Destiny's Child (Kitsune series Book 3) (33 page)

THIRTY-THREE

Cross your heart and hope to die.

Stick a needle in your eye.

You can’t escape—go ahead and try.

The Shadow Fox has come.

                                         
           —Ballad of the Shadow Fox

               
                                        Tukka

A forest carved from obsidian clawed at a flat iron-gray sky.  A rose-gray moon hung like a pearl just out of reach, waiting for some dragon to come along and collect it.  I stood in a clearing, on smooth, white river rock.  Breaking the surface in splotches, black blades of volcanic glass looked sharp enough to flay open our skin and shed blood.  The wind across the glossy grass made a breathy song moving in and out of harmony.

Why would I make a dream like this?

Taliesina said,
This is a race memory from your darkness.  A copy of the place that gave life to shadows long ago.  You ripped this image out of your shadow self when she tried to purge us.

On Taliesina’s back was a moth, a monster moth with slim black limbs and a gray-brown tube of a body.  Her wings were two feet wide and twice that long.  The red-haired insect wore my triangular, foxy face and a frown.  She stared down at her flat chest—flatter than mine—and said,
I’m so cursed
.

I scowled.  “Hey, Motherella, that’s my line.”

Taliesina took a prancing step then whirled back, as if searching for an approaching miracle to help us out. 
So, how do we break out of this dream and bring our shadow self back under control?

I’d aborted her attempt to eat us, building us a dream instead.  All the years I’d spent dream
-hopping with Tukka had paid off.  I could form dreams, shape them, step in and out of them, and make shields of them.  That’s how we’d hung on, but hanging on wasn’t enough.

We can’t break the dream
, Motherella warned. 
It’s protecting us
.

I found a small boulder to sit on that wasn’t pointy and dangerous.  “Right, what we have to do is lure our shadow self in here, then we can use the dream as a weapon against her.” 

Change of venue, change of rules
.  The physics of the subconscious weren’t those of the waking world.  Already this place was having an effect.  My dream self was articulate and insightful, my sense of plotting sweeping toward a perfect answer!  If only I was this insightful in the waking world, I might have sold a few of my stories.  Not yet published, I yearned to be a writer.  This was my chance to show I had the talent to match my calling.

Hi
, Grace.  Glad to see it’s you kidnapped this time.  Was getting old for Tukka.

“Tukka!” 

I spun around, leaping off my rock seat, and there he was: teal blue hide, curly mane, lavender eyes burning lantern-bright, and two tons of dense, heavy muscle.  He grinned, showing off formidable teeth. 
Miss me?

I hugged him as Taliesina danced around us, the moth on her back working her wings furiously, trying not to be dislodged. 

I pulled back.  “What happened to Fenn and the Trickster?”  I had a half-memory of a new gate opening, taking us to a world of living rock.  Since then, impressions came and went, tasting my thoughts as if my shadow self were tapping into me in search of clarity.  Maybe she wasn’t trying as hard as she might to eat me.  If that were so, maybe I could reach an understanding with her that would give me—us—our stolen lives back.

Taking no injury, Tukka waded through some black grass, snapping the blades, making a discordant jingle of chimes.
  Fenn taken prisoner like me.  Tukka tell him to sleep, see Grace.  Not sure he understood.

Sexy hunk coming?
  Taliesina’s mental voice was sharp with hope.

“I thought you wanted Shaun,” I said.

Nah, we want Fenn now.

“We do?” I said. 

I thought about it.
  Maybe here, my heart isn’t as impervious to change as I’d thought.  Or maybe Taliesina likes anything male.

Male and cute,
Motherella said
.

These multiple manifestations of me were getting weird in a dizzy sort of way. 
Whoever said multiple personalities were fun? 
I shook off the thought, bringing my mind back to the very big problem at hand.  Leaning against Tukka’s side, I filled him in.  “We were about to come up with a battle plan for getting me back in charge of me.  You can help.”

Tukka not great at thinking deep, better being ruggedly handsome.

Taliesina and the moth just looked at him, faces blank as if they were holding back thoughts of contradiction. 

He stared back at them. 
What?

Taliesina looked away. 
Nothing.

I sighed.  “Can we focus
, people?”

“On what?”  Fenn stood beside me, wearing black jeans
, a black tee-shirt, boots, and a scalp wound that sent a trickle of blood down the side of his face. 

I pushed off of Tukka and grabbed Fenn’s arm, staring at his injury.  “What happened to you?”

“Huh?”  He saw my stare and touched his head.  A goose egg was there, but he didn’t seem to feel any pain.  His hand came away, fingertips wet with blood.  “Oh.  Tukka faded out on me, saying he was going dream-walking to see you.  I can’t physically enter dreams, or dream on command…” he scowled as if that limitation pissed him off, “…so I was forced to smack my head into a wall and knock myself out.”

Good
plan,
Tukka said.

I wasn’t sure if Tukka was joking or not.

Taliesina crept up to Fenn.  She delicately sniffed his butt. 

Embarrassed, I shook my head at her. 

She stared back. 
What?

I didn’t answer.  My attention was caught by the low-hanging sky.  It dimmed, running through a dozen shades of ever-darker gray until true black arrived.  The winds went dead calm.  The obsidian grass stilled, its song dying out with a whimpery sigh.  Two slashe
s opened in the darkness overhead, flaring to become crimson eyes staring down.  The eyes distorted, belling outward as a face formed.  A copy of my face, but with fox ears.

“I guess my kitsune nature is proving too stubborn for her escape it altogether,” I said.

Matching my upward stare, Taliesina wrinkled her nose, wiggling her whiskers. 
Or maybe she just likes fox ears.

So much for luring her here
, Tukka said. 

“Anyone got a plan?” Fenn asked.

As I flashed back to a recent dream, an unsettled feeling lodged in my gut.  “I’ve got one.  Not a good one, but…”

Tukka looked at me and grinned. 
Mothership has come, Grace.  You know what to do.

Needing space, I moved away from everyone, remembering to watch my step and stay on the white gravel so I wouldn’t cut my feet on shards of grass.  A deep growl wavered in my throat.  “I really hate it that it’s come to this.”

Quit sniveling
, Motherella said. 
I need to survive.  That’s what important.

Taliesina nodded. 
That goes for me, too.

“Grace.
Incoming!”  Fenn pointed upward.

The sky had formed hair and a neck for the floating face.  Shoulders appeared.  An arm broke through the cloud, spearing down at us.  The shadow-fox was a swimmer emerging from an upside-down sea.  Her lips were tight across her teeth.  The red light of her eyes hazed the air and tinted the white rock clearing pink.  On the ground, our shadows were red as well.

I raised a fist high over my head in defiance.  A band of stars twinkled around my wrist.  A platinum band materialized.  On the back of my wrist, a bump on the band had an engraved circle that flashed lavender.  “
Metamoriffic!” 
My voice echoed into infinity, then doubled back on me.  I felt silly.  It didn’t help that Fenn and Motherella both snickered at me.  “You guys tell anyone about this and you’ll be sorry,” I warned.

The firestorm came.  Icy jags of energy crackled around, searing the air.  Spinning coins pastel pink and blue passed through me as if I had no substance, a living dream.  My clothing misted away.  Ribbons of teal light came out of nowhere, wrapping my limbs, my torso.  The bands fused into a clinging, tinfoil combat suit.  A
miniature cape, draping from a hood behind my head, fluttered from my shoulders in a wind that sprang upward from my feet.  Platinum stars danced across my brow.  The haze melted into a jeweled tiara.  Interlocking platinum plates appeared, cinching my waist.  Lavender gloves and boots formed as well. 

Just what I always wanted to be—an anime warrior of love and justice!

Tukka go mecha-Tukka?
he asked.

“Don’t bother,” I said.  “I’ve always believed that ultimate weapons need to be used right off.  Nothing good ever comes from waiting.”  Besides, the shadow
-fox had covered half the distance to the ground.  I had no time to waste.

As dramatic music swelled out of thin air, Tukka, Motherella, and Taliesina formed a chorus line, singing in three
-part harmony:

“Between a rock and a harder place,

We face the fury of our times—

Dandelion fluff in the wind—

Don’t let the dream of us die—

Fighto, fighto, fighto…”

A pearlescent energy expanded from my raised fist.  It took the shape of a big violet-blue broadsword with a cross-shaped hilt.  White lightning spiraled around the length of it.  The winds under me roared even stronger, lifting me into the air as a crater formed in the ground, and the little rocks were fused into a steaming glaze.  

“Tachyon Soul Sword Attack!”  In anime tradition, screaming out the name of the combat technique you use increases your power exponentially.  I didn’t know why, but I needed all the power I could get as I pointed my energy blade dead center of the shadow-fox’s face.  That done, I screamed a medium-high note, and felt an answering vibration in the hilt I held.  I poured out my soul’s defiance: every thought of love and friendship I could disgorge, every hope I’d ever fought for, every dream for a bright future.

Fight, Grace, Fight!
Taliesina urged. 
We can’t die here; we’re still virgins!

Take out an ad on TV
, why don’t you? 

The note I sung took on a ragged, desperate edge as my lifeforce poured into the sword.  Just like in the dream I’d had back at the Slayers school, raw, cosmic fury cast out wings of lavender, extending sideways from the blade as a spire of light slammed up into the shadow-fox’s face.  Her red
-eyed stare was washed back, the bloody glow shattered into fuzzy coals that drifted earthward.  She screamed, hunger becoming disbelief.  My beam bored into her face, cracking it like an obsidian mask.  Then charcoal motes mixed with the red, both fading to nothing as they reached the woods and the clearing. 

I had won in the dream.  I wasn’t sure what that meant for all the pieces of me outside the dream.  There was only one way to find out.

I looked down at my friends.  “Wait here.”

Fenn reached up toward me.  “Grace, take me with you.”

I shook my head at him.  “Not this time.  Stay here.  If I don’t come back,” I shrugged, “give your heart to someone else.”

“I’m available,” Taliesina said.

I refrained from pointing out to her that if I didn’t make it, she probably wouldn’t long survive either.  Though separate in a dream, we really were just on person.  Only Motherella had a chance to survive, being a recent add-on with only shallow ties to the rest of us.  I spun, rising like a bullet above the black-glass woods.  The ebony sky had paled to charcoal.  The rose-gray moon was visible once more.  I shot across her face, driving to the limits of the dream, the point where I’d burst out of it, into whatever awaited.

My sword evaporated from the tip down unti
l my hand was empty.  The wristband flashed away, a platinum mist that condensed into ice particles brushing my face, dribbling down my body.  My girl-hero anime costume shimmered, dispersing like everything else. 
Naked, I came into this dream.  Naked, I leave it.

And then there was darkness
.  Endless.  Empty.  A wall I hit.  Fractured pieces swarmed, then reformed under me—a dark mirror sea that I stood upon.  My mind reoriented, and I walked on, hearing gasping sounds of pain in the distance.  I should have reached someone, but the sounds never came closer.  Then I realized that it was the darkness around me that was injured, sobbing.