Copper Eyes

"Who are you," you say, "and how did you get in my apartment?"

It comes out lower and steadier than you feel. Your eyes go to the door. Locked, the chain still on. Then to the window over Depot Street. Shut. Then back to her, because it's hard to look anywhere else.

"You carried me in," she says. "Up the stairs. You hit my tail on the railing. I forgive you."

"I carried a fox."

"Yes."

"You're not a fox."

She tilts her head. It's a small movement, quick and precise, and something about it makes the skin on the back of your neck prickle. You've seen that exact angle. Last night. On your kitchen table.

"Not at the moment," she agrees.

The eggs pop in the pan. She flinches and reaches to pull it off the burner, and her fingers close around the handle, and she hisses and lets go. The pan clatters onto the stovetop. She shakes her hand, and when she holds it up to look at it you can see angry red welts rising across her fingertips. Not a normal burn. It looks like she grabbed a nettle.

"Cast iron," she says, through her teeth. "You might have warned me."

"It's a frying pan."

"It's iron. Your whole house is iron. Your whole shop downstairs is a box of iron." She sucks on her fingertips and glares at the pan like it insulted her mother. "Your grandfather knew exactly what he was doing."

You open your mouth. Close it. "How do you know about my grandfather?"

She doesn't answer that. Instead she turns away from you, hooks a thumb in the hem of your shirt, and lifts it a few inches on the left side, matter-of-fact as anything, to show you her hip.

There's a wound there. Fresh, pink, puckered. Eight small dots on either side where stitches were until very recently. Exactly where Della put them in the fox.

You sit down on the kitchen chair. Your legs make the decision for you.

"I took them out," she says, letting the shirt drop. "They itched. Your friend does good work. Tell her I said so." A pause. "Don't tell her I said so. She'll ask questions."

"I'm asking questions."

"You're allowed. You're the one I owe."

Her name is Briar Larkin. She tells you this while she scrapes the ruined eggs into the trash with a wooden spoon, holding it like a fencing foil, and makes you sit while she tries again. The second batch is worse.

"Larkin," you repeat.

"I took it from a bird. A long time ago. It suited me." She sniffs the pan. "Is this how they're meant to smell?"

"No."

"Then I'll try a third time."

"Please don't."

She laughs. It's a startled, bright sound, as if laughing surprised her too. She leans back against your counter and folds her arms and looks at you with those coins for eyes, and you realize you've stopped being frightened somewhere in the last ten minutes and started being something else that's harder to name.

"How old are you?" you ask.

"Three hundred and forty. Roughly. We weren't careful with years back then."

"You look twenty-five."

"Thank you. I work very hard at it." Her mouth curves. "That was a joke. I don't work at it at all."

"Okay." You rub your face with both hands. "Okay. Say I believe you."

"You don't have to say it. You will." She pushes off the counter and crosses to the window. The morning light hits her and you see it: a faint shimmer on her skin, on her forearms and her throat, green and pale like moonlight through leaves. It flickers and fades as she turns. "That happens when I'm nervous," she says, without looking at you. "Or afraid. Or happy. It's very inconvenient. Foxfire."

"You're nervous?"

"I've never done this before."

"Made eggs?"

"Owed someone." She turns back. All the teasing is gone from her face. "Listen to me, Ethan, because this part is law, not opinion. You pulled me out of that water when I was finished. Another minute and I'd have been nothing. That's a life saved. By the old laws, a life saved is a life owed. I have forty nights to repay it."

"Repay it how?"

She doesn't answer.

"And if you don't?"

"Then on the forty-first morning I'll be a fox. Just a fox. No voice, no hands, nothing in my head but hunger and weather." She says it the way someone else might say then I'll miss my bus. "The debt eats you if you hold it."

You stare at her. "That's insane."

"That's the law."

"Then go. Go do whatever you need to do. You don't owe me anything."

"That's very sweet," she says, "and it doesn't work like that. I go where the debt goes. Until it's paid, I can't be farther from you than the end of this street without feeling like I'm being pulled apart." She tilts her head again, that fox angle. "So. I'm staying. I'll need the couch. And more of your shirts. This one's very soft."

"You can't just move in."

"I already have," she says reasonably. "You carried me."

You make the eggs. She watches you do it as if you're performing surgery, leaning so close over your shoulder that you can smell her hair: rain and cold pine and something warm underneath, like a woodstove.

"You're good at this," she says.

"It's eggs."

"I've been alive a very long time and nobody has ever made me eggs." She takes the plate from you with both hands. Then she takes a bite, closes her eyes, and makes a sound that is frankly not appropriate for breakfast.

You have to turn around and look at the refrigerator for a while.

When you turn back she's watching you with a small, knowing smile, and her forearms are glowing very faintly green.

"Inconvenient," she says.

"You said."

She sits at your kitchen table where she was lying, bleeding, eight hours ago, cross-legged on the chair in your flannel shirt, and eats every bite. She asks what the toaster is for. She asks why the radio has no knob. You show her the radio is your phone, and she holds your phone up to her ear and listens to it very seriously and then hands it back and says, "There's no one in there."

You start laughing. You can't help it. It's the first time you've laughed since March, and it comes out rusty and too loud, and she watches you with her head tilted like she's memorizing the sound.

"There," she says softly. "That's better."

Somebody knocks on the apartment door.

You both freeze. Three sharp raps, then a voice through the wood. "Ethan? It's me. I brought the antibiotics. I didn't want you driving to the clinic on no sleep."

Della.

You stand up so fast your chair scrapes. "Don't," you whisper. "Stay here. Let me just..."

But Briar is already up, light and quick and barefoot, crossing your living room in your shirt with her hair loose down her back. She's at the door before you've finished the sentence. She undoes the chain. She opens it.

Della stands on the landing with a paper bag in her hand and her mouth falling slowly open.

Briar leans one shoulder on the doorframe and looks her up and down with total, ancient calm.

"He's mine now," she says. "Who are you?"