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ancestor came back as a ghost, but also my sister and myself remember our great-grandmother and we think she would like to try to help us escape. She was born in Baranowicze, which was then Lechia, and she fled into Siberia when the war started.”
    “Which war?” Meg asked. “They were having them every ten years for a while.”
    “World War Two,” Alexei said. “Nineteen thirty-eight.”
    “I thought they didn’t persecute foxes.”
    Alexei lowered his ears. “Foxes with proper coloring. Great-grandmother was a cross fox.”
    “Fucking hell.” Meg lifted a paw to her whiskers, the black dye in her fur. “So she went to Siberia?”
    “She stopped in Samorodka because she…” He frowned. “She twisted her ankle so that she could not walk. Sprain, is this right?” Meg nodded, and he inclined his head, searching for words. It was harder to tell the story because he could hear Prababushka laughing in her cracked voice, the Siberian words so familiar that he had fight to speak in a language Meg could understand. “My great-grandfather was the son of the doctor. He helped take care of her and they stayed. She said that it was the happiest time she ever sprained an ankle.”
    “She could have sprained her ankle in any town, though,” Meg pointed out. “She might still have met someone, and then someone else would be here telling me this story.”
    Alexei shook his head, annoyed that he was telling the story badly. Prababushka would scold him, would tell him to start again. “She had a small doll from her grandmother, who had died the year before. When they were traveling through Samorodka, the doll slipped from her paws. She tried to catch it, and…” He mimed twisting his ankle. “So she always said that her grandmother’s spirit made her stop to meet Dmitri—my great-grandfather.”
    Meg smiled. “It’s a nice story, but it’s still just putting meaning into randomness. What about you? You’re running away from a horrible place and you ended up here. What ghost did that?”
    “Perhaps I am not meant to stay here,” Alexei said. “I have not met a…” The word ‘husband’ didn’t sound right. “Special person.”
    “Thanks.”
    “I mean,” he said quickly, “someone to build a life with. And anyway,” he added before Meg could argue more, “I may still have to return.”
    “You can’t go back. They’ll fuck you up. It’s just getting worse back there for gay cubs, y’know?”
    “Not only the gay ones.” Alexei thought of Cat. “But I will say prayers to Prababushka that I may remain. That is what I mean. We do not put our ancestors in churches, but we say prayers for them and thanks to them.”
    “Whatever works.” Meg washed out her glass and one of Sol’s and put them in the drying rack. “I guess it’s no stranger than praying to a guy who died two thousand years ago and nobody knows what species he was and he wants you to eat part of him.”
    “Does your vampire fox not want to eat people?” Alexei said, to tease her.
    “He drinks fake blood,” Meg said. “It’s fruit punch.”
    Alexei laughed. “So everyone believes in something strange. Who can say what is true?”
    “I can,” Meg said. “It’s whatever I can touch, what stays the same from one day to the next. I never saw a ghost, I just saw Sol acting weird and then somehow screwing up his eyes. My vampire fox friend says there are chemicals on the Internet you can get that change your eye color.”
    Alexei started to shake his head, then said, “Your vampire friend, does he have a name?”
    Meg scowled. “I call him Athos, but that’s not his real name.”
    “Are you going to learn his real name before he comes to visit?”
    “You sound like Sol’s mother,” Meg said. “I trust him. I talk to him just about every day.”
    “I only ask,” Alexei said, “because of what happened to Sol. Not the ghost, the real world.”
    “Sol believes in a lot of things I don’t. Ghosts. Nice people. Love.