Revenge10 min read
My Red Veil and the Fox Eyes
ButterPicks15 views
I opened my eyes to the banquet room and the polite smiles of both families. I was India Crouch. I thought I knew every corner of the life I was stepping into. I did not.
"He's your uncle?" I whispered to Niklas Allen, nodding toward the man who looked too young to be that relation.
"He is," Niklas said. "Laurent Payne. He just flew in."
"He's beautiful," I joked, "teach me how to look that young."
He squinted and put his hands over my eyes. "Don't look at him. Look at me."
"Small-minded," I laughed and poked his chest.
Then a voice crawled over my skin like cold smoke, speaking in a tongue of hunger.
"How delicious," the voice breathed, close enough to make my skin ripple. "If I could marry her, I would taste her on the wedding night. I would slice her open, set her heart on a dish."
I spun. The room remained ordinary. Everyone remained ordinary. Laurent smiled across at my in-laws. His eyes flicked, and for a breath there was a flash of something that was not human.
"Niklas," I said, my fingers tightening around his sleeve. "Do you hear that?"
"Hear what?" he answered, looking genuinely puzzled.
That night, sleep left me thin and jagged. I tried to tell myself I was tired, that a year of plans and bright colors could make a woman hear things that weren't there. But at the wedding—during the bouquet toss, during the toasts—I heard the voice again, low and wet.
"Wedding night is the best sacrifice," it said. "A joyous bride tastes best. Maybe I can pick some meat tonight."
"That voice," I muttered when Niklas bent to kiss my cheek. "It keeps saying... eat."
"Eat?" He smiled, play-acting concern. "Eat? I can feed you myself tonight."
I tried to laugh it away.
Later, in our bridal suite, the room full of roses and red silk, I watched Niklas pour wine. He wanted us to drink, to drink to vows he knew were not enough to bind us in the way he needed.
"Drink," he said, bright. "Come on, our new life."
"I don't want to," I lied, and hugged him instead. "I'm tired."
"That's fine." He smoothed my hair. "Sleep. I'll tend to you."
I slept like a stone and woke to thunder and the terrible flash of a huge shape crossing our window. I told him. He said I must have seen wrong. He told me I was tired. He kissed my neck and told me, half-joking, half-mean, "You promised you'd like me the way I am. Don't look around."
The morning after the storm, a stray cat lay in the garden—its belly ripped open, organs splayed like red lace. I was sickened and terrified. Niklas called the pet service and made light of it when he could not hide the way his mouth tightened.
On the way to his family home, I watched our world change into something built of stone lions and long driveways, a walled place where the trees watched. "This is their land," he said. "My family always returns here in old age."
"Looks like a private kingdom," I breathed, the word setting a cold weight in my chest.
Clear through the gates, through smiling cousins and a child's balls at the porch, the house changed. The smiles curved wrong. The guests' faces lengthened. There were more eyes than usual. The air grew sharp.
"Look at them," I told Niklas, and he looked.
"Don't be silly." He sounded tired.
But there was a scream in me. People around us—our hosts—turned like masks. Eyes went black as ink. Faces lengthened into fox mouths. I saw claws where sleeves ended. They filled the room and made sounds like delighted children.
I fainted.
I woke into Niklas' arms. "You're awake," he murmured. "Did they frighten you?"
"They are foxes," I said. "They're not people."
He laughed a little too long. "They always look like that to you. You're tired."
"Don't lie," I said. "They tried to force me to wear the bridal robe. They had..."
He kissed my eyelid. "You said you liked animals, didn't you? Even foxes."
"Not like that," I whispered.
He let me sleep. But when I wandered into the next room, a small boy pushed a trolley of food and flinched when his tail showed. He apologized in a voice young and hot with fear.
"Sir says you have to eat," the boy said. "He will punish me if you don't."
"Who is 'sir'?" I asked.
"He is our head," the child said with tears. He looked at me and added, "He likes you."
I forced a bite to keep the peace. I let the small fox children fuss over my dress, and later they ran like startled birds when I asked the name of the bride before me.
"She never smiled," one of the little foxes said. "She was eaten."
"What?" My blood turned to ice.
When Niklas helped me into the heavy red robe and placed the crown on my head, the house shook. From the trees came an animal roar. The air filled with moving shadow. Foxes began to circle. The voice was back. "She smells so good," it sighed. "He will fail if he cannot make four tails. He must feed. The old law."
The voice belonged to Laurent Payne. He had been whispering of old rites and of hearts placed on plates. He told me that consuming a bride's heart could speed a tail's growth, that it would give strength. His grin split his face.
"He wants you dead," I said.
"You're feverish," Niklas said. "Don't be silly."
He went on the stage. He made the signs. He bit my fingers and drew blood. Red ink on my skin. A gold sigil drank it. The world shifted and a huge fox eye opened behind him in the sky, slow and patient.
"Forgive me," he said then, soft like a knife. "I'm sorry."
He was sorry, he said. "If you forgive me, I'll make it right." He meant the fight with a creature bound on the hill. He meant a thousand other things. He had had plans. He had left sigils sewn into my seam, protections and traps at once, and a contract none but fox-blood could bind.
When the mountain beast—the thing I had hunted for years—broke free, the ritual cracked like glass. A horror rose: Dexter Schuster, a thing of bone and rotten light, the monster I had chased for decades. He came out in growth and fury like the smell of rot.
Niklas fought. He bled. The fighting stole the air and the sky. I did not go to his side at first. I stood on the platform and watched my husband—the man who had kissed me into safety and the man who had planned a ceremony of blood—stagger as the creature struck, as the seals they had built unraveled.
He collapsed. He said something small and human. "If we die, let us go together," he told me. "Forgive me."
I did not kill him. I could have. I did not save him either. I stood. I let the world decide for a while.
Then Laurent moved. He slunk from the crowd and laughed with the bellies of foxes. He came close and whispered—to me, to the air.
"If the husband dies, you can choose," he cooed. "You could take his life instead. Or you could help. Look at this; the blade for your hand."
He pressed a dagger into my palm. "If he will not bargain, kill him yourself," he said. "If he cannot make four tails, you could finish him and live."
He smiled like a viper. He imagined me a frightened tool. He thought himself clever: set two enemies against each other and scoop whatever he wanted.
I watched him. The boy foxes backed away. The crowd of foxes circled us like a tide.
"Why would I do that?" I asked him.
"Because I'm generous," he said, amused. "Because I want the pleasure. Because I want him weak. Because if they fall, I rise."
I remember when he climbed a windowsill to show himself brave and cruel. He tore a street cat as proof of his talent. He shoved the carcass into a doorway and called with proud hands to those who loved to gape.
The crowd murmured. Their applause was wet. Their eyes glittered like plates.
I was tired with being hunted. I was tired of fear. I decided it was time to end a hunger that had taken many lives.
I took him by the throat.
The punishment of Laurent Payne was not private. It could not be private. There were witnesses: foxes who had laughed, human-shaped faces that had twisted with hunger, the small child who had pushed the food trolley, the cousins who had first welcomed us. All of them were there when I turned Laurent into a small, screaming thing.
"Stop!" Laurent begged the moment my hand closed on his neck. At first he laughed as if this were a joke. "You're making a scene. You're ruining the ritual."
I squeezed. He felt laughter die in his throat. His eyes bulged white. The foxes around us made noises like wind through hollow bamboo.
"What do you think you are doing?" he whispered, then louder, "You beast, you can't—"
"You promised crimes," I said. "You promised corpses."
"You're mad!" he croaked. "Mad, mad—"
"You killed Jun's girl and left her in the woods," I said, naming a past he had covered with smiles. "You fed the monster. You lied to your family. You used me like a bone."
His face was changing faster than I expected. The control he had so often kept on the room slid away. Panic rippled through him like a remembered thunder. "You don't know—"
"I know everything," I said. "You fed Dexter. You fed the valley. You thought you'd take the spoil and vanish."
His bravado crumpled. He began bargaining the way frightened men do, with words soft and sudden and slick. "No! Forgive me! I can give you power! I can give you—"
The foxes leaned closer. "Give us the tail, give us the heart!" some called, their voices strangely human and entirely animal at once. "Make it quick!"
"See?" he gasped. "See? They'll forgive me if I give them—"
A small, honest sound rose from the crowd. The little boy who had brought me food stepped forward, tail tucked, eyes wide. "You hurt my mother," he said, voice trembling with a child's courage. "You told us to kill. You lied."
The crowd's mood moved. The faces that had been adoring became curious. The children were confused. The older foxes tilted their heads.
"Let him go," called one voice we had known as kin. "We are not his tools."
"Don't let him make you soft with words," another muttered. "He trades bones like coins."
Laurent's expression moved from smug to stunned, from stunned to rage, from rage to pleading, in quick stabs. He began cursing, then screaming. He tried to claw at my grip. He spat names, offered gold, offered secrets. His eyes sought Niklas like flint seeking spark, as if pleading for rescue.
"Please," he gasped. "I can help you. I can help you—"
"Then help us correctly," I said. "Stop feeding the monster."
He shouted that he had done nothing wrong, then he sobbed that he'd been wrong but could fix it. The pleas tumbled into a nasty mosaic. Around us, murmurs swelled. Some foxes moved away. Some drew closer. The little ones cried at seeing him so small.
"You're only a man when you stand high," I told him, voice low. "Now you are a man on the ground with your heart in my hand. Tell me, what do you want me to do?"
"I'll give you everything," he sobbed. "Money, jewels, my tongue—anything!"
The child who had come with the trolley spat. "You kill and call it trade. You tell lies and call it wisdom."
His words spread. The older foxes turned their pretty faces into contempt. "I never liked him," one hissed. "He thought it would be fun to watch."
"See?" another said. "He made our houses into traps."
Laurent's eyes flashed from one face to the next. His composed mask had broken into a dozen smaller faces. Each smaller face trembled with a different sound—denial, anger, hope, cunning. He tried to reach for an ally, for a pardon, for a backhand on the shoulder that would turn the tide.
"No!" he cried when the little boy stepped ahead. "Don't—"
The boy lifted his chin. "You took Julieta," he said. "You told us a story and then you ate her and hid the truth. She had a future. She wanted to be a real person."
"You little brat—" Laurent rasped.
"It was you!" another voice called. "You set her out like bait."
Suddenly a dozen hands were on Laurent. Not the hands of my full strength alone, but the hands and claws of those who had lived in the shadow of his lies. Hands that had been gentle with food platters and hands that had been cruel in gossip. They were there, and Laurent's struggles became smaller in the chorus of their condemnation.
"Look at you," I said, watching as the mask of his bravado slid into a thin film of terror. "Look at your face, Laurent. This is what you bought."
He began to weep like a man who had been found out a hundred times and finally had no space left to hide. "I can change," he said, voice ragged. "I will stop. I will—"
"No," I said. "You will not, because you think you can fix things with coins. You don't even know what 'stop' means."
A hush fell. The foxes around us looked at their leader for a moment, measuring. The little boy whispered something in the child's language, and a hush like rain answered. Then the circle closed tighter.
His head rolled back when I crushed his chest. He choked on the sound of betrayal, eyes wide and shocked as if he had never before seen a hand with the courage to end it. The crowd reacted at once.
Some began to cheer—not for killing, but for the end of his power. "Finally," hissed one old fox. Others wept—the ones who had lost to his lies. A few tried to attack me, to take the pleasure away, but the older ones stood firm. The child who had been brave clapped his small hands, tears on his face. People took out their phones and recorded; some posted without shame, some lowered their heads in shame.
Laurent's jaw worked. His last sounds were a mix of pleading and bitter laughter. "You... you are nothing," he managed. "You will be hunted..."
"I already am," I said, and dropped him. He crumpled.
When his heart stopped, the black smoke around him sputtered. His face lost color and then shape. He shriveled into ash where he had been and a small black bead—the core of his evil—rolled into my palm. I crushed it, because I could not bear the thought anyone else might find it.
There was silence for a long, heavy breath, then the open chatter of people, the angry wail of those who were relieved and those who were horrified. The child with the trolley ran to me and hugged my knees.
"Why did you do that?" Niklas asked, coming up through the smoke, chest raw and bleeding.
"Because he needed stopping in public," I said, and felt the tiredness deep inside my bones fold into something like peace.
After Laurent's death, the mountain beast and Niklas fought on. The monster was cut and burned. I killed it with the old weapons I had learned to make. The valley was cleared. Julieta Schulze's fate came to light: the body found in red, the evidence that the lies had been many and terrible. People on the outside debated gods and ghosts. They did not talk about the fox village behind the gate.
When Niklas woke, he was broken and humble. He held my hand and told me the truth: he had never truly wanted to kill me. He had wanted to keep himself alive. He had made plans he did not fully understand. He had sealed our vows to bind us, made a marriage not of law but of blood, as foxes do. He had been afraid to tell me. He had meant to protect me by protecting himself.
"I am sorry," he said over and over, and I watched him try to explain the way a man explains a map of his fear.
I looked at him, my hand in his, and I did something neither of us had expected. I forgave him in a quiet way, not because I needed to, but because the world was already too small to hold another hate. "You are a fox," I said. "So am I in more ways than one. We fought like wolves and we hurt like humans."
He smiled, crooked and true. "Then stay. Or go. Help me be better."
The red veil he had placed once on my bed later appeared on my coverlet with a small note: "For my wife." I kept it. I kept him, more because his life had become stitched with mine than because I trusted every seam.
Years later, I would walk past the hill that burned and think of Julieta and the small boy and the faces in the crowd. I would remember how Laurent's expression moved through triumph to shock to pleading to nothing. I would remember the children who clapped when the end came. I would remember how the foxes who loved the taste of easy power turned, some of them, to better things. And sometimes, on quiet nights when Niklas slept and the moon was a thin coin, I would press the red veil to my cheek and think of the way a vow takes flesh.
The End
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