Tristan knew that look, that nefarious grin. The guy was thinking about what Ash would taste like. Like he didn’t know. “I’ve had enough your bullshit, pal.” Tristan lifted the long blade of his katana to point it at Lucien’s head, an excellent target if he ever had one.
Lucien only smirked, head tilted down slightly to give him a menacing glare. It was the vampire who broke first, suddenly darting across the space separating them as he jumped the line of fox. Tristan swung out but missed as Lucien’s path made a sharp left. The vampire crashed into Ash, scooping her up and slamming her into the wall separating the bedroom from the living room. Tristan turned to help but the fox with the five-tails let out a screech that gave him goose bumps and then all four fox jumped him at once.
One sprung up and bit into his right hand before dropping off and skittering away. Tristan cried out, dropping the sword as he instantly went numb. Two other fox landed squarely on Tristan’s chest, their tiny but sharp claws digging deep into his flesh for purchase. The last bit down on his left foot and held on, making him to topple backwards as he went numb and off balance.
He groaned when he landed, feeling the burn of the carpet across his naked back. Rug burn was the least of his problems right then. Fur and whiskers brushed his collarbone and he tensed, expecting a pair of bites he wasn’t sure he could deflect. Determined to try, he swung out with his non-dominate left hand and caught the two on his chest right in their middle. Their claws let go with an almost electric pain of skin tearing as they yelped, falling away.
One little biter left. Cake. He shook his left leg hard and gave a groan when it responded with deep muscle pain. He could hardly move the leg, the numbness was already past his knee. His sword was on the floor next to him and he twisted to reach it with his only working hand and swung out blindly when he found it. Luck was in his favor, for once, and he actually hit his target.
Guilt made him cringe when the animal cried out in high pitched screeches. He had to remember to think of it as a thing and not an animal. This kitsune, this shinwa—whatever the hell that is—was not human or animal. But as the little red fox collapsed on the carpet, a line of blood from the little fox’s cut-off leg streaking the distance between them, he felt cruel.
The two-tailed fox that’d bitten his hand once already snapped at him again and then latched on to grind its teeth into his dead flesh. Sure, it didn’t hurt now, but he could tell that when the numbness wore off, it was going to burn like a son of a bitch.
Tristan grumbled a curse or three as he stumbled to his feet, using his sword as a crutch. He’d only just gotten upright when the other two fox jumped him again, this time landing in unison on his shoulders. One nipped his ear before he knocked them off his shoulders. The other latched onto his hand.
Tristan grabbed his right wrist with his left hand and spun, slamming it into the wall. The two-tailed fox yelped as it broke the plaster and then lost its grip. It stumbled, looking dazed and Tristan didn’t hesitate to go for it. He grabbed his sword again and cut the little red fox in two, right through the middle.
In a flurry of angry chatters and sharp teeth the remaining kitsune came for him again. One, he kicked in the face, sending it flying across the room. The tiny body smashed into a side table near the patio window. The last unhurt fox, the one with five tails, ran straight for his neck. A surge of anxiety shot through him. He wasn’t sure if he would move in time. He forced himself to wait and at the last moment he flung himself to the right, swinging his blade with the left. The angle was bad and that damned little fox was fast. It darted right for his arm and Tristan gasped, flinging himself back so that he smacked his head on the wall.
Five-tails landed on his chest, jaws snapping shut onto empty air as it missed his face by a mere inch. He swung out with the sword hilt fisted in his hand and caught the fox in the face. It tumbled, looking stunned. Instead of cutting it, he scrambled to his feet, cursed when his left leg shot tingling pain up his hip and hobbled into the bedroom, dropping his sword somewhere along the way. Moving quickly, but clumsily, he tore a pillowcase from its pillow. Seconds later he was shoving an unconscious five-tailed fox into the makeshift sack. The other two fox fell back, waiting—for what, Tristan wasn’t sure, but was happy they weren’t biting him anymore.
Having a moment’s reprieve, Tristan took the opportunity to check on the vampires—you know, the real reason he was in this mess. They’d somehow ended up on the sofa with Lucien pinned under Ash’s smaller frame. His arms were trapped under him at a bad angle and Tristan wondered if they were bound. Ash, well, she looked like she was enjoying being on top as much as Lucien was. She was riding his waist, mouth locked to his neck and hips grinding. Lucien’s face, it was pure bliss. And when the vampire opened his eyes and saw Tristan staring, he grinned devilishly, jerking his hips up into Ash so that she gave a little moan.
“What the,” Tristan muttered, completely thrown. “Hey!”
Ash balked, tearing her fangs from Lucien. He screamed when a chunk of skin came free. She met Tristan’s eyes and was instantly filled with guilt. The look on his face, it struck the human in her with a pain that no other vampire could ever understand. She was too different from those others, how could they understand?
Tristan forced himself to look at Lucien again and shook the bag held in his only working fist. “Got your pet. I think it’s time for you all to leave now.” Really, he should have walked right over to that sofa and laid the sharp end of his blade right across the vampire’s throat and cut off his smug fucking head. So what was stopping him, besides a numb hand?
Lucien’s not-quite-brown eyes moved to the pillowcase for a quick glance and then to Tristan again. “You’re not very good at this are you?”
“What?” Tristan snapped.
“You think that I actually care about those kitsune? That we vampire make bonds?” He looked up to Ash. “Am I right, Asta?”
She frowned and slapped him hard enough that Tristan almost felt it.
“Oww,” Lucien mumbled around a fake frown. “Bit my tongue. Lick it for me,” he said and then laughed when Ash hit him again.
A female moan sounded to Tristan’s right and he spun. There were two naked women lying on the floor. They were nearly identical with their sharp Asian features, pale skin and contrasting bright red hair, the last two inches pure white. Tristan gasped as he took an unconscious step back, feeling the open bedroom door at his back.
The closest woman was missing her right hand, though no blood came from the wound. She looked up into his eyes and his pulse beat up into his throat. She had bright yellow fox eyes in a human face lined in that heavy black all canines had. But more than that her ears... they were fox ears, fuzzy black-tipped fox ears pinned right onto the side of a very human head.
The other naked Asian chick was across the room, groggily picking herself out the table she was entangled with. Frowning, she tossed the table away and it crashed into the wall. She pushed to all four, limbs akimbo to support the sudden shake of her head that made those fuzzy, pointy ears flap against her head.
Tristan took another step back. Am I the only one seeing this? Seriously!
The woman wobbled to her feet, shaking slightly. She moved as if her head were heavier than it should have been, weighing her to the left and right when she stepped. She was a broken bobble head.
“What the shit is this?” Tristan whispered and flinched when he hadn’t expected the words to come out of his mouth.
The pillowcase in his hand started to convulse violently and he jerked his arm straight out, holding the sack away from him. The scream of cloth being torn apart made him let go. The cotton shivered and then there was a woman lying at his feet, a torn pillowcase on her head like an extremely undersized Halloween ghost costume. She sat upright, teetered and then shot her legs out almost at a 180-degree angle as she reached up to pull off the ruined pillowcase.
“Oh Christ,” Tristan breathed when he noticed that she had no sexual features bet
ween her legs.
Bright yellow eyes lined in heavy black blinked up him, considering. “Konbanwa,” the naked woman said in a tiny voice.
“Uh…,” Tristan drawled, pulse hammering in his head. “Hi?”
Lucien burst into laughter, making Tristan flinch back enough that he crossed the threshold into the bedroom.
“Ah! My dear kitsune. These are the one I told you of. They have it, you have to kill them for it. Do it, do it now!” Lucien sang.
The two kitsune across the room screeched a noise that shouldn’t have come from human throats, but before they could dart forward, the closest of the three held a hand up. She was the one that had five tails, clearly the leader of the group. “Taiki!”
The other two growled their discontent, but stopped, crouched on all fours and the ready to shift and move at a second’s notice. Tristan held the sword across the front of him, ready to strike too, albeit a bit slower with the way these things moved and his numb body parts. Damn, he really needed to know more about the world he lived in and those things that were not meant to be. Like himself.
Ash growled a noise that made Tristan shiver with foreboding and then she flung a few quickly spoken, smooth French words at the vampire under her before sending a fist into his nose.
“Oh, that’s it! Hit me, hit me harder! That’s how we play!”
Lucien laughing like a maniac seemed to snap something in Ash. Tristan chanced looking away from the kitsune in time to see Ash bite down over Lucien’s nose.
“My god,” he whispered. He wasn’t sure if he was disgusted, but he was definitely in shock. He’d never seen Ash this angry, not even with Malik—the monster who changed her fate for his amusement, giving her only pain and despair.
He’d looked away from the fox—women, whatever, for too long and when he felt movement, he snapped back around to find the kitsune had moved closer to him. The one who’d spoken before stood at the front line, protecting, dominating the other two at her back. In her arms, she held the halved body of the one Tristan killed, still in fox form, petting it slowly.
He forced himself to step back into the main room again. It was only an invisible threshold, holding no meaning, but he felt like if he didn’t it would make him look weak. Out of his element, sure, he was, but he was anything but weak. Physically inferior, but not weak.
Together, he could see that all three kitsune looked alike, almost identical, but not. Their bodies were exactly the same, exactly. Each woman was thin with shapely hips and legs and small but very perky breasts with perfect little dark nipples. Their faces were identical too, but different enough, that if you stared at each, you could figure out who was who. All three had delicate upturned eyes, inset with their yellow gazes lined in thick black; the same auburn hair, reaching mid-back and tipped in snow white; and fury fox ears tipped in black. The most noticeable difference amongst the women was the one near the front, the one he’d caught in the pillowcase—the one with the five tails. She had a small scar on her right cheek just below her eye. He remembered seeing that scar mat the fur of her fox form.
“Akane!” Ash snapped and all heads swiveled around to look at her. Tristan recoiled when she spit out a chunk of something red and meaty onto the coffee table. His stomach lurched immediately, recognizing it even without fully acknowledging it as Lucien’s nose.
“Holy fuck,” he whispered. He’d seen the aftermath of the vampire’s brutality before, just never in action. And certainly not from someone he still viewed as human. The realization almost made him flinch. Because it was true. He hadn’t realized it until that moment, but despite all the evidence against her humanity, he still thought of Ash as… human.
Her pale eyes, blazing with animosity, narrowed on him. “That is your first mistake to a quick death.”
He knew.
Even after seeing her kill Aaron in that house, chop off one of Malik’s lackey’s heads… drain Malik himself of blood… Tristan was still looking at her in all the wrong ways.
“Fuck,” he whispered, holding strong to keep his stance. He licked his lips nervously, not liking the look Lucien was giving him, smirking like he knew everything. Didn’t like the look from Ash either, like she was… someone else. Where’d he drop that sword? “Ash?”
Some of the coldness softened but not enough to hide her anger. “Yes, Tristan?”
“What, ah… what’da I do?” he asked in a whisper and not because he was scared. Okay, maybe he was scared, just a little. “Are the kitsune bad guys or not?” They did attack.
She shrugged, completely comfortable with Lucien’s blood covering her chin and neck. It would eventually flake away to nothing, but that couldn’t happen fast enough for Tristan’s comfort.
Tristan nodded towards the naked women. “Can you ask them what they want?”
The one in front made a little noise, garnering Tristan’s attention. “I can speak for us.”
He scowled, hating that he just assumed they only spoke Japanese. “What’re you doing here? And you’d better tell me fast or I’ll kill you along with him.”
Lucien chuckled.
Really, Tristan felt no real threat from any of the kitsune despite the fact that they bit him. Sure his left foot and right hand were dumb, useless because of them, but he didn’t feel as if they truly meant to hurt him and Ash. Lucien was the problem here and the only one Tristan really wanted to kill. He already felt guilty enough about the one fox he killed, not to mention those vampire at Audric’s castle. They didn’t deserve that. But he didn’t have time right then for regrets and self-hate.
“I am Akane,” the one in front said. “Gobi no Akane.”
He licked his lips slowly. “Tristan.”
“Hajimemashite.” She gave a little bow.
He frowned at her. “What do you want?”
She didn’t even bat an eye. “We are looking for it.”
“It?”
“Please!” came the sudden gasped, strained voice. “Mon seigneur!” Sebastian was draped against the foyer doorframe, blood matting in his hair, streaking down his forehead into his eye. His neck was a bloody mess, staining his white dress shirt. “They… they mean no true harm. Please…” He had to stop to take in a breath. “I beg your mercy, mon seigneur. They do not know... what they are doing...”
“Look pal...” Tristan started, suddenly angry thinking there was no way they didn’t. But then, it was Lucien pulling the strings, wasn’t it?
Sebastian’s thick French accent spoke more surely than moments ago as he talked to the naked fox. But it wasn’t French he was speaking. No, this was a language Tristan’d never heard before. He was betting no human had. Akane did the “talking” for the others and answered.
Clearly exhausted, pale and looking ready to pass out any moment, Sebastian gave a long sigh. “Mon seigneur... please, there was ah, malentendido… confusion. They didn’t know who you were before... they wish you and yours no harm. They are sorry for the intrusion and only wish to take their sister and leave.”
Jaw stiff, Tristan shot a look to Ash. The vampires were sitting quietly, waiting, listening. Why Lucien wasn’t fighting was beyond Tristan. Maybe the boy vampire was just biding his time or he knew he was beat. Ash gave a tiny shrug, to what, Tristan didn’t know.
“Fine. Get out of here. Don’t bother us again.”
Akane handed the felled fox in her arms to another before stepping up to him. He shifted on his feet and noticed that the toes on his left foot were on fire, tingling violently as the nerves awoke from their vegetative state. The little step also told him where his sword was. The naked woman looked up to him, craning her neck to see his face as he towered over her. Suddenly her mouth opened in a big smile, a smile full of fox teeth.
“We know you and give our thanks, Uruwashi.”
Tristan balked, eyes widening in shocked horror. Just what did she know?
She started to turn, seemed to think better of it and turned back to face him again. “We are happy to know the
re is still honor amongst our brothers and sisters.” She gave him a final, deep bow, turned on her heel and fell to the ground upon her hands and knees. Her body folded in on itself in a blur of red and white fuzz, and suddenly there was a red fox in the living room. Again.
The five-tailed fox blinked bright yellow eyes at him and then, mid-step, the entire group disappeared in a fog of wispy red smoke that left the room smelling of musty ozone.
Tristan let out a long breath, still staring. “Okay... that’s just the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen...”
Sebastian let out sigh and collapsed to his knees.
“Two-faced cur!” Lucien shouted making Tristan jump. Suddenly the boy vampire looked less confident and more angry. Ash on the other hand looked completely satisfied as she teased him, letting him wiggle just enough that the hope of his escape lit up his pale eyes with fire.
“Stop playing with your food,” Tristan mumbled at her as he shuffled his way towards Sebastian. Wouldn’t do for an innocent, not matter how much of a pain in the ass the man was, to die because of him. White hot, sharp pain shot up Tristan’s leg from his toes. He imagined his hand hurt that bad too but didn’t bother trying to move it.
“Food? You think this sack of shit is good enough for consumption?” She harrumphed. “This one is nothing but fertilizer.”
Tristan chuckled to himself, thinking Ash sounded an awful like him just then. He didn’t bother to look back when Lucien winced audibly and then cried out in pain.
He stopped over Sebastian and nudged him with his tingling toes. “Hey, you alive?”
Why was he always asking the fucking elf—sorry, faerie if he was alive?
He was just reaching down with his functioning hand when Ash gave a cry behind him that made all the hair on his body stand on end. It was not a good cry. He spun to find bloody, nose-less Lucien standing in front of the sofa with angry, groaning Ash wrapped up in his arms. He had one hand held her forehead, forcing her head back over his shoulder so that her neck was a long exposed line. The other had ahold of her arms, wrenched behind her back and bound with a set of disposable handcuffs. With a tensile strength of four-hundred pounds they were nothing to a vampire—even a vampire who never fed from humans. Then again, she’d recently had fae soufflé, didn’t she?
Bete Noire Page 19