Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Chapter One: Everyone Who's Anyone

~*~

"I do not know Mr. Wilde, and not to know Mr. Wilde is not to be known."

- King Edward VII of England, in reference to Oscar Wilde

The rest of his life arrived one night, in the form of an unknown caller. The phone on the nightstand buzzed and buzzed; from the bed, an ear twitched. Then silence. There are moments that cleave a life in half. Often too mundane or sudden to spot, they create a 'before' and an 'after.' Nick, a sentimental creature in his heart of hearts, would, scrolling through old call receipts, pin the beginning of the better half of his life to 2:17 a.m. on a Monday in late November. Of course, this would take some time to become apparent.

The phone revived, and the fox whined, pawing around for the damn thing. "Y'ellow?" he croaked. "Who is this?"

It was Skip Hermès who, a few minutes later, foisted himself into Nick's apartment the moment the fox could unlatch the door. The young coyote trudged through the kitchen and into the living room, despite Nick's protests, trailing after him the tang of blood, wet fur, and not a little gunsmoke. He wrestled the blinds on the far windows closed, then grumbled "something-something la puerta;" the fox closed the door, and morning dark reswept the place.

Nick shut his eyes against the world, leaned against the door, and sighed. He'd only come in some hours ago from visiting his mom—an affair about as painstaking and disheartening as writing one's own obituary—and on returning home had merely stripped to a tank top and boxers, devoured a bowl of cereal, guzzled mouthwash, and flopped face-down into bed. The phone rang three hours later.

Now, when Nick's eyes readjusted, there was a coyote pup on his couch, a paw hiding his eyes, old blood from what remained of his left ear drying in matted pleats of fur down one side of his neck. Nick waited for sobs, but they never came. Skip merely sat there, breathing in the dark with a paw over his face.

"Good morning," Nick huffed. Unbelievable. He had half a mind to return to bed and pretend this was a dream—and maybe it was. Instead, he went noislessly into the kitchen to put coffee on.

The Hermès Pack, he would later learn, had been ambushed at a hideout in the dockyards. Those who weren't killed outright (and Skip had seen at least one go down) were cuffed in county hospital. The escape of the namesake of this posse of teenage delinquents had less to do with luck, Nick imagined, than it did with a saving tendency among coyotes and foxes alike to slip out of sight in an instant. Skip wouldn't admit this (however much his name suggested it), but the coyote pup would profess that his boy, Lox, before taking one himself, had landed a good shot on one of their attackers. Only after recounting all this and dragging himself, an evidence locker on two upright paws, across Nick's door, did Skip care to mention the assailants were wolves.

If the olfactory cocktail of coffee and clotting blood hadn't roused him already, it was the wolves that finished the job. "Hold on, wait, just..." Nick pinched his brow, "just let me get this straight, yeah? Your lot managed not only to go head-to-head with Bracco and Guzzo Scaglione," he huffed laughter, "but also get one of them killed—?"

"Since when'd I say killed—I said shot." 

"And then you leave a blood-trail straight to my door." Nick stared. "Yeah? Do I have all that right?"

"Uncle Red?" Skip's voice was smooth with adolescent reassurance, "I ain't never said 'killed.'" 

More than sleep or a strong drink, Nick needed a strategy. He'd have to air the kid out first. "Who knows?"

The coyote gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug. 

"I mean," the fox persisted, "who saw you?"

"I dunno. Nobody."

Nick leaned with both arms against the stovetop and bit back anger. He shook his head. "Nuh-uh, nope. That's not how this goes." Rounding the wall into the living room, he said, "You come to me, you're gonna answer my questions, capiche?" Skip said nothing. "Alright. Maybe you'd rather talk to the police, huh? That would wash my hands of this real quick."

"Hah. Like you would."

"Y'uh-huh, try me."

"But they'd sack you, too, zorro. 'Aiding n' abetting.' You done harbored me and shit."

"You forced your way in," Nick gestured to the door. "Manipulated me over the phone. Came into my place carrying." The coyote glanced to his waistband, and Nick scoffed. "Yeah, don't think I didn't notice that little item when you came in. But sure. Since we've clearly got a young prosecutor in the making, here, practice on this one: it's my word against yours, and everybody knows that I could talk my way out of a gang war with my muzzle tied shut."

"C'mon, man," the pup whined, "what do I look like to you?"

The coffee was sputtering in the kitchen. Nick turned. "You really want to know? Your back's to the wall, and you're scared. Which is fine. You're still a kid, and you got into things over your head. It happens." He shut off the range. "But that still leaves you a cornered animal, which means you're a hazard."

"Sure I'm a hazard. But I ain't a kid anymore." When Nick didn't reply, Skip raised his voice, "And I ain't scared neither, vato, that's you."

The fox returned, two mugs in one paw and a moka pot in the other, trailing steam. "Alright." He eased onto the couch and set the coffee down. "But you sure are in that corner. Coffee?"

They drank (Skip grimacing), and the clock marched past five, and things began to seem a little more coherent and bearable. And then the kid set to talking, and Nick sat back with his mug and let him run himself out of words, going on about friends—pack-mates, how they probably made it alright. They've seen action before and came out alright, always did. Skip hadn't been able to see for shit, anyway, it was so dark and everything so fast. A wolf caught one, went down on a knee, and the other laid Lox out good. Lox was probably dead. Yeah. (Skip was quiet, and Nick watched.) But what was he supposed to do? They came on them, the Scagliones, unannounced and firing in the dark; that was real low, real Northside behavior. The kind of shit a cat would pull—and Skip wouldn't be surprised if the Pisicas were wrapped up in it, too, chingados gatos. And now he shows up here, and Nick treats him like he'd rather see Skip dead in the river. Is that what Nick wants? For Skip to stop tracking in blood and shit, so he doesn't get wrapped up in it—like Nick hasn't been caught up in some bullshit before, selling that rodent in Tundratown some janky-ass rug and nearly getting his own ass skinned. Everybody knows about that one. Yet Nick's still all 'high and mighty'—but aren't coyotes and foxes supposed to be tight? They're blood; everybody says so, the way they look and act. Skip's been called a fox a million times, and he takes it as a compliment! (Nick doubted that.) And besides, Nick's always looking out for him; for years, now, he's always telling Skip where to get something to eat, and who to trust, and where to go score some (this, the fox would deny). But now he sees who Nick Wilde is. Shit gets real, and the fox would rather sleep in, and see Skip wind up dead in the river.

"Truth is, Spike, I'm getting older."

"What are you—forty?"

"Yeesh." He'd only just turned thirty-three. "Not quite, bud, but...older all the same. Let's say I'm twenty-five."

"Now I know you ain't twenty-five."

"But let's say I was, and let's also say that I've been around the block; and hey, you know what, you're right. I've gotten myself in a particularly tight twist more than once."

"A twist?"  Skip exhaled. "Damn, you is old."

"And because of that, I've started to realize that it takes a pretty young person, like yourself, to work the hustle all the time, and to slip out of hairy situations, which, by the way, I never said I wouldn't help you do. Do you get what I'm saying, Spike?"

It was seeing his mom that had done it. Visiting Sylvia over the years, in the same old flat he'd grown up in, always made Nick wish for more to report than "the usual, ma, you know how it is." But this time, with her sunk deep in a reclining chair, impartial to the things that always made her Mom—the incessant baking, the Tai Chi in the park, the frayed romance paperbacks she'd always hidden from him—it seemed suddenly and vitally important that Nick present something new, a possible future, to fill the blank where his mother had been and so ease them both back a normal place. "I worry for you," she'd said, "all this rain..."  Him reminding her he was out of the rain, had lived in the same apartment for nearly two years now, she replied, "But things happen to mammals, don't they? One day, they're making rent, the next..."  She'd fallen on ice in February and broken a wrist. The bones recovered, but Sylvia had not. "Things just happen, the most goddamned things, and there doesn't have to be a reason why."

Any predator in the neighborhood, certainly any fox, knew the look of life on the brink. Nick, in his own precarious experience, had been right up to the chasm once or twice; had peered over its edge, finding nothing. There'd always been something to save him: an idea, a connection, or else a persistent luck he certainly didn't earn.

But Nick had never fallen back on his mother. That he would never do. His best self, like an old suit one kept for weddings and funerals, was brought out and ironed for no one more than Sylvia Wilde; and yet, as of late, Nick's best had seemed insufficient. She never said anything outright. "I just hope and pray that you have somebody. Things happen to mammals," she'd said again, "and when they do, we need someone, Nicholas, we really do. Especially a young fox. I had your grandmother, and then I had your father, and now I have you; and you'll always have me. You'll always have me," she repeated, willing it true, and settled back in her chair from which he'd scarcely seen her move all day. "But you already know that."

"You tired, I get that," Skip conceded from the couch. At length, "And nobody calls me that no more."

"What, Spike? Last time we spoke, it was Spike."

"Well it ain't last time, is it?"

"Alright, Skip. Until your next change of heart."

"Gonna be Splat, you don't get your ass up and help me out."

"Dark," Nick murmured. "Well, whatever helps you cope."

The coyote grinned, "I was telling my boy, just the other day, I can't catch a break; now he's dead, and I'm on the—"

Buzzing erupted from the kitchen. Both canines were startled into upright ears and flared tails. The fox's phone rattled on the kitchen counter. Nick had put out an instinctive hand, to keep Skip on the couch. He moved suddenly to fetch it.

Another unknown number. ("What's wrong?" whispered Skip.) The same one, in fact, as had woken him up that morning. Nick never left contacts unlabeled.

He looked up. "You yanking my tail?"

"What? No, I—"

"Then what does an oh-four area code mean to you?"

Skip sputtered, whispered, "What the hell does it look like I know about area codes?"

"Touché."

The phone went quiet in Nick's paw, and the relative silence of the morning returned. On one wall, water shifted through the radiator. Outside, a bus accelerated with a lumbering whine.

"You just standing there, looking at it," Skip cried. "Don't you get spam calls?"

"The phone's the first thing they track," Nick turned, "where's your phone?"

"Oh that thing's gone. Relax."

But foxes are anxious mammals, and he just knew the call and Skip's appearance were related. Knowing wouldn't help the pup. Nick was about to reassure him, parting his lips when the screen blazed to life again: a notification for voicemail.

Nick sat and unlocked his passkey.

"What the actual—"

"Shuddup."

He let the message play.

"Um, hi there, this is...well, I guess it doesn't matter who, really. I don't know this number, and I hate to disturb by calling so early..."

The voice was a feminine alto. Soft, a little hoarse.

"...but I'm assuming you're familiar with a certain wolf pup? A male, maybe sixteen or seventeen? Anyhow, I guess you're his parent or guardian, or a friend of some sort. I'm calling just to make sure he's okay. I'm the one who found him, out in the rain. He used my phone to call you, seemed...well, a little upset."

She paused; neither fox nor the coyote breathed.

"Alright, well, I'm sorry to bother. Hope everything's alright."

The recording shuffled and slapped a second before ending.

"You...You used a stranger's phone to call me?"

"Mierda, right..." The coyote scratched at his bad ear, then winced, glancing down at the offending paw. "I totally forgot about the rabbit."

Nick blinked. "The what now?"

~*~

She dressed in silence, half-awake because she'd thought of the wolf all night instead of sleeping. Or maybe it was a jackal, all that sandy fur. Judy ought to know the difference. She ought to know to sleep before her lesson with Rodger, where she'd be expected to be prim and professional, and to know things offhand about rhetoric and sentence structure. Never mind that nothing made sense. Life went on for other mammals. A young lion sought admission to a good school, and Judy needed a secondary income. She took the train uptown.

But something had happened to time. She'd never experienced anything like it. The proportions of her day were all wrong: she forgot entire sequences, some crucial, like leaving the apartment and locking the door, and crossing the road against traffic, and finding the right train; while other moments, entirely mundane, were infused with a misplaced urgency rising from instinct gone awry. The train, for example, somewhere between downtown and the Rainforest: the passengers next to her staring down, waiting for any slip in her demeanor. Judy kept her eyes low, while inside, her heart bludgeoned her ribs. She must not rupture. There was an enormous pressure differential between the interior and exterior worlds. She wanted rupture. Would she wail, faint? Or would there simply be an internal pop, like an aneurysm, and nothing visible from the outside? Whatever happened, it would be a breach of terrible, irreconcilable materials loosed into the everyday world. She could see oil globules in water; she could see entrails floating in zero gravity. She would be despised, even killed. They would carry her body off the train. 

Judy understood none of this was real. An hour was only sixty minutes, and no one on the train was watching. But what good was understanding if the hour felt like a day entire, and she could sense their stares on the back of her neck like flies.

The lesson, however, was almost completely unremembered. The stern matron, a lioness who did not approve of Judy, let her into the grand, bleak apartment. There was a moment at the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out on the verdant canopy through morning haze. 

"It just has to be good enough for Linxley," said Rodger, referring to Linxley College, the city's most elite liberal arts school, where the lion cub had visited that weekend. "If it's good enough for Linxley, it's good enough for anywhere in the UZ system."

"It's tight," Judy found herself saying. (She sat on a pile of textbooks at the cub's meticulous desk, watching on.) "Your tone's consistent, and it's well-worded. You misspelled 'naïve...'"

And then the feline was holding back tears, and Judy was a little startled. Misspelling was normal, but he'd never last at Linxley if he couldn't take criticism. Then she remembered asking which careers interested him after school, a question for which the young lion had only tentative replies, and over the course of a few minutes, Rodger had seen himself and his ego into spiraling freefall.

"A-And anyway," he stammered, staring hard at the screen, "I don't need to know. Nobody kn-knows what they're doing in university. Anybody who says they do is just lying. It's n-n-" he cried out, "normal, not to know what to do."

"You're right. You're right," Judy was saying, unsure what else to do. Distantly, her own cruelty frightened her; she wasn't moved by Rodger's distress. He had time, his parents had money, and if he cared about anything enough to bring tears, he would be okay.

"I'll figure it out," the cub was saying. "I just need to g-get in. When I get in, I can finally..."

"You can be happy," Judy finished. Which of course was the wrong thing to say. 

It didn't matter. Rodger would be okay. Maybe. Or maybe he wouldn't. That, too, was possible.

Back at her apartment it was cold, and she fought the urge to put on the heating. She couldn't afford it, so she wore jackets indoors. October's rent had been late—something that would've mortified her once—and she promised under threat of eviction that November would be on time. Judy didn't believe this, but it was the only thing to say. 

Her parents called eventually, because she'd neglected the Sunday Night Call. Bonnie and Stu insisted on this ritual, worried by her distance and the rising suspicion Judy wasn't being truthful about her situation. She wasn't. They'd fought over the phone, some two or three months previous, and she'd hardly said a truthful word to them since.

"It must be getting cold up there, huh?" said Dad; but no, it wasn't so bad. Colder in the Tri-Burrows. "And that friend of yours," asked Mom, "how is she?" Queenie's fine. They'd actually had lunch earlier today. (Queenie had canceled; they settled for drinks later.) "She isn't a rabbit, now, is she?" asked Stu; and no, Queenie wasn't a rabbit (which was true). "Well, surely you must meet other bunnies every once in a while, doncha?" Oh, sure, she saw them around all the time. He laughed. "It's not like we're in short supply." Laughed: No, never that. But rabbits in the city usually kept to themselves. "Well I can hardly blame 'em," said Stu. "When there could be a savage lion or some such thing around the corner, I'd stick to my own kind, too, thank you very much!" "They aren't savages, Stu," Bonnie said, and daughter agreed: he should watch less nightly news. Animals didn't just go savage, surely. Scientists suspected an adverse reaction to an as-yet-unidentified agent in over-the-counter and recreational drugs. Plenty of research was being done, and Judy worked with plenty of predators. "We know it's probably blown out of proportion," Bonnie said, "but your father's right to worry. What, with our daughter working for city police—you probably have to deal with this sort of thing all the time, don't you, bun?"

"Mom. You know I don't talk about work."

And Bonnie realized that, she did. She hadn't meant to offend. It was just in the nature of parents to worry, and on that note, was Judy getting enough sleep? She seemed a little droopy. Maybe it was just the phone.

"Still adjusting. But plenty of mammals work nights."

Well, plenty of predators, sure, but never rabbits. And neither Bonnie nor Stu would blame Judy for being exhausted; nothing about her lifestyle was in the least natural for a rabbit. She was living alone, for one. Surrounded by noise all the time. Things were larger in Zootopia, and there were all sorts of mammals who might put her instincts on alert. It was a miracle she could get any sleep at all!

So she let them go, claiming fatigue. The afternoon dolled out its relentless hours: one, two, two-thirty, two-forty, like heaping portions of a meal she was expected to finish. And Judy did not sleep. Instead, she thought of the canine from the night before.

~*~

"Would you know your salvation if it came to you, on Prosper and 23rd? If it took the form of a child, drunkard, or prostitute—those unlikely characters so dear to the Savior—or else as a mouse or rinocerous, herbivore or carnivore; a sea-going animal or avian or reptile?" The priest looked up, and right at Nick, or so it seemed to the fox. "We'd all like to believe that we would."

It had been years since Nick last entered a church: last time in hopes of a favor, and this time was no different. He wasn't a spiritual mammal. His mother was, but kept such things to herself; his grandmother, with her simmer pots and white sage and the insistence they celebrate Longest Night every December, had been what these mammals would call a pagan. But church was familiar to Nick all the same. It had played some part in raising him. Anyone, canine or feline or otherwise, could score a warm meal from Our Lady of Peace on weekdays, and a spare coat and some paw-warmers besides. Eleven-and-a-quarter, the first time he'd come, the old Catholic ladies had taken to doting on him. It had bewildered him at first; he had spent more time with herbivores, even, than with felines. The cathedral stood on the banks of River North, feline territory, where Nick was taught never to go. But the fox pup came to appreciate their soft, rumbling registers and habit of speaking in riddles. Altogether more majestic than canines, though nowhere near as funny. And he liked Our Lady for all the different mammals he met there, and for the echoes of its cavernous ceilings and the musk of burning incense. Even at noon, there was something subterranean about the place, and Nick was relieved to find it still had the power to relax him.

There was prayer, its phrases welling up whole from deep memory galleries Nick hadn't known were there, and the priest wishing peace on everyone; and then everyone on everyone else. The fox offered two fingers to the cat sitting nearest. He followed everyone up for communion, and on reaching the formidable snow leopard in all his vestments, nearly forgot what to do. 

Father Hiram Kass regarded him with a feline's inscrutable gaze. He must not recognize Nick. But then, the cat's expression softened just shy of a smile: a look that welcomed the fox back as much as it chastised him for taking so long. Remembering, Nick crossed his arms, and the father made the sign of the cross over him.

"God bless you."

"We need to talk."

Kass looked beyond him. "I don't imagine it can wait fifteen minutes?"

When service had ended, the congregation milling about in gentle conversation, the father made his way down the crowd, addressing some and patting others on their shoulders. Before reaching the fox, he was ensnared by a portly black bear in suspenders, who held him in soft, earnest conversation long enough to try Nick's patience. The fox weaved between the parishioners.

"Well, there is no precedent for this sort of thing, is there?" the father was saying, his voice a fast-flowing hum. "And any place with high traffic runs all the ordinary risks. We can't very well close our doors to the public now that things are hard; we aren't protestants." His eyes fell to Nick. "Anyways, Howie, if you'll excuse me, I have some business in my office. Send Cathy my love. Assure her, if there are any accommodations we might make—"

"But it's the church's safety she's worried about, not her own," the bear insisted, trapping gently but firmly the father's arm. "She really thinks that if she..." Noticing Nick, he leaned in to confide something in the feline's ear.

Father Kass nodded. "Naturally. To lose control, see ourselves made into something we don't recognize, is anyone's worst fear, isn't it?" And he excused himself, passing Nick for the main doors. The fox trailed him through the vestibule and out into the blustery afternoon.

"You ought to've come in the evening," said Kass. "Impossible to get anything done after service—yes, and you too, Marjorie, have a nice lunch!"

They reentered through a side door, skirting side chapels and the dimly lit corners of the sanctuary before reaching a door labeled Sacristy. Kass ushered him inside; a quiet, wood-paneled room with a rack of garments and an unlit fireplace. The father took to disrobing immediately.

"A little old for the altar-boy treatment," Nick said before he could contain himself.

"You know," the father rounded on him, "that isn't funny."

"Yeah, no, you're right." Growing up, no one had treated him so fairly as Kass and his clergy. "I'm a bit on edge today. Sorry."

"You and everyone else." Kass fell into a chair beneath the room's single stained-glass window. "Should've been Gethsemane."

"Pardon?"

"The homily. It should've been Gethsemane."

"You'll...translate, for a lay person?"

"The garden where Christ prayed before death."

"That's pretty metal, Father K."

The leopard sighed. "So you're worried about the maulings, too, is it?" And it took Nick a moment to climb down from his own inner drama and return to the larger one plaguing the city. 

"Right, right, the 'savages.'"

"Idiotic word," Kass grumbled. "It's what anyone's been called for a thousand years who acts in ways we don't understand. Do sit."

Nick obliged. "I'm not here about that."

"You aren't in trouble, are you?"

"Well, I'm always in trouble with someone. It just depends how you define it."

The father spared him an expectant scowl he knew well. "Nicholas..."

"You know those pups who got shot up, down in the dockyards?"

Kass frowned. "I didn't know they were kids."

The events of last night were explained: the Scaglione twins, the fugitive in his apartment, and the bystander—the rabbit—who'd heard god knows how much.

"But it's ol' Skip I'm worried about," said Nick. "Kid's hot as a housefire in a heatwave. He needs to disappear."

"And why are you suddenly his guardian?"

"He came to me."

"Well, yes, but you took him in."

Nick's eyes widened a little at that. "Look, maybe I don't attend Monday afternoon mass very often," he gestured with one paw, "but that doesn't mean there's a hole the size of a holy book where my heart should be."

"I'm not insulting you, Nicholas. I just happen to know that vulpines are solitary creatures. To take anyone you don't know, indeed someone you don't seem to trust, into your home. It's unusual."

Nick huffed. "So a fox cares about anyone else, and everyone raises their eyebrows. Okay."

Kass drew himself up. "Are we having a conversation? Or will you continue to presume to know my thoughts and speak for me?"

Nick drew a breath, held it. "Alright, you know what? I knew his mother. We have history."

"Fair enough. Why doesn't he go to her, then?"

"She's locked up. Assaulting an officer, at least that's how they spun it. She's not coming out any time soon."

The father shut his eyes and nodded, accepting a familiar story.

Nick continued, "She made me promise I'd look out for him." He scoffed. "Which of course is impossible, when he's out wilding with every other neighborhood runt. But he's not cruel like some of them, just heady. Then he's at my door, one of his ears blown away, and what—I'm supposed to tell him to...?" He grasped at words, gesticulating, and gave up. His paws fell in his lap. "I mean, what the hell do you do with that? You disengage, that's what you do. Let it all blow over. Not my problem. Except that he is my problem, and..."

He noticed Father Kass watching him closely.

"Sorry," Nick sighed, "language. Can you bless a guy twice?"

"You're good, Nicholas," said the father.

"What, just like that?"

"I mean," Kass leaned toward him, "you're a good person. You're compassionate." (The fox guffawed.) "I have a feeling you don't hear that said enough."

"A pretty good indication it isn't true, Father K."

"It's an indication," Kass persisted, his ice blue eyes turned very sincerely on him, "they don't see who you are. You walked in halfway through the homily."

"Sorry about that."

"No, I mean—did you catch any of it?"

"Well, sure. 'If Jesus was a reptile.'"

Kass grumbled, "It's called 'The Road to Emmaus.'"

"Where's that?"

"Irrelevant. What matters is the road. In the story, a few travelers join up with a stranger. Stopping to eat together, they realize he resembles the executed Christ, and the moment they go to ask, he's gone."

"What's the lesson?"

"There is no lesson. Some stories merely emulate the shape of experience, neither recommending nor condemning. We read from them what we need to read."

"But," Nick made a paddling gesture with one paw, "the lesson being...?"

Kass sighed, "That mammals make mistakes in judgment, Nicholas, that's all. They see who they want to see. They see what's convenient for them and their own ways of thinking. They see a fox. You see them: a feline, or an herbivore. But neither sees one another until they choose—dare—to look closer."

Nick studied the opposite wall for a while. "Kid stays with me tonight," he finally brought out. "But I came to you because you know mammals this side of the river better than I do. If you can think of anywhere—"

"Does Anya Sirko ring any bells?"

Nick looked down, a little startled. "Of course. She's the old linx, the immigrant."

"She's looking for help around the house. Something discreet. She can't pay much of anything."

"You really think Skip could clean a house?"

"You tell me: he appears to be your godchild."

"I resent the implication," the fox murmured. "But sure, it's a better idea than anything I've got."

"Give him no choice but to agree," advised the father. "If he's as volatile as you're implying, keep him under constant pressure. Tell him Anya's a family friend of Felix Pisica."

"Now there's an idea," Nick grinned. "But I'm curious what Felix himself would think."

"What the Pisicas think is their own matter. But," Kass weighed, "if you're afraid of stepping on any tails, you could always ask their permission."

"You mean ask Felix?" Nick's mirth spread to both corners of his mouth. "I'm flattered you think I wouldn't be skinned."

"Nothing so gruesome as that; and anyway, who can ask Felix anything directly. There is, however, a young couple I married some two years ago..." And the father whisked an anachronism of a cell phone from the pocket of his undergarments. "One, Pisica by blood; the other by marriage, and a very close friend of mine. Perhaps she might assist you in asking."

"Asking to harbor a fugitive canine?" Nick leaned into his elbows and knees, sighing, "I can hear the sweet sounds of a gang war already."

"Well, a dog's bad day is often a cat's good one."

"Exactly my point."

"But do you have any alternative?" asked Kass, and Nick thought about that.

"Well," he said, "I like to think every bad decision I've ever made has been made somehow out of necessity. But I'm sure my therapy animal would call that magical thinking."

"Nicholas Wilde has a therapy animal?"

"He..." Nick paused, "has drinks, sometimes, with an animal who's a therapist. That's not quite the same thing."

"I'll put you in touch," said Kass. "But I'm sure you know one Hannah Casley already."

"Of nightclub fame?"

"Well, the Black Cat's more of a cabaret, and Hannah's a Pisica, now. But sure. Anyway, it was a good marriage. I gave the vows personally, and the champagne at the cocktail hour was divine." The father winked. "Or so everyone told me."

~*~

A little later, a back door opened on a red fox, hoisting a duffel bag. "Heya, Ted," said the tod, "I've got some hot garbage." And he hefted the bag off one shoulder.

Sagely, the brown bear in hat and apron nodded. He turned, motioning Nick to follow him in.

"Now I wouldn't do this to you, buddy, if there wasn't a good reason."

Ted only shrugged his wide shoulders, like no big deal, and nodded with his muzzle to a place in the corner where the fox could drop his cargo: Skipper's old bloodstained clothes and his disassembled handgun, scrubbed in the kitchen sink and soaked for an hour in bleach. 

It had been a decade since Nick had run anything across town as hot as the gun that shot Bracco Scaglione. Less thrilling than he remembered, and more embarrassing; he was getting too old for this sort of thing. But Theodore "Ted" Hoen never asked questions. In fact, the grizzly seldom spoke at all. It was why Ted Hoen's All-Night Café competed with the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace for the most neutral place in Happytown. Ted Hoen's was great for business or friends, but mostly for its food, which Nick Wilde ate for free. He'd known the bear since primary school, had even once ridden on his shoulders to reach the honey chews Mrs. Luttrell kept on a high shelf, in case of the unthinkable: good behavior. More recently, Nick had been known to aid Hoen and his kid brother, Art, on their yearly tax returns, slogging it out in a corner booth over a series of weekend nights in spring, exhausting every possible deduction and sifting through receipts (legion in a fast-food restaurant) while Bianca, a white vixen in her twenties, brought them hashbrowns and slices of cherry pie. But Nick had always liked a puzzle, and the Hoen brothers were full of gratitude, in addition to their usual reticence.

What's more, Art Hoen was a supervisor in waste management, and it was generally known that a family friend could drop off just about anything that wasn't breathing for disposal.

Coming out through the kitchen, Ted identified Nick's guest: a tall cheetah, female, sitting alone in a trenchcoat and scarf at a corner table.

"Huh," Nick observed. "Since when do you allow smoking?"

Theodore glanced down with a dubious look and said, "Since she became a Pisica." And he left him for the service counter.

Hannah Casley, everyone knew, had only been Hannah Pisica for eighteen months, following somewhat of a celebrity wedding in which she had taken her husband's name. It was an unusual, if expected decision for a feline, matriarchal as they often were. For a time, the marriage had been the subject of uproarious debate on either side of the river, everyone wondering if Casley had an ulterior motive. She did, of course. Nick would've taken Richard Pisica's name (along with Richard Pisica's anything else) with an eager 'I do,' had it been offered; Hannah had taken it with the then-failing Black Cat in mind. In the time since, with family money, the old speakeasy on Sousten had bought out the surrounding lots and blossomed into a cabaret club of instant renown. All sorts mingled there. University students from well-groomed campuses came to feign reading and stage arguments with one another, emissaries of foreign city-states met there with their Zootopian counterparts over house cocktails, powerful families held business upstairs, and lately, to enormous controversy, a travel magazine based uptown had listed the bar as the city's hidden gem. Canines, felines, oursines, and neighborhood folk of all makes and manners came. The drinks were cheap enough, and the rooms large enough, and the music was always live.

The coat Hannah wore was of undeniable panache, and if she had any reservations about smoking in a restaurant in this modern day and age, she kept them buried in one of its many pockets—probably next to an ivory cigarette holder. One rounded ear flicked at his approach, and she turned, her face a calm kabuki mask of spots and natural markings. Two lines of dark fur in particular traced symmetrical curves from the corner of either eye down her snout, to meet at the lips, tying there a severity of form that only improved, Nick thought, on her already stately reputation.

"There you are," she said. "You had me thinking I'd come to the wrong place."

"To a fox, that means you're early."

The corners of her mouth shifted, a faint smile. "Is that so?"

"Sure." Nick slid into the booth. "Early to juvenile court, late to just about everything else."

"You'd disparage yourself to a perfect stranger? Funny."

"Oh, it is, I assure you. Foxes would've evolved into wolves if we couldn't take a joke." And he murmured confidentially, "Joking with wolves feels a little like delivering a bomb, don't you think?" Straightening, "Anyway, you're hardly a perfect stranger, Mrs. Pisica."

"I ask that you call me Hannah."

"Do you ask that sincerely, Mrs. Pisica?"

"I do."

"Sure thing, Mrs. Pisica." And he winked.

Ted came by with a carafe of water, an urn of coffee, and two mugs. They spoke. Nick poured the coffee, and Hannah smoked. Outside was dark and wet as midnight in winter, though it was only five in the evening. Cold emanated through the glass.

"Small talk has its place, Mister Wilde, but I was under the impression that things were rather urgent." She watched him closely while she spoke. "You don't seem nearly as desperate as Hiram let on."

"Eh," Nick shrugged, "a guy gets good at hiding it."

"If we're going to reach an arrangement, I don't need you hiding anything from me."

"Of course. Wouldn't dream of it."

Hannah took a delicate first sip of her coffee, considered, and replaced her mug. "Why's Kass so worried for you?"

"He didn't explain?"

"He did. Only I'd like to hear it from you. The Father has a certain way of talking about crises."

"He's a very tactful cat, I know."

"He could paint an altarpiece in bullshit and you think it was done in oil paints."

"That," Nick swallowed coffee, "is an apt description."

He took to detailing the situation as he imagined might appeal to a feline. Code switching could be risky, though Nick, whose social sphere was an intricate web of animals, would admit to more than a little expertise. If Hannah Pisica were instead, say, Hannah Scaglione, he would fall back on canine loyalty; how he'd promised an old friend to look after her kit, and now that Skip was against the wall, Nick was right there beside him. (He'd throw in a touch more groveling, of course, as tickled the egos of more traditional canines.) But saying these things to Hannah Pisica would only affirm him in her eyes as a brown-nosed canid, one of many. Hierarchy meant less in a family where, if one could demonstrate a proper purr to their vowels, anyone might become an equal business partner. The feline sensibility wanted wit and finesse. If it wanted confidence, it was confidence checked with an appropriate measure of self-negation. Cats wanted to play with a situation, with the very facts of life and death, and all with the lightness and theatrics of a game of charades. All the while, and perhaps most importantly, they wanted to feel in control.

"The kid needs humbling," Nick explained, knowing it was any cat's dream to do just that to a dog. "He has the ego of any young canine. Unchecked, it's going to get him killed."

"If that's true, then why do you care?" She'd taken to knocking out ashes right into her largely untouched mug. "I took you as the type only to fend for yourself."

Nick took the microaggression in stride. "Oh, that plays into it for sure," he assured her. "I try to stay clear of these things."

"What sorts of things?"

"Well frankly, Mrs. Pisica, anything directly involving mammals like yourself. I like a low profile. It suits me." 

"Does it?" she wondered genuinely. "Everybody knows Nicholas Wilde. No, don't roll your eyes, it's true." Her gaze drifted out the blue window. "To live here, and not to know Mr. Wilde, it seems, is not to be known at all."

"If that were true, then you of all mammals would certainly have already met me."

"Yet you never come by the place."

"The Cat?"

"Where else?"

"That's because I'm a canine."

"Since when has that mattered?"

"It matters."

"It does. And it doesn't. It takes a village, as they say."

"To raise what, exactly?"

"A profit."

Nick chuckled. "That's not bad. I'll have to use that one."

"You know why I call it that?"

"What?"

"'The Black Cat.'"

"It's a riff on that foreign place, isn't it? Le Chat Noir. Where everyone who's anyone went for a time."

"Yes and no." She drew deeply on the last life of her cigarette. "My mother," she exhaled, "she used to tell us cubs that our black spots were another cat. A black cat, trying to get out. And we must fight to be normal, moral children, or else we'd become dark as a moonless night and lose ourselves entirely."

Nick hummed. "She sounds nice."

"The bar," Hannah continued, "is a place one can let out the black cat, the one that hides in each of us. What makes us unacceptable, that's what I try to coax out of others. I'll have it out of you, tonight, and of this kid you're harboring."

"Not ominous at all."

She shrugged. "Truth rises, like a thing that floats. Something about the place. You'll see." And the feline took a long drink from her water.

"You need a village," she resumed, "to train this coyote of yours—is that what you're saying?"

"All he's ever absorbed are pack dynamics, the idea he wasn't born a wolf, so he's a lesser canine. He's a time bomb if he stays in that environment, and hot as a snowshoe hare in a sauna besides. Around felines, the same stressors don't apply. The right cat wouldn't entertain them."

"You have someone in mind," she remarked.

"Someone who could use help around the house, yes."

"And say he doesn't take well to his new life as a housekeeper in River North?"

"Don't give him the choice," Nick parroted. "Either he shapes up enough to dust an old cat's blinds, or he's out on the streets. Nothing I do will impress on him the severity of the situation; but if he's a young canine among felines, that changes quick. He needs to learn tact, restraint, and how to think ahead. It's just the sort of thing a feline would impress on him."

"Maybe you could teach him those," she said, taking Nick by surprise.

"I'm not sure I understand—"

"Don't you?" She put out her cigarette. It bobbed in her coffee mug. "You're hardly the orange dog I expected to meet."

"Sure," he snorted at the epithet, "but I'm hardly a cat."

"You're a very interesting mammal, whatever you are." She watched him a moment as he fumbled with his words. "You'd make a very overgrown calico."

"...I'll say 'thank you' to that."

She sighed, making to stand. "Kass thinks highly of you, in any case. I'll send Kitty to pick you up later this evening: let's say eight. Feline, not fox time."

"Seven-thirty it is."

"Let me talk to him." She tightened her coat about her waist. "I'll see what we can do."

~*~

Changing into her uniform, Judy caught sight of herself in the mirror and held her own gaze. She'd lost weight without meaning to. While some mammals faced standards that had them starve themselves for beauty, the opposite was desirable in a rabbit. Traditionally, anyway. More of oneself meant a healthier litter, and a safer birth for the mother.

There was less of Judy, now. Things certainly felt that way. Her family would never let her hear the end of it. She wouldn't go home for the holidays.

At the curb, Queenie's bike sputtered and smoked. Judy clambered up the seat, and Queenie shifted her tail aside, tossing the rabbit her small helmet before throttling the bike into motion. The air was damp, the navy sky giving over to black, and the city spun its sounds and slick buildings all around. Judy disregarded the helmet for how it pinched her ears; so did the driver, who liked the feel of wind on her face. Queenie both frightened and interested Judy. She drove with the calculated recklessness of someone who could afford to total her bike but not her reputation.

Clinging on, Judy let her head fall back, her nose in the air, ears aflutter in the slipstream. The speed was just the right kind of bewildering. It scratched an itch, embodied something otherwise abstract while she forgot her own body, becoming instead the alternating sensations of slowing and racing ahead, becoming the billboards and the pilons and the wires dancing between the pilons, becoming the lights, becoming inseparable from all the world's details and disorder.

She knew they were close when Queenie began to drive like a normal person. Winter's early dusk was done with, and the lights of Happytown were all around her. A food truck with a crowd. A shuttered auto repair. A thrumming stereo, rising, falling away in an altered pitch. The bike turned; the walls came in very close, and Judy could smell waterlogged cardboard and urine. 

Queenie parked at the far end of the alley. In the dark, she found the door and opened it for the rabbit. 

"You can come through this way," Judy said. "No one minds."

But Queenie seemed to disagree, opting to go around front while Judy navigated the bustling kitchen, announcing her presence so as not to be trampled. On her way, she snatched up an apron from the clean aprons bin.

"Open mic 'till seven-thirty, then it's Happiness 'till midnight. Tables are fucked up on account of the luncheon, but after seven it's packed, so let Dishes take front of house. Less work for us, right? Oh, and anyone asks? We're out of Mezcal. We aren't, but everyone's tired of stool three, and he won't drink without that margarita. The guy gives you shit, let Enrico deal with it. He pulls any more bullshit and he's eighty-sixed, thank god. Right, I'm outta here. And don't worry too much about close; I open tomorrow."

Her manager left in a hurry, as any sane lapine in a Happytown bar might. Judy was a standout in that regard. She had a reputation among the bar staff—all prey—as being unflappable. But that wasn't true. Of course the regulars got to her; even sober predators still made her nervous. It was only that, as with the motorcycle helmet, Judy could not muster the appropriate concern. Caution was a voice crying out from a deep well.

She got Queenie a drink, a double; it had apparently been a long day. Judy knew something about long days and said as much.

"Well what happened to you?"

"Nothing." She shouldn't have said anything.

"Girl, don't play in my face. It doesn't take a rabbit to read those ears."

So Judy had to tell her about the wolf pup, or the jackal kid, or whatever the whimpering teenager had been who she'd found under the South Harmony Bridge. The quality of Queenie's attention made her reconsider her words.

"I think he was a jackal. Smaller than a wolf. I'm not sure."

"Could be a coyote," Queenie suggested. "You wanna know how to tell?" She pointed to her nose. "It's the snout. Full canines have a very pronounced bone structure. Coyotes, foxes, lesser canids—theirs are shorter, more angular."

There was much she'd like to tell Queenie, then, because she was always bringing Judy up to speed. The lay of Happytown, her childhood home, and the felines of River North and canines of Southriver. Why she carried a firearm (here, they were in feline territory) and would advise Judy to do the same. Why a coyote wasn't the same as a wolf. Judy would have liked to admit, in turn, that she'd never been bar-trained; was in fact a terrible bartender, and the only reason her co-workers liked her was because they thought she was tough, even though she wasn't tough. Only tired, and unmoved. And she'd like to tell Queenie she hadn't always been that way. She'd like to admit she was trained with a handgun, had excelled on the range despite her size, had been top of her class, celebrated by city council, by the mayor, for whom she'd been a sort of poster child for the latest diversity initiative. Had been for the entire two days she was an officer with the ZPD. Insubordination. Emotional and literal squallor—where had she heard that, a book? It didn't matter. She would like to ask if Queenie had any childhood dreams of her own, and if so, where were they?

"I thought I could make things better," she said. "Just a little bit."

"But you got the kit home, yeah?"

"I walked him someplace. An apartment south of the river. I let him make a call on my phone."

Queenie frowned. "Never do that again, unless you wanna treat yourself to an upgrade." Her tail swished, a salt and pepper pendulum of fur behind her seat. "You know what," she leaned in, "tell me more. I think I might actually know the kid."

~*~

While Skip groomed himself in the kitchen sink, Nick closed the bedroom door, fell back on his bed, and commenced feeling sorry for himself. The conversation with Hannah had gone well, but was he really up to all this? Father Kass was right: not that he had much choice. But his strategic moves in the neighborhood had always been reactionary, running defence and maintaining his name. Somewhere along the way, his various methods of gaining social and literal capital had become, while never entirely above-board, at least less likely to step on the tails of anyone powerful. All that was about to change. Hannah was wrong in her assessment of him. It took an entirely canine stupidity to commit to a promise that would string him out.

His phone pinged.

risky cat, do not engage: hiya nicky! long time no C! kitty here

risky cat, do not engage: here as in outside your front door

risky cat, do not engage: parents said you need a lift, so I got Carlo and Rico to drive

He breathed deep of the silent, solitary moment, relishing it, wondering if he'd ever have another. And then he pushed himself upright, changed Kitty's contact information, and set into motion the most pivotal evening of his life.

~*~

"Fuck is all this?"

Skip was gawking at the three felines waiting at the curb, two of them guards leaning against a town car with tinted windows, the third, a female snow leopard about his own age. The latter came forward, then broke into a charge, pounding up the front steps. Both canines cringed.

Nick was waylaid into a sudden and brutal embrace that lifted his toes from the ground. "Nicky!" Kitty growled. Her muscle watched from behind like they'd seen this all before.

She dropped the fox. "Goddammit, dude, why's it been so long?"

Nick fixed his jacket collar. "Kitty, hey..." His chuckle was mechanical.

"Where do you even go?" she demanded, and he shrugged, all hollow smiles and heavy eyelids.

"Solitary animal. What can I say?"

She flared, "You can say sorry for not making Halloween!"

"Halloween?" he frowned.

"Halloween! Half the neighborhood was there! Maybe I just missed you." Her gaze shifted to the darker-furred, slightly taller mammal standing a little bit apart. "And you? Who the fuck are you? I've never—" Her eyes danced between them a moment, and then she gasped. "No. Well tie me up and throw me in the river; Nicky's got a big brother."

Nick guffawed, his breath a small cloud.

"Nah," Skip swooped in, "we're not like that."

"Yeah, he's seventeen."

"I'm a 'yote, he's a red. Completely different animals."

Kitty and her feline entourage only stared.

"Coyote," Nick elaborated, thumb cocked to Skip; and then to himself, "Red fox."

"Well I knew that," Kitty dismissed. Then her eyes widened, and she swept her arm in a vicious motion toward the street: "Now get in the trunk. Or I'll have my men throw you in."

The canids blanched a little under their fur. Skip glanced at Nick, and then Kitty broke up into laughter. One of the larger felines in back, a lioness, glanced at her watch.

"I'm kidding," Kitty cried, "god, gag me with a wrench. Nobody can stomach a joke anymore!"

In the car, she slurped indiscreetly from a large iced coffee that, Nick judged from the color, could have only been sweet cream. He sat between the kids in the back seat, though Kitty still insisted on leaning over him, to talk to Skipper.

"No, but really: who the fuck are you?" she asked, not unkindly. "Nicky never hangs with anybody."

"Just lying low," Skip replied easily; he seemed to take the car, the guards, for luxury treatment. "Kickin' it with Uncle Red 'till some bullshit blows over, you know how it is."

She glanced up at Nick. "You're his uncle?"

"Not his uncle."

"Abue, more like," jeered Skip, and Nick sighed, forcing the two apart.

"Corrections all around. The kid and I aren't related." To Skip, "If you were in fact lying low, now you aren't. And I'm the same age as your mother."

"So?" Skip shrugged. "She old."

Nick gave up as Kitty forced herself again into his personal space to ask, in a cooing voice, "Now, what'd you go and do to get your ear all bandaged up like some war veteran?"

It was just the question Skip wanted. "Oh, eso? Just a little souvenir from that kid, Bracco. I got him between the ears, though—"

"No!" Kitty gasped with no small glee. "That was you? You shot Bracco Scaglione?"

"No-no," Nick ran defence, smiling forcefully for everyone including the cats now eyeing him through the rear-view mirror. "There are, as of the moment, no murderers in this car. Spike, here, got himself into a scrape with a very mean but, let's give him credit, rather tall barbed wire fence."

"Bull-shit I did."

"Skip," Nick warned.

Kitty had fallen into laughter again. "Aww, a proper thug."

"What, zorro, you really think I don't know how to jump a fence?" The coyote nestled back in his seat. "I don't need you playing lawyer for me, Red."

"You boys." Kitty sighed with all the matronly authority of someone twice her age. "So entertaining." And she drew from her emptying iced drink with a wet crackle, throwing Skip a wink.

Nick's muzzle took shelter in one supporting paw; didn't the kid know cats love to play with their food?

"Aww, poor Nicky." Kitty thumped his shoulder. "Always keeping the peace. Or trying to. Nonno says he doesn't know how you do it." And she smiled at him, this high school senior, with condolence and condescension.

"Easier just to pick sides," she said.

But Nick's ears were already alert at the mention of Felix Pisica. "Your grandfather talks about me?"

"Well, sure! Says he's never seen a fox so quick to play both sides of the river. Oh, don't get like that!" she groaned when Nick returned to self-soothing. "He doesn't mean anything by it."

To one side, Skip hissed at him, "See? You the one on the fence."

~*~

Hannah was, despite her business savvy, a mammal of emotion. Her paws already full with a busy final quarter, she had nevertheless allowed Hiram Kass to talk her into meeting with Nicholas Wilde. She'd done it because Hannah had a soft spot for the old cat, who besides had been instrumental in orchestrating her marriage with Rudy. A favor for an old friend. But then she'd met Nicholas, and the fox had been so well-behaved, if a little unpunctual. She hated nothing more than a brash canine, and so felt an absurd and instant fondness for the first one to display a little common sense. 

The coyote striding in the front doors alongside her niece seemed just the opposite sort. And there she went, having already succeeded in chatting one ear off, pointing out to him the pianist and the stage where later there'd be jazz and a friend behind the bar, whose attention she failed to capture. Hannah hadn't played any part in raising the girl, a snow leopard like any Pisica-by-blood. Still, she was very fond of her niece of eighteen months, and the sight of her with such a canine as Skip made the cheetah a little tense.

Beside her suddenly, Nicholas had said something. "You don't say?" she responded, unsure of the context.

"I do," the fox replied, sounding morose as he held back to watch Kitty and the coyote pup. "Whatever you do with him, make sure it has nothing to do with her."

Whatever he meant, Hannah agreed, and liked him all the more.

Going up the narrow stairs, the piano and bar were exchanged for a dimmer, more intimate setting whose effect Nick felt immediately. The fox relaxed; he would have something to drink. They were going to hear him out. This all would be wrapped up by dinnertime, and then he would catch some sleep. But he'd hardly eaten all day, the fox realized; and damn, if there wasn't anything but sauce and old milk and baking soda in the fridge at home. Pizza it was. Nick would have visited Ted, but he couldn't imagine asking the diner for any further favors. At least not until next week.

Hannah presented a corner table where candles in old wax-covered bottles illuminated, in the reflection of the dark windows looking out on the street, their figures settling down.

"They let you into a place like this?" Nick smirked, coming to sit next to Father Kass in his lay clothes. "Does the big guy know?"

"Who, Felix?"

"No," Nick frowned. He pointed up at the ceiling. The leopard sat up in his chair, aggrieved. Nick caught him discreetly crossing himself as the waiter appeared with the wine.

"I've invited my husband," said Hannah, once drinks were poured for everyone save the minor and the priest. (Kitty always got what she wanted; in this case, a glass of sparkling rosé.) "And he is here," Hannah insisted, smoothing her napkin taut on her lap, "allegedly. Until he joins us, I suppose Nicholas might introduce us all, seeing as he seems to be the mammal in common."

"Nicky knows everybody," Kitty agreed.

"I take it the felines among us are already acquainted?" Nick asked.

Father Kass startled awake. "Oh, yes. Hannah and I go back some time, don't we?"

"Yes. To a time and a place we needn't discuss tonight."

"Well, she was a convent girl, you see."

"Hiram, I really wish you wouldn't."

"I sincerely wish you would," said Nick, forgetting himself and incuring a glower from the proprietress.

Kitty burst out in laughter. "I've seen the photos!" she cried. "She never looked very happy. Looked about as she does now, actually."

"Sorry," Nick mouthed, and Hannah drew a long-suffering breath.

"In any case, I know the Father. This here is my niece..."

To Nick's other side, Skip spoke up, "Who're those two?" Everyone looked at him, then followed his eyes across the room to find two mammals, a tall, regal snow leopard with a shorter, light-furred wolf wearing a fair isle sweater.

The two approached the table. "Sweetheart," said the leopard, sliding a paw down Hannah's shoulder and landing a brief smooch above one ear. She didn't flinch.

"You're late. Who's this?"

"This is Dean," he supplied.

"Hi," said the wolf, and waved while the husband flagged down a waiter.

After a moment's shared silence, Kitty burst out, "Who the fuck is Dean?"

Briefly, no one at the table knew what to do. Then Nick smiled and said, "Why, he is, of course."

"Language, Kitty," the male leopard warned. His resemblance to his niece was unmistakable. He glanced at Dean, who smiled and shrugged. Another chair was brought, and more wine. They all sat. 

Skip leaned not-so-discreetly into Nick and muttered, "Wait, are those two—?"

"Nope. Nada. Shut it."

"Everyone," said Hannah, her politeness having a diamond edge, "this is Rudolfo, my husband." ("Rudy," confided Rudy.) After a moment, she added, "...This is Dean."

"Hi, Dean," Kitty intoned.

"Nicholas, why don't you explain why any of us are here tonight?" Hannah nodded with her nose to the coyote, who seemed a little nervous. "Start with him, please."

"Alright. Well. First of all, it should be known that I didn't ask for any of this—"

"I'm bored!" Kitty announced, pushing back from the table with enough force to send wine teetering from her glass. "Sorry, Nicky, as you were. Text me if there's a shootout."

"Darling," said Rudy in reproach.

"Oh, what is it?" Kitty groaned.

"You know we've talked about this."

"I know."

"If there were a shootout—"

"Run the other way, yeah," Kitty glared at her uncle, "I get it." Sometimes she hated Family, felt she could drown in a sea of concerned aunts and uncles, stern mothers, doting fathers, and mock-wise older brothers. Of course shootouts and drive-bys and bomb threats were dangerous, but none of them seemed worried that their own condescension was the thing killing her. "It's in your interest," they would explain, imprisoning her at the family estate; but if they could see so well from her perspective, how could they miss that Kitty was a feline of action? And she wanted in on the action, the dirty work that secured them any of this comfort and control in the first place.

And why won't they admit it? Kitty wondered as she slid halfway down the banister, trying to ignore Carlo, the enormous bengal tiger trailing at a practiced distance. Even the mint of the bodyguard's suit could enrage her anew. The Family always wanted to obscure their sordid business behind silken scarves, imported wine, and intolerably urbane guests. Kitty sometimes envied the dogs; they could be so forthright. A Scaglione wolf would be seen packing to her own wedding: a Glock behind the groom's lapel, the bridal gown all but splashed in the gore of their last unpaying debtor.

"Judy, goddammit, I wanna live!" she cried, collapsing over the bartop. "I'm young, I'm beautiful, I've got prospects! What the actual fuck!"

She'd drawn looks from several patrons, including an intense-looking she-wolf a few stools down, who moved to stand with her drink. "Just let me know, 'kay? I'mma go take in the music," she muttered to Judy, though neither her words nor the careful, parting glance she cast Kitty's way were lost on the young leopard.

Kitty stared until she was gone, then sprang up to sit on the bartop. "What'd that bitch want with you?"

"Kitty."

"What? Just a female dog."

"She'll hear you."

"Let her, with those big ears," Kitty dared. "She comes for you, that's like coming for family. Get her ass packaged quick, dropped in the bayou."

The rabbit sighed. "I'll pretend I didn't hear any of that."

"But you did, bunny ears. I'm serious. Anybody touches you, I'll take their fingers. That's just what friends do."

The rabbit hefted an empty mug half her size off the countertop. Glasses, as well as clients, had built up in the hour or so she'd spoken with Queenie. In that time, she'd watched the quality of the wolf's attention sharpen. It might have scared Judy, were she again able to feel her emotions rather than glimpse them, like silhouettes waving for her attention from across a great distance. Then Queenie had explained that the jackal Judy had chanced into was instead likely a coyote, one Sebastián Hermès, on the run after nearly killing someone Queenie knew. This time, the thought of the canine pup sobbing under the bridge had pierced through, finding her raw and unprepared. Now, she thought of the kid—dangerous, inconsolable—while she carried the mug down to the bus bin.  

"Lemme give you a paw with that." Suddenly, Kitty was gathering up glasses in her arms.

"I'm fine, I've—" she grunted, "I've got it."

"Jesus, who leaves gum in their drink? Animals are so disgusting."

"Seriously, Kitty, it's fine."

"Girl," Kitty gave her a look, "you're tiny. Accept help. Some of these glasses got, like, two feet on you."

But Judy was imagining her boss, Kitty's aunt, discovering her niece collecting dishes at the bar. The young leopard misread her silence as offence.

"What, too insensitive?" She dropped an armload of glasses in the bin with a clatter that made the rabbit's ears retreat. "Everyone's a fucking china cup these days. A few savages and they're all you can't say this, you can't say that."

"The atavism cases aren't something to laugh about."

"The ata-what cases?"

Judy let it go. It was eight o'clock and she was already tired. The young feline prattled on, now about some handsome, rogish canine upstairs. Judy took the opportunity to resubmerge, sinking below the crowded bar, to be alone at the bottom of sensations and thoughts. At this, she was becoming something of a pro. It was quiet, down there, and she fell deeper into unreality like something heavy lugged overboard. Identity began to dissolve the deeper one went. There was no bottom in sight. There was no fear. This deep, the waves of rumination that bombarded the surface only nudged one blindly along; meanwhile, somewhere above, a rabbit named Judy Hopps answered the same questions and mixed the same drinks, weathering cold wind and sea spew, stolid as a lighthousekeeper maintaining her lamp.

"And then there's this music," Kitty was saying, "this god-awful music."

"I think it's kind of nice. Kind of sad."

"Well, it makes me wanna pull my claws out." Kitty stood. "Sorry, girl. You're clearly busy. I'm gonna go check on things with Nicky."

"No problem. I'll see you."

Kitty hurried past the dreadful musicians, whose open saxophone case of accumulating tips she not-so-unintentionally kicked with one foot, and up the stairs to rejoin the cornermost table as casually as possible. Conversation paused to accept her. Remembering her undrunk glass, she threw it down in an instant, grimacing at the rush of bubbles.

"Well I've never kept house," Skip was saying, "but mama was a janitor. Maybe it's in the blood."

"He means yes," Nick interpreted. "The kid's a hard worker when he wants to be—aren't you, Spike?"

While the fox and the kid squabbled for the proper sobriquet, Father Kass, in the next chair over, stifled a creeping yawn behind one furred paw. He'd always been an early riser, disposed to long mornings with strong tea and something to read. This wasn't his first night on the town, or even at the Black Cat, but the incessant turning and thrumming of nightlife exhausted him, not to mention the delicate web of this conversation between canines and felines—which, admittedly, was going better than he'd expected. 

But with Kitty returned, they all seemed very young, even though Kass had only as many years on Nicholas as the fox had on young Skip. Their hopes, their conversation, were that of a different generation: even Hannah, whom Kass had known since he was twenty-seven and she scarcely an adult. Yes, he would retire. The cat stood. There was work to attend to at the monastery, and his evening tea besides.

"Don't mind me," he said, pulling on his light coat. "Just an old cat, turning in." And there was well-wishing all around, and the reminder that he wasn't yet fifty. "Not for another three months, I'm not," he retorted, deciding he'd actually enjoyed the evening. Kass had come to see them introduced and had succeeded. The serious talk had turned them all earnest, even Nicholas, who thanked him discreetly on his way out.

Downstairs, however, the jazz gave him pause. Its slow cadences blew through him like waves of heat, the delicate string of its melancholy held aloft, intact, without collapsing into melodrama. Jazz had always been good to him, particularly in his twenties. Kass had hidden his affinity from the clergy, for whom reputation was all, in fear of the genre's more sordid associations. Not that the father was entirely righteous; he was, as he always maintained, only an animal in clerical clothes.

Now that he was a priest, however, there was more room for enjoyment. Kass reclined a moment at a standing table, taking in the players: mongoose on sax, kudu on keys, hippopotamus on bass, and a burly bobcat behind the drums. An arrangement befitting the Black Cat, where he'd noticed more than a few canine-feline couples, large- and small-class animals, and a rabbit behind the bar. All this was typical, welcome, in a neighborhood so stratified. It relieved tensions for everyone. And the music, in his mind, seemed to slip between the various animals and link them, implicate them in a display of civility—of what was possible—such that their horns and fangs and hooves and claws could not be told apart.

And then he saw Queenie Scaglione, opposite him from the band, and the music's timely conclusion and the resulting applause was suddenly like a cruel joke the whole room was in on. The light-furred wolf did not applaud, the fixed quality of her attention suggesting a mind entirely somewhere else. Convenient, but never good. When she moved to drink, Kass slipped out the front doors.

Outside, a particulate rain blew under the streetlights like swarming insects. Father Kass fumbled with his tiny cellphone, grumbling at errors brought on by his haste. At SEND, and before he could even pocket the device, the message was live, was transmitting at a fraction of the speed of light, cast out, up, through the rain, to a cell tower on an overgrown island north, in the Rainforest District, then speeding further: to a processing center in the Meadowlands. 

Heavy rain, suspended in the sky.

Like the recoil of elastic, binary data rebounded back again, threading the cell tower and zapping south, to Happytown, across its little river and down, through the roof of the Black Cat. 

Father Kass pocketed his phone and walked against the light rain, muttering a quick prayer, while indoors, upstairs, a phone pinged.

Father K: Queenie S downstairs, by the bar. Unsure if alone. BE CAREFUL.

Nick scanned his surroundings, stood, and asked directions for the bathroom, knowing the response.

"Across from the bar, downstairs," said Hannah. "There's another in back, more private, if you'd like."

"The bar is fine."

Beside him, Skip pushed back in his chair and rose; Nick turned on him: "What're you doing?"

"Uh." The kid blinked, looked back at the table for help. "Bathroom? You want me to elaborate?"

Dean, whom Nick continued to forget was even there, snickered and earned himself a glower.

"It's fine, Nicholas," Hannah assured, abstaining from 'Nick' in the same way the fox abstained from 'Hannah.' "We're mostly done here."

They would misread his hesitation if he did not go. The night was a success; the kid would stay with the old lynx. Nick couldn't afford to sour things. Taking the coyote by one shoulder, he steered them away from the table, where Hannah leaned in to her husband for a private word, and Kitty thrust her phone at the wolf beside her, saying in a deadpan, "You seen this one, Dean? Shit's hilarious."

Out of sight, Skip shook off Nick's grip and went ahead of him down the stairs. "Hey," Nick hissed.

The coyote didn't turn. "Tranquilo. Just 'cause you anxious doesn't mean I have to be."

"I'm anxious," Nick hissed, "because—"

"Some fox thing, ain't it?" Skip reached the bottom stair. "Well, keep it to yourself, zorro. Todo estará bien." And with that, the coyote disappeared out of sight.

The main room was brimming with animals and music. Senses flaring, Nick dodged around tables and smaller mammals, and the waistlines of larger ones, reaching a clearing in the crowd just in time to watch the coyote's tail disappear behind the bathroom door. He stopped short, deliberating. Scanned the room in search of a vantage point.

From atop a barstool, he surveyed the crowd.

"Be right there," called the bartender.

"Sure, take your time."

He found the shag of a grey-white wolf at a short distance from the stage, head down, perusing a phone no doubt. It could be anyone. Maybe Kass misread things, because why would a Scaglione be in River North?

For a night at the Black Cat, replied the cynic in his head. It was not outside the realm of possibility.

Nick tried to relax. With eyes on the bathroom, he let his ears dial back and his weight sink into the bartop, so he didn't come off like some rookie cop undercover. But his tail still bristled beneath the counter. For something to say to the bartender, who was probably waiting for an order, he asked, "You've heard of this group before?"

But she was preoccupied, only muttered in the affirmative. 

"Not terrible," he remarked.

"They do jazz here every—"

"Every Monday and Wednesday night, I know."

The wolf was in profile now: a female. Nick's stomach turned.

He choked out, "What're they called, d'you know?"

"Community Jazz Nights," came the bartender, which made him chuckle.

"I meant the band."

"Oh. 'Happiness.'"

Nick made a face. "Happiness?" Turning, he smirked, "Don't you think that's a bit—?"

"Strange, I know," said the rabbit in shirtsleeves. She was stooping to search through a dishwasher. Behind the bar, the floor was high, so as to accommodate smaller mammals. He had full view of where her apron was tied, just above a fluff of tail.

Nick turned away, staring pointedly down the bar; but his head didn't seem to stop turning, and everything slid a little aslant, like a ship run up on something jagged. He didn't know her—why would he know her? Even if somehow he did, one never watched prey. Every predator mastered that in childhood, and yet, he went on stealing indiscreet glances.

She said, still turned, "They don't sound any happier than last week."

Rabbits everywhere; an abundance of rabbits making more rabbits; talking heads, raving for population control among highly productive species because there were rabbits bounding, twitching, sniffing, and munching on flowers or whatever else a rabbit does, in every corner of the world. Nick could scarcely tell the difference between any of them, so why was intuition making him hesitate now? Was it her voice? The dark tip of either ear? Why should this bunny be any different?

"Wha...?" He stammered. Swallowed. "What's that?"

"The band." The rapid thumping of her left foot stopped the moment she found the object in question: a short paring knife, but a large one in her rabbit's grip. 

"But they're local," she turned, "so they're probably referring to..."

The fox and rabbit met eyes over the bartop. 

Nick shut his mouth, which had wandered open a little more than was civil. Her ears rose a fraction, in a tentative assessment of the strange predator, watching her.

"...The neighborhood," she finished, her nose twitching a little. Violet eyes fluttered, then widened a little; the look of one rousing from sleep. And then Nick watched her realize who he was, a realization he had managed himself only moments before, and her ears collapsed like sails without wind, softly, against the back of her head.