? ? ?
The hulijing was swift of foot, and her silvery tail seemed to leave a glittering trail across the fields. But her incompletely transformed body maintained a human’s posture, incapable of running as fast as she could have on four legs.
Father and I saw her dodging into the abandoned temple about a li outside the village.
“Go around the temple,” Father said, trying to catch his breath. “I will go through the front door. If she tries to flee through the back door, you know what to do.”
The back of the temple was overgrown with weeds and the wall half-collapsed. As I came around, I saw a white flash darting through the rubble.
Determined to redeem myself in my father’s eyes, I swallowed my fear and ran after it without hesitation. After a few quick turns, I had the thing cornered in one of the monks’ cells.
I was about to pour the remaining dog piss on it when I realized that the animal was much smaller than the hulijing we had been chasing. It was a small white fox, about the size of a puppy.
I set the clay pot on the ground and lunged.
The fox squirmed under me. It was surprisingly strong for such a small animal. I struggled to hold it down. As we fought, the fur between my fingers seemed to become as slippery as skin, and the body elongated, expanded, grew. I had to use my whole body to wrestle it to the ground.
Suddenly, I realized that my hands and arms were wrapped around the nude body of a young girl about my age.
I cried out and jumped back. The girl stood up slowly, picked up a silk robe from behind a pile of straw, put it on, and gazed at me haughtily.
A growl came from the main hall some distance away, followed by the sound of a heavy sword crashing into a table. Then another growl, and the sound of my father’s curses.
The girl and I stared at each other. She was even prettier than the opera singer that I couldn’t stop thinking about last year.
“Why are you after us?” she asked. “We did nothing to you.”
“Your mother bewitched the merchant’s son,” I said. “We have to save him.”
“Bewitched? He’s the one who wouldn’t leave her alone.”
I was taken aback. “What are you talking about?”
“One night about a month ago, the merchant’s son stumbled upon my mother, caught in a chicken farmer’s trap. She had to transform into her human form to escape, and as soon as he saw her, he became infatuated.
“She liked her freedom and didn’t want anything to do with him. But once a man has set his heart on a hulijing, she cannot help hearing him no matter how far apart they are. All that moaning and crying he did drove her to distraction, and she had to go see him every night just to keep him quiet.”
This was not what I learned from Father.
“She lures innocent scholars and draws on their life essence to feed her evil magic! Look how sick the merchant’s son is!”
“He’s sick because that useless doctor gave him poison that was supposed to make him forget about my mother. My mother is the one who’s kept him alive with her nightly visits. And stop using the word lure. A man can fall in love with a hulijing just like he can with any human woman.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said the first thing that came to mind. “I just know it’s not the same.”
She smirked. “Not the same? I saw how you looked at me before I put on my robe.”
I blushed. “Brazen demon!” I picked up the clay pot. She remained where she was, a mocking smile on her face. Eventually, I put the pot back down.
The fight in the main hall grew noisier, and suddenly there was a loud crash, followed by a triumphant shout from Father and a long, piercing scream from the woman.
There was no smirk on the girl’s face now, only rage turning slowly to shock. Her eyes had lost their lively luster; they looked dead.
Another grunt from Father. The scream ended abruptly.
“Liang! Liang! It’s over. Where are you?”
Tears rolled down the girl’s face.
“Search the temple,” my father’s voice continued. “She may have pups here. We have to kill them, too.”
The girl tensed.
“Liang, have you found anything?” ?The voice was coming closer.
“Nothing,” I said, locking eyes with her. “I didn’t find anything.”
She turned around and silently ran out of the cell. A moment later, I saw a small white fox jump over the broken back wall and disappear into the night.
? ? ?
It was Qingming, the Festival of the Dead. Father and I went to sweep Mother’s grave and to bring her food and drink to comfort her in the afterlife.
“I’d like to stay here for a while,” I said. Father nodded and left for home.
I whispered an apology to my mother, packed up the chicken we had brought for her, and walked the three li to the other side of the hill, to the abandoned temple.
I found ?Yan kneeling in the main hall, near the place where my father had killed her mother five years ago. She wore her hair up in a bun, in the style of a young woman who had had her jijili, the ceremony that meant she was no longer a girl.
We’d been meeting every Qingming, every Chongyang, every Yulan, every New Year’s, occasions when families were supposed to be together.
“I brought you this,” I said, and handed her the steamed chicken.
“Thank you.” And she carefully tore off a leg and bit into it daintily. Yan had explained to me that the hulijing chose to live near human villages because they liked to have human things in their lives: conversation, beautiful clothes, poetry and stories, and, occasionally, the love of a worthy, kind man.
But the hulijing remained hunters who felt most free in their fox form. After what happened to her mother, Yan stayed away from chicken coops, but she still missed their taste.
“How’s hunting?” I asked.
“Not so great,” she said. “There are few Hundred-Year Salamanders and Six-Toed Rabbits. I can’t ever seem to get enough to eat.” She bit off another piece of chicken, chewed, and swallowed. “I’m having trouble transforming, too.”
“It’s hard for you to keep this shape?”
“No.” She put the rest of the chicken on the ground and whispered a prayer to her mother.
“I mean it’s getting harder for me to return to my true form,” she continued, “to hunt. Some nights I can’t do it at all. How’s hunting for you?”
“Not so great either. There don’t seem to be as many snake spirits or angry ghosts as a few years ago. Even hauntings by suicides with unfinished business are down. And we haven’t had a proper jumping corpse in months. Father is worried about money.”
We also hadn’t had to deal with a hulijing in years. Maybe Yan had warned them all away. Truth be told, I was relieved. I didn’t relish the prospect of having to tell my father that he was wrong about something. He was already very irritable, anxious that he was losing the respect of the villagers now that his knowledge and skill didn’t seem to be needed as much.
“Ever think that maybe the jumping corpses are also misunderstood?” she asked. “Like me and my mother?”
She laughed as she saw my face. “Just kidding!”
It was strange, what Yan and I shared. She wasn’t exactly a friend. More like someone who you couldn’t help being drawn to because you shared the knowledge of how the world didn’t work the way you had been told.
She looked at the chicken bits she had left for her mother. “I think magic is being drained out of this land.”
I had suspected that something was wrong, but didn’t want to voice my suspicion out loud, which would make it real.
“What do you think is causing it?”
Instead of answering, Yan perked up her ears and listened intently. Then she got up, grabbed my hand, and pulled until we were behind the buddha in the main hall.
“Wha—”
She held up her finger against my lips. So close to her, I finally noticed her scent. It was like her mother’s, floral and sweet, but also bright, like blankets dried in the sun. I felt my face grow warm.