Biking home was shit.

  It was about forty blocks. Normally no big deal. I’d ridden my bike to classes and then to Binsa’s apartment, and our city has safe bike lanes for the most part, except for when I have to go around all the delivery trucks that consider bike lanes as parking opportunities, and of course the random pedestrians that wander into the bike lanes whenever the sidewalks get too busy. Nothing too terrible for an alert biker. But I ran into something unexpected.

  A murderer.

  Though at first it was the foxes.

  Just past the climbing gym, when I was idly admiring a pair of lanky women leaned up against the outside wall, a fox darted out from behind a car and loped across my path.

  “What?” I said. “Fox?” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Foxes don’t live in the city. Was it an escaped pet? The fox continued loping at half speed, just ahead of my bike, for the better part of a block.

  I tried to take a photo I could post online, maybe get the two rock climbers to send a reply of, “Oh wow! We saw that too! We should get together and talk about it in the nude!” It was an easy kind of whimsical fantasy, watching that fox run along the bike lane in the city, because everything felt unreal. Even otherworldly.

  I could hear the padding of the fox’s paws on the painted green concrete of the bike lane, and hear its breath above the sounds of the traffic. Then the fox darted beneath a parked VW van and I continued biking, having failed to get a photo. Nobody else seemed to notice the fox, too absorbed in their own worlds to notice the creature in their midst.

  Three blocks later I saw a different fox. It had a darker coat, a mixture of blacks and tans. It was perched atop a newspaper box, staring at me as I went past, ignoring everyone else, and being ignored in turn. I thought about stopping to take its photo, but something about seeing a second fox sent warning bells down my spine. I pedaled faster.

  A few blocks further, just as I was passing Fat Frog Café, I saw a line of foxes moving along the sidewalk, winding their way in and out of the various pedestrians’ legs, all of whom seemed oblivious to the presence of these sleek creatures, even when the foxes made sharp yipping noises as I cycled past. Their teeth looked sharp. The sounds of the city faded. I couldn’t hear any cars. No horns. No people and no music. There was nothing left but the sound of my own breath. The wind. My tires rolling over the concrete. The padding of fox paws. The yips and the howls.

  Three blocks further on, with me increasingly exhausted from how I was now pedaling like crazy, I saw three foxes blocking the bike lane ahead. Eyes unblinking. Tails twitching. Watching my approach.

  The world turned gray and the air turned harsh.

  Then the man with the blurry face walked out from behind… nothing. He simply stepped out of midair to join the foxes. He was the same as he’d been on the day my father died. The same clothes. The same blur. He held up his hand and motioned me to stop.

  “Fuck that,” I whispered. Everything felt wrong. There was a sliver of open space outside the bike lane, and I nudged my wheel and leaned to the left and . . . not a damn thing happened. My bike kept rolling adamantly forward. I squeezed the brakes and they didn’t care.

  “Fuck this,” I said, and leapt off my bike, crashing and rolling to a stop that was aided in a rather abrupt fashion by a parked delivery truck, thumping my head into a tire. My whole body burned for escape. I scrambled on all fours and noticed the foxes padding forward in a line, intent and menacing.

  “Josh Hester,” the man with the blurred face said.

  “That’s not me,” I told him, scrambling backward, watching as my bike slowly came to a stop. It didn’t fall over, though. It stayed upright. Fuck that. Fuck everything. My lungs were ragged.

  “It’s you,” the man said. “We have business.” His voice was a broken thing pieced back together. It hurt to listen.

  I ran.

  But it was like one of those dreams where you’re running but your whole body is anchored to one spot. Your feet keep trudging, each step demanding more effort than you can bear, but you push on, and it still doesn’t matter because you’re not making any progress. You’re being cheated. I was running as fast as I could, but the man with the blurred face caught up to me while walking at a leisurely pace. He put his hand on my shoulder. My chest went numb. It felt like my heart would seize.

  I tried to punch him.

  He deflected the blow with ease, guiding my fist to one side with the back of his hand. My arm went numb.

  “You have something of mine,” he stated.

  “Did you kill my dad?” I screamed. I thought everyone would notice what was happening, but the gray world around me plodded along in oblivious fashion, like I wasn’t a part of it anymore. Nobody even looked in my direction.

  “I only cemented decisions he’d already made. But that’s no matter. He was nothing consequential. You know that, right? You know your father was nothing?”

  Despite how the man’s entire face was a blur, I could feel his eyes burning into mine. I could feel my will turning to his. Maybe Dad really had deserved to die on the floor of that bar, with the bullets in his chest? It was absolutely true that he was nothing. His end was fitting, lacking any tragedy.

  My mind fought to filter out the man’s thoughts and stamp them down, but they kept seeping inside. I wasn’t winning this fight.

  “You have something of mine,” the man repeated. The foxes gathered around us.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “I don’t have anything,” I said. “What could I have?”

  “Salena gave you something,” the blurred man said. “Before she died she—” But at that moment one of the foxes let out a terrible, fierce howl. Blacks and reds swirled in the misty blur of the man’s face as he glanced down to the fox. The other foxes joined in, creating a chorus of howls.

  “Damn it,” he said. “Another time, then.”

  He put his hand on my chest. I was too numb to avoid him, like a puppet hanging from strings. There was a terrible pain in my chest where he touched me. Murmurs came from his blurred lips.

  “One month,” he spoke after some few moments.

  “One… month?”

  “Before the foxes join,” he said. Then he tore my shirt from my chest, revealing that he’d burnt me, a dark mass of blackened scar tissue almost like a tattoo, formed into the shape of a fox. “A binding spell,” the man explained. “One fox. Two. And three.” He touched me as he spoke, first touching the scar on my chest and then identical ones that had appeared on my forearms, all three in the shape of foxes.

  “Give me what Salena gave you,” the man said, staring in my eyes. “You have one month. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t understand a fucking thing!” I told him.

  “I have to leave now,” he said. “And you have one month to give me what is mine. If not, then… I’m quite sorry, but you’d leave me no choice. The three foxes will meet. And you will burn, as did Salena before you.”

  With that, he simply vanished. The foxes darted away, lost to the traffic and the crowds. The colors returned to the world. The sounds returned to my ears. I couldn’t catch my breath and I still felt numb.

  My bike fell over and I began to puke.

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  I woke that night to a knife at my throat.

  “Don’t move,” a man’s voice said. It was nothing like the voice of the blurred man. That was a relief, I suppose, but I still had a knife at my throat. My room was much darker than it should’ve been. My throat felt like it was sweating. The knife was cold and sharp.

  “I’m a friend,” the voice said.

  “Hate to point out the obvious, but you have an unfriendly knife at my throat.” It was a lot of talking for a man with a knife at his throat, but I hadn’t been asleep for more than a couple hours, meaning I was still under the arrogant influence of the bourbon I’d been drinking all night, acting like a burning throttle for my mood.

  After I’d come home from helping my sister with her mattresses and then getting tattooed by a supernatural blur, I’d stared in horror at the mirror for a couple hours, looking to myself and those tattoos or scars or whatever the fuck they were.

  I’d poked at them with the point of a paring knife, trying to disbelieve them. I showered at length, idiotically hoping they’d wash away. They didn’t. There’d been nothing to do but run for the bourbon. I’d stood naked in my kitchen, drinking straight from the bottle.

  Afterward, I wrote out all my memories of the stories Salena had told me, with the rapidly diminishing bottle of bourbon acting as my constant companion during this literary outburst. I wrote and I drank. The tapping of the computer keys was calming. The sounds felt real. The bourbon was a flame inside me.

  After I’d written down everything I could remember, I didn’t know what to do. I’d stood with the dagger from Goncourt clutched in my hand for almost ten minutes, staring at the section of the wall in my old bedroom, where I now knew I could open a door and step into another world to begin my search for a blurred murderer.

  Luckily, I wasn’t quite that drunk, or at least not drunk enough to go it alone, though I did open the door and call out into the meadow, yelling Molly’s name, but getting no answer. So I’d closed the door and put down the dagger and picked up the bottle and started drinking again while looking at internet porn, which was maybe not the antics of any epic hero, but I was in a mood.

  Afterward, I’d showered again, keeping my eyes closed so I couldn’t see the tattoos. Then I thanked the bourbon for spending the night with me, finally sprawling into bed for what turned out to be a short nap before waking with the blade at my throat.

  My bed shifted. Someone was moving around. But the knife was still at my throat, unmoving. It was unthinkably dark in my room. It had never been that dark before.

  Whenever the bed shifted, I could see some sort of figure above me, but it was no more than the shadow of a shadow. Had the guards from the Leaky Centaur found me? What were the rules for people sneaking in through the magic doorway in my old bedroom? I should’ve put out bear traps. I should’ve been smarter, but I’d been dumb, and now it looked like I wasn’t getting a second chance.

  “This is where Salena used to live?” the grave-like voice asked.

  “No. Next door. I’m the one who used to live here.”

  “If you used to live here, why are you here now?”

  “Ahh. I still live here. I mean, no. I used to live here and now I live here again.”

  “Why are you so nervous?”

  “Because you have a goddamn knife at my throat, asshole.”

  “Oh. Do I? Shit. I shouldn’t. Sorry.” The blade was removed. I remained motionless, waiting to see if it would return and wondering if I should leap to the attack. Maybe this was my only chance.

  The darkness receded into normal darkness. I could make out the figure of a man.

  “You’re Josh Hester, right?” the voice asked.

  “Yes. No. Maybe? I’m not supposed to give my name.” I was doing really well.

  “Wise,” the voice said. “When you give your true name, the spectral tendrils of Fate reach out for you, and Her iron grasp shall be your bane.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I always say, too. Listen, you mind if I turn on a light? Also, would you mind leaving?”

  “I’ll get the light. But I won’t leave until I’ve had my say.” The bed shifted. I expected the lamp on my bedside table to flick on, but instead there was the flare of a match. The man held it up to his face.

  He was a short man, grizzled and wiry, but with evident muscle. His eyes were sunken. His lips were a thin line. He had bushy sideburns and scars on his face, dotted burns that had long since healed, and two cuts in one cheek that looked more recent. The dancing light of the match played over his sharp features. He wore leather armor, marked with dirt, grease, and what looked like blood.

  “I’m Gerik,” he said. “I can’t give you my last name. I wouldn’t if I could, but it doesn’t matter because I can’t. I’m an unknown child, found in the ruins of a charred cart outside the village of Tavenstott. The bones of the horses were exposed, as wolves had been eating at their bellies, and the birds had been at their eyes. The bodies of my family were in a similar state. But not from wolves, no. It wasn’t those beasts. Because a wolf won’t eat where a ghoul has been feeding. The marks on the bones of my family were from human teeth. Or from creatures that had been human, once. I myself was alive, bathed in the dried blood of my family, having been tucked inside a cheap wooden chest at some point, with the wood so thin that the blood of my kin had soaked through and stained my face.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I whispered.

  “I was raised by nothing and no one,” the man continued, sheathing the knife he’d held to my throat. “One house to another. Always hungry. Searching. Remembering the howls of the wolves and the grunting gnashing of the ghouls. I killed my first ghoul when I was eleven, Josh Hester. Do you know what I used?”

  “Uh. A knife?” It seemed a fair guess.

  “My teeth,” he said.

  That hung there for a bit.

  “These very teeth,” he said, tapping on them, his lips pulled back.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I just kept ripping at his flesh. I didn’t swallow, of course. They’re poisonous.”

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “I can still feel the moment when its life force faded, with his foul festering body pitching and heaving in my hands, my face buried in his neck, and my left hand plunging up through the cavity of his leathery stomach, reaching inside to grab his black heart and yank the cursed thing from where it was moored.”

  “God damn,” I said.

  “You have anything to eat?” Gerik asked. “Some chips or something? Nothing too salty?”