Xiao Ru

But the surface upon which I now lay was not the hard, violet brick of that unholy city. It was soft, damp earth, and the air, far from being sterile, was rich with the smell of moss and decaying leaves. I opened my eyes to a canopy of colossal trees, their branches so densely interwoven that they created a perpetual, emerald twilight.

And looming over me, framed against this dappled light, was the face of a woman. Her hair was a dark black and pleasing tangle, with messy bangs that fell across her brow, and her eyes were impossibly large and dark, like pools of violet ink, regarding me with an artless and unnerving curiosity. It was only as my vision cleared further that I perceived the feature which marked her as a creature not of my world, nor of any I could have imagined. For rising from the crown of her head, peeking through the dark strands of her hair, were two ears—delicate, pointed, and covered in a fine, dark fur. They were, unmistakably, the ears of a fox.

The sight of those unnatural ears sent a violent start through my whole frame, and I pushed myself into a sitting position with a strength born of pure alarm. But the effort was too great for my enfeebled state. A wave of vertigo washed over me, and the emerald world swam before my eyes in a nauseating whirl. I fell back against the damp earth with a groan.

A light, musical peel of laughter, like the chiming of small bells, met my failure. In the next moment, a pair of surprisingly strong hands took hold of my shoulders, gently but firmly helping me to sit upright once more. “You must not move so quickly,” a voice said. It was as smooth as polished river stones, yet possessed of a high, melodic timbre.

I confess, the sound was not entirely unpleasant; there was a disarming, almost childish sweetness to it that warred with the reluctance I felt at her touch. I shrank from her grasp, though I had not the strength to pull away entirely. And it was only then, as the meaning of her words settled into my consciousness, that a new and far more dreadful question began to form. For I had understood her. I had understood her as clearly as if she had spoken in my own native tongue, and a chilling perplexity, more terrifying than her strange appearance, began to creep into the forefront of mind’s eye.

My mouth opened as if to form a question, but no sound came forth. All power of speech, and indeed of coherent thought, seemed to have deserted me. I could only stare, dumbfounded, at the strange and cheerful apparition before me.

It was only then that I truly began to perceive her attire. She wore a loose-fitting robe of the purest white, with wide, flowing sleeves, bound at the waist over a pair of voluminous trousers of a deep and striking blue. It was the vestment of some manner of priestess, I thought, a ceremonial garb that seemed wholly out of place in this wild, sylvan setting. Her hair, a vibrant noir that caught the dappled light, framed a face of startling innocence, and from its depths, two delicate, pointed fox ears, also the colour of blue-black twilight, twitched with an innocent curiosity.

And then my gaze was drawn to a new and even more astonishing feature. From the small of her back, a great, bushy tail, the same rich black as her hair and tipped with white, emerged from an opening in her robes. It swayed back and forth with a slow, happy rhythm as she continued to inspect me, her wide, dark eyes never leaving my face, her smile never faltering. It was a gesture of pure, uncomplicated delight, one that was terribly at odds with my own disoriented state of mind. A priestess, with the ears and tail of a fox. The sight was a waking dream, where I could find no purchase upon the shores of reason.

It required a prodigious effort of will to reclaim my voice from the abyss of my astonishment. My throat was dry, and the first sound I made was but a hoarse and broken rasp. The girl’s smile did not waver, her great, shining eyes simply blinking at me with that same unnerving curiosity.

I tried again, the words feeling strange and ill-formed upon my tongue as I looked upon her impossible form. "What... are you called?"

The sound of my own voice, so thin and strained in the immense quiet of that wooded place, seemed to hang in the air between us, a fragile and foolish thing.

At my question, one of her furry ears gave an inquisitive twitch, and a low, musical hum of satisfaction seemed to emanate from her throat. "Hmhmhm!"

Her smile, if it were possible, widened. "I am Xiao Ru!" she declared, her voice ringing with a bright, simple pride that was utterly devoid of guile.

And before I could recoil or even fully comprehend her words, she leaned forward and took my hand—not in a simple shake, but enclosing it entirely between both of her own as she bowed her head in a gesture of graceful, yet unfamiliar, respect. Her palms were possessed of a surprising and immediate warmth, a living heat that seeped into my own chilled flesh, a sensation so startlingly normal it felt like the greatest strangeness of all. I remained perfectly still, my own hand limp and unresponsive in her gentle grasp, utterly bewildered by this display of cheerful, yet alien, courtesy.

She released my hand at last, but did not retreat. Instead, she straightened from her bow and brought her face so near to my own that I could see the faint, curious specks of gold within the heliotrope pools of her eyes. She held me with a bright, unwavering stare, a look of almost feverish expectation, as a child might look upon some new and fascinating marvel.

One of her ears gave another inquisitive twitch. "And you?" she asked, her voice soft now, yet possessed of an unnerving directness. "What are you called?"

I found myself utterly incapable of breaking her gaze, held fast by an anticipation that was at once both gleeful and terribly determined. I could feel a great heat rise from my neck to my cheeks, a hot flush of which I was deeply and helplessly ashamed, for it was a betrayal of the terror that ought to have been my sole companion.

Under the heat of her unblinking gaze, my own name became a treacherous sequence of sounds I could barely command. My tongue felt thick and clumsy in my mouth, and a fresh wave of mortification washed over me.

"M-Mei—" I began, the sound catching in my throat. "Mei-Ling," I managed to finish at last, the name escaping in a rushed and shameful whisper.

At this, a soft, breathy chuckle of pure delight escaped her lips. "Hehe," she seemed to breathe, her eyes sparkling and the happy rhythm of her tail quickening for a moment. "Mei-Ling," she repeated, tasting the name as if it were some sweet confection. Her obvious pleasure seemed only to compound my own humiliation, leaving me to feel like a foolish child in the presence of something utterly, cheerfully, inscrutable.

The hot flush upon my cheeks began to cool, replaced by a dread of a far more… pronounced and intellectual nature. The shame of my stuttered introduction was a trivial thing, a fleeting vanity, when compared to the central, gnawing horror of my predicament.

I looked at her then, truly looked, not as the source of my own foolish embarrassment, but as the impossible, living riddle I was compelled to solve. My voice, when I spoke again, was low and steady, stripped of its earlier tremor.

"Why can I understand you, Xiao Ru?"

She tilted her head, a motion so perfectly foxy it sent a fresh shiver down my spine. The gleeful light in her eyes did not diminish in the slightest, and for a moment, she simply beamed at me as if I had asked why the grass was green. It was clear from her expression that my question, which to me represented a catastrophic breach in the very laws of nature, was to her a matter of the most baffling simplicity.

"Why, because you’re a vampire, of course," she said, as if stating the most obvious of facts. "All of us Kindred—all Youkai—speak the same heart-tongue."

A cold wave of disbelief washed over me, so potent it almost brought forth a hollow, humorless laugh. "Vampire?" I repeated, the word a grotesque and alien sound in my own mouth. "Surely you are mistaken. I am a detective. I am... a human woman."

For the first time since I had awoken, the bright grin faded from her lips, replaced by an expression of thoughtful and sincere confusion. Her foxy ears flattened slightly. "You... do not know?"

Before I could answer, she reached out a hand, her touch surprisingly gentle, and placed her thumb against my lip, pressing it back to reveal a tooth that lay hidden beneath—a tooth of whose existence I had heretofore been entirely, impossibly, unaware.

She then took me by the shoulders and turned me toward the black, silent river. "Look," she whispered.

I leaned forward, my whole body trembling, and gazed upon my own reflection. There, in the dark, placid mirror of the water, my own face stared back at me—pale and haunted, as I expected. But from my upper jaw, where no such abnormality had ever existed, there descended two teeth, elongated and unnaturally sharp. They were the unmistakable fangs of an oupire, the fabled drinkers of blood.

I recoiled from the riverbank as if struck, a strangled sound of protest escaping my lips. It was a trick of the light, a foul deception wrought by this strange, dark water—it had to be. My own hand, quivering, rose to my mouth, my fingers searching for the familiar shape of my own teeth. But there, where only the rounded edge of a canine ought to have been, my fingertips met an unmistakable, needle-sharp point.

A deathly cold that had nothing to do with the night air seeped into my very nerves. With a gasp, I forced myself to look once more into the placid, black mirror of the river. The fangs were still there, but now I perceived a new and even more fundamental alteration. My eyes, which had always been a simple, human brown, now glowed with a faint yet baleful scarlet light. And my pupils… they had narrowed and elongated into a thin, vertical slit, like that of the black kitten from afore.

Xiao Ru merely tilted her head, her expression of puzzlement deepening. She then raised a delicate finger to the side of my own neck, where the memory of a sharp sting still lingered.

"There," she said softly. "You were bitten." Her face, for a moment, was a mask of dawning realization, a look of pity mixed with her endless curiosity. "You truly do not know," she murmured. "You are a fledgling, newly turned."

My own hand, moved by some frenzied impulse to deny the evidence of my senses, rose and struck my cheek with a sharp, stinging force. I pinched the flesh of my arm, digging my nails in, seeking a pain that might awaken me from this dreadful slumber. But the monstrous reflection in the water remained, and I could only stare at the fox-girl, my expression one of utter, vacant despair.

At the sight of my wretchedness, a sharp gasp escaped her, and the last vestiges of her cheerful demeanor crumbled away, replaced by an expression of such melancholy and mirroring sorrow that it was a torment to behold. Her sorrow, so freely given, only served to deepen my own, and I felt a fresh wave of misery wash over me at the thought that I had brought such pain to this strange, innocent creature.

"Why... me?" I stammered, the question a hoarse, broken whisper.

Tears welled in her great, light eyes, threatening to spill over. "It is not… all a terrible thing," she whispered, her own voice trembling. A sound, half a sniffle, half a sob, was my only reply. She took a hesitant step toward me on her knees, her arms half-raised as if to offer an embrace, but then she stopped, seeming to think the better of it.

"Can this not be undone?" I asked, my voice pleading, grasping at the last, frail thread of hope.

At this, she fell silent. Her gaze drifted away from me, toward the distant weeping willows, as if she were consulting some unseen wisdom. Then, her pupils returned to mine.

"I do not know," she said with a grave quietness. "But perhaps… perhaps the vampire who turned you might possess such knowledge."

She settled upon the emerald grass, kneeling with her hands placed formally upon her knees. Her earlier pity seemed to recede, replaced by a quiet, solemn intensity. "Do you know who it was?" she asked, her voice now devoid of its earlier tremor. "The one who bit you. Do you recall her face?"

I closed my eyes, my mind a weary and boisterous sea. I sought to recall the moment of the attack in that unusual, unreal city, but my memory was a frustrating blank—a mere flutter of wings and a sharp sting. And yet... as I searched that blankness, another image rose unbidden from its depths: “The white-haired girl whose hands clung to her throat…”