My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 154: My Fire Fox Went Looking For A Before She Never Had

Maren found him after the floor closed for the night.

She didn’t knock.

She came into the room where he was sitting and stood in the middle of it with her hands still smelling of smoke, and she didn’t sit down.

"I’ve never asked," she said.

Soren waited.

"Where the fox came from. I’ve never once asked it. Not in my whole life."

◆◆◆◆

She started moving then, small steps, the pacing she fell into when the fire wanted out and she was holding it in.

"I know the girl," Maren said. "I know everything about the girl. I know her name and I know the town she died in and I know what she liked to eat and I know she had a sister who cried at the funeral I wasn’t awake for yet."

"You took her after."

"I took her after. That part I know cold."

She stopped.

"But the fox. The thing that walked into her. I have never once asked where that came from. It was just always me. I was always the fox. A fox doesn’t have a town."

◆◆◆◆

Soren watched her circle the room.

He’d known this about her from the start, that the girl was a coat and the fox was the body under it, and he’d never once thought to wonder about the body either.

That was the thing the delegate had done.

He hadn’t asked Maren a question about the girl. Everyone asked about the girl. The girl was the interesting part, the tragedy, the story with a shape.

The delegate had asked about the fox, and nobody had ever asked about the fox, because the fox was supposed to be the simple part.

"He looked at me and saw a line," Maren said. "I don’t have a line. Foxes don’t have lines. We’re just born wild in a wood somewhere and we take what we take."

"Is that true?"

She stopped again.

"I don’t know," she said. "That’s the problem. I said it my whole life and I never once checked if it was true."

◆◆◆◆

She sat down finally, on the edge of the bed, and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

Not to cry. Crying wasn’t a thing Maren did. She covered her eyes to have somewhere to look that wasn’t the room.

"Everybody’s got a before," she said into her palms. "Selah’s got a before. Dani’s got parents she doesn’t talk to. Even Yara’s got the wolf that was before the girl she wears. Everybody’s got a floor under them."

"And you."

"I go down and there’s nothing there. I go down looking for where the fox started and it just stops. There’s no bottom. There’s a girl, and above the girl there’s me, and under me there’s supposed to be a fox from somewhere, and when I reach for the somewhere my hand goes through it."

She dropped her hands from her face and looked at them.

"You know what’s worse than not having a before," she said. "Not knowing you didn’t have one. I walked around for years thinking I was the simple one. I was the easy girl. The fox who eats and burns and doesn’t overthink it."

"Nobody thinks you’re simple."

"I thought I was simple. That’s the point. I built the whole of me on being the one thing in this pack that didn’t have a hidden floor. Then one border-crossing stranger asked me four words, and the floor wasn’t there."

"Four words didn’t take your floor. They showed you it was already gone."

Maren laughed, short, with no funny in it.

"That’s supposed to help?"

"No. It’s supposed to be true. You can decide later if it helps."

She looked at him for a long moment.

"You always do that. You take the thing I’m scared of and you say it flat, like it’s a fact on a table."

"Because it is. And a thing on a table can be picked up and looked at. A thing you keep in your chest just sits there and burns."

◆◆◆◆

Soren got up.

He crossed the room and crouched in front of her, and he took her hands down off her face, one at a time, and held them.

They were warm. Maren’s hands ran warm the same as the rest of her, and tonight they ran hot, close to the edge of what her skin could hold without letting the fire through.

"Then we find the bottom," Soren said.

"There isn’t one."

"You don’t know that. You just told me you never checked. That’s not the same as there isn’t one."

Maren looked at him.

"You’re making it a project."

"I’m making it ours. You’ve been standing on a hole your whole life and calling it a floor because you were the only one looking at it. Now two of us are looking."

◆◆◆◆

She let out a breath.

Some of the heat went out of her hands with it.

"You don’t have an answer," she said.

"No."

"You’re just going to stand on the hole with me."

"Until we find the bottom or find out there isn’t one. Either way you’re not doing it alone anymore."

Maren was quiet for a while.

Her hands stayed in his and cooled by degrees, and the room was quiet around them, and the smoke smell in her hair was the only thing left of the floor she’d worked all day.

◆◆◆◆

Then the fire came.

It wasn’t a flare. It was small, a thread of flame that lifted off the back of her right hand where it lay in his. Her fire idled up on its own sometimes, when her feeling ran ahead of her control, and this had the look of that.

Except the color was wrong.

Maren’s fire was orange going gold, warm, the color of a hearth. Soren had watched it a hundred times and knew every shade it moved through.

This thread wasn’t orange.

It came up a deep blue-white at the root, a color Soren had never once seen her make, a color that did not belong to a hearth or a fox or anything he’d read in his book about fire-fused beasts.

It burned for less than a second.

Then it went out, and Maren’s hand was just a hand again, warm and cooling in his, and she hadn’t seen it because she’d been looking at him.

Soren said nothing.

He had no shelf for the color. No name for it. No book that had ever mentioned it.

He ran back through everything he’d memorized about fire-fused beasts, the whole catalog the novel had given him, and none of it held a blue-white root. Fox fire was warm. Fox fire had always been warm. Warm was the entire point of a fox.

A fire that burned cold at the root was not a fox’s fire.

It was something the fox had been carrying under the warm, the same as Maren had been carrying a hole under the floor, and it had lifted its head for one second when she’d said out loud that the floor wasn’t there.

He held her hand in the quiet.

He did not tell her that her own fire had just answered the question she couldn’t ask. She had enough tonight. A hole with no bottom was enough. She did not need to know that something down in the hole had just looked back up at her.

"Stay here tonight," he said.

"I wasn’t going to ask."

"I know. I’m telling you so you don’t have to."

Maren leaned into his shoulder, and her hand stayed in his, and the blue did not come again while he watched for it.