by Leia Stone
“Take me to the gate,” he said.
The terrain was rough across parts of the pack’s land, and so my father’s nursemaid Cho hovered his wheelchair across most of it. She set him down twenty feet away from the gate to the underworld, amid a cloud of colorful sprinkles of magic. The witch didn’t even look tired from the effort, and I wondered how powerful she might be to have aligned with my father.
“It’s so strange not to sense the gate anymore,” my father said, staring ahead through the dim light of predawn.
Brock and I, who’d been staring in the direction of the gate, turned to face my dad. My father’s stoic face was blanketed with grief, though I didn’t think he realized it was so apparent. When I raised my brows in question, his shoulders slumped.
“Just being here reminds me of all I’ve lost. I miss the magic, but mostly I miss your mother … and I regret all the time I missed out on with you.”
Shit. As difficult as it’d been for me to grow up without parents, he’d had to watch his wife die. He’d had to live on knowing that I was still out there, just out of reach. Thanks to the fucking Akuma. My face hardened in resolve at the same time his did.
He waved a hand in dismissal. “Let’s get to it. The sun will soon rise, and we have to be ready. Evie, my girl, you have to shift.”
“I’m on it,” I said, but then hesitated when I realized that meant I had to get naked in front of my dad unless I wanted to shred my clothes and then be naked after I shifted back to human. “Um,” I started, but Brock was already leading me behind a copse of trees.
“You can shift here. I’ll watch your back.” His amber eyes sparkled with mischief.
“You just want to see me naked,” I whispered, overly conscious that my dad was within hearing range if we didn’t keep quiet.
Brock shrugged. “Hey, can you blame me? I’m smitten.” He smiled, and my heart did a flip flop. He moved closer, all but pressing himself against me. His hands hovered around my body. “I can’t help but want to be naked with you,” he whispered, and I batted his grabby hands away.
I flicked my head in the direction of my father and his nurse, and he threw his head back and laughed. “You’re all flustered. I like it.”
I playfully shoved him away. “Move it. Let me get undressed already and on with it.”
“As you wish,” he said, but didn’t give me much space, his gaze pinned on me, prepared not to miss a moment of my disrobing.
Thank God I wasn’t shy—at least not normally. I placed my katana on the ground with care, then pulled off my shirt and bra, boots and pants, all the while holding Brock’s gaze, enjoying the way it heated with every new inch of bare skin I exposed. Even with my little potbelly baby bump he thought I was sexy. Then I shot him a wicked grin that promised we’d take this up later, and closed my eyes.
Each time I shifted into my kitsune form, the pain receded a bit more, and I couldn’t be more grateful. The first time, my shift had been pure agony. But now I pictured myself as a fox, envisioning my rust colored fur, lithe little body, and violet eyes, as I built the purple magic of my kitsune deep within my center. When it had expanded so that it felt like the size of a soccer ball, completely filling my chest, I pulsed the energy outward, toward the image of my kitsune shape I held in my mind’s eye.
My magic tingled in a fast rush across my body, spreading from my center, across my limbs, and down my extremities. Then my form began to morph. My bones and cartilage cracked, my muscles snapped, my flesh stretched until … I landed on four feet in the figure of a fox. I shook my head to free myself of whatever pain lingered from the shift and tried to look behind me.
Brock chuckled softly and spoke to me through our pack bond. ‘You have seven tails. So crazy.’
I felt a little bit crazy…
‘Great. Just two more to go and we can shut this thing down,’ I said.
‘How does the gate look?’ Brock asked me as I rounded from behind the copse of trees.
I sensed my dad’s gaze on every one of my movements as I passed him and his witch to inspect the gate. ‘It looks about the same. Maybe the crack has expanded a bit, but not enough to suggest we’re in any deeper shit than we already were.’
“Is my daughter communicating with you?” my dad asked Brock.
“Yes, through our pack bond. She says the gate looks about the same as it did last time she inspected it.”
“Excellent. That’s the best we could hope for at this point.” Dad wheeled his chair closer to me. “Evie, we need to perform the ritual now. The sun is about to break the horizon. The ritual needs to be in progress when the sun appears.”
I nodded my little fox head and looked at him and Cho attentively.
The slim witch, who appeared to be of Japanese ancestry like my father, walked over to me and took a seat on the damp earth, pressing her palms flush against the ground on either side of her. “Please join me, Evie.”
But when I started to move in her direction, I stilled mid-step, and my jaw dropped before I managed to snap it shut. A … projection of my fox form was standing two feet from me, to the side of Cho.
‘What the fuck. Brock, are you seeing this?’
‘Whoa. I guess we just discovered your new power. That’s pretty wild…’
‘Uh, you can say that again. There’s another one of me standing where I was planning on going!’
“Evie has developed the ability to project herself,” my dad said, sounding pleased. “That will prove a useful power when dealing with the Akuma.”
He was totally unfazed, while I couldn’t stop staring at a projection of myself.
“And the sirens,” Brock added, reminding all of us we had enough enemies that they could form a club.
‘But I didn’t mean to project myself. I have no control over it,’ I fretted.
The last thing I needed was another power I couldn’t control.
‘Don’t worry, Evie. It’s probably like everything else. With practice you’ll learn how to use this new power.’
‘Right,’ I said, and continued toward Cho … and the other little rust-colored fox with seven tails and violet eyes. My body double was peering at me like she and I were separate instead of one and the same. What a mind trip!
I settled on the other side of Cho, shaking my seven tails once to get a feel for the new fit. The witch tilted her face toward me, but didn’t remove her hands from the earth. “All you have to do is follow my lead,” she said. “I’m going to connect the power of the earth that runs through this land to you. I’ll be directing the energy of the earth to link with you, so when you feel her energy, open to it. Don’t pull away. No matter what you do, make sure you don’t do anything to reject the connection I’ll be working on forming. You need to embrace her energy, allow it to weave together with yours. Any questions?”
A million or so. They didn’t make manuals for this kind of shit. But I shook my head anyway. If I’d learned anything since discovering I was a kitsune, it was that I just had to roll with things and hope for the best.
“Will it hurt the baby?” Brock asked, of course always thinking about the baby. I internally chastised myself for not doing so myself.
Cho shook her head. “Mother Earth nurtures and gives life. Her magic will do nothing but support the baby.”
Relief flooded through me.
“Alright.” Brock didn’t sound as sure, but what choice did we have at this point but to trust?
“Okay,” Cho said. “By binding your power to the earth closest to the gate, our hope is that you’ll be able to influence the land that contains the gate, helping you seal it once you have your nine tails.”
I nodded, my communication skills as a fox being limited and all.
With a final look to the east, Cho’s mouth settled into a tight line of determination. “Let’s begin.” She closed her almond-shaped eyes and dug her fingers deep into the dirt.
I was ready to hang onto every word of her spell, wanting to learn more about t
he witch side of my magic, but when she began she spoke in Japanese. And though I’d studied some Japanese, I wasn’t fluent enough in the language to follow the intricacies of the spell.
Before disappointment could set in, my fur stood on end as the air around us electrified. A breeze whipped up, rustling the leaves of the trees that surrounded us and making the long grasses around us sway.
Whoa.
Cho’s chanting increased in volume and intensity, speeding up until her words merged into what seemed like a single melody. The magical breeze circled the area around the gate, settling above us like a tornado.
I tilted my gaze upward, staring warily at the visible cloud of violet magic funneling above us, while Brock edged carefully around the area so as to be closer to me.
Then a bright purple glow began to seep up from the ground, dividing my attention. It was faint at first, but quite rapidly it thickened until it all but concealed anything behind it. My paws began to tingle as magic moved from the earth into me.
I shifted on my feet, resisting the urge to fight off the tangible magic pressing in on me. My fur whipped in every direction as the magic from above thickened, congealing into a fog that precisely matched the one rising from below.
Heavy, as if it were solid, the violet mist pressed on me from all sides, making me feel caught without escape. But Cho told me not to fight it, not to resist, so I clamped down on my instincts to fight, or at least to get out of the fog’s way. Brock, Dad, and Cho were no longer visible, hidden behind the wall of purple that separated me from them. Though I couldn’t see them, I could still sense Brock. Our bond to each other buzzed happily in my heart, reassuring me things would be fine. I could do this, though I felt like climbing out of my skin.
The purple mist grew thick enough that it transformed into a glow, settling across my fur like a neon coating. Cho’s chanting rose to the next level. She was practically singing now. Her melody vibrated beneath my skin as the power continued to build, pressing in on me. When what felt like electricity rose through the ground beneath my paws to vibrate through my legs, torso, and finally traveling into my head, Cho’s spell reached its crescendo … and the purple mist that surrounded me in every direction imploded like the collapse of a nuclear blast. The violet power sucked inward, consuming me entirely, before it blasted outward in a rushing wave that pulsed across all of the pack’s land, leaving behind a clear sky, shot through with the first rays of the morning’s sun as it peeked above the horizon.
My heart was beating a mile a minute, my flesh feeling like tiny ants were crawling all over it. I was panting like I’d just sprinted. I could almost feel the blades of grass moving in the wind, the roots of the trees that reached deep into the earth, as if all of nature were an extension of me. Was I now tied to the land’s power?
Immediately, I searched out Brock. The beaming smile on his face suggested everything had gone well. I turned to Cho, who looked as pleased as my father.
‘You all right, Eve?’ Brock asked.
I nodded, working to release the tension from my body. ‘I’m fine. That was just weird as fuck.’
‘It looked weird as fuck too. At least now there’s only one of you again.’
I snapped my attention around our circle. He was right. There was no duplicate of me. That was a relief. I had enough to deal with without mirrors of myself running around—though if I learned to master the skill it could become a really cool party trick.
“That was excellent, Evie,” my dad said. “The spell appears to have been a complete success.”
“Absolutely,” Cho added. “Everything went as well as we could have hoped. Evie’s powers are fully linked into those of the land now, I can feel it. With a bit of luck, the earth’s power will give her the advantage she needs to seal the gate to the underworld, once and for all.”
Sounded like a damn fine plan to me. Especially the luck part. I welcomed all the luck we could get.
‘Ask them if I can change back to human?’ I projected to Brock. When I got the okay, I trotted over to the trees where I’d left my clothes and made quick work of returning to my human body. I had questions to ask. With my katana back in hand, I moved over to the others.
“I don’t really feel any different than I did before,” I announced. Other than maybe feeling like I could sense the energy of nature around us, but that could be my mind playing tricks on me or some kind of remnant of the spell.
“That’s okay,” Cho said. “It definitely worked.”
“Great. Now what?”
“Now we start your training,” my dad said.
“I’ve already been training.” I didn’t want him to think I’d been sitting around doing nothing with Haru and Reo.
“Not the way I have in mind. The survival of all of humanity rests on your shoulders. We have to step things up.”
I barely managed to keep from rolling my eyes. Step things up? How could things possibly get any more intense than they’d been over the last few weeks? It was barely 6 AM or something. The only thing I wanted to step up was my napping game.
As if I’d jinxed myself, I narrowed my eyes at the location of the gate, which I could no longer see now that I was back to being human, or as close to it as I got as a hybrid kitsune-witch. But I could sure as shit see the putrid-looking black-green fog seeping from what appeared to be a random spot in the forest, but had to be the gate.
“Uh, what the hell is that?” I asked, pointing.
As one, Brock, Dad, and Cho swiveled to look.
“Shit,” Brock said. “That can’t be good.”
So he saw it too.
“It isn’t,” Dad said. “Cho, I thought everything had gone to plan?”
“It did,” she said. “But maybe the force of joining Evie’s power to the earth shook up the gate. Her power is substantial. It might have been enough to upset things inside the gate, especially if it’s cracked open.”
Well, that would have been a good point to bring up—before we bound my power to the land’s and unleashed the nasty-looking green misty shit.
“We have to get inside. Now,” my dad said. “It’s moving fast, and if it touches us...”
“What happens if it touches us?” Brock asked, urgency vibrating through his words.
“I’m not exactly sure, but whatever it will do, it’s the energy of the underworld, so it can’t be good.”
My father was right. The sinister looking mist could be poison for all we knew.
I gulped. “We have to stop it, then.” What if it hurt someone?
“I don’t know how to stop it, and unless you do, we should steer clear of something we don’t understand. You’re our only chance at stopping all of this chaos. We need to keep you and my unborn grandchild out of harm’s way.”
Brock’s hand settled on the small of my back and he urged me forward. “Come on, Evie. We’ll figure it out. Once you and the baby are safe.”
Cho was already dusting her hands of dirt and flinging them in Dad’s direction to hover his wheelchair. This witch was definitely powerful. The binding spell had been strong, and yet she looked as bright and eager as before, and it was still butt early in the morning.
I gave the green fog a wary look, hesitant to leave when there might be something I could do to stop it, though I’d probably have to be in kitsune form again so I could see where it was coming through the gate. I couldn’t risk another shift so soon, not with the danger that might pose to the baby. Besides, the fog seemed to be rolling away from Brock’s house and Gran’s cottage, so we had time to think.
“Let’s go,” Brock urged again, and when he took off at a run behind Cho and my dad, I followed.
Seconds later, Brock was in my head, only this time his message was directed to the entire pack. ‘We’ve got a problem. A green fog is seeping out of the gate. We don’t know what it does, but it’s gotta be bad news. Do not touch it. No contact. Get inside your homes and stay there. If you’re out and can’t get back home in time, stay in your
cars or a locked building, all windows shut. I’ll update again once we know more.’
The day was barely starting, and already it’d gone to shit...
4 Shit’s about to go down
“Blackish green, you’re sure it was a blackish green fog?” Cass was pacing Brock’s living room.
When I’d mind-messaged him about what happened, telling him to stay inside, he’d come right over. Tianna had sensed my merging with the land all the way over at his loft in town, and they’d already been on their way to see what the magical disturbance was about. Molly, Reo, and Haru were locked tight in Gran’s cabin awaiting further instructions.
“It was mostly green,” I told Cass.
“But it was also blackish.” Brock trailed off in thought, rubbing his stubble.
My father was watching my bestie with one raised eyebrow. “Do you know what it is?”
Cass grumbled. “Well, I sure as hell hope not. The only fog demon I know of is from childhood stories, and if that’s what we’re dealing with, then this is a huge problem. Huge.”
I swallowed hard. “Fog demon?”
Cass rubbed his little pot belly. “If it’s a fog demon, the entire town could be in trouble.”
My eyes widened. “The entire town?”
He nodded. “If what you saw is what I think it is, then things in Eugene are about to go south, and quickly.”
My heart jackknifed in my chest. “How? Should we warn the townspeople? What do we do?”
Cass placed his little palms out in an effort to calm me. “No sense in causing panic. Besides, warning humans about a demon fog that makes them turn into raging murderers will only cause mayhem.”
Raging murderers. He said raging murderers.
“What should we do?” Brock growled, moving to my side.
Cass sighed. “We call Detective Swanson and tell him what’s going on, and we watch the news. If crime spikes, then we have a fog demon on our hands.”
Oh God. Just what we needed. I was so close to sealing that gate! I only needed two more tails and then this would all be over with.