My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 153: He Asked My Fire Fox Where Her Line Came From and She Didn’t Have An Answer

The delegate stopped at the edge of Maren’s floor and waited for her to finish.

That was the first thing Soren clocked as he came up on her flank.

The man did not interrupt the fire.

He stood with his hands folded and watched the showcase run to its end, and there was courtesy in the waiting.

Real courtesy.

The patience of a person who considered it beneath him to break another person’s work.

Maren finished the sequence.

The fire she’d been shaping folded back into her hands and went out.

The small crowd gave the scattered applause people give a thing they enjoyed without understanding, and Maren wiped her palms on her apron and finally looked at the man who’d been waiting.

"You’re not here for the fire," she said.

"I enjoyed the fire."

"That’s not what I said."

◆◆◆◆

The delegate inclined his head, a small concession.

"No," he said. "It isn’t. Forgive me. My name would mean nothing to you, so I’ll spare us both. I’m with the delegation. We were invited under the openness banner, and I take openness seriously, which the rest of my colleagues do not."

His voice was even and unhurried and carried the faint shape of somewhere else, a first language worn down under years of this one.

Soren reached Maren’s side.

The delegate’s eyes moved to him for exactly as long as it took to file him and moved back to Maren, and the filing was polite and complete and gave nothing.

"You’re her tamer," the delegate said, not quite a question.

"I am."

"Then you’ll want to hear this too."

He returned his attention to Maren, and the attention was the thing Soren could not stop watching, because it was wrong for the setting.

A man at a festival looking at a fire showcase looked at the fire.

This man was not looking at Maren’s fire.

He’d dismissed the fire already, a talent, a trick, a thing the academy had put on a floor to be admired.

He was looking at Maren herself, at the line of her, the set of her shoulders, the color that came up under her skin when she’d been working the flame.

It was the look a breeder gives stock at a fence.

Assessment, not admiration.

A face being matched against a description, and found to match.

"You burn clean," the delegate said. "Cleaner than the fusion should allow. Do you know that?"

"I burn how I burn."

"Yes. I imagine you do."

◆◆◆◆

Maren’s tail-end of a smile went out.

She was not slow.

Soren had never once found her slow, whatever the pack teased her for, and she’d caught the same wrongness he had, a beat behind him but she’d caught it.

A stranger studying her this closely was a stranger who thought he knew something about her.

"You keep looking at me like you’ve met me," Maren said.

"I’ve met your kind of fire. Once. A long time ago and a long way from here." The delegate folded his hands the other way. "It’s why I came to the floor. I heard there was a fox-fused on the Class Z roster and I did not believe the report, because the fire in the report burned cleaner than a fox-fusion burns, and I had only felt fire that clean one other time in my life."

"Lucky you."

"Not lucky. It’s a rare thing. So rare I crossed a border to see whether the report was wrong."

He tilted his head.

"It wasn’t wrong."

"You said once," Maren said. "You felt it once. Where?"

"Somewhere I won’t name, before you were wearing that face. I couldn’t say by how much." The delegate’s tone stayed light, conversational, a man discussing weather. "It doesn’t matter where. What matters is that clean fire runs in a line. It doesn’t just appear. A fox-fusion gives you fire, yes, but it gives you the fox’s fire, wild at the edges, dirty in the burn. Yours isn’t dirty. Yours came refined before it ever met a fox."

"That doesn’t mean anything."

"It means a great deal to the people who refine it." He said it gently, and the gentleness was the sharpest thing about him. "I’m not one of them, if that reassures you. I’m only a man who felt that fire once and never forgot the feel of it, and spent a long time wondering where the other end of the line went."

Maren’s jaw set.

"There’s no line. I’m a fox. I took fire because foxes take fire."

"Of course." The delegate smiled, small and closed. "Forgive me. I forget that a person doesn’t always know what they’re standing on."

◆◆◆◆

Soren felt the trap in the courtesy before he could name its shape.

The man was building toward something.

Every polite sentence had been a step, and the steps had all been leading Maren somewhere, and Soren could see the destination coming without being able to see what waited at it.

He almost cut in.

He didn’t, because cutting in would tell the delegate that Soren had seen the trap, and a trap you’d seen was worth more left open, so you could watch what the other man reached for.

The delegate asked his question gently.

"Where did you say your line was from," he said, "before the fox?"

Maren opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

Soren watched it hit her.

The question went in past the easy answer she reached for first and found nothing behind it.

Because she did not have a line before the fox.

She had been the fox.

The body she wore had belonged to a dead girl before she ever wore it, and that girl was a thing she never thought about, and no one had ever once asked her where she came from.

"Before the fox?" Maren said.

"Yes."

"I don’t."

She stopped.

She’d been about to say I don’t know what you mean.

The sentence came apart in the middle.

Somewhere in the saying of it she’d understood that she didn’t know what she meant either, that the question had a floor she couldn’t find the bottom of, that she had a before and had never once looked at it.

Soren stepped in then.

"She’s due back on the floor," he said. "The showcase runs on a schedule."

"Of course." The delegate straightened, and the courtesy came back over him smooth and total. "Forgive me. It was only a question."

He gave Maren a small bow, correct and complete.

"It was good to confirm the report," he said, and he turned and walked back into the crowd, and Maren stood on her floor with her hands still smelling of smoke and a hole open in her where an answer should have been.

Maren tried to laugh it off.

Soren watched her reach for the laugh and watched the laugh not come.

"That was nothing," she said. "That was a weird man being weird. Delegates are weird. You said they’d be weird."

"I said the fourth one wasn’t in my book."

"So he’s weird and you can’t spoiler him. Big deal." She wiped her palms again, though they were already clean. "I take fire because I’m a fox. That’s the whole story. There’s no before."

"Maren."

"There’s no before, Soren."

She said it too fast, and she heard the speed of it in her own mouth, and the hearing was worse than the question had been.

She looked at him.

"Where’s my line from," she said. "Before the fox?"

Soren did not have an answer for her either.