by Mina Carter
“Kitsune?” I repeated. I’d never heard the word before.
“Yep, Kitsune, we’re a species of shape shifters.”
“There’s an entire species of people who turn into dogs?”
“Actually, we’re not dogs, we’re wolves. But that’s not exactly what the Kitsune are. There are several different animal forms that different Kitsune can shift into, though, generally it’s limited to only one animal form per person. You’re a wolf, I’m a wolf, and there’s an entire pack of wolves in Gila Valley.”
“An entire pack of wolves around here? Now you’re the one who’s dreaming. I’ve never seen a real wolf before, at least until I was one, and I’ve lived here all my life.”
“Not real wolves, Nickie, Kitsune wolves, there’s a difference. Though, you should know, the accepted phrase is natural wolves, not real, because we’re just as real as they are.”
“Okay, not real wolves, natural wolves. How can there be an entire pack in the valley and nobody knows about it?”
“Actually, there are a lot of people who know about it, the pack members, but very, very few outside the pack. Our secret is well kept.”
“How did I become…Kitsune? Is that what you call it? I’ve never been bitten by a wolf, and I’m sure it’s not something I would forget.”
Brandon rolled his eyes. “There’s only one way to be Kitsune, you’re born one. Kitsune can only be born, there is no other way to become one of us. The biting thing is pure myth, Hollywood and fantasy novels.”
“News flash, Brandon, so are werewolves,” I couldn’t help but point out.
“Point.” He conceded. “You’re going to find that some movies and fantasy novels aren’t as make-believe as you thought. I know it’s hard to believe but I’m not lying to you. I wouldn’t do that to you and you know it.” He said calmly, and I shifted in my seat, feeling guilty that I had suspected him of doing just that.
“You’re sure? I mean about the whole wolf thing.” I asked, looking out the passenger window to avoid looking at him.
“Absolutely certain. Look, do you mind if we head back into town while we talk? While you were shifting back to human I called the Anikitos, our pack leader, and he’s expecting us. I’d prefer not to be late and risk angering him.”
“Do I have to?” I asked, apprehensive at the thought of meeting the leader of the local wolf pack. I tried to think of everything I had ever read about werewolf packs and their leaders and nothing I was coming up with was reassuring.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. Plus he’ll have a lot answers for you that I don’t. I may have been raised as one of us, but I’m still pretty young, and honestly, not all that high in the pack. There’s a lot that I just don’t know.”
“Okay, but you have to promise not to leave me alone. I don’t want you to just drop me off at some stranger’s house and leave me. I’m uncomfortable enough with everything that’s happening to me as it is, without being told what to believe by some stranger.”
“I’ll promise you that I won’t leave you alone with the Anikitos unless you want me to, all right? You may decide after meeting him that you don’t want me around.”
“I can’t see why I would do that, but if you say so I’ll take your word for it. You’ve done nothing but help me this afternoon and I thank you for it,” I said. Brandon started the car and pulled out on to the highway that headed back toward town.
Chapter 2
MY CONFUSION ONLY grew as Brandon pulled up in front of Bill Hayes’ house. Bill had been my father’s best friend for as long as I could remember. Why on earth were we here when Brandon said he was taking me to see the pack leader?
When Brandon opened his door to get out, I asked, “Why are we at Bill’s house?”
“You know the Anikitos?”
“I don’t know who this Ani-key-toes you keep talking about is, but I do know that this is Bill Hayes’ house. Bill is Dad’s best friend. I’ve known Bill my whole life.”
“Do you trust him?” Brandon wanted to know.
“Well, yeah, of course I do.”
“Good. Then this’ll be easier for you. You already know he’s not going hurt you, and you know you’re in good hands if you, or he, want me to leave.”
“You keep acting like one of us is going to throw you out or something. Why would we do that? You’re my friend, you’re telling me that you and he are the same thing I supposedly am, so why would we throw you out?”
“It’s a Kindred thing, and he’s the Anikitos, the boss. If he says jump I ask how high and then I do it. End of story. I know you don’t get it now, but later you’ll understand. Maybe not right away, but eventually, you’ll get it. I just want you to be prepared, in case it happens.”
“Okay, if you say so, I’ll take your word for it. Let’s just get this over with,” I said, opening my door and climbing out of the car. The heat of the day rushing in to smack me in the face after the cool temperatures from the air conditioning in the car. I was starting to feel the ravening hunger I had felt earlier return. “When we’re through here can we find something to eat? I’m starving.”
“I don’t see why not, but let’s see how things go here before we make any solid plans.”
He had already made his way up the short walkway and was standing at the door by the time I managed to tiptoe around the car on my bare feet.
I’m so glad that Bill keeps this place so shady, it’s saving me from burning my feet now. Brandon rang the doorbell while I was still padding carefully up the sandstone walkway. By the time I got to the door, it been opened and Karen, Bill’s wife, was standing in the open doorway.
“Alekto, I offer my apologies for showing up without warning, but the Anikitos ordered me to bring Nickie to him as soon as possible,” Brandon said to Karen in a formal and subservient tone. It baffled me as I’d never seen Brandon behave in such a manner. I looked back and forth between the two of them and I noticed that Brandon was carefully avoiding looking Karen in the face. What’s going on here?
“Not a problem, Brandon. Bill told me you would be coming. I’m glad to see you both, come on in, Bill’s in his office. Nickie,” she said, turning to face me for the first time, “You know where it is. Please let Bill know I’ll be there in just a moment. Is there anything I can get for you on my way?”
My stomach chose that moment to let us all know just how hungry I was, it growled loudly. I felt the blood rush to my face as I blushed bright red.
“Did you have anything to eat after shifting?” she asked kindly.
“I had a couple of protein bars,” I said, trying to pretend that had been enough to satisfy me.
“Oh, dear! Is that all?” She seemed surprised.
“Sorry, Ma’am, it’s all I had in the car, and the Anikitos told me to bring her straight here,” Brandon put in apologetically.
“Ah, no worries then,” she smiled. “I’ll just put something together for you, and then I’ll bring it in with me. You two go on in and see Bill though, he’s waiting for you.”
I led Brandon down the hall toward Bill’s office. I’d been here many times before with my Dad and I’d thought I knew Bill well, but apparently not as well as I had thought. I wonder if Dad knows about Bill being some kind of werewolf leader? I didn’t know Karen quite as well, but we’d always gotten along well. The door to Bill’s office was standing open, and I stuck my head in first, looking to make sure he was actually in there before I just walked in. He looked up from the papers he had been studying on his desktop and I could see a smile jump to his face, as though he had been unsure who was coming in the door.
“Nickie!” he said as he stood up, pushing the wheeled chair backward with his movement. He skirted his desk and approached me. “I’m so glad to see you, and that you’re safe and sound too.
“Why don’t you come on over here and have a seat? Then you can tell me exactly what happened today,” he invited as he guided me with an arm around my shoulders toward the sofa and chairs arranged
into a conversation area at the opposite end of the long, narrow room from his desk.
“I thought Brandon already told you what happened?” I asked, confused. I took a seat in my favorite of the large black leather chairs. Curling my bare feet under me as I settled into the comfortably familiar overstuffed seat. I could remember many hours spent in this same chair over the years, listening to Bill and Dad talk.
“He did, but I’d like to hear it from you, if you don’t mind,” he told me as he sat down on the matching leather sofa across from me. Only Brandon was still standing, he looked uncomfortable and like he was waiting to be told what to do next.
“If that’s what you want, I don’t mind. Oh!” I said, suddenly remembering. “Karen said she’d join us in a few minutes, and to let you know.”
“That’s fine…” Bill said, and he, almost absently, pointed at Brandon and then to the other chair in the seating area, silently ordering him to have a seat, but his eyes never left me.
I was quiet for a moment as I tried to decide what to say. “Where do you want me to start?” I asked, does he want just the shift or what led up to it, or everything that happened to me in the last few months since we’ve seen each other?
“Wherever you want to. Where were you, what were you doing? Tell me as much as you feel comfortable with.”
“Ok…” I said, deciding to start with this morning. “Well, Brandon and I left early this morning…” I told Bill what happened, getting caught up in the memory of it. “The next thing I knew I was looking up at Brandon and he just looked so surprised. He said something like he thought it would never happen, and at the time I had no idea what he meant. It was several more minutes before I realized I wasn’t human anymore.”
“You were, and still are the same person you’ve always been, Dear, you just weren’t in human form,” Bill said firmly. “Remember that. You are always you, no matter what shape your body takes. You were still able to think weren’t you?” I nodded. “Then you’re still you. End of story.”
I nodded, accepting his reassurance, and continued my story, “He picked up my back pack and told me to follow him back to the car. I have to admit it took me a few minutes but once I got the hang of it, the trip was a lot easier on four legs instead of two. Anyway, we got back to the car, and Brandon got these out of the trunk,” I said pulling at the loose black sweats I was wearing. “He told me how to shift back. After I got dressed, he gave me a couple of protein bars, he told me I’m not crazy and I’m something called Kitsune, and that you and he are too, and then he brought me here.” I turned to look at Brandon. “Why did you have these in the trunk anyway?” I asked.
“I always carry an extra set of clothes,” he said, shrugging.
“Oh.” I only have clothes in my car for specific reasons, so I didn’t know what to say.
“Can you tell me exactly how you managed to shift back to human form?” Bill asked, once again taking control of the conversation.
“I just listened to Brandon and did what he told me to do. I pictured my human body and concentrated on how badly I wanted to be back in it, and it worked. When I opened my eyes I was normal again.”
Bill turned to Brandon, his eyes narrowed in suspicion, and asked, “And you didn’t help her?”
“No, Sir, that’s not something I have the talent for. I just told her how to do it. I was hoping that she could manage it on her own. If anyone has the force of will to manage their first deliberate shift without help, it would be Nickie,” he said. I found his confidence in me startling, but at the same time comforting and reassuring.
“And what would you have done if she hadn’t been able shift back on her own?” Bill questioned.
“Wait a second,” I interrupted, feeling myself start to panic again. “Are you saying I could have been trapped as a wolf? That I could have been unable to shift back?”
“Kind of, but not really, or more accurately not for long.” Bill said gently. “I’ll get to that in a minute, but I want this answered first. Just give us a second.” He turned back to Brandon and his voice hardened. “Well?”
“I’d have brought her here to you. I called you while she was trying to shift, I didn’t know if she would manage it or not at that point. If she hadn’t managed, I would have told her what I could and kept her as calm as I could while I brought her to you. I know that our Harmonia has the talent to call and restrict animal forms, and once I got Nickie to you, you would have been able to see to it that Nickie got the help she needed to shift back to human form.”
“Very well,” Bill said, seeming to find the answer acceptable. He turned back to me and his tone softened again, as if he had gone from speaking to an employee to a beloved family member. “As Brandon just said, we have someone who would have been able to help you to return to human form. Being stuck, as you put it, would only have been a temporary inconvenience.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to relax away some of the tension that had seized my body when I thought I could have been trapped as a wolf. “Now, how are you feeling? Physically, at least, I’m sure your mind is spinning at all the new information.”
“Honestly? I’m starving.”
“That’s to be expected. After all, you’ve shifted, not once but twice, and healed the snakebite too I’m sure, in a very short amount of time. Changing shapes takes a lot of energy, even shifting once will make you hungry, and two energy bars aren’t nearly enough to replace what you’ve burned. I’m willing to bet if I know my wife,” Bill smiled fondly as he thought of Karen, “That’s what’s taking Karen so long. She’s taking the time to fix you something to eat.”
“She did say she was going to put something together before she joined us,” I recalled.
“Very well,” he said. He turned to Brandon and again his voice cooled as he spoke to him, “You’re free to go.” It sounded like a dismissal and I looked at Brandon, expecting him to protest being treated like a subordinate.
Brandon looked at me and asked, “Are you all right here without me or do you want me to stay?” I saw Bill’s eyebrows rise at this, as though Brandon’s not immediately leaving surprised him.
I turned back to Bill. “When Brandon told me he was taking me to see the pack leader, I had no clue who that might be, and I admit I was more than a little nervous. I made him promise not to just drop me off or leave me somewhere I wasn’t comfortable. He promised that he wouldn’t leave me anywhere without my permission.” Looking back at Brandon I said, “I’m fine here if you want to go. Bill will take good care of me and see to it that I make it home, I’m certain.”
“Of course,” Bill agreed easily.
“But I’m going to need my backpack out of your car, it has my PCD and some other things I’m gonna want in it.”
“No problem, I’ll bring it in before I go. Give me a call when you can, we’ll get together,” Brandon said before turning back to Bill. “If you’ll excuse me, Sir.”
Bill nodded and Brandon backed out of the room, almost as though he didn’t want to turn his back on Bill.
I must have had a confused look on my face because Bill asked me, “What has you so baffled, dear?”
“Him, you, all of it. I’m going to ignore everything that’s happened to me today and just let that process for a while. But what I can’t understand right now is Brandon acting almost afraid of you. I’ve never seen him act like that before with anyone but you, and Karen when we got here.”
“It’s not fear exactly, more like healthy respect. I’m the Anikitos for our pack. The pack alpha, for lack of a better term. It’s a position I had to earn by battle and dominance. Simply put, I’m the strongest and the most powerful in the group, and I have the right to punish or have punished anyone in the pack, as I see fit, and Karen as well, though her title is Alekto. Normally he’s not quite so submissive, but I think he was a bit afraid that after you were injured and shifted so suddenly I would be angry. Maybe a bit more so after he found out how well we know each other.”
“Oh.” I was still confused, but not sure what else to say. I was still watching the doorway that Brandon had left through, but I wasn’t really focusing. I’d let my eyes go distant as I thought about what he was telling me.
“Now,” Bill said, changing the subject. “Would you mind showing me the wound where the snake bit you?”
I shook my head slightly, jarring myself from my thoughts of what he had told me about Brandon and pulled my attention back to him.
“Not at all.” I scooted forward in the chair pulling my right leg out from underneath me and sliding the elasticized bottom of the leg on the ill-fitting black sweats up to my knee. I carefully propped my bare foot on the edge of the table that was situated between the sofa and chairs and leaned my leg to one side so that the spot we were looking for was on top. “Here it is.” I pointed to a spot on the side of my calf. “You can see the marks, but they look days old and mostly healed now, more like healing scrapes than any kind of puncture or bite.” I looked from them up at him and back down at my leg again. “I really don’t understand how that can be.” I tilted my head to one side and watching him for his reaction.
Bill slid forward in his seat until he was just barely seated on the edge of the couch and leaned forward so that he could get a better look at the marks on the meaty part of my calf. He reached forward with one hand but stopped mere millimeters shy of touching me. “It appears that your shifting has healed any damage that the venom might have done, not that it had time to do much damage and it’s well on its way to healing the wound, too.”
“It wasn’t quite this healed when I shifted the second time, in the car. I could still see a wound, it was starting to scab over but now it looks at least a week old.”
“That’s not uncommon, the worst of the damage was healed when you first shifted, it healed more with your second shift and now your body’s working on finishing up.”
“But how? I just don’t understand.”
“Well, I wasn’t there, so I can’t tell you for certain, but I can give you my best guess based on my experience with Kitsune healing…”