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I woke in a strange room to the certainty that someone had invaded my personal space. Heavy curtains blocked all light, leaving nothing but air whispers to hint at danger. They danced in eddies, refusing to pinpoint the invader’s location. I flared my nostrils but caught no distinguishing scent.
The room was huge, more of an open-plan suite than a bedroom if my exhausted memory could be trusted. Whoever had crept in could be anywhere. Given yesterday, they could be anyone wanting to take out a kitsune turned alpha’s heir.
The tiniest snick of something hard tapping against wood focused my attention. My hand clenched around the knife I’d swiped off last night’s dinner table in plain view of Chief Reed. He’d laughed at my need to arm myself, hadn’t responded when I tried to bait him into offering blades meant to be used for stabbing rather than sawing through bloody steaks. Had laughed harder when I suggested he open the necklace caging my star ball so I could create my customary sword.
Now I intended to be more secretive and also more aggressive. It was better to attack than wait and defend myself. No matter what, the covers—warm and comforting yet sure to slow my response time—had to go.
They were soft enough not to rustle. Soft enough to fold back as I let my bare feet chill silently against the wooden floorboards.
I was entirely naked because my possessions hadn’t arrived before dinner ended and I hadn’t been willing to accept the nightgown Quentin’s widow had been forced to offer me. The well-washed seams had smelled like her, the faintest scent of spring sunshine out of place in January. Before today, I guessed, this woman had offered a kind word and smile to everyone. She didn’t smile, though, when she pushed a gown she must have worn during nights spent beside her now-dead mate into my arms.
“I can’t take this,” I’d told her.
“Take it or sleep naked,” Chief Reed had countered.
So I’d slept naked. And now, naked except for a steak knife, I padded across the room.
Luckily, I possessed the stealth of a kitsune even two-legged, so there was no problem remaining silent. But the blankets had a mind of their own. Despite the fact I’d stacked them carefully at the end of the bed, they slumped onto the floor as I left them. Air whooshed past my bare calves as the blankets landed with a very audible thud.
Whoever had entered my room paused. Paused then...meowed?
“Pumpkin?” I knew that throaty chirrup. Knew, now that he was closer, the fishy scent of his breath.
I dropped the knife and flung myself toward the place where I’d last heard a claw click against floorboards. Warm fur indented beneath my fingers. Pumpkin’s purr thrummed pleasure through us both.
No wonder Thom had demanded I be allowed my possessions. Pumpkin wasn’t a possession, but he was deeply necessary for a woman in exile. The cat settled onto my lap, digging claws into my bare knee deep enough to leave scratches. And, for one endless moment, I felt entirely at home.
Then a chuckle erupted from the direction of the door. Not Chief Reed’s deep belly laugh. No, this humor was feminine and carried with it the faintest scent of sunshine.
Sunshine and smugness that lingered even after the door opened and closed behind her. Quentin’s widow had seen my weakness. Had seen and taken the information with her back into the night.
***
WILLOW—WHOSE NAME I learned at breakfast—didn’t act on her knowledge right away. Instead, she faded into the woodwork, her posture in my presence staying just as submissive as it was around her alpha. But the glint in her gaze when she thought no one was looking made me imagine her poking pins into a kitsune-shaped voodoo doll as soon as I turned my back.
I also imagined her skinning Pumpkin and leaving his bloody body on my pillow. Luckily, the old tomcat was used to fending for himself. I pushed him out the window that first morning and he left the way he always used to when I was rooming with Dixie Lee or Charlie. Disappeared and didn’t return until I was ready to go to sleep.
So I didn’t worry about him. Instead, I worried about Ava, about how long Dixie Lee’s child had been missing. About how every passing hour made it more likely she would turn up dead.
Not that I could do anything about it. I wasn’t granted access to my phone or to the outside world in any other way either. Hard as I tried, my oath didn’t allow me to try to escape.
Instead, I found myself drawn toward obeying even Chief Reed’s unstated wishes. He wanted me to bind with his pack. Wanted me to become one of them.
He never said so out loud, though, so I was able to fend off the questing pack tendrils while dragging myself through the busy schedule Chief Reed set for me. And time slipped away, first an hour, then a day, then a week.
I toured a school where children lived separately from their parents, affection forbidden. I visited a sword-training facility where matches ended with a gush of blood.
When given a spare moment, I asked anyone willing to speak with me about kitsunes, about the orb that caged my star ball, about fox magic. Even those who’d been welcoming a moment earlier avoided those questions, which told me more than they suspected. There was something to learn here, something about my heritage embedded in the history of the Reed pack.
But I didn’t learn the connection. Instead, every night I ran two-legged behind vicious werewolves. We hunted, not the mice and rabbits I was used to catching with fox teeth, but bigger prey wolves could flush out of the mostly wild mountainside. Usually, our chases were painless for everyone except the unlucky source of dinner. But as the moon grew larger, one wolf was speared by the antlers of a bull elk defending his life by taking another. Breathless, I caught up just in time to see the squiggle of intestines trailing across bloody leaves, the clouded eyes of someone who’d been in his prime moments before.
Chief Reed changed back to human form so he could laugh and laugh and laugh.
That night, I dreamed of Quentin. Of my own hands-on awfulness, worse than Chief Reed’s humor. Scarlet slipped into the stream of images as well, her pain beneath the Executioner’s knife, the fact I’d never checked afterwards to see whether she was alive or dead.
Come morning, I was sick from lack of sleep and self-loathing, but Chief Reed set me the same sort of timeline as ever. I toured workshops and gardens and tried out each task underlings were assigned to. I learned how Chief Reed built a machine out of living beings, each shifter fitting together like gears so their alpha could sit in his manor at the top of the mountain and gloat.
I was another cog in that wheel, a cog that Chief Reed intended to keep pushing into place until I stuck there. He pushed and I resisted. Shoved harder and I dug my heels in deeper.
Our impasse might have gone on forever if the moon craze hadn’t struck.