Emma grinned. The leather and spikes looked a lot less intimidating when they were scurrying away. Next time, she’d try giving Saskia a hug. It might send her into an all-out run. Emma cradled the boots to her chest, still smiling, and shut her bedroom door.
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 tocare 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. Francesspoke 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 isappropriate.”
“Appropriate has never been in the sameroomas 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…”
