“Change your mind?”
He’s panting a little, and there’s a wild look in his eyes.
I turn on the outside light and peer through the kitchen door’s window. Something is out there! I hold my breath, and open the door a crack. There they are, a pair of golden eyes, glowing and still in the dark, up near the big spruce. Watching. It’s her. It’s Sitka again. I pull on a pair of rubber boots and slip through the door, closing it quietly behind me.
Sitka doesn’t run away. The tips of her ears twitch back and forth, and her golden, black-rimmed eyes lock onto mine. I stop, remembering some things I read earlier in Ghost Wolf— some stuff about body language. Both Sitka’s tail and head are held high. That’s good. It means she isn’t feeling aggressive.
I’m not sure why, but I take a step forward and then two more before I stop just off the path. Sitka doesn’t move a muscle. She’s watching my every move.
There is movement over my head, and a moment later Jack settles on a branch of the big spruce. The three of us watch each other, and my senses are suddenly razor sharp. I can smell the damp earth under my feet; I can see tiny beads of moisture clinging to the silver-blue spruce needles; I can hear the chattering of a small animal—a raccoon maybe—deeper into the woods, but throughout it all, I keep quiet
There is a beautiful wild creature standing silently before me, and I want to somehow stop time.
It feels like the best gift I’ve ever had.
Chapter Sixteen
Kimiko walks into the kitchen just as I’m taking off my boots. “Where were you?” She picks up the teapot beside the kitchen sink and pours herself a mug.
“I had to let Norman out,” I say.
Kimiko looks around the kitchen frantically.
“Don’t worry. He’s not here. I think I heard him in the laundry room,” I tell her.
“It isn’t like I’d hurt him,” Kimiko says nervously. “I mean, not on purpose.”
“What do you mean by that?” I ask.
There is a snuffling sound outside, and Norman barks from somewhere down the hall.
I stare at the back door.
There is a bump on the other side of it. Kimiko hears it, too, but she quickly takes her tea and disappears into the Big Kahuna.
When I stick my head out the back door, I see the black tip of Sitka’s tail disappearing into the bush. And from somewhere deeper in the forest, I hear Jack calling to her.
The heat is intense. I cover my eyes with my hands but have to move them over my mouth to keep from choking. Smoke is everywhere: my eyes, my throat, and my nose. Jack is close by. I can hear him calling out to me.
Through smoke, I see the orange flicker of flames; hear the snapping and popping of burning wood. I’ve got to get out of here! I’ve got to find Jack!
I’m suffocating, thrashing around as though I’m half-blind! I flail my arms in all directions, desperate to find some familiar landmark to grab hold of, desperate to get my bearings. My arm smacks abruptly against a hard surface.
“OW!” I open my eyes in the darkness, and a few seconds pass before I realize that I’m in bed, and my wrist is sore from banging it into the wooden nightstand.
I exhale. Okay. I get it. It was a dream—a realistic, terrifying one, but just a dream. But it was so convincing, I can still smell the smoke. I can still hear Jack calling. I can still hear the crackle of flames consuming wood, and—
Fire! I leap out of bed. Smoke has found its way into the room, and a flickering light from somewhere outside throws dancing shadows against the wall.
Outside on the ground, and not far from the outbuilding where the compost is kept, a structure is burning. The wood shed! Flames have crept across one end of the neatly stacked piles of split alder and cedar and have begun advancing up the sides.
Voices rise above the fire: Peter’s, Jade’s, and then Ruth’s. I see them running back and forth with buckets, hoses and shovels, shouting at each other.
I rush over to Sabrina’s bed and fling off her duvet. “GET UP! WE HAVE TO HELP! THERE’S A FIRE!”
“Whaaa? Go away! Leave me alone, Anderson. Must. Sleep.” She struggles feebly to retrieve the duvet, but I’m one step ahead of her. I grab her arm, and pull her awkwardly to her feet.
“You can sleep later. There’s a fire outside!”
“Are you freaking kidding me?” She is suddenly awake, and searches wildly for her housecoat. “Why is there a fire in the middle of the night?”
We stuff our feet into shoes and I drag her out of the room. There is no need to wake Kimiko. Her bed is empty.
When we get outside, Peter is throwing several heavy transport blankets over the woodpile, and most of the flames are smothered. Jade is wielding the hose, while Ruth smashes a shovel on the ground in an effort to extinguish the remaining sparks.
“What happened? Is everyone okay?” I say, stamping on a stray spark. I turn on my flashlight, shining the light in Peter’s face.
“We’re okay,” he assures us. “But man, we were lucky your raven buddy made such a racket!”
I remember my dream. “Jack! Where is he?”
Jade points to a nearby fir; I shine my flashlight at the tree. Sure enough, there he is. Agitated, but okay.
“That was close!” Jade says, brushing some ash off the sleeve of Ruth’s housecoat.
“It was also suspicious,” Peter says. “Fires don’t spontaneously start on woodpiles without a little help—not in March on the soggy West Coast.
“What happened?” Kimiko says, emerging from the trees. Her braids are all mussed up and there is black soot on the side of her face.
“Where have you been?” Sabrina and I say at the same time.
“What do you mean?” Kimiko says. She rubs at the smudge on her cheek and looks at me with those weird, amber eyes.
“You weren’t in our room,” I say.
“No,” Kimiko says. “I was in the downstairs bathroom, and then … I heard all the noise outside, so … here I am.”
“You didn’t do a very good job of washing your face,” Sabrina says quickly.
I was thinking the same thing. When Kimiko ignores the comment, I look at Peter, Jade and Ruth, but they’re not listening to us; they’re double-checking to make sure the fire is good and out.
When everyone has calmed down, Ruth, ever cheerful, says, “Well, that’s enough excitement for one night, I think. Who’s up for some hot chocolate?”
And while the hot chocolate is appreciated, I can’t believe I’m the only person who isn’t buying Kimiko’s lame explanation for her behaviour. Doesn’t anyone else see the holes in her stories? I sip my cocoa while I watch Kimiko drink hers. If you ask me, she looks nervous. She drinks too fast, and she keeps setting her mug down on the table beside her and then picking it up again.
When we trickle back to our rooms, I’m halfway up the stairs before I remember I left my flashlight outside. I spy it on a stump near the woodpile. There is a smoky smell still lingering in the air, and a few blackened logs scattered on the ground; I can still feel a little heat coming off them.
I switch on the flashlight and shine it at the fir tree. The branch is empty. Jack is gone, but when I shine the beam at the ground, I see them. Wolf tracks. Fresh ones. Somehow I know they’re Sitka’s. They circle around the woodpile several times in both directions before going off toward the beach.
But there are another set of tracks, too. Smaller and finer, not quite the same as the wolf tracks, but not Norman’s either. They too make the same circle as the others, but instead of heading toward the beach, they go straight back to the Artful Elephant.
I shut off my light, allowing my eyes to adjust to the different, more diffused light that the hazy waxing moon casts. It spills across the ocean, painting the small waves that ripple against the shore.
I blink, and then I blink again, because Aunt Maddie has always said that a person’s eyes can deceive them in the moonlight. When I blink a third time, there’s no mistaking
what I see: trotting along the shoreline is the dark shadow of a lanky four-legged creature—a bird hopping along at its side. Jack. I know it’s Jack.
I race back to the lodge, up the stairs and tiptoe into our bedroom. Sabrina and, yes, Kimiko too, are back in bed.
I’m just settling under my duvet when I see the sliver of light under the bathroom door. Someone forgot to turn the light off. I heave myself out of bed and pad over to the switch, but when I reach the door, I freeze. On the floor, are several sooty paw prints—prints that perfectly match the smaller tracks out by the woodpile.
Chapter Seventeen
I dream about my dad. In it, we’re hiking up Cobble Hill and he tells me that we’re not moving to Victoria after all; that he’s decided we should stay in Cowichan Bay and fix up the houseboat. When a tapping on the window jolts me awake, I’m so disappointed to discover I’ve been dreaming. I look outside. It’s still dark—really dark. I pick up my phone from the nightstand and squint at the screen: 2:28 a.m. Really?
Tap tap tap tap.
There it is again. It’s got to be Jack. He does this at home, especially when I sleep through my alarm. How he knows is a complete mystery.
“I hear you,” I mutter under my breath, opening the window. But tapping isn’t the only thing I hear—somebody is crying, and that somebody is standing on the balcony outside our bedroom. I look over my shoulder and vaguely make out a lightly snoring Sabrina, but Kimiko’s bed is empty. Clearly, she’s the “somebody.”
I pull on a sweater and slip out onto the balcony. There’s a big storm brewing, and its building fast. Waves slam the shore beyond the lodge, and the dark shapes of the trees bend and strain against the wind.
“Kimiko?”
She starts and turns around, drawing her blanket tighter around her shoulders.
“Why are you out here? Are you okay?”
She sucks in the air and stifles a sob.
“What’s wrong?”
“Go away, Hannah.” Her voice is small and fearful. “You … you wouldn’t understand.”
The moment has arrived; it’s time for that conversation. “I might.”
I can tell she’s holding her breath, trying hard to keep herself from falling apart. She isn’t doing a very good job.
“It’s pretty wild out there, isn’t it?” It’s a question that I’m not expecting her to answer. “You should come back inside.”
“No. The ocean is soothing. I want to stay out here.”
She’s a terrible liar. I very much doubt a person could survive a massive tsunami and then think of the ocean as soothing.
“Come on, Kimiko. I’ve been waiting to talk to you. Just tell me what’s going on.”
She starts to cry for real. I touch her shoulder, and she buries her face in her hands. “You can’t help me, Hannah. Nobody can help me. Not here. I just—”
“What? You just what?”
“There are things you don’t know about me.”
Don’t be so sure!
She takes another huge gulp of night air and locks her hands around the railing. “It’s so awful. I’m such a freak!”
“No, you aren’t.”
That’s when she comes unglued. “Yes, I am! I’m a pariah! It’s the same wherever I go. I hate being the way I am! I hate that I’ve never had any real friends. I hate that people are scared of me! I hate that I don’t belong.”
I count to five in my head, trying to choose the right words. “That was you in the woods tonight, wasn’t it?”
Silence.
“I’ve seen you, Kimiko. You know I have. The fox. It’s you, isn’t it?”
She hesitates and looks leans looks down at the ground below us. She knows I’m on to her, and for a minute I think she’s going to hurl herself over the railing. “Yes.”
“You can do things with fire,” I say. It’s a statement, not a question.
“Sometimes,” Kimiko says sullenly. “Sometimes I can.”
“Like the smoke near the tree the other day. That was you. I know it was.”
She nods.
“And tonight? The woodpile, too?”
Another nod.
“So it’s true, then,” I say. “You’re a kitsune.”
“Yes,” Kimiko says. “It’s true.”
I remember the mad rush to extinguish the flames, and how scary it might have been if no one had been at the lodge to put the fire out. Suddenly, I’m angry. “Why would you do something like that? Someone could have been hurt!”
Kimiko’s voice is low, but there is frustration at its edge. “Don’t you think I know that?”
“Well, then, why—”
“I was trying to regain my strength! A kitsune is deeply connected to the earth’s elements. Fire is especially important. Kitsunes draw strength from the flames. Only—”
She stops.
“Go on,” I urge.
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m terrible with Foxfire! That time you saw me by the tree near the beach, I couldn’t even make a single flame, only a lot of smoke. And then by the woodpile … well, it grew out of control so fast, and I got scared.”
“Okay, okay,” I say, placing my hand on Kimiko’s arm. “I understand. It was an accident.”
Kimiko faces me in the dark. She touches the chain around her neck, and pulls the hoshi no tama out from inside her clothing. It pulses in her hands and floods them with the same golden light I’d seen when I first found it.
“I came here to find it. I’ve been without it for years now. Back then I thought I would die without it, but … I didn’t.”
“And?”
“I didn’t die, but I never really felt fully alive, either. It was horrible. I had no powers. Not even bad ones. But then a clan member told me my hoshi no tama was here. He told me I needed to take back what was rightfully mine. So I had to come here, Hannah. Because without my hoshi no tama, I have no—”
“I will carry myself with honour,” I suddenly hear myself say. “I will protect the defenseless. I will help the helpless. I will seek the good and reject evil. I will speak only the truth. I will serve the light.” Ever since Marcus recited the oath in the Driftwood Diner, I’ve repeated it over and over in my head. I know it by heart.
“That’s the Zenko oath,” Kimiko says with wide eyes. “You just recited the Zenko oath!”
I point to the hoshi no tama. “I learned it from someone I met recently. He had a tattoo on his arm like your star ball. It even had the red spiral and the character for kitsune on it. I asked him a bunch of questions.”
“It’s a common hoshi no tama design,” Kimiko says. “Nothing special for me. I may be a Zenko kitsune, but I am a failure. And the thing is, I don’t even care anymore. I might as well be dead.”
“What are you talking about?” I say. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“You are naive, Hannah,” Kimiko says. “It’s so much more complicated than you know.” She pauses. “Do you remember our first conversation? The one when I asked about your family? When I asked about your mother and father?”
“Of course.”
“Well, my father. He has been dead a long time.”
“But you don’t know that for sure. I mean, for all you know, he could be—”
“He has been dead for almost 850 years.”
Wait. What?
“He was mortal, Hannah,” Kimiko says. “He was human. But my mother, my mother is an ancient and very powerful kitsune.”
“Wait. Are you telling me you’re—”
“I am not pure kitsune, but I’m not entirely human, either. I don’t fit into either world. That’s why my magic is so unreliable—why I make so many mistakes. I’m like a misshapen puzzle piece, the one that will never fit in well enough to complete the picture.”
“But all those tails? I’ve seen them! You have to earn them, don’t you? You couldn’t have earned all those tails if you are as bad a kitsune as you say you are.”
“Fluke,” Kimiko says. “Fluke, an
d a lot of help from our clan. My mother is ashamed of me, and has always been concerned about my dishonouring her name. If I fail before all the others, she would lose respect from the clan. No, I cannot take credit for my tails. If it had just been left solely to me, I would still only have one.
I’m silent, because it feels like anything I might say will come out sounding trite.
“I have never done anything of which I can be proud,” Kimiko says quietly. “Not one thing. That is why I’ve been trying to draw strength from fire. But I’m useless, as you can see.”
“What if I helped you with the fire stuff?”
“No! I’ve had help my whole life. I will never grow strong unless I am able to do things for myself!”
“You’re half-kitsune,” I say, “and half-human. It’s just … this is so hard to take in.”
“Well, believe it,” Kimiko says. “And know that I didn’t have a choice in any of it. I would give anything to have a regular life like yours.”
“Listen. Kimiko, if your father died over 850 years ago,” I begin, “just how old does that make you?”
“Old.” Kimiko sighs. “In human years, I’ve lived almost nine hundred years.”
“No way!”
“It’s true. My birthday is in a few days.”
I process this information. Nine hundred years old? How would anyone even remember when they were born if they were that old? How would they remember anything from their past? I have a hard enough time trying to remember stuff I did when I was eight or nine.
“But you look so young. You look like a teenager.”
“When I transform, I can be any age I choose,” Kimiko explains. She’s finally stopped crying, but her voice is still small and I have to strain to hear her over the wind. “It’s the one part of the magic that I can manage. I have chosen to be this age for such a long time. It is the age I would like to be, if I were human.”
“Well,” I say, “what if you worked at making your magic, I don’t know … better?”
“I’ve tried that. I even had an ancient teacher for a while, but even he could not help me. It’s so unfair. I don’t want much. I don’t wish for great power. I just want to be able to trust myself and lead a normal life, like your life. I want to have friends and go shopping and to the movies. Maybe even learn to ride a horse …” She trails off, the tears getting the better of her once again. “I don’t know why, but I’ve always wanted to ride a horse.”
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