Where Foxes Hunt with Wolves - K.A. Merikan Page 0,34

Yev said, whistling when the cold pinched his cheeks. He’d been afraid of allowing Ember to run free at first, but the fox didn’t want to leave his side, so he opened the door wider, and once the ginger bundle of joy skipped through the snow, Yev followed him to the side of the building. He was intelligent enough to understand that the dressing on his stump was there for his own good, which prompted Yev to remove the plastic cone already, because it seemed to irritate the fox more than the injury itself.

Ember had a weird bathroom ritual his previous owner must have instilled in him. Whenever he was to do his business, he would only go once Yev faced away, and would bark angrily if that didn’t happen. Yev indulged his new pet, because he didn’t feel there was any harm in it, while remaining wary of another quirk of Ember’s—digging.

The fox would thrash around in the snow and pick up dry branches whenever they went outside, but since Yev feared Ember might get stuck underground, he always took him back home when that happened.

If Ember had so much excess energy, maybe Yev should build him an obstacle course? Or teach him tricks? A fox was a wild animal, but there was something different about Ember, something that made Yev believe his fox was special.

This morning, Ember’s routine was taking longer than usual, but once he yelped, it was time to turn around.

“I know it sucks you can’t run around the house without me on your tail, but someone might take a shot at you. We’ll get you a collar, and a tag, and besides, you’ll be safe with me. I just wonder how it’ll all go down with my family,” Yev said with an exhale before facing the little guy.

The fox sat in the snow, a ball of ginger fluff next to… a row of sticks arranged to form the phrase ‘I HVMAN’. He made a sound that was somewhere between a bark and a whine, and tapped the snow with his tail, staring at Yev as if he were expecting a reaction.

Heat burst into Yev’s skull while his knees weakened as if they’d been stuffed full of cotton. What the fuck? He’d have sworn the word hadn’t been there moments ago, but his brain wouldn’t accept the impossible and prompted Yev to look for footprints other than his own and Ember’s.

There were none.

He could barely breathe as the little fox glanced at him with eyes that now seemed to radiate wisdom beyond that of an animal.

The trees above hummed as the breeze cooled Yev’s cheeks, but Ember didn’t walk off to play in the snow.

He kept staring.

“Was… was that you?” Yev asked, feeling like a complete idiot asking an animal this kind of question.

Any other person would have dismissed this moment as an extremely unusual accident or a case of their brain assigning meaning to a random collection of twigs, but unlike any other person, Yev wasn’t human. He was a werewolf, and knew that there was more to the world than met the eye. If his kind existed, so could another sentient species. A witch lived in the valley, and forest gods walked the earth, so why could this—Ember’s human-like intelligence—not be just as real?

The fox nodded, and the gesture now looked painfully sentient. Yev couldn’t have been more embarrassed about letting Ember sit with him at the table last night. He’d even talked to the fox about how cute he was, how Yev would only feed him the best food, and how he’d make him an outdoor playpen in the spring. He’d also let Ember curl up next to his naked body and rubbed his tummy as if he were a dog. Why would a cursed human want any of that?

Still, he’d never heard about a human turned into a fox, so he looked around, both embarrassed and worried what this might imply and spoke, “Write ‘y’, so I’m sure,” he tried, because Ember could just be trained to perform this one freaky trick.

The fox huffed, but got to it right away. He picked up a longer twig, put it in the snow in front of Yev, then ran off for a smaller one and arranged them to form the required letter. He glanced up at Yev, then back into the snow, and slowly wrote ‘ev’ with the tip of his nose. It now dawned on Yev what Ember’s messing in the snow must