Yuki coming up behind her, still breathing hard.

They step into the hall. The glow of the city spills through the windows, dappling the floor in fallen-leaf patterns of silver and blue and neon-red. Ani walks through them, barefoot, and the light slides across her skin.

“Here.” Yuki holds out the fallen robe she left behind in her sprint up the stairs. Ani slips it on, a skin over her skin, and belts it tight.

“It’s this way.” Ani beckons him down the hall, memory and scent guiding her back to the room filled with half-broken computers.

Outside, she pauses. She opens her mouth, about to tell Yuki to go back. She knows, without a doubt, what they will find inside. She can smell it—strength and pain. He shouldn’t have to see this.

As though reading the words on her face, Yuki lifts his chin, defiant. Tea-colored eyes shine in the dark.

“Open it.”

Ani doesn’t bother to change. The door is unlocked and she pushes it open. The first Ani, the real Ani, is waiting inside for them.

She rises stiffly from the bank of computers. Fox-Ani braces herself, but behind her, unprepared, Yuki gasps. Human-Ani’s left eye is swollen shut, the skin around it deepened with purple bruises, fading to sick yellow. She holds one arm against her side, wincing in pain as she steps forward. A hairline fracture in her rib, Fox-Ani thinks. She can smell sickness, infection, a wound improperly cleaned and struggling to heal.

Still, the human Ani’s eyes are bright. They defy any offer of sympathy. She holds her chin high, and speaks through cracked lips, her voice almost without inflection.

“They found out I helped you and tried to kill me. I escaped. I’ve been hiding out in the ventilation system and the basement. There’s so few of them in the tower now, they can’t cover enough ground. If I keep moving, they’ll never find me.”

Ani takes a labored breath, and Fox-Ani winces.

“I’ve been waiting for you to come back. Every night, I sneak up here and wait.”

Fox-Ani nods and swallows hard around a sudden thickness in her throat. She reaches up and unknots the leather cord she has tied around her neck, carrying the silver-patterned chip. Ani’s eyes gleam, and she holds out her hand, but the fox-girl pulls back.

“Don’t touch it, unless … unless … ” She takes a deep breath, and forces herself to look Ani in the eye. “You have a choice. I can destroy the computers, bring the whole system crashing down. But if you touch this chip, you’ll be infected with my memories, with the fox-girl I used to be. You can help me spread the disease, bring war to the Crow Lords one human at a time.”

Behind her, Fox-Ani feels Yuki stiffen, understanding her betrayal. The real Ani’s bruised face doesn’t change, her eyes still shine and she lifts her chin a little higher.

“No more war.”

Fox-Ani nods. “Then you should leave now. I’ll come find you when it’s done.”

She turns, unable to bear the human woman’s eyes any longer. If she saw anger there, she would understand, but there is only a kind of sadness, and the fox-girl feels young and foolish again. How is it that she, who walked the earth for ages before the first humans ever raised their heads to look up at the stars, could be so much less wise than them?

The fox-girl hears the humans retreat, footsteps soft on the carpeted floor. She counts them along with her breath and her heartbeats, waiting until she can’t hear them anymore, and kneels. She opens the panel beneath the desk, seeing where the chip fits back into the computer. The next time one of the humans tries to access something from the chip’s memory, the essence of everything she was will infect the system, wipe it clean.

A sound that isn’t a sound makes Ani’s head snap up. Crow Lords—she can feel them coming, she can smell them on the air, a scent like oil and shadows and blood. She snaps the panel closed and rises, running for the hall.

Ani climbs, spiraling up into the dark. At the top of the stairs, she steps out onto the roof. Crows fall from the sky, screaming at her. Ten of them, whose taste she knows, throw their bodies between her and the bodies of their brothers, fighting beak and claw. She beats his brothers back, snapping with human teeth, trying to gather the birds belonging to her Crow Lord.

All around the edges of the roof, men with hollow eyes watch her while their shadows do battle. Only one does not have hollow eyes. His eyes are full of fox-light. He trembles.

Her gaze fixes on him, ignoring the feathers that snap against her skin and the beaks that draw blood.

“Trust me,” she whispers.

Ani holds up cupped palms. She can feel hot, sticky blood, running down her skin. She won’t fight the Crow Lords, not here, not now, not like this. Her war will be a quiet war, infecting the Crow Lords from within as she would have infected the humans. One of her birds lands, awkwardly in her out-stretched hands. She draws it close and holds it against her heartbeat. Then she lifts it to her lips.

Across the rooftop, the man with full eyes twitches. His Crow Lord shadow melts between her lips, sliding down her throat. He surrenders. The nine birds remaining flock to her. She opens her arms wide, opens her jaws, and devours them all.

When she has swallowed the last of her Crow Lord’s shadow, Ani screams at his brothers. “I’m one of you now! Your Fox Brother, your Crow Sister.”

The Crow Lords shriek their rage. They slash at her with beak and claw. Twelve birds lift, swirling around one of the hollow eyed men at the corner of the rooftop. They coalesce, and his shadow lies long beneath him. He steps forward.

“We still have your name.” His chuckle becomes a crow-caw. Ani answers with a fox-grin.

“I don’t need it anymore.”

She turns towards her Crow Lord. He is on his knees now, but he raises his head. His eyes are full of light. Even though he is shaking, she feels his shadow inside her, stronger than ever. He knows her name, and he will whisper it to her in the dark. His eyes are a promise. It is all she needs.

He grits his teeth, and speaks. “Trust me. Jump.”

She drops four paws onto the ground and runs for the edge of the roof. She leaps, trusting the shadow beneath her skin. She falls and the city streaks towards her from below. In the screaming wind, her shadow shreds, tatters, and spreads impossible wings. She soars.

She bares fox-teeth, laughing, and tasting the stars. She is free, and she is alive.

After an eternity of flight, of devouring the moonlight and drinking the world, she touches down. Four paws come to rest on dirty asphalt in an alley that smells of rotten food. Red neon spreads puddles of light beneath her feet. When she rises to stand on two legs, she is clothed in a coat as black as a crow’s wing. It hides her torn and bloodied skin.

Yuki steps out of the doorway where the fox-girl first saw him, the human Ani behind him. She looks smaller away from the glow of the machines, half-broken by all that has been done to her.

Fox-Ani closes her eyes and places her hand to her mouth. She tastes the stone, Crow Lord magic, smooth and cool on her tongue. It has been there the whole time, but she can touch it now. She pushes it onto her palm and opens her eyes, holding out her hand.

Ani looks at her, questioning. “What is it?”

“Forgetting. If you want, you can start over again.”

Ani considers a moment, then holds out her hand. The Fox-Crow-Girl tips the stone onto the human woman’s palm. The woman considers it a moment, weighing it, then slips the stone into her pocket.

“Thank you.”

She turns away. Yuki moves after her. “Ani! Wait!”

The human woman turns, a sad smile moving cracked lips, pulling bruised flesh tight around her eye. “That’s not my name anymore. I’m no-one, now. A ghost.”

She turns again and walks away. This time Yuki doesn’t try to stop her. Fox-Ani steps close and slips her hand into his, pressing warm skin against skin. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he answers, but she can feel the sorrow rolling off him. The air around him smells like tea and tears. “I never really knew her. I only had an image of her in my head that I wanted to love. Now there isn’t enough of her left to know.”

“Maybe she’ll come back one day.”

“Maybe.” Yuki shrugs. He turns to look at Ani, his tea-brown eyes clear. “What are you going to do now?”

“Run. Fly.” She lets go of his hand and whirls, changes, a blur of fur and feathers, then she is a girl again.

“Thank you for everything.” Her voice is soft in the neon tinted dark. She means the words more than she has ever meant any words before. Though it was the Crow Lord’s shadow she devoured, Yuki has changed her, too.

“We’ll see each other again,” she says. “If you want. We can eat noodles on the rooftops, up under the sky. The world is going to change soon. I’ll tell you what it looks like from above.”

A smile touches Yuki’s lips, shadowed with pain, but still a smile. “I’d like that.”

He lifts his hand to wave goodbye, and she is flying, fox and crow and girl, lifting up above the city to taste the light of the stars.