The Nine

by C. M. Stunich

  "Fine," I snarled, "If that's everything?" I didn't really give a shit if it was or not, I was already closing the door on his handsome face when he stuck his foot in the way.

  "Thea," he pleaded. "Let me come with you. I need to talk to you anyway, so at least we can do it on the drive."

  My lips tightened, and I was ready to tell him where to shove it. But he placed his hand over mine where it gripped the door and my heart softened.

  "Fine," I said again. "But I swear to foxfire, Fin. If you just want to bitch me out about Mik and Revel, I will dump you on the side of the road and not look back. Are we clear?"

  "Crystal," he assured me, his autumn eyes clear and full of truth.

  "Wait here, I'll be back in a few minutes." I didn't bother to wait for his reply as I turned and trotted back up to my bedroom to find some ass kicking clothes. It was a mental thing, more than anything else. The old vixens required I change into a kimono before greeting them, but at least I could feel powerful and sexy while dealing with Fin.

  Wait, not sexy. I didn't need to be sexy for my ex because he was my ex.

  And yet, somehow I ended up in a pair of ripped leather pants, thigh high boots, a midriff baring top and then a leather trench coat over top. Once I'd added my bone knife, dual katanas and a handgun, I looked kickass.

  "Let's go," I announced, blowing past Fin in my foyer and clicking Lola's key fob to unlock her. Ziff ran after me and jumped into the passenger seat, but I lifted him back out and returned him inside.

  "Sorry buddy," I apologized. "Kitsune council is just no place for you. Too dangerous." I did not put it past the Ancients to harm Ziff to get to me.

  Ziff whimpered and I swallowed past a stab of guilt. Instead I freed the second mouse from its box as a reward for him staying home. With him happily chasing after his dessert, I returned to my car where Fin was waiting in the passenger seat.

  Slipping inside, I belted in, then waited for my gates to open before gliding out into the street. I lived in a good neighbourhood, full of upper middle class families. Humans for the most part, but a few witches and vampires mixed in. As far as I was aware, I was the only shifter. But that was largely due to the fact that most shifters lived with their Pack, Earth, Ambush ... whatever collective noun they used.

  "Don't you get lonely here, Thea babe?" Fin asked in a sad sounding voice after we’d been driving in silence for a few moments. "All these ... fucking mundanes. No forest, just a few bushes here and there. Isn't it depressing?"

  Grinding my teeth together, I kept my gaze locked on the road ahead of me. "It's only depressing when my exes show up and interfere with my new life. I was perfectly happy until you had to get your panties in a wad over wanting a pure kitsune wife. Why couldn't you just go cross-species like everyone else is doing these days?"

  "Like you're doing, you mean?" His tone was sour and I shot a glare at him.

  "Oh, because Riot is such a fox? In case you forgot, Rusty, Riot's a jaguar. We're not even close to the same species." Calling him by his old nickname had been a mistake, and I regretted it as soon as it slipped from my mouth. I'd started calling him Rusty when we were kids, because it was surprisingly uncommon for kitsune to carry their coat colors over into human form. Fin was one of the rarer red-haired kitsune, a feature I'd always loved about him.

  "Riot's different," he glowered.

  "Why? Because the Earth adopted him? Doesn't make him a fox, Fin. So maybe consider your glass house before throwing stones at anyone else." It was straight up hypocritical for him to be trying to guilt me for not staying pure.

  "It's different, Thea. Riot’s not dead like your new boyfriend." He glared at the side of my face and I refused to engage. I needed to keep my eyes on the road, anyway. "He's a good friend, and he’s always been there for me."

  "A good friend with benefits," I snorted. "That's beside the point though, you two have been messing around for years and I honestly have no issue with it."

  He huffed an annoyed noise. "Yeah, because you were a part of what we had. Fuck, you were the center of it. We love you, Thea!" He paused. "Loved. We loved you."

  His slip-up in the use of present tense made me glance sharply at him, but his face was turned away from me as he stared out the window.

  "This is stupid Fin. You both pushed me away with your jealousy, and judging by your actions over the past week, nothing has changed." I chewed the inside of my lip, trying to stop the hurt from showing through my voice. "You just need to let me go, Fin. You're only hurting us all by continuing like this."

  "Let you go?" he laughed bitterly. "What, so you can keep fucking that vampire? That dead piece of shit who's old enough to be our great grandfather? Or maybe you want to start fucking that kitsune bitch, the one you ordered to get me off your back?"

  I clenched my jaw to keep from yelling obscenities at him. Deep down, I understood that he wasn't actually homophobic or necrophobic. He was just hurting, and lashing out.

  "Well, quite frankly, Fin ... it really doesn't matter what I want to do with my private life. You're not part of it any more so you get no say. If I want to start my very own harem of kitsune women, vampires, wolves, and skinwalkers, I damn well will." Actually that idea appealed to me more than I was willing to let on. How great would it be not to have to choose? If the goddess Inari could do it, why couldn't I?

  Fin scoffed. "You want a reverse harem? Be my guest. What do I care? Now you're telling me you're fucking wolves and skinwalkers, too? Since when?"

  "I'm not—" I broke off, taking a breath to calm myself. "I don't need to defend myself to you, Fin. Is this what you wanted to spend two hours talking about? My love life and how disgusted it makes you?"

  "No," he admitted, sounding a little sulky. "I wanted to tell you..." He trailed off and sighed. From the corner of my eye I saw his shoulders slump and he stared out the window. "I wanted to say I'm withdrawing my complaint against you. I'm going to the meeting with you, and I'm going to ask that Trina bind your ninth tail so you can have your magic back."

  This was entirely not what I had expected from him, and I took my eyes from the road to peer at him for a moment.

  "Sorry, say that again?" I blurted out and he turned to glare at me.

  "You heard me. I just wanted to let you know, so you're not blindsided at the meeting and do something stupid, like insult the kitsune-tsukai." He arched a brow at me, like that was something I might do. In fairness, he knew me pretty damn well and that was absolutely something I would do. Stuffy old hags with their power trips.

  "But ... why?" I didn't want to talk him out of it, but this seemed like a really selfless act on Fin's part. Something he wasn't well-known for. Not that he was selfish as such ... but he definitely looked out for number one first and foremost.

  He sighed again, drumming his fingertips on the door handle. "Because, Thea. Your boyfriend called me last night. Or this morning ... whatever, it was late at any rate."

  "My ... boyfriend?" I squeaked, feeling like I almost needed to pull over and squeeze the information out of him.

  "The vampire. He called and told me—yelled at me, actually—about how apparently you went rogue last night and took on a nest of those diseased wolves without any magic." He paused but I was too stunned to speak. "He told me you almost died, and that it was on me. It's my fault you have no magic right now. It's my fault you couldn't properly defend yourself and worse still, it's my fault that you didn't have the magic to heal yourself. Thea ... I was hurting. Ry and I both were. But honestly ... we don't deserve you. Hearing from the vampire that we could have lost you for good, all because of my stubborn pride ... it damn near broke my heart, babe."

  I didn't know what the fuck to say. First, how the hell had Mik known so much? Second, he called Fin to yell at him? So much for not wanting to fuck his food ... but most shocking was Fin's reaction.

  "So ... you admit you were wrong?" I asked gently, not wanting to set him onto the defensive.

  "I do. I thought mayb
e you just needed a push, that if you saw how serious I was then maybe you'd come back to us. But ... it's only pushing you further away, and that was never my intention." He sounded utterly miserable and I had to force myself to keep driving instead of pulling over to comfort him.

  "Right," I murmured, exhaling a long breath and letting my mind process before speaking again. "So, you'll move on and start dating crossers?"

  He chuckled a light laugh. "No. If there’s one thing I have come to understand in this past week, Thea babe, it's that I am still totally in love with you. I'm withdrawing my complaint from the council and releasing you from our betrothal, but I do not intend to let you go so easily."

  This time when I stared at him, I took a little too long and had to do a rapid steering correction to get Lola back on the road and away from the cliff edge.

  "What the hell does that mean?" I panted, after finally getting us safely back on the road and decreasing my speed a little.

  "It means," he explained patiently, like he was speaking to a small child. "That I want you back ... no matter what it takes. You're the love of my life, Thea."

  "Fin," I groaned, feeling like a migraine might be sneaking up on me. "I can't ... I have ... other interested parties right now."

  He made a little frustrated growl in his throat. "I know, but that's my issue to handle. Besides, if the goddess Inari can have a harem of both men and women ... why can't you? I don't see any rule book for how the youngest Nine in history needs to act, do you?"

  Any response I tried to formulate just came out in a strangled squeak, so for a really long time, neither of us spoke.

  Eventually, I gathered up my scattered wits and glanced over at Fin, who was watching me with those gorgeous warm brown eyes of his.

  "I don't even know what to say, Fin," I whispered, and he gave me a small smile.

  "Just say you'll give me an equal chance. That's all I ask? You lead such a dangerous life now, I honestly don't think I can bear another minute of us fighting ... we need to make the most of all the time we have on this planet, right?" His smile was bittersweet and I knew he was thinking about me almost dying last night.

  My heart felt useless to me, like it was flopping around in my chest and being entirely zero help. "Okay," I agreed in a whisper. "Equal chance. But—"

  "No one says you have to choose, Thea babe. You can go against the grain, just like Inari did thousands of years ago," he reassured me, and I smiled. He knew exactly what I'd been about to say without me needing to say it. "If you end up falling in love with those other fuckers ... well then you can have your very own polyamorous relationship."

  I gave him a quick grin. "Inari calls hers a harem, remember? Because they all love her, and her alone. Between themselves they're just ... good friends." I winked at him and he gave me a smile back.

  "Speaking of good friends, I haven't discussed this with Ry. I didn't want to influence his own decisions so everything I've said ... it's just from me. I have no doubt he’ll want you no matter how he can get you, though. You know he still cries out for you in his dreams?" Fin gave me an almost puppy dog kind of face when I glanced to him and I growled.

  "Fin, you shouldn't tell me that. Let Ry come to his own decisions ... but just so we're on the same page, I never stopped loving you two assholes. Even though you were totally jealous and flat out wrong all those years ago," I scolded him.

  He snorted a laugh. "Were we? You and the vampire seemed awfully friendly on his desk the other day."

  "That was ..." I sighed, remembering the feel of Mik's lips on mine, his hands on my body ... "That was the first time we'd ever kissed."

  "Are you sure?" He sounded suspicious. "Because that had a whole lot of intensity to it; you looked like you would have fucked right then and there if Ry hadn't put his fist through the glass."

  "Are you calling me a liar, Fin?" I challenged him and he grumbled something under his breath. "Anyway. Let's just ... get through this stupid council meeting and get my tail bound, okay? You have no idea how awful it is to be without the earth magic. I feel like my hands are tied behind my back and I'm blindfolded."

  "I'm sorry," he whispered again, and I shrugged.

  "It's fine, we're getting it fixed tonight, right? Then maybe I can really make a difference in curing this disease." I tapped my fingers on Lola's steering wheel, feeling better about myself than I had in weeks.

  Fin made a little chirp, not unlike what Ziff did when he was curious about something. "How, though? I thought there was no cure?"

  "Not yet. Apparently the disease originated with a kitsune, so Nix—he's a scientist—thinks he can work out how to cure it by studying my magic." I shrugged. "I don't really understand how, but he seems confident."

  "Well that's great, if it works. I don't know if Ry told you or not, but your dad has been infected by it, too, along with a couple other kitsune in our Earth. They're being contained at the moment by the kitsune-tsukai magic, but it can't last forever." He delivered the news as matter-of-fact as he could, which I appreciated.

  To anyone else, this might have been upsetting news. Not to me, though. My dad and I hadn't spoken in a great many years, and he was little more than a stranger to me now. When Mom died, Dad moved in with his younger girlfriend not even six months later ... It was something I hadn't been able to get past, and something that soured what little relationship we’d had to begin with.

  Last I heard, he and Birgette—the girlfriend—had started their own new family and wanted no reminders of his first family. Fine by me.

  "Let's talk about something else," I suggested, choking back a wave of emotion. It was too raw, too confusing, to tackle in that already fragile moment. "I saw you'd done some renovations to the treehouse? How's that going?"

  Fin laughed at my lame change of subject, but started telling me all about the improvements he and Riot had been making to the house recently. Listening to him talk without all the hate and jealousy ... it was nice. Relaxing, almost, and the rest of the drive back to Vail flew past.

  In silence, Fin and I shed our clothes and weapons and changed into the traditional Japanese garb that waited for us in the antechamber, just like we’d done the last time we were here. It was barely a week ago, but it felt like it’d been years.

  "I hate these things," I muttered under my breath while adjusting my tails through the slit at the back and then winding my hair around my head in a traditional pattern. I was lucky that my hair manipulated into these styles easily, because the elders were not tolerant of scruffiness.

  Fin flicked one of my white ears playfully. "It suits you though. I look like a massive dork."

  I snickered, looking him over. "More like a tourist playing dress-up in Japan. Come on, let's go get this over with. I'm itching to get my magic back."

  "After you," he replied, bowing and sweeping his hand out to the door which would lead us into the inner sanctum.

  Hips swaying as I moved, I lead the way into the opulent room and tried not to cringe at the magnificent gold of the three kitsune sitting on their thrones. Their hundreds of tails fanned out around them, covering almost the entire wall.

  They used to awe me, seeing these magnificent, oldand powerful women. But now ... surely one hundred tails would just be a nightmare? How would you even move, let alone shower? Heh. I cracked myself up sometimes.

  As required by protocol, I sank to my knees as gracefully as any accomplished geisha, and pressed my forehead to the cool stone floor. Beside me, Fin did the same.

  "Finley Wilde," Giselle spoke first—as always—and she sounded pissed. "You were not summoned to this meeting. Why have you come?"

  Fin, having been directly addressed, was allowed to sit up and respond while I was forced to remain as I was, with my forehead to the ground.

  "Respectfully, I came to formally withdraw my complaint against my former mate, Thea Hunt. We’ve come to our own mutually agreeable arrangement, so I humbly request her magic be restored and her ninth tail safely bound
." Fin's voice was strong as he spoke, not wavering with even a moment’s hesitation.

  The Ancients sat silent for a long time, and Fin's words hung in the air like a stormcloud. Finally, Nadege took her turn to speak.

  "We wish to hear from you, Thea Hunt," she announced, as magnanimous as the freaking queen.

  "Not that anything you have to say will change what you’ve done, continuing your work with the murderers’ guild against our direct orders," Trina added in a snide, bitchy tone.

  "I—" I started to defend myself but they clearly didn't summon me to hear my side of things.

  "This is a formal complaint we will file against your organization. Mikhail Ravena should know better." Giselle again. "We summoned you here to follow up on how things were progressing with Mr. Wilde, but we see now that they have not gone well."

  "The kitsune race is already endangered, and now we’ve begun to be affected by this new disease. Now is the time it is mostimportant for kitsune to stand together and stand strong as one pure race." Nadege's voice was coated in frost and I had a sick feeling this wasn't going to end well.

  These three were thousands of years old, and progressive thoughts didn't come easily to them. They were totally stuck in the dark ages when it came to their attitudes around cross-species relations.

  "I am trying to find a cure—" Once again I was cut off.

  "Quiet." Trina's command cracked through the room like a whip. "You have been free to do as you pleased for too damn long, and have brought nothing but disgrace on the Vail Valley Earth. You are a disappointment to your people, Thea Hunt."

  I spluttered with outrage. "How am I a disgrace?" I snapped. "I have—"

  "Thea Hunt!" Giselle bellowed my name, and Fin lay a hand on my arm. In support or to tell me to shut up, I wasn't sure. "I suggest you keep your mouth shut before I bind it."

  "Finley Wilde," Nadege turned to my ex ... was he still an ex? "Your complaint withdrawal has been noted. We, however, find it necessary to keep our binding in place."

  "You will not get your magic restored and your ninth tail bound until you officially breed with your intended mate—Finley Wilde." Trina addressed this to me and my blood ran cold. "You will swear an unbreakable oath of fidelity and monogamy, or your magic will never be restored to you. Do we make ourselves clear?"