Kevin snapped himself from his thoughts and smiled. “I’ll be fine. I guess I’m just feeling a little overwhelmed by everything that’s happened is all. I don’t think it really hit me until just now that this is really happening; that we’re really here in Greece, living with your family.”
“Kevin…”
Kevin wondered if the sudden weaknesses in his legs was natural.
“I… to be honest, while I’ve been made aware about the dangers of the yōkai world, I never really believed it would have anything to do with us. I mean, yeah, we had to deal with that kitsune who kidnapped you, and we got involved with that disaster in California, and the assassin Seth Naraka when we came back home, but all those events happened in the human world. I guess a part of me always assumed that any yōkai problem we had would be dealt with in the human world, too, but now we’re here, and I… I feel like I’ve suddenly realized that this is all real.”
“Oh, Kevin.” Lilian’s warm hands on his felt pleasant. They were like a small buoy keeping him from getting lost at sea. Kotohime gave him a compassionate glance as well.
“Does that make me weak?” Kevin asked.
Lilian looked appalled that he would ask something like that. “Of course not. Why would you say something like that? There’s no shame in being afraid. I’ve been afraid plenty. When that Fan woman attacked us and hurt Iris, I was frightened out of my mind. You were the one who took command back there. You were the one who saved my sister and killed Fan. You are really, really strong. You’re just feeling a little overwhelmed by everything that’s happened. To be honest, I am, too. Even though we spent twenty hours on a plane doing nothing, we never really had a chance to just absorb everything that’s happened. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been trying to not think about all this because I feel like my mind would break if I did.”
Lilian’s words went a long way toward reassuring him. He knew that he was being stupid. They’d already been through so much. He’d been almost killed numerous times, yet here he was, his feelings overwhelming him as if he were a lost child. It made him feel pathetic, but it also made him feel human.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He sighed, then smiled. “Sorry for acting so pathetic. I think I just had a Yuki moment there.”
Lilian shook her head and gave him her own reassuring smile. “It’s okay. We all get like this on occasion. And don’t compare yourself to that fruit cake. Yukiteru Amano is a complete beta, and while you might not be a prime example of an alpha male, you’re definitely not some whiny little brat like him.”
“Ouch.” Kevin winced. “I don’t know who I should feel sorrier for: Yuki or myself.”
“Muu.” Lilian pouted at him. “That was a compliment, Beloved. I was complimenting you.”
“Didn’t sound like a compliment,” Kevin muttered. Kotohime giggled. “Quiet, you.”
“Ara, ara.” The woman with the katana merely gave him a placidly amused smile.
***
After eating at the small café, Kevin, Lilian, and Kotohime left to wander the village some more. The female kitsune who’d been watching them from several tables over also left. When Kevin turned his head, he saw them out of his peripheral vision.
Are they following us?
“Lilian-sama…”
“I know.”
“Shall I…?”
Lilian closed her eyes and sighed. “No, let me deal with this. I can’t… I can’t run away from this forever.”
Kotohime, who walked several feet behind and to their left, bowed her head in acknowledgement. “Very well. I’ll leave things to you. Please be sure to call me if you need help.”
“Will do.”
Kevin blinked when Kotohime slowly withdrew, heading into an alley between two buildings. He frowned. Glancing once more at the group of girls behind him, he understood that his belief had been correct. They were following him and Lilian.
“Lilian, what’s going on?”
“I’m sorry, Beloved.” The disheartened expression on her face bothered him. “I was hoping this wouldn’t happen, but it seems that even several years isn’t enough to erase some grudges.”
Before Kevin could ask what she meant, the girls finally caught up to them. There were six of them. All of them wore togas. Five of them had two tails, like Lilian, but one of them, the ringer leader, Kevin guessed, possessed three.
“Lilian Pnév̱ma,” the ringleader said, flicking her long brown hair over her shoulder. “I didn’t think you’d return after being sent away. You’ve got a lot of nerve coming back here.”
While she appeared outwardly calm, Kevin was certain that Lilian’s mind was a flurry of activity.
“I’m sorry.” Lilian smiled. For some reason, it reminded him of Iris. “Have we met before?”
“Tch!” The woman spat on the ground. “I see you’ve grown more arrogant since getting sent off. Did living in the human world make you forget about all the fun times we’ve had?”
“I don’t recall having any fun with you,” Lilian declared. “Perhaps your memories are fuzzy.”
“Is that so?” The woman’s lips pulled back as she grinned. Her canines were sharp. “I think you’re the one whose memory is messed up. Shall I remind you of all the good times we’ve had together?”
Kevin didn’t know exactly what was happening here, but he once remembered Lilian telling him that she wasn’t well liked. He had assumed it was her family that she’d been talking about. However, it looked like she had also been bullied by the girls in her village.
Well, whatever. He didn’t care about the details. These people were picking on his mate. That was unacceptable.
“I do not know what business you have with my mate,” he began, stepping in front of Lilian to address the woman, “but I suggest you speak to her with more respect.”
The woman looked shocked. Perhaps she was surprised that a human was addressing her in such a tone, or maybe she was simply shocked that someone was talking down to her at all. It didn’t really matter.
A smile appeared on her lips. “Ho? It seems you’ve got some bark to you, child.” The smile disappeared. “I don’t like men who bark at me like some kind of rabid dog. I think we should fix that.”
Kevin twitched as a sense of vertigo came over him. The world around him darkened as everything, the buildings, the stalls, and the people, disappeared one by one, until only the woman remained. It was like he had tunnel vision.
Enchantment.
As the name implied, enchantments were a method of controlling, or rather, enchanting a person into doing a yōkai’s bidding. They were generally cast by producing pheromones laced with youki. Depending on the strength of the yōkai in question, an enchantment could do anything from making someone mildly aroused to turning them into that yōkai’s willing slave.
Kevin had let Iris cast enchantments on him as a part of his training. Her enchantments were strong—stronger than this three-tails. Ignoring the effects were easy.
“Lilian,” he said in a steady voice. “This woman is casting an enchantment on me. Does that count as assault?”
A hum off to his left told him that Lilian was thinking. “Yes, I believe it does.”
“Good.”
Kevin had always been told by his mother to never hit girls, and he used to follow that rule—until Heather started beating the crap out of him on a daily basis. While Kevin often duked it out with his sparring partner, that didn’t mean he would hit a female at random. Violence wasn’t in his nature.
However, it was a different story if he was attacked first.
Kevin stalked toward the woman, whose enchantment still affected him. He could feel it pressing against his mind. He could feel it making his heart beat rapidly in his chest, like the double bass pedal to a metal band. And since he could feel it, Kevin could ignore it. These feelings weren’t real.
“How are you still standing?” the woman asked, taking one step back for every two steps he made. “You should be
kneeling before me! You should be licking my feet! Why are you still standing?!”
“I’m not in the mood to answer your questions,” Kevin told her, quickening his pace. “You’ve made me rather angry. I think it’s time to punish you.”
“W-what do you plan on doing?” asked the woman as she continued to retreat. “Y-you wouldn’t hit a woman, would you?”
“Oh, you don’t need to worry about something like that.” Kevin smiled. “I believe in gender equality.”
The woman’s fair skin turned white as a sheet. She kept going until her back hit a wall. Kevin rushed forward. The woman shrieked as he threw a punch—
He stopped his fist just before it could graze her nose. The woman’s eyes went crossed. Her knees trembled. An acrid stench filled the air. The three-tails had pissed herself.
“I do not know who you are,” Kevin said. “Frankly, I don’t really care. Mess with my mate again, and I really will hit you.”
Pulling his fist away, he ignored the woman as she sank onto her hands and knees. He turned away and walked back over to Lilian.
He paused.
“I’m not sure why you said you weren’t strong enough to start training our teamwork. Seems to me like you’re plenty strong.”
Lilian stood in the center of a pile of bodies. The five girls who had been with the three-tails were lying around Lilian, moaning and groaning. All of them sported bruises. Two of them were drooling and possessed glazed eyes, showing that they’d been felled by an illusion.
“These vixens aren’t very strong,” Lilian replied. “Well, they seemed that way when I was younger, but that’s because I was weaker back then. Most kitsune don’t know how to fight.”
Her words were difficult to accept at face value, but that wasn’t because he didn’t believe her. Thus far all of the kitsune they had met until now knew how to fight. Luna, Seth Naraka, Fan, Kotohime, Kirihime, that blond fop who beat him at the Comic-Con, all of them could fight. Given how often he’d fought against a kitsune, it was easy to assume that every kitsune could fight.
Kevin understood that this wasn’t true. The kitsune he’d fought, the kitsune he knew, they were the minority, a small percentage of the kitsune population. It was also because they were violent that Kevin had confronted them. If they hadn’t been, if they were like these girls, then he probably would have never met some of them.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Kevin walked up to her. At the same time, Kotohime landed on the ground next to them. He assumed she had been watching them from one of the buildings.
“That was an excellent display of prowess, Lilian-sama, Kevin-sama,” she said with her perennial smile. “However, I believe we may want to leave now.”
“Why is that?” asked Kevin.
“Because you two have attracted a crowd,” Kotohime informed them.
Kevin and Lilian looked around. Their battle, if it could have been called such, had not gone unnoticed. A large crowd had gathered around them. Many kitsune were staring at them, whispering and pointing. From the way their noses and lips had curled, he assumed they were making snide remarks.
I see why Lilian didn’t want to come here now.
“I think you’re right,” he said. “We’ve overstayed our welcome. Lilian?”
The relieved smile on Lilian’s face told him all he needed to know. He regretted asking her to take him down to the village now. At the same time, he was glad this had happened. It gave him a new perspective from which he could look at his mate with.
“Yes.” She grabbed his extended hand. “Let’s go back to Granny’s.”
***
Sitting on her dais as she mused about life and other trivial issues, Delphine sneezed.
“Kuchu! Kuchu!”
It was a surprisingly cute sneeze.
“Are you feeling ill, Mother?” asked Daphne.
“No.” Delphine wiggled her nose in another gesture of surprising cuteness. “I think someone was just talking about me. Heheh, I hope it’s a hot guy!”
Daphne merely stared at her mother with her best “WTF?” expression.
“… Right.”
***
Jasmine was a very fastidious kitsune, though she preferred to consider herself more the type of kitsune who simply strived to be the best she could. Perfectionism, she understood, was a fallacious concept. Even the gods were not perfect. This she knew from the one time she’d seen Lord Inari after the annual kitsune poker night.
It had not been a pretty sight.
One of her many habitual patterns was that Jasmine liked routines. Doing the same thing every day at the same time every day, going through the motions, as it were. It kept things relatively easy. She didn’t have to devote much time to thinking about her day, which left more time for other pursuits.
Like figuring out why her mother’s titanic lumps of fat defied the laws of physics and the very fabric of reality.
Jasmine also considered herself an intellectual. Perhaps it was the result of her young age, though she liked to think otherwise, but she was a curious kitsune. When there was something that she couldn’t figure out, she enjoyed researching whatever that something was until she understood every facet about it, inside and out.
She sat on the porch of her abode. The sun had finally begun dipping below the horizon. From where she sat, Jasmine could see it beginning to hide behind the Omichló̱di̱s mountain, the very mountain in which her home sat. Colors filled the sky, splashes of pinks, swirls of purple, streaks of red. They congealed with an artistry that no painter, be they human or yōkai, could recreate.
She paid little attention to the sight, however, as sunsets were only of mild interest. Her focus was instead on her book, one on human psychology, which she’d convinced her shadow to travel into the human world and acquire for her. While she didn’t much care for the primate race in general, she would admit that their pursuit of knowledge was worthy of admiration. They had some truly fascinating ideas.
After flipping the page of her book, Jasmine paused in her reading to take a sip of her tea. She blinked several times and then looked up because her eyes were getting a tad sore from having stared at pages of text for several hours.
That’s when she saw him. His messy blond hair gave him a carefree look, a sort of devil-may-care appearance. Hiding behind his bangs were eyes of a bright azure. He was blessed with sun-kissed skin, and she could tell from the definition in his arms and the broadness of his shoulders and chest that he was in good shape. He had no tails and no ears. Jasmine had never seen a human before, but in that moment, she knew, beyond a doubt, that this young man was human.
“Ayane?” she spoke into thin air. “Who is that?”
Jasmine did not look behind her, but she knew that her shadow had appeared. She also knew that, were she to turn her head, her shadow would be kneeling submissively before her. As expected of a kunoichi.
“That is the human, Kevin Swift, Jasmine-denka,” Ayane told her. “According to the information that I have already gathered, he is Lilian-sama’s mate, de gozaru.”
The young man walked next to a familiar redhead. Lilian. Jasmine didn’t have many dealings with the other girl. They had never spoken before, and Jasmine preferred to keep it that way, for the time being. She didn’t hate the older kitsune, of course. However, Lilian and her sister were trouble.
At the same time…
“I see,” Jasmine murmured. “So, he is, indeed, a human, just as I expected.”
“Shall I gather more intelligence on this human, de gozaru?”
Jasmine considered having her shadow do the preliminary intelligence gathering on Kevin Swift. She’d already managed to gain some useful information, it seemed, and she could probably do a better job than Jasmine herself. However, the intellectual in her would not allow someone else to study something that fascinated her.
“… No,” she said after a moment. “I would rather study him myself.”
“As you wish, de gozaru.”
> She felt, more than heard, her shadow disappear. Without paying the human a second glance, Jasmine went back to her reading.
***
Christine arrived at her empty home several hours later. A glance at the clock revealed it to be 12:25 p.m., considerably earlier than she usually arrived home when going out with Lindsay. Thinking on it, it was not actually all that unusual for her to not arrive home until the next day. She normally spent the night at Lindsay’s house after they went out.
Lindsay…
She knew that her friend was worried about her. She also felt horrible for worrying one of the few people who accepted her. While she never really showed it, she did care about her friends, and Lindsay was definitely one of her best friends. She didn’t want to worry the human girl, but it wasn’t something that she could help.
Iris smiled at her. Even as blood dribbled down her chin, even as she collapsed, she still smiled at her.
The problem she was confronted with was something that Lindsay couldn’t help with. This issue was outside of human boundaries. It delved into a world beyond the comprehension of an athletic tomboyish schoolgirl.
Christine sat on the bed, her hands hovering over Iris’s chest, her youki willingly coursing through her as she covered the stab wound in ice.
What’s more, this wasn’t something that she wanted her friend becoming involved in. She already had one human friend neck deep in the violence of her world. Kevin. The boy who, even now, she loved more than anything, the boy she would probably never stop loving thanks to her curse.
But even though she worried for him, Christine knew that Kevin, at least, could handle himself. She’d seen proof of that during their fight with Fan. Christine didn’t know if she would be able to deal with someone like Lindsay, a regular high school girl, also becoming embroiled in the world of yōkai.
She watched with a sense of helplessness as Kevin and Lilian worked together, slowly sewing Iris’s wounds shut.
However, something had to change. She knew that. More and more yōkai incidents were occurring in heavily populated human centers. Christine didn’t know if her situation was an isolated event, though considering how she and her friends had run smack dab in the middle of a war between kitsune and kappa in California, she didn’t believe so.
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