Stone-Cold Fox (Black Dog)

by Hailey Edwards

  Outrage purpled his face. “We swore to return you to your rightful place.”

  I shook my head. “I’m still figuring out where that is.”

  “What have you done to her?” Itsuo snarled.

  Ryuu’s voice carried. “What she does is as much a mystery to me as it is to you.”

  Beside me, Thierry smirked. She stepped forward, and her presence commanded respect.

  “I’ll stay behind and keep an eye on Mai.” A fragile spark of light burst at her fingertips to emphasize her point. “Some disturbing information has been brought to our attention, and it is within my rights to demand an inquest into the situation, considering Mai’s age at the time of the alleged crime.” The kitsunes shifted on their feet. “As I hold nothing but respect for the Hayashi skulk, I would prefer a peaceful—and private—resolution be met without conclave intervention.”

  The threat hung there suspended, until I patted her arm. “Itsuo, tell my father I wish to speak to him in twenty-four hours. He may pick the spot, but I want neutral ground because Ryuu Tanabe will be accompanying me.”

  The sentry’s skin rippled as the change attempted to overtake him. “I will convey your message.” He picked three men from his party. “I will also leave these sentries here to ensure your safety.”

  “Not on my land,” Ryuu argued.

  “You’re a rogue.” Itsuo didn’t even glance at Ryuu. “You have no land, no title and no authority to tell me or anyone else what we can or cannot do.”

  “Stick to the perimeter of the town,” I told them. “If I catch you disturbing the Tanabes, I’ll hand you over to her.” I hooked a thumb at Thierry. “She hasn’t eaten today, and trust me when I say you won’t like her when she’s hungry.”

  The sentries paled, but each one nodded in agreement with the terms.

  Itsuo and Minoru shifted, and the ones not assigned to Mai detail turned furry and headed home too. The remaining guards shuffled past the tents, leaving me and Thierry alone with Ryuu and Gen. Thierry placed a hand on my shoulder, and I covered hers with mine, squeezing her fingers.

  “I’m going to stick to the woods. I want to be able to keep an eye on the skulk as well as the sentries.” She reached into her pocket and tossed me a plain black cellphone. “Call if you need help. I have another burner phone in my bag. The number’s programmed in already.” She spared Ryuu a withering glance. “Be thankful for whatever mercy she shows you and know that I have none where those who harm her are concerned.”

  “Duly noted,” he said with cool detachment.

  As she faded into the darkness, I spun on Ryuu, who had gestured Katsuo forward, and bared my teeth. “If you tell him to take me to my room, I will claw your eyes out.”

  A slow grin threatened to break the hard line of his mouth. “Take her to my tent.”

  Maybe I had spoken too soon.

  Chapter 6

  Retreating to the patchwork tent gave me time to steel myself against what was to come. I had questions lined up and ready to fire, when Katsuo lifted the flap and guided me inside the main living area.

  “Wow.” It was the only word to cover the scope of what they had done. The odd pattern of material on the exterior made sudden, perfect sense. They had incorporated one long tent as the center of their home then sewn multiple others to it in order to give the structure individual bedrooms and other amenities. Mismatched carpets covered the floors, and thin fabric tubes hid wires that ran from their few electronics out to one of the communal generators. I picked out spots that had been patched with precise handsewn slip stitches and made a guess. “This is your work.”

  He glanced around, a faint smile lifting his mouth. “This is the real reason my Inuyasha has improved. I’ve had a lot of practice mending tears and expanding living quarters as our families grow. I’ve achieved transcendence with my sewing machine. I’m no slouch with hand sewing, either.”

  “You’ve carved out a good life here,” I observed.

  “For now.” He guided me down a narrow hall and into a sparse bedroom. “We’ve only been in the area for six weeks. Our previous address lasted longer than most. We managed six months before the local skulks chased us off the property.”

  “I thought—” Apparently I had thought wrong. “You’ve been moving around this whole time?”

  “Yes.” He dropped onto a cushion in a small seating area without waiting for me. I chose the one opposite him and sank into the plush material. “If things go poorly tomorrow, we’ll be looking to relocate again. Now that your skulk knows where we are, we won’t have a choice.”

  I bristled. “You make it sound like this is my fault.”

  “It isn’t your fault,” a deeper voice said. “I would like to speak with Mai alone.”

  Katsuo pushed to his feet and left the tent through a slit in the wall separating the bedrooms. Ryuu claimed his brother’s position, their postures almost identical.

  He regarded me through somber eyes, and I regretted that he had already tied back his hair. I wondered if the ends would brush the floor if he hadn’t. “Thank you for what you did tonight.”

  Thanking a fae was never a good idea. It’s like giving someone a free pass they can cash in for the favor of their choosing. Not a smart situation for him to put himself into when the logical favor I would ask was to be set free.

  “Helping was the right thing to do” seemed like a vague enough response.

  “I see now that I should have gone about this differently.” He linked his fingers. “I was…angry…and not thinking clearly when I captured you.”

  “Eight years is a long time to hold on to your anger.” I wasn’t sure I could write him a pass because he’d finally snapped almost a decade later.

  “Six weeks.”

  “Isn’t that how long you’ve been—” don’t say squatting, “—squatting here?”

  “It is.” He sank so far into the chair his knees were almost as high as his chest. “Our parents passed away six weeks ago.” He rubbed at a stain on his jeans. “I was on a job in town, and Katsuo had gone on a supply run with Shinji. The local skulk hadn’t made contact. We thought we were flying under the radar, but it was a ploy. They waited until we left and confronted our parents.” He rubbed harder. “We don’t have any trained fighters. Our sentries are volunteers. Their reynard issued an order to slaughter all the males and females past their fertile time. That included Mom, and Dad couldn’t let the insult stand. He killed the reynard, but his injuries… He died in that field. Mom was heartbroken. She retreated to their bedroom to grieve.” He blinked hard. “Two days later Shinji brought her breakfast, and she was gone.”

  A pang ricocheted through my chest. That explained why Gen didn’t want to talk about her parents and why no one had remarked on their absence. “I’m sorry.” I leaned forward, fingers brushing his kneecap, the only part of him in easy reach. “I didn’t know.”

  “I haven’t exactly made an attempt to enlighten you.” He captured my hand in his. “I’m sorry for that, for all of this.” He linked our fingers. “I’m not sorry it pushed me to find you. Of all the things I would change, that’s not one of them.”

  Prickles crept up my nape, stinging in their intensity from being the focus of his attention.

  “I need you to level with me here.” Focus was hard with him touching me. Whatever his faults, Ryuu was electric. His skin was a live wire jolting mine. “When I face my father tomorrow, I want all of the facts.” I steadied myself. “Tell me your story. I want to know what happened. I want to know it all.”

  He leaned back in the chair, releasing my hand and tipping his head so he stared up at the poles supporting the tent. “You were six the first time I saw you. Katsuo had dragged you home after school, and you two were eating peanut butter cookies at the kitchen table together. Even then I sensed there was something special about you. I was ten, and you were a girl, so I didn’t examine the feeling too closely.”

  I settled in to listen, straining to grasp a fiber o
f those same memories and falling short.

  “Your father didn’t mind your friendship with Katsuo. He was close to our father at the time, and I think he believed it would strengthen our ties to the skulk, which would keep Father loyal to him.” Ryuu chuckled darkly. “Your father always was a numbers man, and he wanted as few people to know his business as possible. He wanted to protect his fortune, but there was something he wanted to protect even more.”

  His legacy, his family, and by extension…me.

  “You and I…” He lifted his head, rubbing the base of his skull. “The pull I felt when I was around you got worse as we got older. You were my little brother’s best friend. You practically lived at our house. You were this whiny brat who bossed me around and tattled on me when I didn’t do your bidding.” The sheepish grin he shot me would have melted my knees had I been standing. “Needless to say, I avoided you as much as possible.”

  I caught myself leaning forward and adjusted like it was what I had intended all along.

  “I still didn’t get it.” He drummed his fingers on his kneecap. “It wasn’t until you were twelve and your mother gave you The Talk that things changed. You learned about the shiren, how female kitsunes test their suitors to find their one true mate.” Another chuckle. “That day you marched upstairs to my room, knocked on the door and declared the right of shiren. I laughed it off, but decided to be a good sport. I was kind of flattered, actually. By then I knew letting you get it out of your system was the fastest way to get rid of you.”

  A flush warmed my cheeks. “You make me sound like a tyrant.”

  “You wore one of those sparkly crown things on your head everywhere you went for the first ten years of your life.” He spread his hands wide. “If the tiara fits…”

  Flames smoldered in my face. And I thought Gen was bad.

  “You asked me a trivia question, and I answered it.” He clapped his hands together, and I jumped. “It was like two magnets snapping together. I felt the rightness of it, and so did you.” He shook his head. “You were so damn smug, said you had known it all along. You went straight to your mother, even though I begged you to keep it a secret.”

  Referencing my particular choice for the shiren drew an inward groan from me. Trivia about my favorite movie had seemed like a good idea to my twelve-year-old mind. Picturing the scene as he described it was so simple I almost wondered if the faded image wasn’t a long-buried memory.

  I climbed the stairs two at a time and blasted through the door to Ryuu’s bedroom without knocking. I spotted him standing at the foot of his bed, peeling off a sweaty T-shirt, and boxed him in by gripping the door casing with my hands and spreading my feet the width of the threshold. Heart pounding, I made an X of gangly limbs in the doorway before he could escape. “Ryuu.”

  “Look, brat, I’m kind of busy here.” He tugged on a clean shirt while I gawked at his abs. “I have baseball practice in twenty, and I still have to put up my weights.”

  “I declare the right of shiren,” I announced.

  “Do you now?” He smirked and patted his face dry with the dirty shirt. “All right. Do your worst.”

  Fingers biting into the wood, paint chips wedging under my nails, I wet my lips. “How many crystal balls did David Bowie juggle during the filming of Labyrinth?”

  “None.” Ryuu smirked at me with all the superiority of his sixteen years. “The contact juggling was performed by Michael Moschen. He crouched behind Bowie and performed the tricks blind.”

  A frown knitted his brow, and his hand lowered to his chest. My hand lifted, and I rubbed my breastbone until the skin turned red, but the fire engulfing my rib cage continued to expand. I had to swallow a few times to get my mouth to work. “Ryuu?”

  “Mai,” he replied, dumbfounded.

  “Ha!” Exhilaration whipped through me, and I was gone. My feet sprouted wings, and I flew straight to Mom. “I did it.” I squealed. “He’s mine. Ryuu’s mine. I claimed him.”

  Ryuu’s voice intruded on my thoughts. “Once your mother knew, it was over. She told your father, and Mr. Hayashi cast my entire family out of the skulk the next day. All because I passed your test.”

  All of this… It was because of me? “I had no idea.”

  He didn’t have an answer for that. “I still had friends in the skulk, distant relatives really. We talked a few times. Mostly they wanted to know what the hell my parents were thinking uprooting us all to move in with family no one had ever heard of because they didn’t exist.” His forehead bunched. “Then the calls stopped coming. Whatever your father told them put them at ease or warned them off trying to help us or both. The only ones who knew what had happened between you and me were Katsuo, because he had been spying on us, our parents and the two of us.”

  “That’s how you knew I didn’t remember.” He had ears inside the skulk.

  “One of my cousins mentioned seeing you on the street in front of our old house. He stopped to ask you what was wrong, and you asked him who used to live there. He told you, and you didn’t react. You didn’t leave, either. You just stood there until your father picked you up and took you home.” Ryuu grimaced. “The skulk thought you were in denial because you had lost your best friend. Severing friendships can be tough, skulk bonds run deep, and you were a very—” he almost said spoiled, I could tell by the way he bit off the word, “—indulged child.” He rolled a shoulder. “They figured you would outgrow it eventually, and honestly, at the time, I thought the whole incident was a fluke. It wouldn’t have surprised me to hear you had married by the time I caved to the need to check in on you.”

  I struggled to get my legs under me. “You’re saying I claimed you when I was twelve.”

  “You did,” he said calmly.

  “You—no. Just no. That’s not possible.”

  “You haven’t felt that pull in your gut?” He sat upright, sliding to his knees on the carpet, a predator stalking his prey. “You don’t feel the need to mark me?” He prowled closer, eased his hand around my nape and anchored me to the spot. “Because I want my scent all over you.” Ryuu lowered his head, eyes dark and focused on my mouth. “This close I can’t think for wanting you.”

  Even though my inner vixen was brushing the underside of my skin, eager to claim what was hers, I had to be honest with him. “I don’t know what I want.”

  He braced his forehead against mine, and I rested my hand over the steady thumping in his chest. “That’s not a no.”

  “No,” I allowed. “It’s not a no.”

  He released me almost in slow motion, crossing the room to sort through a hanging rectangular cube divided into cubbies. “Katsuo is heating water for a bath.” He reached for the lowest shelf and removed the set of clothes folded there. “You can change into these when you’re finished.”

  “Are those your clothes?” I wasn’t sure yet if I hoped they were or prayed they weren’t. “I can make do tonight, but Dad doesn’t need to see any territory marking before he gets close enough to be reasoned with.”

  Ryuu’s smug expression prompted me to shake out the clothes. The set was identical to the outfit I wore now. He had been keeping clothes in my size in the “closet” in his bedroom.

  “I was optimistic,” he explained with a shrug.

  “So I see.” I crushed the clothes to my chest and took a long look at Ryuu. “There’s one thing that keeps bothering me about what you’ve told me.”

  His stance widened, and he folded his arms over his chest, bracing his fingers against his upper arms. It was a dirty ploy that tricked me into watching the flex of muscle and the tightening of his T-shirt over his straining biceps. “Only one thing?”

  I carefully spread the snare at the center of my trap. “You said it would be easier if I remembered.”

  “It would be,” he agreed without hesitation.

  I baited my prey carefully. “But what I’m hearing is we didn’t have some great love affair.”

  “You were twelve,” he said flatly.
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  I pushed extra sway into my hips as I approached him, placing one hand over his heart, which pounded just below his skin as though eager to leap into my palm. “So what you really meant was that things would be easier if I remembered our past, because I used to idolize you.”

  Trap set, baited and sprung.

  Ryuu’s lips parted, but not a damn thing came out. Possible answers swirled behind his eyes, but he blinked those away too. He was a smart man, and he had done a stupid thing, and he knew it.

  “You wanted me to fawn over you.” I linked my fingers, tucked them under my chin and batted my eyelashes at him. “You wanted me to trail after you like some lovesick puppy.” I shoved him back. “That’s not me. That’s not who I am.” I gestured toward myself. “This is me. I’m loud, hilarious and have amazing fashion sense. Think about that.” Ryuu’s expression blanked. “You need to open your eyes and take a good look at who I am, and then you need to take a good look at who you are.” I crossed to the exit and toyed with the flap. “I hope you respect us both enough not to pursue me if you’re chasing the memory of a girl who doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Mai…”

  I clutched the clothes tighter. “I should go before the water gets cold.”

  Or before curiosity got the better of me and I decided to explore Ryuu’s mouth with my tongue in case there were any more secrets waiting to be uncovered in there.

  Chapter 7

  The companionable murmur of voices lured me through the same slit where Katsuo had vanished earlier. I found him standing over an inflatable tub, testing the temperature of the water with the inside of his wrist. A striking young man stood beside him wearing a bemused expression. He still had a few grains of white rice in his hair. I wondered if they had gotten into a food fight in the kitchen. His wide-set eyes lifted at my approach, and his smile broadened a fraction.

  He hefted a plastic bucket and tapped his fingers on the lip. “You must be the princess from the tower.”