Inherit (5 page)

His body seizes for a minute, then he looks at me, his face confused. “I do understand.” His voice slides over the words slowly, so gentle and kind, I wait for the punch-line. JR is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a thoughtful guy. “She’s losing her grip on reality. She’s making mistakes she never made before. You can’t trust her to operate the oven, let alone pay the bills and keep up with the housework and take care of herself. She hates doctors and putting her in a home would kill you both.”

I press a hand over my mouth to stop my lips from shaking right off my face. JR’s expression is pure confusion, like he’s as surprised at the words tumbling out of his mouth as I am. “Why did you say all that?” It’s horrifying to hear all of my deepest fears and worries pouring out of JR’s mouth like he has a direct feed to my brain and heart.

“I don’t know.” He stands up next to me, unsteady. “I don’t feel so hot.”

“You should go.” I’m so relieved, I could scream. I don’t want to hear my words from his mouth, don’t want to see him acting like anything other than the self-centered, self-assured guy who thought he always had all the answers; at least I could trust that JR. I don’t know how to handle the new, sensitive version of him.

JR stalks away, head down, muttering to himself, and I throw Macie, who just walked in ready to take over my section, a quick wave and punch out, my time card jumping in my hands as I slide it into the clock. I don’t even bother to change out of my uniform, just run out to my truck and slam the door hard.

I can’t trust time, I can’t trust JR’s cockiness, I can’t trust my memory or my instincts, and I feel like my grasp on reality is shaky at best. The engine roars to life and I head home to Bestemor, hell bent on figuring this all out. There’s no way we can get by with two kooks in that little house. I need to get my head on straight.

Chapter 5

Nevaeh sits on the front porch when I pull in, long legs sprawled in front of her, leaned back on her willowy arms, face tilted back to eke out every ray of the weak early spring sun. She unfolds herself and leaps over to the truck, grabs my hand and drags me into my room. Her laptop yawns on my bed, ready with, I’m sure, a frightening amount of information just waiting to cure my ills.

“I’ve been doing some research.” She pauses, picking up on the tilt of my ear. Loki is asleep in the laundry basket where we put her last night. “Don’t worry. Bestemor is lying down for the night. And while we were getting her ready for bed, I asked for some information about your family, and she gave me some names. This is going to sound really weird, but that fox is part of this long line of… magic foxes. Kind of like Jonas said.”

“Magic foxes?” I sit down at my little iron vanity with the cream roses around the mirror that used to be my mother’s when she was young, and take off my cat glasses with the rhinestones. I peel off my poodle skirt and stuff it in the laundry along with my sweater and socks. I’m in my crinoline, bra and underwear, but Nevaeh doesn’t bat an eyelash. We’ve been twined around each other for so long, our bodies are old news, dressed and undressed.

“Magic foxes. For witches.” She crosses her long legs and her eyes turn serious; I can tell because they’re more tawny brown than any other color. That’s a sure sign that she means business.

“What kind of magic? And why me?”

“In Japan foxes are like familiars, likes cats are to American witches. They team up with human witches and they do their bidding,” she explains, leaning forward, her cheeks all flushed and excited.

“Wait. Wait. So for Japanese witches, it’s a fox sitting on the end of the broomstick when you fly around on your broomstick with your pointy hat on?” I raise an eyebrow.

Vee scowls and points a sparkly fingernail my way. “You’re not taking this seriously.”

I throw my hands up. “Taking what seriously? That the family I’ve never met in Japan is a bunch of witches? And maybe in a few weeks I’ll go back to the airport and find out they sent me a cauldron and some newt penis potions? This is crazy.” I shake my head, trying to jumble these thoughts into a form that makes sense, but nothing makes sense. No way of putting this together makes it work. At all.

“This is ancient magic, Wren. Forget the fairytale broomsticks and movie hocus pocus. This is like elemental, ritual magic, and you’re a part of it. So is this fox. From what I’ve read, if you want something or desire something, the fox will go out of its way to see that it happens. But they come with a warning.” Her tongue darts out and wets her lips.

“Warn away,” I sigh. My brain is slowly expanding inside my head, crushing against my skull in painful, reverberating pulses.

“The fox can go overboard in an attempt to help you. Like, say you want to win your cheerleading competition at any cost. The fox might kill the competition.” Nevaeh clutches her hands over her heart dramatically. My best friend is logical, but she has a true flair for drama. She brought the house down in last year’s production of
Romeo and Juliet.

“Vee, that’s—” I’m about to disagree just because her logic is straight out of a Lifetime movie (really, we watched that one where the mom kills her daughter’s cheerleading competition) when I think about the weird things that have happened lately. How I wished for more cash, that velvet coat, a new tire. And today, specifically, the words
I wish
went through my head or came out of my mouth when I wanted more time, better teeth, JR’s sympathy. “Oh shit.”

“What is it?” Nevaeh tumbles over the pillows on my bed until she’s next to me, grabbing my wrist. “Sit down! You look like you’re going to faint!”

I pull my lips back. Nevaeh looks at me like I’m a loon, then her expression melts into open admiration.

“When did you get your teeth fixed? Did you get that clear thing you put over them?”

I shake my head. “They were snaggly and kind of yellow this morning.”

The clues are all there and Nevaeh is quick. “Ah. Okay, I get it. I get it. You
wanted
them fixed. You wanted the coat, and the tire and the money. And you got them when the fox came. Anything else?” She should have a funny hat, a cape, a pipe clenched in her teeth; she’s solving this mystery in a fraction of the time it took me.

“I wished for more time this morning. I wished that JR would understand my situation with Bestemor.” My words plunk out of my mouth like fat plums dropping off of a tree.

“And?” Her mind is still slicing and dicing. She needs the facts fast.

“The clock in the kitchen was broken. I thought it was, but Bestemor’s watch read the same time, and so did my cell, my alarm, and my computer. I gained an hour and a half out of nowhere. And JR came to Tony’s to hit on me and he wound up basically spouting off all the stuff I’ve been dreading thinking about when it comes to Bestemor. Then he left looking like he saw a ghost.”

I shiver and it’s not just because I’m standing in my underwear. I dig through my closet and focus on finding my favorite shirt, the pink and grey striped one with silver stars that fits snug and comfortable, like a hug from my grandma. This isn’t really the time for fashion particulars, but I want normalcy. I want comfort. I want the life I had the day before Loki upended everything. I pull on cute jeans, pull my crinoline off, and dig out boots. I sit at the vanity and wipe off my old makeup, then begin to patiently, studiously reapply. It feels vacantly productive to go through the motions of doing normal things and focus on anything other than this newly-hatched weirdness.

“So what are you going to do?” Nevaeh peers at the fox, ears twitching in the basket, and my heart Tarzan swings back and forth in my chest. As simple as life would be without Loki, she’s here. She’s here and she’s making thing better in her own complicated way. And I’m responsible for her. I don’t take responsibility lightly. Vaeh’s words bring me back to reality. “If you buy into this, that fox is going to go after what you want, probably whether you want it to or not.” She pulls at a piece of her dark hair and licks her lips.

“How can this be true? But if I do believe it, I’ll have to stop wanting things, because, knowing me, I’ll want something I have no business wanting and screw this all up.” I stand up straight and it sounds like it might work. And then I consider responsibility. Loki is in my care right now, and I’ll honor that, but it makes no sense for me to keep her. There are people who understand her. People she should be with. I nod and take a deep breath. “And I’ll contact whoever sent Loki to me and find out how to get her back where she belongs safely.”

I imagine the mountains of time and paperwork this is going to take and stifle a groan.

We hear a high-pitched whine. Loki is awake, her golden eyes fixed on us, her ears flat on her head. She leaps out of the basket, trembles, and scoots towards me. It looks like a servant, scraping on the ground, asking forgiveness.

“She knows,” Nevaeh whispers.

The hair on my body is standing straight up, but I ignore it. “Loki doesn’t know what we’re talking about.” I say it with authority, like I can make it true just by throwing the words out in the open.

She lays her dark orange head on my feet and rubs, like a cat. When she looks up at me, there’s apology written all over her intelligent face. I scoop her up and cradle her close to my chest, murmuring comforting words. There’s an immediate softening of her little form, like her bones have melted with relief. When she stops trembling, I put her gently back in the basket.

“So say this is all possible, right? Say there’s truth to this whole thing. Maybe this is a good thing, Wren. Look, you’re a good person. A really good person. You’ve had a hard time, with your dad leaving and then your mom. Bestemor isn’t in the best health, this house is falling down around your ears. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that you have some…force on your side. Right? I mean, look what you got. A coat? Hello, why didn’t you have a warm coat anyway? A new tire? Yours are bald, and it’s dangerous. Better teeth? C’mon, that isn’t even vanity, sweetie! When’s the last time you went to the dentist?”

It’s basically what Jonas said. Good karma. Pay it forward. I tongue the tooth in the back of my mouth that aches whenever any sticky candy touches it. Maybe they have a point. “You work two jobs, make straight As, take perfect care of Bestemor…let yourself live a little! Maybe your family knew you’d be mature enough to handle this fox. I mean, there’s ancient history about this kind of stuff. Books and articles, all documented, and I’ve been reading through them all day. There’s even this totally debated underground documentary in the works. Apparently, some witches are willing to break their sacred vows of silence and share their stories with the guys who did that movie about the cave paintings in France. Remember? The one Mr. Ross made us watch in art last year? Anyway, there’s all this news about covens going underground to escape attention and factions breaking apart over the betrayals. It’s totally fascinating stuff, and it’s documented if you know where to look. There are hundreds of legends about this.” She ends her ramble pink-cheeked and excited.

Now it makes sense why Nevaeh is so willing to believe in this. If there’s enough evidence, her mind is wide open to anything.

“Okay. So, say this is all true and some old witches from my family-I’ve-never-met-from-Japan gave me this fox that can make wishes come true or whatever. Shouldn’t I wish for bigger things? Like world peace or the end of poverty?” I bite my lip and steel myself against Nevaeh’s spot-on logic. Even the thought of all my wishes coming true seems scary. It’s one thing to hope for something. It’s a whole other thing to see that wish come to fruition.

“It’s a fox, not a god. My advice is to keep going with this, see where it leads and just keep an open mind. Everything I read said that these foxes bring a lot of respect to the families that keep them. They aren’t little demons or anything.” She lowers a hand into the basket and pets the fox’s head. “Keep an open mind,” she repeats, then stands up to go.

“Are you and Zivalus headed out?” I swallow the lump of jealous loneliness that I’m dunked into at the thought of Nevaeh leaving me to go laugh with her loud, fun, sweet boyfriend.

“Yeah! We’re going to see this zombie movie remake. Zivalus is so adorable, all excited about it. He’s been making me catch up on all these old zombie movies.” She stops and scratches her nails in neat, quick circles between my shoulder blades. “Come with us. Bestemor will be fine for the night. She had a really good day.”

I force my face to fake all the happiness I only wish I was big enough to feel for my best friend. “Are you crazy? This is your thing. And Zivalus’s. Zombies freak me out. Totally. Go!” I push her out the door, and the energy is part desperation, part guilt, part shared excitement that my friend is living the happy, socially normal life I only dream about.

“Are you sure? We’d love to have you.” Nevaeh’s face is so pretty and sincere, it wrenches at my heart.

I grasp for any excuse, even a lame one. “You know, I thought I’d want to go out, but now that I sat down, I’m so beat, Vee. I swear, I’ll catch you guys next time.” But I feel the tears prick my eyes, and I know Nevaeh will see and force me to crash her date. I look over at the fox and close my eyes. I think,
I wish I had a reason to say no to Nevaeh.
It takes one instant for the warm feeling to flood through me, for me to look at Nevaeh with a calm, happy peace emanating from me. I hold up one hand, the one I’ve been careful not to wash too vigorously since I last saw Jonas, and I smile at her.

She’s screaming with excitement. “You’re going to call him! You didn’t wash the number off? That’s so freaking unsanitary! Call me tonight and let me know! Fill me in on every detail! This is so awesome!”

“Shh! Before you wake my grandmother,” I laugh, trying to put a lid on the choking dread I suddenly feel.

I stand at the front door and wave my best friend away, then sag against the doorframe when her speedy little car is out of sight. I check on Bestemor, who’s snoring away, then head to the kitchen. My absentminded thought is to get out some chicken, the last avocado, a nice tomato and make a drool-worthy sandwich, but my hand picks up the phone like it’s not my hand, attached to my wrist, bound by my thoughts, and under my total control.