The Fox Under the Hedge
Two boys lived in the house at Number Four Privet Drive. One of them had black hair, green eyes, and a scar like a lightning strike on his forehead. Hidden under a dog rose hedge, the fox dropped to her belly, her lips peeling back to expose small, sharp white teeth as her mouth opened in some parody of a vulpine laugh. She probably looked rabid, but she didn't care. Besides, this was the United Kingdom. Rabies had been eradicated here for nearly seventy years.
The fact that she could remember that, but not --
She snapped her jaws shut and sat up, no longer feeling amused. Her white-tipped tail tucked itself around her front paws. It was hot out, a dry summer. The boy was drinking water out of the hose while he was supposed to be gardening. She watched from the shade, panting yet glad for the heat all the same. The heat meant it was summer. More importantly, the heat meant it wasn't October. Halloween. She shivered despite the temperature and tried not to think of such things.
The boy. He was young, three or four maybe. She hadn't been around kids much, never wanted any of her own. She was pretty sure they shouldn't be left alone in the yard this young, or expected to do the weeding on their own. The boy was sunburnt, which indicated this wasn't the first day he had been left out here for hours. She didn't need the sun to tell her that, though. She already knew.
This boy had a famous name. His life was a story, one famous enough to be known across worlds. This boy lived in an abusive home, and had no one to help him.
She lay back down, her pointed muzzle resting between black paws as she watched him. She hadn't been able to find her way home, but she'd found her way here. At least it was somewhere she knew, somewhen she knew. She might only be able to see the briefest glimpses of Fate and Story, but she didn't need to be able to see anything to know this story. The Boy Who Lived. A world that magic was leaking into. The magic was in his blood, in his bones; she knew, she could smell it on him.
A boy in a garden drinking out of a hose. She watched until his aunt came out to shout at him and drive him back to his work, then she rose to her paws, stretched, and slipped into Faerie. She could find those places the worlds touched, now. It had taken her longer than she could comprehend to learn how to do so, but the skill was fairly earned and she had every right to use it. Faerie had taken something essential from her, but she'd be damned if she wouldn't take something from it too, even if she had to claw and bite and and tear every step of the way to do so. Faerie owed her.
Now, though, it was time to think about the boy. It wasn't true that the boy had no one, but sometimes she lied just to remind herself that she could. Lies tasted like iron, like blood. They reminded her of another time, when she was something else, more human than she was now.
The boy had a werewolf and a dog. The werewolf, she thought, lived in Wales somewhere. She wasn't sure. Either it was one more thing she had forgotten, or she had never known it. The dog was in Azkaban. The name of the place felt like a brand in her brain, and she didn't know why. She decided to start with the werewolf. It was almost the full moon, which might make it easier, and she had always wanted to visit Wales.
She followed the hidden paths along outskirts of Faerie and covered two-hundred miles before the sun rose the next morning. It felt like a week to her. Maybe it had been. Time was slippery on the outskirts, but she didn't dare go further in.
Wales was... well, it was big. There were sheep in some places, concrete and glass in others. She wandered, a fox in all but truth, and sought out the spicy scent of magic. It led her to interesting things, sometimes, but not what she was looking for. She didn't know what the scent of a werewolf was, and if there was one in Wales, he wasn't where she was looking. Wales was too big for one fox, and she wasn't even sure if he was there at all, so after the moon passed its fullness, she gave up on finding the boy's werewolf and decided to find his dog instead.
She didn't know where Azkaban was, except that it was somewhere in the North Sea. She thought it would be hard to find, given the size of a sea, but it wasn't. Azkaban was a hole through the fabric of the world. It punched clear through Faerie and to whatever was on the other side. She had never considered that there might be someplace on the other side of Faerie, a place even stranger and more alien. She could feel it even from the shore and in an instant knew she could never go to Azkaban. It wanted to eat her.
She couldn’t get the dog, but she didn't want to just leave the boy where he was. She couldn't change his Fate, she was too fey for that, but she could change how he reached it. She could make his journey a little better, perhaps.
She slunk around Cokeworth for a few days, letting her coat go ratty, a dirty fox digging through garbage bins and sniffing around doorsteps, looking for a man who had mastered the making of potions. She found his house, or at least she thought she did. It was wrapped in magic and smelled of dead plants and dead animals and regret, but she didn't see him.
It didn't matter, anyway. He wasn't a good choice.
The boy had no one to help him, and this time, the thought didn't have the bloody taste of a lie. Not quite.
She could help him. She was just a fox, but she wasn't always a fox. She could be something else, at least until the hounds came for her. That was only one night a year. The rest of the time, she could be a woman. An adult. Responsible. Couldn't she?
She thought it might be the answer. Fairies stole children all the time, and while she had only been touched by Faerie, it was close enough that it might help things along. There were stories and then there were Stories, and a fey creature stealing a human child was certainly one of the latter. Fate and Story went hand in hand. If she was smart, maybe she could fix more than she first thought.
But a boy needed a house. Clothing. Money. Food that wasn’t grown in Faerie, that wasn’t steeped in True Magic. She had none of that, but she could get it, and what she couldn't get, she could glamour. She had never wanted children, but she had never wanted them to suffer, either.
And she had always loved Stories.