Dusk was a human sometimes.
She had to be a human to do her work, because that was the rule. But when she had no work, she returned to her true form, which was a fox with three tails. At night she slept in a kennel with a chain around her neck, because her masters knew that she would escape if she ever had the chance.
Dusk disliked her work. It was boring and repetitive. Every day, people came to her to see her paint illusions for them, and every day she painted the same ones. She would make a car look like a tiger, or make the side of a building into a movie screen playing a soda commercial. Her masters were paid according to how good her illusion was. They made her practice the same ones over and over until they were perfect. But perfect illusions were boring.
When Dusk was off having lunch, and the exhibition stage was closed, she made her bowl of dog food look like a steak, or a hamburger. Anything but dog food. But even an illusion could not mask the taste, and dog food just tasted like dog food.
Painting illusions was easier as a fox, but she was not allowed to become a fox in front of customers. Her masters said that there would be inquiries if anyone knew what she really was. But if she was merely a human, then everyone would think that she was just a magician, or even a witch. Dusk held real magicians in high regard. What they did was real magic, while all she did was make things look like other things. That wasn't magic. That was fooling a person's brain.
There were other people in the circus who gave performances. Dusk felt most sorry for the freaks from other worlds. They sat in their cages all day while people gawked at them, and took pictures, and screamed, and gasped. Dusk knew all of them, because she was something of a freak, herself. They all rode in the same train car when they moved from city to city, and there they learned each other's scents and languages.
Dusk was fluent in Human as well as animal speech, and she could understand the freaks well enough. They weren't so frightening. One was a rat the size of a horse. He was very polite and kept himself well-groomed. Sometimes Dusk was called upon to give him red glowing eyes and matted fur to impress a skeptical patron, and the rat found this insulting.
There was a morose centaur, and a ten-foot long lizard they called a dragon. He never did more than eat and bask in the sun, and Dusk tried and tried to persuade him to breathe fire. "Fire?" he chuckled at her. "I am no breathe fire. Is too hot." There was a giant vampire bat and a tiny wispy fairy who always had to have fresh flowers to live in.
There were all the usual circus people, too: the lion tamer, the trapeze artists, the clowns, and the elephants. But Dusk was not allowed to mix with them. She was too valuable, and her masters did not trust their employees.
Dusk had plotted her escape many times, but she had never tried it. Where would she go once she was out of the circus? She knew nothing about the various cities that they performed in, aside from their different smells. Some smelled like cars and smoke, while others smelled like the ocean. Outside the fence she could see buildings, streets and lights in the distance. Where in all that could a little fox hide? If her masters wanted her back badly enough, they would offer a reward, and someone would catch her and bring her back. She couldn't stand the thought of being brought back. If she escaped, she had to get out and stay out.
Then one day, during the middle of summer, an unexpected opportunity arose.
The circus had erected its tents outside of town, but next door to the circus was a zoo. Dusk stood at the door of her kennel and sniffed the strange smells of other animals. There were hundreds of them in there! If a fox needed to hide, then that was the place! She looked at her three tails. She could disguise them. Perhaps paint herself as a different animal altogether until the hue and cry had died down.
She kept alert for an opportunity to leave the circus grounds all that day. As the sun set, a gang of children arrived to see her illusions. She was transformed into a young girl, as she always was when dealing with humans. It hampered her skill a little, but not enough to mar the illusions. The children oohed and ahhed. Then, as they were ushered toward the next attraction by their attending adults, Dusk threw an illusion of herself onto the stage and slipped into the crowd.
Walking around with the kids was the easy part. Maintaining the illusion of herself was more and more difficult the further away she went. Finally, as they left the gates, Dusk made her illusion leave the stage and go into her kennel, and there she let it fade away. Now she might have as long as half an hour before anyone noticed that she was gone.
She abandoned the group of children, raced across the street in the deepening twilight, turned into a fox and slipped through the fence surrounding the zoo.
The zoo was fascinating! She dashed here and there, using aisles between the pens that kept her hidden from the eyes of the humans in the zoo. The animals looked at her curiously. "Who are you?" asked a giraffe as she paused to stare up at him.
"I'm Dusk," she replied. "I'm trying to escape from the circus across the road. Where should I hide?"
The giraffe considered. "If I were you, I would hide in the pen with the meanest animal in the zoo."
"Would a mean animal eat me, though?" asked Dusk.
The giraffe smiled with his ears. "Depends on the animal. Do you like lions?"
"No," said Dusk.
"How about hippopotami?"
"I don't even know what that is," said Dusk.
"I know," said the giraffe. "In the middle of the zoo they have a real live dragon. He hates everybody, especially humans. Maybe you could persuade him to hide you."
"Sounds promising," said Dusk. "Thank you!" She bounded away across the zoo.
A real live dragon! Not like the circus dragon. She hoped he could really breathe fire. She also hoped that he wouldn't try to eat her. Carnivores were so single-minded sometimes.
Various signs pointed her toward the Dragon Pit, and before long she found it: a huge hole in the ground with a fence around it. There was a moat filled with water, and an island in the middle with a cement imitation of a cave. Inside the cave was a blue scaley backside and a scaly tail. She studied it. It was not a large backside. It was the size of an elephant's.
She trotted around the circumference of the pit, found a ramp used by zookeepers to feed the dragon, and squeezed through the bars. She emerged on the concrete island. It was smaller than it looked, and the cement was strewn with dirty straw. She walked up to the dragon and peered into the darkness of the cave, trying to spot his head. All she saw was the back of his elbow.
As she tried to think of how to announce her presence without being offensive, she heard the sound of running feet. "She must have come this way," said a familiar voice.
The masters!
Forgetting caution, Dusk dove into the cave. She squeezed between the wall and the dragon's scaly body until she arrived at the back, where his head rested. His head jerked up and he snarled. "What the?"
"Please, hide me," she whispered frantically. "They're coming!"
The dragon turned his head and listened to the voices and pounding feet outside. Then he looked down at her with his eyes narrowed. "You're a freak from the circus," he said.
Dusk nodded.
The dragon looked over his shoulder again, then opened his jaws in a wicked grin. "They'll never find you in here." He swept out a forearm and pulled her in against his chest. "And if they do, they'll never get past me."
Dusk examined the dragon's claws. They were as long as one of her tails, but the tips were dulled from contact with the cement. "You need your claws trimmed," she said.
"And who's going to do it?" retorted the dragon. "I lamed the last three zookeepers who tried it. Humans have such long legs. So convenient for biting."
"How come you hate them?" she asked.
"You sit in this cage for years on end and have mobs of them stare at you," he growled. "You'll hate them, too."
Dusk looked up at him with interest. He did not look like the lizard at the circus. He had a square head with horns sticking out the back of his skull. He had two huge tusks that protruded from his bottom jaw and rose above his snout. He looked like her idea of a dragon. "Can you breathe fire?" she asked with interest.
"Sometimes," he grumbled. "Shut up, here they come."
Dusk flattened herself against the hard scales on his chest. Outside there was the squeak of a gate opening, and voices.
"Why would she come in here? What is she, suicidal?"
"He sleeps this time of day. He wouldn't bother her."
"Where would she be? There's nowhere to hide here."
There was a tinny rattle as someone poked the dragon's tail. "Hey Charr!" one of them yelled. "Wake up! Seen anything unusual in here lately?"
The dragon's head jerked up, and he glared over his shoulder. "Just a few extra tidbits," he snarled at them. "Don't touch me again. I haven't been fed yet, you know."
"There's your answer," one human told the other. "Anything he doesn't eat, he shreds. Let's get out of here."
"And don't come back," Charr grumbled as the gate swung closed.
Dusk exhaled and relaxed. She hadn't realized she was holding her breath. "Thanks," she panted. Charr lowered his head to sniff her fur, and she licked his snout. "I don't know what they'd do if they found me. Chain me up forever, probably."
"Sounds familier," said Charr. He extended his other forearm, and Dusk was horrified to see the iron shackle and chain on his wrist.
"Why do they chain you like that?" she asked.
"No roof to my pen," he said. "I could fly away if they ever took this off."
Dusk looked at the chain. Then she looked up at the dragon and grinned, showing her teeth. "Why not breathe fire on it?"
"Watch what they give me to eat," he said, sounding glum.
Dusk heard footsteps and the sound of a sliding pan outside. When the footsteps retreated, Charr crawled backwards out of the cave and walked across the island, dragging his chain. Dusk watched from inside the cave. Charr reached into the large metal bowl and lifted out a chunk of raw meat. Then he reached in his free hand and awkwardly scooped out a bunch of green cubes. "See?" he said. "Meat and hay cubes. No flavor at all."
"You eat hay?" said Dusk increduously as Charr dumped the handful in his mouth and chewed.
"Yep," he said with his mouth full. "I'm omnivorous. I'd be a vegetarian if I could. Meat makes me sick."
"Well, I like it!" said Dusk, throwing caution to the wind and dashing out to him. She stood under him and begged, sitting on her haunches with her front feet held in front of her.
Charr bit a chunk off the slab of meat and dropped it to her. "Here, take it. It doesn't help me any."
Steak! Real steak that wasn't an illusion! Dusk bolted it down and was sorry afterwards, because it was gone. "What do you mean, it doesn't help you any?"
"I have to have spice if I'm going to breathe fire," said Charr. "At home, we eat peppers by the truckload. We season our food with horseradish and chili pepper. Makes my mouth water just thinking about it. But here, all I get is the blandest of the bland."
Dusk thought about it, looking at the chain on his leg. "Could you melt the chain off?"
"Easy," said Charr. He looked at her and his green eyes glowed in the twilight like lanterns. "If you get me some spice, little fox, then we'll escape together."
Dusk ran out her tongue and grinned.