Lounging on the sofa opposite was one of the more glorious specimens of femininity Emma had ever seen. Selina was a peroxide-blond confection of cone bra and curves, lipsticked toperfection beneath the wave set of a fifties starlet. Half-eaten chocolates littered the cushions around her. Beside Selina sat the beautiful older maiden, Frances, who refused to go out unless properly attired in a bonnet and pelisse, and whose voice still held the song of her birthplace in Jamaica.
They were curious and welcoming, and Emma felt herself shrink under their kindness. She did not want it. She could not let them draw her into feeling she belonged. The House of Foxes was not her home. Her real home was in the mortal world, and she had to focus on getting back to it. So she ducked her head and answered in monosyllables. She heard the fox maidens murmur in sympathetic tones about how tired she must be, after her ordeal.
“We all ought to be abed, late as it is. Has Sara gone already?” Nancy said, scanning the room. “Well, you go join her. It’s past dawn already.”
“I’ll stay a while.” Saskia unfolded herself from the window seat. “The new girl’s not eaten yet. She might be hungry.”
“I’m really not—” Emma was cut off by a gurgle from her stomach. “Oh.”
She was ravenous.
“Good idea, love,” Nancy said. “We can see Emma right.”
The other fox maidens filtered out in a cozy, yawning group. Saskia gestured Emma toward the dining table. It groaned under the weight of empty dishes. From the feathers left on the largest platter, it seemed a roast peacock had been the centerpiece.
Nancy pulled a face. “Sorry, love, there’s not much left for you. We’re not a house of delicate appetites.”
A clunk shook the table. Saskia had dropped a platter onto it, whisked from beneath the chairs. She pushed it across the tablewithout meeting Emma’s eye, and flopped into a claw-tipped dining chair. “Saved what I could,” she said.
Nancy slid into a seat opposite. Emma sat next to her and inspected the tray. A luscious little rectangular tin was calling to her. It was all she could do not to tear into the metal with her teeth. She couldn’t place the smell, but the animal voice pulsing beneath her thoughts was enraptured.
eat
tear with teeth
tongue bright and sure
Peering at the gold tin, she recoiled.FINEST PÂTÉ.
Many things she had forgotten. But not that she, Emma, was a vegetarian.Oh,she thought, with a sickening twist in her belly,but when I was a fox, I…she forced her gaze from the tin and clenched her hands.
“Is something wrong?” Saskia offered a serving spoon of peacock with icy courtesy. When Emma shook her head, Saskia wolfed down the lot and licked the spoon.
Emma fought not to shudder. She pulled a dish of spiced rice toward her. It tasted like ashes.
Nancy tore into her own haunch of peacock as she recounted the twists of Emma’s trial. When they reached the point of Emma’s debt, Saskia sucked in a breath.
“A whole mortal life? Night above, that’s steep. And you told the Court it was better for them to let you live, because you’d be able to pay back the debt as a fox maiden?” Her face cracked in a silent laugh. “That’s too good.”
“I will be earning,” Emma said, a little defensively. “The contract said so, when I swore to the house.”
Saskia crunched on a peacock bone with vim. “It didn’t say how much, though, did it? I don’t think anyone from the Lower Houses has ever earned as much as half a mortal life. Not hunting, at least.”
“Hunting on behalf of the Night City.” That was the phrase the contract had used, describing her duties as a fox maiden. But hunting what?Skimming mortal fires,the riddle had said. That was the service of the House of Foxes.
Hunting. Mortal fires. Emma bit down hard, nipping the edge of her tongue.
The shivers started between her shoulder blades. “The mortals. We aren’t—we don’thuntthem?”
It would be too cruel. She’d only wanted to be close to her mortal friends. What kind of sickening trick would force her into a life of hunting them, instead? She thought again of a fox’s gleaming teeth, of the blood-hungry gullet of its throat. Her throat.
Saskia snickered. “Yourface,new girl. It’s not like that. No blood and body parts. We hunt what’s inside them. There’s a vitality to mortal life. Their lives are so short, and all that intensity is bottled up, and—”
“And it has a power of its own,” finished Nancy.
“And we can hunt that?” asked Emma, fascinated. “Doesn’t it hurt them?”
“No, love. We only take a little at a time. To mortals, what they lose might feel like a night’s sleep. The color blue from their dreams. The memory of their first hiccup.”
