by Jadie Jang
Or … somethings. I couldn’t tell; it was happening too fast. The shadow was a twisty, rapidly morphing mass of darkness, in the center of a whirlwind of motion. The whirlwind was … it was hard to tell. It seemed to be morphing, too, but I saw … some creature … some furry creatures, and bundles of … no bushes of … brownish … no blackish-red fur? Could that be right? I strained my eyes, since I felt strangely disinclined to move. The only thing I could see with any clarity were those bushes of reddish-black fur. They looked like … tails? What creature had a reddish, bushy, fur tail?
As if to answer my question, Shady hit out in all directions with his shockwave, and the whirlwind of sinuous, reddish fur resolved into a single creature, the size of a large mastiff, that flew towards me and landed, stunned, a few feet away.
It was an enormous fox.
I just stared at it with, I’m sure, WTF?-face.
Sure, I’d seen werewolves aplenty, and were-hyenas, and even, recently, a were-dog. (This thought gave me a sharp pang in my now-empty spot.) But I had never seen a … were-fox? Is that was that was?
The fox opened its eyes, gave me a rueful, goofy look that was ringingly familiar, then leapt up and faced Shady again. It lashed its full, bushy tail … s? Was that more than one tail I saw, or was it just an optical illusion from a fast-lashing tail? The question quickly lost interest when I saw a strange, bright energy growing and coalescing around the tail/s’ motion. No, not an energy: fire!
The fox turned its body slightly, then drew back its lashing tail/s once more and struck forward with them, sending the hot yellow flame in an offensive streak towards the shadow.
Having had little impact on Shady myself—with all my strength and power—I didn’t expect this fire streak to do much. But, shockingly, the shadow shrank back from it, and swirled frantically to get out of its path.
Of course! We’d been calling it a shadow creature for weeks, but I’d been thinking about it more as a solid substance. But it really was a manifest darkness—an actual shadow. And, of course, light is inimical to shadow!
The fox, evidently heartened by its initial success, was now lashing bright lines of yellow/orange fire all over Shady’s general direction. I dragged myself to an upright position and plucked a hair off my arm. I turned it into a fireball; it didn’t burn me, and I had no idea if it just cast light or actually had the power to burn others. But the light was the thing.
I threw the fireball, and it flew into the center of Shady’s mass. The shadow shrank away from it on all sides, creating a hole in his center for the fire to pass through. Well, okay then. I began yanking clumps of hairs out of my arms and chest at random, creating strings of fireballs, and heaving them over towards Shady.
The shadow took on—somehow, I still don’t know how—a posture of severe alarm, formed a random cloud shape, and flew off into a side street as fast as it could.
I dragged myself up, and galumphed on all four sets of toes a few yards down the street to the intersection. But Shady had already disappeared. It knew, apparently, when it was beaten … and now, so did I.
I turned to look behind me at the fox, who was watching me intently. Time to find out what this creature wanted from me.
I walked upright toward the fox now with a deliberate, stompy pace, turning quickly back into human form as I did so. Changing shape while moving deliberately towards a target is as intimidating as changing size while doing the same. But the fox didn’t flinch.
I stopped two yards away: a good tactical distance for me.
“Thanks for the help, but who the hell are you?” I demanded, in a firm, but not hostile voice.
The fox turned its back to me and ducked its head. It looked like it was … throwing something up? Huh? I thought I saw, for just a split second, the fox placing something on top of its head … but that was impossible. It didn’t have any hands … did it? And then, the next instant, it was morphing and growing quickly; its fur was disappearing, and being replaced by skin, covered by jeans and a red t-shirt. Its tail, or tails, were the last thing to disappear, as if they didn’t want to go. Finally, I looked at its strangely familiar, triangular face and saw … Todd Wakahisa, wearing a cautious, rueful grin.
I was strangely unshocked. Todd was a were-fox.
“Huh,” I said. “Well, that explains a lot.”
Todd’s grin lost its caution and widened.
“A were-fox? Really? That’s a thing?”
“Not a were-fox. Just a fox. I’m a kitsune.”
“Oh, you mean like you’re a fox who turns into a human? A fox-were?”
He looked around us uncomfortably.
“As much as I’d love to stand around in the middle of public street talking about our most closely held secrets, why don’t we go somewhere a little more private?”
I nodded, suddenly feeling disinclined to speak, and turned to lead Todd back to my apartment a block away. At least, I tried to turn and walk, but the turn was apparently too much for me. I felt my knees buckle and was entirely unable to do anything about it. A strangely blithe feeling came over me as I thought, “Hey! I’m going to crumple to the ground! Oh well.”
The expected blow on my backside from the sidewalk never came, however. Instead, there was Todd, holding me up.
“Whoa,” he said. “Are you okay?”
I still didn’t feel like speaking, and after an effort, realized that that was exhaustion.
“Sucked it out of me,” I mumbled.
“What, that smoke creature? Sucked what out of you?”
“Essence,” I mumbled, and my head started to loll. I couldn’t do anything about that, either.
Without another word, Todd swooped me up into a bodice-ripper carry and legged it down the street in the direction of my apartment. Hm. How did he know where I lived? I struggled to put this into words, but Monkey, who was tiny and depleted, just leaned back in my head and told me to enjoy it. I’d always fantasized about being literally swept off my feet like this. I only wished it had been—
“I’m gonna have to set you down,” Todd said. We were at my building’s front door. He put me butt-first on the ground. I felt better, actually, and was able to hold myself upright while he swung my purse around his back and fished my keys out.
“Hey,” I said, only slightly slurring. “How do you know where I live?”
He immediately looked shifty. “Oh,” he said breezily, opening the door. “It was some meeting or retreat or something.”
“We’ve never had a meeting or retreat here,” I said. “It’s too small.”
“Huh.” Todd said, silencing me by picking me up again and carrying me up the stairs.
Boy, being carried by a strong man was kinda awesome. And rare. I was unexpectedly heavy, like all beast-shifters; something to contain the power, Ayo thought. Guys would test my weight, and then never bother to try again. I’d actually carried injured or drunk guys far more often than the reverse. Hm. It had never occurred to me before to deliberately seek out supernats to date, but maybe that was the way to go. Too bad it wasn’t—
“Okay, I think you can stand now,” Todd said, propping me up on the landing outside my apartment door. He turned out to be right. He unlocked the door and went to pick me up again, but I demurred.
“I can make it inside, thanks,” I said. My words were coming back, and the hollow in my center was shrinking.
He waved me in ahead of him, which is why I saw Journey to the West lying on the floor directly in front of the door. I hurriedly kicked it under the couch.
He had taken his shoes off before entering. “You’re feeling better,” he said.
“Yes, a lot.”
“You’re welcome.”
I paused in taking my shoes off. “That was you?”
He bowed slightly. “Kitsune provide general benevolence and good luck. It takes many forms. Perhaps my presence called your … essence? … back from wherever it had been taken.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Or maybe it just couldn’t s
tay away.”
I plopped down on my bed and hmphed. That was interesting. What was suddenly more interesting, though, was how soft my bed was. I decided to investigate with the rest of my back. Yep, that was surprisingly soft. I’d never noticed before.
“What was that thing, anyway?” Todd asked, sitting down on the couch. Oh, I had a guest.
“Would you like something to drink?” I asked, from my supine position.
“Uh … sure,” Todd said doubtfully.
“Okay, I have coffee, tea, soda …” and I fell asleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Maya’s Apartment, San Francisco
Only to be jerked out of sleep a short time later by the blaring of Ayo’s ring tone. I answered the phone, still half asleep, and woke up while telling Ayo the latest about Slim Shady.
“How did you get him away from you?” she asked. Apparently, she’d accepted Shady’s maleness, too.
I glanced up at Todd who nodded approval. “Todd Wakahisa was there. He knocked the shadow off me and we were both able to drive it away with fire. Not sure if it was the heat or the light, but I think it was the light. I think this thing is literally a manifest shadow.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“Wait, what? Did you figure out what he is?”
Todd handed me a cup of tea and a plate of three sandwiches—neatly arranged into an overlapping row—instead of the usual single one that humans ate. Yes I really needed to start dating supernats.
“Yes. It was difficult. The creature is not behaving the way it’s supposed to. But I’m almost certain now that he’s a nalusa chito. That’s a Choctaw shadow creature; shadow, in this case, meaning malevolent, not necessarily made of shadow. But there’s disagreement about its form: some saying it takes the form of a black panther, and some saying it’s a big black shadow.”
I remembered thinking I saw a black cat standing over Tez the night before, but didn’t interrupt.
“This creature is interesting, because it’s a literal representation of depression. It creeps inside you when you allow evil thoughts or depression into your mind, and then it eats your soul. I had always classed the nalusa chito as entirely mythical: a very direct story to explain depression or other mental illnesses. This is part of the reason it took me so long to find. My bad.”
“What did you find?”
“Well, I was remembering how the San Antonios were so convinced that the shadow was employed by someone else, and I thought about how that actually mapped onto what Bu Bu told you about there being a creature with the shadow. And that got me thinking: what if this creature doesn’t usually behave this way, but it’s being constrained by someone else, or it’s acting as an agent for someone else? Could a creature be magically forced to act differently than its nature?
“Then I remembered a story I’d heard from a Chickasaw medicine woman in Tishomingo, and I went and looked it up. She said she’d witnessed a foreign creature—she couldn’t be specific about what kind of foreign; just not white, not Black, and not Indigenous—draw out a nalusa chito from a possessed young Choctaw/Chickasaw man, and then enslave it. She said she was the one who referred the afflicted man to the foreign creature. She said the creature had been in the guise of a man, but was radiating an unusual level of supernatural energy. That sound familiar to you?”
It did. That was pretty much exactly how Ayo had described me to myself the first time we’d met. But Todd was right there, had were-animal ears, and I didn’t want him to know about this.
“You think this foreign creature might be the same guy Bu Bu saw with the shadow creature?”
“I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions, but it’s too much of a coincidence to dismiss out of hand. After all, stories like this, of mysterious supernats who enslave not-quite-corporeal nasties, are extremely rare. In fact, outside of sorcerers bottling djinns, I can’t remember ever hearing any other such stories, which is why I was able to find this one.”
We both chewed on this for a moment.
“When did the whole enslavement thing happen?”
“I got the story about three years ago, but the medicine woman was irritable and wouldn’t be specific about when the story actually happened. And she was old. So … no clue.”
“Okay, how do we … uh … defeat it?”
“I’ve never seen any stories of anyone defeating a nalusa chito—besides this one, I mean, and she couldn’t give details. The stories are all cautionary, mostly about not giving in to evil thoughts or despair. But once the creature gets in you, it eats you up and then your soul is gone. What happens to the creature after that, I don’t know. But you said light works.”
“Drives it away. Hey! As far as we know, it’s never been seen in the daytime, right? But I don’t know if light destroys it. Can it be destroyed?”
“No idea. I’ll make some calls tomorrow, see if I can get some more direct information. In the meantime, since it’s clearly after you now, you shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’ll stay the night,” Todd volunteered, loudly. Monkey perked up.
“Todd said he’d stay here tonight. Any ideas for tomorrow night?”
“I’ll get right on it. I might be able to gin up a protective spell for your apartment or something. Or you can always sleep here. Get some sleep.” And she hung up.
I turned to find Todd unexpectedly close, and staring at me. “What?”
“Nothing. You’re just, nothing I expected … in a good way,” he said, with his patented rueful smile.
Looking at him up close, I had to reinterpret the smile. Maybe it wasn’t so much rueful as … mildly amused at the world. Or maybe himself.
“Surely you knew from the first that I was … something.”
His unblemished brow wrinkled a little. Boy, was he good-looking, up close. Like a K-drama star, except less plastic and more … um … gritty? And he had a musky smell that was … a little off from what I expected of a human man, but not unpleasant.
“It’s true, your scent isn’t quite … right,” he said, as if reading my mind. “But then, when I take a deeper whiff it’s … not wrong, either. I just assumed after a while that you were mixed blood and that was the deal. But you seemed so intent on passing for human that I didn’t wanna out you, and I thought maybe you didn’t even know …”
I understood. Mixed blood people—people who were part human and part supernat—could be extremely touchy. They were very diverse: some with abilities and some not, some knowing their heritage and some not. And they had all kinds of ways to feel about it. We always had some of them coming into Sanc-Ahh, looking for a place to belong, and often being really difficult about it. It was understandable: supernats were all over the place about mixed bloods as well.
Part of me had always wondered if I was mixed blood, too. It would explain a lot. But the strength and extent of my abilities kinda kiboshed that notion. Human blood weakened abilities; magic was zero-sum like that. No mixie would be as powerful as I am … unless my supernat parent was even more powerful. Scary thought. And my mixed-human-race features kinda suggested that I might be mixed in other ways as well.
Ayo had suggested once or twice that I might be mixed species—a mix of more than one kind of supernat—which was why my abilities were so multiplied in number and strength, and why I couldn’t find accounts of creatures with my skill sets. Mixed species supernats—by all accounts—were extremely unpredictable in terms of appearance and abilities; there were stories of weak ones, ones with incredibly bizarre abilities, and unbelievably strong ones with abilities neither parent had. But mixed species creatures were so incredibly rare that Ayo couldn’t point to single extant creature who was an actual mix. I’d heard many stories about them, but no one I knew had ever met one. So if I was one, I was a frakkin’ unicorn.
Suddenly, I didn’t want to talk about me.
“So, can you explain the whole were-fox, or fox-were thing to me?”
“Uh …
I’m not a were-anything. I’m a fox. Period. A stone fox …” He waggled his eyebrows.
I just looked at him, confused.
“It’s what people used to say to mean ‘hottie’ in the seventies … never mind. Japanese foxes are just Japanese foxes, but some of us reach a certain age and we gain supernatural abilities.”
“But you’re a huge fox! Are Japanese foxes that big?”
He laughed. “No, no, not at all.” He pulled out his phone and found a YouTube video. It was charming, and Japanese foxes were freakin’ adorable—and fox-sized.
“It’s part of the deal. If we reach a certain age we gain a whole lot of things, including the ability to change size, if we want that. I’m American, so I want it. We add new tails, and gain the ability to create fire-lightning, kitsunebi, and the ability to change form, including to become human.”
“Okay, wait. ‘Reach a certain age?’ Todd, how old are you?”
He shifted slightly away from me. “Well, typically it takes one hundreed years to get shapeshifting--”
“You’re one hundred years old?”
He shifted some more. “Um, well, more like one hundred-fifteen, if you must know … but I was only a fox for the first hundred years, so I’m really fifteen in human years.” He leaned back towards me and waggled his brows. “Which makes you a cougar right now—”
“Wait, when you were telling me about your grandparents being interned, you seemed kinda shifty. Does that mean that … you were interned?” All the hair on my head felt like it was standing on end.
“No! No, nothing like that. But you’re right, my parents were issei and they were the ones who were interned. They left me behind on the farm, actually, and—”
“So, is this anything like the Chinese evil fox spirits you told me about? I can’t remember what they’re called—”
“Huli jing, yes. There’s a cross-over. Huli jing are related to us, a different breed of fox.”
“But, and maybe I’m remembering this wrong, but, I thought you said the foxes only turned into women, to lure men.”
“But what should we turn into, to lure straight women?”
