She was moving before I could finish, and I heard the springs shifting in her bed as she rolled off and knelt on the floor next to my bed, wrapping one arm around me and pressing her forehead against the back of my neck. Neither of us said anything for a long minute, just breathing as she held me. For all the time we spent together, it was rare for her to touch my skin, but there wasn’t anything sexual about this—despite the darkness, and tenderness of her touch, and the feel of her breath. It was comforting, as if she were wrapping me in all her wiry strength, both of body and will.
When she spoke, it was a whisper, but there was steel in it and a promise that I knew that she meant and would never break. “I’ll rip the skin off that bitch’s back,” she said right against my ear. “Whatever happens, she won’t get to keep what she stole.”
It soothed me to hear that, relaxed the part of me that I didn’t like and that needed blood and vengeance, but that I couldn’t ignore tonight. I reached out with one hand, wrapping it around her elbow, letting my forearm rest against hers. Neither of us moved, and it was in that position that I was finally able to close my eyes and let sleep take me.
• • •
I knew I was dreaming, but it wasn’t my dream. I was walking down a hallway, but at the same time it wasn’t me who was walking.
It was like being at an art-house theater and watching a bad shaky-cam, low-budget movie. The perspective seemed off, and the color balance was somehow wrong in a way I couldn’t quite define but that gave me a distant feeling of nausea. But I recognized the hallway I was walking down and apartment door I knocked on.
Beth opened the door—the Beth I’d known, with an open expression and a ready smile. What she saw erased her smile—she looked down at something on my chest and opened her mouth to scream. I was only able to see, not hear, but a hand that was mine but not mine slapped out to cover her mouth, and when I saw that hand, with its caramel skin and perfect manicure such a contrast to the long black talons that punched out through it, I knew whose dream this was.
But knowing didn’t wake me up, and I was looking through Soli’s eyes, feeling the movement of her limbs as if they were my own, as she shoved her way into the apartment, slammed the door shut behind her, and shoved Beth down to the ground. Those were her hands, yet my hands, that slapped a piece of duct tape across Beth’s mouth to keep her quiet, then flipped her over and pressed one knee hard into the middle of her back to keep Beth exactly where she was. I could feel Beth struggling, trying to push up and get away, but Soli was too strong and held her down.
I felt an echo of irritation inside me. This wasn’t my emotion; it was Soli’s. She was irritated—irritated that she had to replace a skin she’d been fond of. Irritated that this skin wouldn’t be as pretty. Irritated that this had to be done here, where the meat would have to be kept quiet.
And then all that irritation ebbed away, replaced by the pleasure Soli felt, and I was forced to feel as she placed one long black talon at the back of Beth’s neck, just at her hairline, and began to peel the skin off of her. I knew how much Soli enjoyed it as Beth writhed, because it wasn’t just Soli feeling it; it was me—
I woke up when Suze slapped me across the face, and I knew from the blooming heat in both cheeks that she must’ve been hitting me for a while now. Someone was yelling, and it took me a second to register that my throat was sore because the person yelling was me.
The light wasn’t on, but neither of us had closed the heavy drapes and moonlight poured through the window, illuminating Suze as she straddled my chest, one hand still drawn back to deliver another smack if it proved necessary. Her hair hung down around her face, obscuring it in a wave of black, but all of her attention was on me. I stopped yelling, and we both paused.
“Fort?” she said harshly. “That’s the kind of night terror that needs a psychiatrist.”
“It wasn’t my dream,” I said with surprising difficulty. For someone who looked so tiny and dainty, Suze was a little more weight than I liked on my chest. I nudged her leg with my hand, and she took the hint and dismounted me. Instead of returning to her own bed, however, she plopped herself next to me on the bed, her back resting against the headboard as she looked down at me intently.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I saw Soli kill Beth,” I said. “Or start to, anyway. You woke me up before she finished.”
There was a long pause. “I’m going to go on record that I hate this fucking skinwalker,” Suze said. “And at the risk of sounding species-ist, I’m going to say that I don’t ever want to meet another one.”
“Noted and agreed.” I struggled to keep my voice from reflecting the icy horror that was filling my chest. “So, apparently I don’t have enough vampire-ness, and it can get into my head.” Maybe it was because I wasn’t through the transition. Or maybe it was something more. After all, my mother had made me differently than my siblings—she’d told me that but nothing else.
Suze’s voice cut through my thoughts. “According to your sister, it’s just the dreams.”
My jaw dropped. “You’re going to call this just? What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
There was a short pause; then Suze asked, “Have you ever studied the fine art of occlumency?”
I didn’t hesitate, but smacked her as hard as I could with my pillow. It was one of those hotels that set up at least four half-size pillows on each bed, so Suze was immediately able to similarly arm herself, and for a few minutes the only sounds in the room were of pillows making contact and muffled curses as we engaged in a brief but very serious pillow fight. “This is not the time for a goddamn Harry Potter reference!” I finally yelled, and the pillow fight ended just as quickly as it had started. I dropped back onto the bed, breathing hard. “Seriously, Suze. What the hell am I going to do here?”
Suzume was also panting from the intensity of our pillow brawl, something that even under these circumstances made me feel a little better about myself. She wiggled back into her previous position of sitting up against the headboard, but now reached down and ran one cool hand over my forehead, wiping away the sweat that was only partially from our recent battle. Against my will, I felt myself relax at the soothing motion. “Go back to sleep,” she said.
I pushed her hand away, deeply irritated. “Did you not just notice the crazy dream invasion?”
Suze resumed her stroking. “Yes,” she said, finally sounding serious. “And this time I’ll be watching for it. If it happens again, I’ll wake you up even faster.”
I paused, considering what she’d just said. But then I shook my head. “I’m never falling asleep again.”
She tsked her tongue. “Of course you will. I’ll even tell you a story.” Her voice changed, no longer conversational, and took on the rhythm and cadence of repeating something she’d heard many, many times. “This is the story my mother told me, and her mother told her, and her mother told her, all the way back to when it happened, because this is a true story of our people.”
“I don’t think I’m included in that our,” I noted sarcastically.
Suze’s hand stopped stroking just long enough to smack me hard. “Shush,” she scolded me. “This is the way the story is told.” She cleared her throat and resumed the head petting, as if nothing had happened. And once she started talking again, I began to forget about being irritated with her and became absorbed in her story. “There was once a fox who went wandering far from her mother and her sisters and the den where she had been born. She traveled up and down the whole length of Japan, and she saw many strange things. One night, far from any dens she knew or caches of food she had left, she caught the smell of an oni. An oni is a vicious thing, strong and fast, and she had no sisters and cousins to help her, and most foxes would’ve hurried in the other direction. But this fox was a curious thing, and she followed the trail of the oni where it led her, being careful to move more silently than the
wind. Eventually she found herself at a small house, where the oni was crouched beside the door, waiting to kill the man who lived there when he came outside in the morning. And this fox did an amazing thing, for not even knowing who lived inside that house, she crept all around, up onto the roof, and above where the oni was waiting. If she’d put one paw wrong and made a single sound, the oni would’ve heard and ripped her apart, but she didn’t, and when she was above him, she jumped down and broke his neck with one bite. And the god Inari saw what she had done, and for her bravery he marked her as his own by making the tip of her red tail white. Well, the fox was very proud, but she was still a curious fox, and so she waited beside the door to see what kind of human she had saved. When the rooster crowed in the morning and the first light appeared, the man came outside. And when the fox saw him, she fell in love with him, which shows you what a foolish little fox she was.”
That struck me as weird, and I interrupted her. “Wait. One second ago she was honored by gods. Now she’s foolish?”
“No comments from the peanut gallery,” Suze said in her normal voice. I grumbled under my breath but obeyed, and she resumed the story. “So she ran to the edge of the forest and changed into a beautiful woman, dressed in the finest garments. The man saw her when he went walking that night and he fell in love with her, and took her back to his house and made her his wife. She bore him a son soon after, and all seemed well, except that each morning the man’s dog would bark at her, because the dog knew that she was a fox and not a woman. The fox begged her husband to kill the dog, but he refused, and one day the dog was able to get into the house and attack her. And the attack was so vicious that she had no choice but to turn back from a woman into a fox and run out the door and over the fence and across the fields, leaving her husband and baby behind.” There was a long pause, and I wished that Suze hadn’t let her long hair fall forward to shadow her face. I wondered what she was thinking about. Then she picked up the thread again. “And that is why foxes do not belong in the houses of men. But this is a true story. And the fox had loved and married an honorable man. Because when he saw his wife change into a fox and run away, he called after her and said, ‘You may be a fox, but you are the mother of my son and I love you. Come back when you please, and you will always be welcome.’ And so every night after that the fox would slip out from the forest, across the fields, under the fence, into the house, and sleep in the arms of her husband. But she understood then that they were different, and when she gave birth after that, it was to daughters who ran with her on four feet and lived in a den.”
I waited, but Suze didn’t say anything else, and clearly the story was over.
“So, the white in your tail?” I remembered when it had appeared. It has been after she’d risked her life to save mine.
“It’s kind of spiritual. Supposedly it’s a gift from Inari.” Something in her tone told me that we weren’t going to be talking about the circumstances that she’d gotten her white under—not now, maybe not ever.
“Who’s Inari?” I asked, acknowledging the message and leading the conversation away.
“The god of rice.”
“Um, rice?” It seemed like an odd fit. I would’ve expected a much more badass god for the kitsune.
“Yeah, rice,” Suzume snapped. “It was a primary foodstuff, jackass. Every culture dependent on one item so heavily has a god like that. We had Inari, the Mayans had a corn god, and the Irish have their potato saint.”
I paused. “Suze, there isn’t an Irish potato saint.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Very.”
“Fine, whiskey fairy. Whatever.”
In the darkness I winced. “You are not exactly culturally sensitive, Suze.”
“Fuck that noise,” she snorted.
The conversation had definitely traveled a bit, but one element from her story was still bothering me. Very carefully, I asked, “I thought kitsune only had daughters?”
Suze shook her head. All of the playfulness from the potato conversation was gone now, and very quietly she answered, “No, that part is true, but only daughters are kitsune. A son would only be human. When a kitsune changes from fox to woman, and woman to fox when she is pregnant with daughters, the daughters change with her, because they are what she is. But a son is human, and if his mother becomes a fox when she carries him, the fetus will die.”
I thought about what I’d learned and a connection formed in my mind that I hadn’t considered before. “When you were arguing with your sister, it was about her boyfriend. And that she wasn’t changing her form.”
“Yes.” I knew from her voice that Suze didn’t want me to follow this any further, but I asked anyway.
“Keiko is pregnant, isn’t she?”
I wondered at first if she’d just refuse to answer me, but after a tense moment Suze said, “She learned the wrong lesson from the story. Loving a human will only lead to grief.” She stopped stroking and gave my head a little pat. I wasn’t sure which of us was meant to be comforted by the gesture. “But she’s only four months along. She has time to come to her senses. And in all the stories my grandmother has told me about the lives of kitsune in Japan, she only ever met one fox who gave birth to a son.”
I had one last question. “Are you hiding all of this from your grandmother?”
But I’d reached the end of Suze’s willingness to talk about her family, and she just patted my head again. “Go to sleep, Fort. I’ll make sure that you don’t dream.”
I believed her. And when I closed my eyes again, I fell back into a dreamless sleep.
Chapter 9
I woke up the next morning when someone began knocking on the door. For a second I was confused, mainly about why I had such a terrible crink in my neck. Then I realized that it was because a black fox was snuggled into a ball on my pillow and had nudged my head out of the way. Her tail was tickling my mouth, and as I pushed it away and rolled to my feet to head for the door, I ran a hand over my tongue to dislodge some of the hairs coating it.
I checked the peephole, then pulled the door open to reveal Lilah, looking scrubbed and fresh and carrying an armful of take-out bags that wafted smells of breakfast.
I’d texted her the hotel information the night before, but my surprise at seeing her must’ve shown on my face, because she immediately flushed. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I just figured I’d bring over—” and then the light pink of her cheeks suddenly flamed red, and I looked behind me, wondering what had set her off and figuring that it had to be Suze. Instead I realized what she’d noticed—there were two beds in the room but one was still perfectly made, with all the pillows still in order. The other, the one I’d had both a skinwalker-induced terror dream and a championship-level pillow fight in, was completely wrecked. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to draw conclusions from those two pieces of data.
I knew that my own face was flaming as I began sputtering some attempt to explain the situation, and Lilah began backing up, both of us clearly wishing that the earth would just open up and swallow us whole so we could escape the conversation, when there was a sharp yip at our feet that made both of us shut up and look down.
Smelling a breakfast she hadn’t had to pay for, Suze had scampered over, still on four fox feet. She was now balanced on her back paws and was stretching her muzzle as high as possible toward the bags of food in Lilah’s arms. It was the kind of scenario that had viral YouTube video written all over it.
“Oh, that’s Suze?” Lilah said, sounding startled, and I remembered that she’d never seen the kitsune in her true form.
“Yeah,” I said, grateful that Suze’s antics had apparently broken the cycle of awkward that Lilah and I had just been trapped in. Then suspicion kicked in. With Suze’s almost pathological delight in pranking me, the very fact that she hadn’t shifted to human form and let Lilah spot her lolling naked in hotel sheets was weird.
>
I eyed Suze, who was playing adorable fox and resolutely ignoring my attempt to catch her gaze. My mind began sorting through possible motives. Was this part of some elaborate long-con prank? Was she pranking me by not pranking me? Was she taking the situation seriously enough that— Wait, no. I dropped that one as unrealistic before I even finished it.
“So, the extra bed . . . ?” Lilah asked, comfortable or curious enough now to walk inside the room. Eyes glued to the food, Suze tracked her.
“Apparently all she needs as a fox is a pillow. And she liked mine.” I reached out and began helping Lilah set up the breakfast. As my hands fell back to years of ingrained wait-staffing, I wondered—between her painfully obvious “bathroom break” at Dreamcatching yesterday and the decision not to go full false-appearance romantic comedy just now, was Suze trying to set me up with Lilah?
Was Suze trying to find me a roommate and a girlfriend? The sane mind shuddered at the thought of such a situation.
I snuck a look at Lilah, who was lining up tiny containers of orange juice with a precision that hinted at either a past in the engineering sciences or a smattering of OCD. Did I want to date her? I certainly got along with her, God knows I was attracted to her, and she had been sending off hints of possibly being into me (which I liked in a woman). I looked at Suze—who, still in fox form, had stuffed her entire head into one of the empty breakfast bags and was now attempting, skunk style, to back out of it. Not much guidance there.
This was not a thought process that could be conducted on an empty, uncaffeinated stomach, and I reached for the coffee (bless her soul, and true daughter of New England that she was, Lilah had hit up a Dunkin’ Donuts) and mentally put a pin in the issue.
We talked as we ate—or, rather, the two of us talked. Suze stayed fox for the entire meal, comfortably curled in an armchair and simply pointing her dark muzzle at whatever food she wanted to sample next. If either of us didn’t respond quickly enough to her demands, she also demonstrated that she was extremely willing to appropriate food we’d already put onto our own plates, so Lilah and I became very quick to respond whenever that imperious black nose pointed toward another egg muffin.
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