CRACK!
He never finished that sentence, because in less time than it took to say “za warudo,” Christine slammed her fist into his nose.
“My nose!” Eric held a hand to his now bleeding nose. “You just broke my nose! What did you do that for?!”
BAM!
“GA! You just headbutted me!”
“FILTHY, DISGUSTING PERVERT!”
“O-Oi! I take offense to―GAOI!”
“DIE, NEURONS! DIE!”
On that day, Kevin learned a very important lesson. Whenever dealing with Christine, make sure to bring Eric along, so she can have a target to beat up when her tsundere protocols activate. His perverted friend made a great scapegoat.
***
Classes passed quickly that morning, and soon enough, it was time for PE.
“Line up, brats!”
Kevin, Lilian, Iris, and Eric lined up with the rest of the students as Coach Raide blew into his whistle. The man looked at all of them, scowling more fiercely than usual. Perhaps it was just their perception of him, but the large wookiee-like coach seemed awfully angry about something.
“You’ll all be doing drills today!” He received a chorus of groans. “Shut up! Anyone who whines or complains is getting worked twice as hard as everyone else! Now, you’re all going to follow me outside to the track field, where we’ll be doing a one-mile run! Well? What are you waiting for? An invitation? Move it!”
Spurred on by their coach, the group traveled outside.
“Is it just me, or is Coach Raide even more belligerent than usual today?” one of the male students asked.
“It’s definitely not just you,” another said. “He’s pissed. Just look at that scowl. That’s not his normal scowl.”
“Really?” asked a girl. “I can’t tell the difference between this scowl and his normal one.”
“That’s cuz you’re an idiot.”
“Hey!”
Kevin let the conversation flow over him as he walked to the track field, Lilian’s left hand clasped in his. Iris strolled along on the redhead’s right side. Eric frowned as he walked on Kevin’s other side.
“Pardon me, My Lord,” Eric was speaking formerly again, “but I was hoping you would permit me to ask a question.”
“You can knock it off with the ‘Lord’ thing. It wasn’t funny the first time, and it’s not funny now.”
“I think it’s hilarious.”
“You be quiet!” Kevin spat at Iris, seconds before noticing the stare Eric was giving him. He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Go ahead and ask, though I can’t promise an answer.”
Eric nodded as if he’d been expecting Kevin to say that. “I just wanted to know if you’ve seen my master anywhere.”
“Your master?” Kevin blinked. “Do you mean Ms. Grant?”
“Hm. Master.”
“Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen her since we went shopping for Halloween costumes.” Kevin’s face scrunched up for several seconds before relaxing again. “To be honest, I thought she’d be with you.”
“I’m not sure why you’d think any of us would know where she is.” Lilian wrinkled her nose to show her dislike for the blond woman. “You’re the one who’s always spending time with her. Shouldn’t you know where she is?”
“That’s just it, I haven’t seen her since Saturday. I don’t know what’s going on.” Hanging his head, Eric appeared completely unaware of the large raincloud that randomly appeared above him. Kevin, Lilian and Iris moved several feet away as rain began pouring from it. “And Master promised to take me peeping today…”
Kevin facepalmed. “Of course that’s what you’d be worried about.”
Despite Eric’s idiocy, their curiosity had been piqued. They decided to ask Coach Raide if he knew where Ms. Grant was. Unfortunately, the ornery man didn’t seem to appreciate the question. Immediately after mentioning the assistant PE coach’s name, his face turned a deep shade of puce.
“What the hell makes you think I know where that good for nothing slacker is, huh?! I’m not her goddamn keeper!”
Needless to say, they avoided Coach Raide for the rest of class.
***
School had ended, but Eric had been forced to stay after because he had gotten caught peeping. Again. His dad had spoken with him at great length, lecturing him on how he needed to stop spying on the girls because it was disrespectful. His old man had done this while looking through a porn magazine, thereby rendering everything he said null and void. What right did that old codger have to stop him from peeping? The old fool just wanted to stifle his peeping habits because he didn’t have the guts to do it himself!
Getting off the late bus, Eric grumbled about the unfairness of the world as he walked up to his house. The lights weren’t on, meaning that his mother must have still been at work.
He was surprised that his mom hadn’t divorced his old man yet, what with his father’s unrepentant perviness and all that. Perhaps she saw something special in the old man that no one did.
God only knows what she sees in the old fart.
He opened the gate and entered the courtyard. As he locked the gate behind him, the hairs on his neck prickled. He rubbed the back of his neck, wondering if the cold chill blowing through the courtyard was due to the weather or something else. It wasn’t until he had reached the front door that Eric finally realized why he felt this way.
He wasn’t alone.
“Ah… heh… apprentice…”
“M-Master!”
Eric rushed to Heather’s side. She was resting against the cobblestone steps, her back leaning against the door. She held a hand over her torso, which was covered in filthy bandages. Crimson splotches seeped between her fingers, spreading across her skin and soaking into the fabric of her shirt.
Eric felt ready to hyperventilate.
“W-w-w-what happened to you?! Why are you bleeding?!”
“Later…” Heather grunted. “I’ll tell you later…” She looked up, her half-lidded, partially glazed over eyes blinking at his. “H-help me… get inside…”
Eric quickly followed her command. Slinging one of her arms over his shoulder and foisting her up, he entered the house and staggered to the living room, Heather’s feet dragging along behind him.
Because of his parents’ jobs, they were quite well off, and the living room reflected their wealth. The furniture was comfortable and the appliances state-of-the-art. They even had a 76’ flatscreen TV with surround sound built into hidden speakers all over the house.
He laid Heather down on the large leather sofa, ignoring the blood seeping into the material. He could worry about that later. There were more important matters at hand.
“Ha… ha…” Heather’s breathing had grown heavy. A pained expression was etched on her fair features. “Apprentice… I need you…” She coughed, blood dribbling from the corners of her mouth. “I need you to get… contact with Lilian… tell her… need… help…”
“What do you mean, Master? Why would you—Master? Master!” When Heather’s eyes closed and her body went limp, Eric freaked out. “Oh, god! What do I do? What do I do?” he fretted, running around like a chicken with its head cut off—at least until he ran into a wall. Then he remembered what his master had told him just before she passed out. “Call Lilian. Call Lilian.”
He grabbed his phone and was about to dial Lilian’s number when he remembered something else.
“Does Lilian even have a cellphone?”
***
After receiving a phone call from Eric, Kevin and the family of kitsune went over to the pervert’s house.
He was beginning to think coming over had been a mistake.
“Oyoyoyoyoyo! Hello, beautiful girls!”
Eric’s dad had come home just a few minutes after they had arrived. The moment he saw the five gorgeous females standing in his abode, the perverted principle stripped off his suit and bum-rushed them like a fat man at an all you can eat buffet.
Time seemed to slow as the man ran toward them, his flabby belly bouncing and jiggling in ways that made Kevin want to vomit. With a salacious grin, the disgusting principal leapt into the air with the obvious intention of pouncing on the family of female kitsune.
“Here I come―DOOF!”
Kevin watched in mute silence as Mr. Corromperre was smacked in the face by a large, fluffy black tail. The rotund man soared in a graceful parabolic arc until his grotesque body crashed into a wall on the opposite side of the room, causing the entire vertical surface to crack. He also had the unfortunate luck of slamming into it headfirst, which caused his fat little head to get stuck in the wall.
As the pervy principal struggled to pull his head out of the hole, Kotohime retracted her tail. “I believe having that happen once per novel is more than enough.”
“I would be happy if it never happened again,” Kevin added, shuddering as he remembered the fat pervert trying to jump on Iris and Lilian and landing on him instead.
“Hmm. Agreed.”
“Enough fooling around.” Eric was, surprisingly, not up for their antics. “I need you guys to heal my master.”
He directed them to the unconscious Heather. Her skin, once a light tan, had become chalky-white and pasty. The vermillion liquid pouring from a gaping wound in her side had stained the leather sofa, and the repugnant coppery scent of blood filled the air, causing the yōkai amongst them to gag.
Being a Water Kitsune, and the only one present with four tails, Kotohime took to healing Heather. While she did that, her sister pulled Eric’s dad out the wall and knocked him unconscious with an enchantment. Nothing good would come from a human walking further into the house and discovering the scene in the living room.
Healing Heather was an easy task for Kotohime. While not a healer by nature, Water Kitsune had the most powerful healing techniques of all kitsune types.
Kevin watched in fascination as the wound on Heather’s stomach slowly closed, the skin sealing shut as if she had never been wounded in the first place.
“Is she going to be alright?” he asked.
Kotohime removed her hands from Heather’s torso and stepped away. “Oh, yes. She will be fine. It appears she gave herself some basic first aid, which kept her from bleeding out. She’s lost a lot of blood, but blood is made up of ninety-eight percent water. I replenished most of it and healed all of the damage done. She won’t wake up for a while, but provided she gets a full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, she’ll recover.”
“That’s good.” Kevin still didn’t know how to feel about Heather, but he didn’t want her to die if she could be saved. “You’re really good at healing people.”
“Ufufufu, why thank you.” Kotohime hid a demure smile behind her kimono’s left sleeve. “But I am truthfully just a novice. As a four-tailed Water Kitsune, I should be an expert healer, but my abilities are middling at best. Now then, would you mind helping me move her into a bedroom?”
“Oh, um, sure.”
After Kevin helped Kotohime transfer Heather to an unused bedroom, the group adjourned to the living room.
“So, does anyone know what happened to Blondie?” Iris asked, trying not to frown as Lilian sat on a blushing Kevin’s lap. Beside her, Camellia looked around the room, her eyes taking in their new surroundings with the kind of curiousness one might expect from a child.
“If we knew what happened, then we wouldn’t be sitting here discussing it.” Eric crossed his arms over his chest, looking surprisingly serious. Then again, the woman he looked up to had almost died. That was apparently enough of a reason for him to cast his salacious habits aside—at least temporarily.
“There’s no need to get upset. I was just asking a question.”
“Judging by the wound Heather-san sustained, I can only conclude that the weapon used to injure her was some kind of projectile.” Kotohime cocked her head to the side, musing over something. “From the size of the wound and the damage inflicted on her internal organs, I assume it was a rifle, though I couldn’t tell you which kind. There was an exit wound in her back, suggesting the bullet went straight through her body.”
Kevin frowned. “As interesting as that information is, it doesn’t really help us.”
Eric nodded his head. “This is Arizona. Anyone can buy a rifle these days.”
“Of course, we can probably dismiss this as a random shooting,” Kevin added. “People who start shooting sprees prefer doing so in populated areas with a lot of people. We would have undoubtedly heard about something like that happening. That means whoever did this must have known Heather personally.”
“What about those people who kidnapped you?” suggested Lilian, her brow furrowing thoughtfully as she bit her thumbnail. “That Heather woman worked for them at some point. She said that she got laid off when I talked to her, but what if she didn’t? Maybe they tried to silence her, but she managed to escape before they could kill her off, and now they’ve come back to finish the job.”
“That’s…” Kevin paused, considering her words. “Completely possible,” he admitted. Smiling, he leaned up and pressed his lips to her cheek. “Good thinking.”
Lilian beamed at him.
“All this speculation is fine, but it still does not solve our immediate problem,” Kotohime announced. “What do we plan on doing with this knowledge? Should we protect this woman from these people, or should we leave her to fend for herself?”
“Oi, oi, oi!” Eric stood up and gave Kotohime a glare. “How can you even think about leaving my master to fend for herself?”
“Easily,” was the blithe reply. “That woman kidnapped Kevin-sama and tried to capture Lilian-sama. I do not care whether she lives or dies.”
“Yeah? Well, I do!”
“That is not my problem.”
“Why you…!”
“P-please stopping fighting, you two.” Kirihime looked nervously between her sister and Eric. “U-um, Mr. Corrompere, Kotohime does not truly mean what she’s saying. She just doesn’t like people who try to hurt her charge.” The demure woman addressed her sister next. “And Kotohime, please do not say such things in front of others who might care. I-It isn’t very nice.”
Everyone except Camellia stared at Kirihime, who looked like she was about to faint.
Kotohime smiled. “You are right, of course, Kirihime.” She bowed her head to Eric. “I acknowledge that my words were in poor taste. Please forgive them. I was simply speaking on impulse due to my negative experiences with Heather-san.”
“Negative experiences, she says,” Kevin muttered in a soft whisper that only Lilian could hear. “She kicked Ms. Grant’s butt back to the Stone Age and calls it a negative experience.” Lilian hid her snickers behind a cough.
“Tch. I guess I can forgive you this once,” Eric mumbled. “But only because you’ve got the largest rack I’ve ever seen!” A perverted expression overcame his features. “Now, if you really want me to forgive you, perhaps you should put out a little.” Eric’s fingers twitched as he brought his hands up, as if he was already imagining what it would feel like to grab Kotohime’s superlative bosoms. “Maybe if you let me have a quick squeeze of your―oof!”
The group watched as Eric Corrompere received a very brutal smack to the chest by the same tail that put his old man through a wall. The dark-haired teen soared into the air and over the couch, smacked into the kitchen table, rolled across the table, and then fell to the floor, his head hitting the marble tiles with an audible crack!
As one, the group looked from Eric to Kotohime, who gave them all a dazzling smile.
They turned away again, swiftly coming to the conclusion that it would be in their best interest to forget the past sixty seconds of their lives.
It was safer that way.
***
Christine had never felt more awkward in her life. Lindsay had invited her over for dinner and she, like a moron, had accepted the invitation without really thinking about it. To be fair, she’d been a lit
tle busy berating herself when Lindsay asked if she wanted to hang out after school, but even she knew that excuse wouldn’t hold up if used, which was why she didn’t use it—at least not verbally.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Damn it, Christine, if only you hadn’t been so preoccupied with your newest failure, than maybe you wouldn’t be in this situation!
She sat at the table, trying to ignore everything around her. Lindsay’s parents stared at her as if she’d sprouted half a dozen heads from her backside and all six had started shouting, “NOTICE ME, SENPAI!” as loud as they could. She felt like a circus freak show being put on display.
She was really beginning to regret accepting Lindsay’s invitation.
“So, you’re one of Kevin’s friends?” Mrs. Diane asked in a poor attempt at making conversation.
Lindsay’s mom looked nothing like her daughter. Where Lindsay possessed an athletic build, her mom was what many would call “pleasantly plump.” She wasn’t necessarily a large woman; she simply had more meat on her bones than most. Her hair was also several shades darker than her daughter’s.
“N-no―w-well, sort of.” Christine tried to control her natural urge to deny being friends with Kevin. “I-I mean, he and I, well, we’ve spent a good deal of time together, so I guess you could say we’re friends…”
“That’s nice. And how is that young man doing, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Christine’s mind went on high alert. Something about the way Mrs. Diane asked that question, or maybe the disturbing gleam in the woman’s eyes, set her on edge.
“He’s doing fine,” Lindsay interrupted the conversation before anyone else could say something. “In fact, he’s been doing great.”
Mrs. Diane raised an eyebrow at her daughter. “Really?”
“Yep. The past few months have been really good to him. He’s grown up a lot.”
“Mm.” Christine shuddered. That smile. Oh god, that smile! It made her feel like retching—and running away screaming, but mostly retching. “That sounds wonderful. You should invite him over for dinner sometime. I would so love to see him again.”
A Fox's Family (American Kitsune Book 4) Page 24