Paying the Piper

Twenty, Part 2: Answers to Forgotten Questions

My world spun and darkness crept at the edges of my vision as my focus turned inward. Of course. How had I been so dense? I already knew I was cursed because I had been promised to Dorian. So this, then, was why.

"So..." I stopped, piecing it together. Aurora, my birth mother, made a deal with the devil, so to speak, for Derek to fall in love with her. They lived together in peace and tranquility, and my mom must've gotten pregnant at some point, and then Dorian pulled the Rumpelstiltskin act and turned up, saying she owed him her firstborn child.

"She refused." Cale took over the story, maybe because he wasn't ashamed of this part of the tale, or maybe because this was the part he knew for sure. "She wouldn't give you to Dorian, and she fled. She turned back into a fox and gave birth to you as a fox. This was a slight gray area in the deal. When Dorian and Aurora made the deal, it had been when she was in human form, and the binding of the deal related to her being human. If she remained fox, she thought, she could keep herself and you from the curse."

But what about my dad? He had just lost his wife and child so suddenly? Unknowingly?

When I asked about that, Potomah tilted her head and studied me. "Aurora could not keep herself from returning to Derek. She had to know if he still loved her. Surely, she thought, he had grown to love her even if Dorian's initial forced love had been broken. If it turned out Derek did still love her, she was ready to admit the truth to him."

I couldn't anticipate where this was going. Ever since I remembered, Dad had never mentioned having a previous wife. Mom—Lorie—had never indicated she was anything other than my birth mother. Could it be that she was my mom and had just changed her name to escape the curse?

"Aurora was mistaken. The spell had been broken," Potomah said, breaking any such optimism from my thoughts. Did I just imagine the glee she had in telling this part of the story? "And Derek no longer loved her. In fact, he couldn't understand why he had ever fallen under Aurora's spell to begin with, when he was betrothed to another. He went back to his true love and did his best to forget Aurora. He didn't know you existed. Or rather, he presumed you were dead."

I felt nauseous, like I had spun on a merry-go-round for hours. If he had abandoned all thought of Aurora, why was I even with him? And did he truly love me, or was he forced to take me in since he was my biological father and I presumably had no other living relatives?

"Since Aurora took human form to return to Derek, the curse caught up with her. As she fled from his presence, his love for her evaporated, she was hit by a car. Or perhaps she willingly stepped in the path of the car now that her lover had abandoned her."

Cale scowled at Potomah. "Faye, my parents always said it was a tragic accident caused by the curse. She would never have abandoned you intentionally."

So then Cale's parents took me in. We were of the same fox clan, so it was for the best. They could raise me with their own children, and I would know how to shift form. Even as a young child, I knew they were my adoptive parents, but I was too young to know the story of my own parents.

But then the day came when I lost my fox pelt. I could remember the pain of it like a phantom limb. We kids begged to go to the local playground, where we could leave our fox skins off and play like regular human children. Looking back, we treated our second skins like they were mere coats. Take it off, leave it in a pile on the ground, forget about it until we needed it later. The benefit of being young and unworried.

Except when we went back to put our fox skins on, mine was missing.

Cale's parents did their best to scent it out, but the trail just vanished. It must have gone into the In-between.