Destiny's Child (Kitsune series Book 3) (36 page)

Seeing his son in danger, the Trickster leaped off my shoulder, dark wings beating furiously.  The raven shot over to Fenn’s shoulder, perching, arguing.  I wished I was close enough to know what they were fighting about.  Fenn flashed golden-amber eyes at me, and then looked back to the raven, shaking his head in a violent
no!
 

I suddenly understood: somehow, the Trickster could get himself and Fenn to safety, but not the rest of us—and Fenn was refusing to abandon me.  My heart went soft and gooey, melting into my stomach, a pool of bubbling warmth.  At that moment I knew Fenn would forever be my friend—if not something more.

My resolve hardened to steel.
  I’m not letting any of us die!

I shoved away from
the fox and my sword.  The sword began to unravel, unmaking itself, as I slid in the sand, wrenching the weave of space, crossing over.  The sand went gray as did its glow.  I barely noticed the tingle coursing through my body or the slacking of gravity.  My guess on the ghost situation had proved all too true.  There was one ghost present, one huge, towering, amalgamated mess of ectoplasmic mush.  Green and violet energies flickered in its translucent bulk, a firestorm that fought against itself for stability.  It was no longer human except for a devolved face that was all gaping mouth with a Cyclops’s eye just above.  Tentacles writhed in the air, curling, clutching at nothing.

That eye turned toward me, lit from within by flames of madness. 
The entity rippled on the bottom, slug-like, moving closer with growing speed.  I’d just been selected as dessert. 

Intangible
, flying grit ghosted through me and kept going, no hindrance as I bounced ahead, my moth wings fluttering to give me greater speed.  This was like one of those old Japanese samurai movies where two warriors run at each other with lethal intent, except we weren’t raising swords to slash in passing.  The monster ghost was happy to plunge several heavy tentacles my way that would have had no difficulty wrapping up Tukka.

I dodged, going high, landing on one of the monster’s limbs.  I ran, using the tentacle as a highway, straight toward the creature.  I passed Tukka and Fenn.  Still sliding in the whirlpool on the human side of the veil, they couldn’t see the risk I was running for all of us.  They’d have been appalled.  And maybe a little proud of me as well.  Me?  I only felt the lead weight of fear in my stomach, my mouth having gone dry as arena sand.

Good thing no one expects me to whistle.

Staring t
hrough the super ghost, I could barely make out the screaming face of the sand devil.  Both were near each other in the center of the arena, yet oblivious of each, separated by the ghost realm’s veil.  My plan was simple, just not easy: I intended to cancel two threats by introducing them each other.

T
heoretically possible.  A long shot really.  But all of my life’s highly improbable.  This will work because it has to.

The monster ghost was relaxing, having figured out that I was saving it bother by coming right to it. 
The eye opened its mouth even wider, its tongue rolling out to create a red carpet event.  All we needed were the paparazzi. 

Almost there, I jumped with all my might, flashing past its mouth, rising up the flat cliff that was its face.  And then I was falling into its face, plunging in just under its bulging eye.  Ghostly energies jagged around me, searing me with the passing edges.  I joined the screaming party, hanging onto consciousness and purpose.  Flaming with aura, I used my own energy as a buffer against the beast I’d become part of.

I’d built up enough momentum to sail through the monster, but that wasn’t my intention. 

THIRTY-SIX

Spirits war and fuse.

And there’s a murdered wind.

It’s a monster-eat-monster world,

that’s coming to an end.

                                                     —Ballad of the Shadow Fox

                   
                        Tukka

Haunts were nocturnal.  Ordinary ghosts faded in the daylight, a union rule or something.  It took an apparition of great strength to break that rule.  An entity like the one I was now inside.  The question wasn’t if it could walk the mortal realm, but if I had enough strength to pull it across the veil with me.  I grabbed hold of space itself and gave the continuum a vicious yank.

Jags of green and purple ghost-fire splintered against me, splaying past my body, ripping and burning at my toga, splashing against arms and legs, washing my mind in agony so I wasn’t sure if I was making progress
crossing back
, or just slowing baking myself in a supernatural oven.  It not for the sheathing of my aura, my skin would have blistered open, cauterized, and blackened.  Limbs might well have been blasted off. 

The energies around me ebbed and in that lull, I felt the electric tingle of transition.  I dropped through the surrounding turbulence.  The sand under me was back to glowing gold with the lifeforce of the enraged planet.

And I was literally on fire, slamming into the sand, left behind as the super ghost faced the whirling sand and the screaming face poised above it.  I rolled in the sand to extinguish the flames gnawing my toga.  Weak—my own energies drained by the roughest
crossing
I’d ever made—I couldn’t even fight to my feet.  I laid there as the spiraling sands spun me around the whirlpool.  It seemed like I had a few more orbits before dropping down that maw, but Tukka and Fenn weren’t so lucky.  They were almost at the edge, about to drop down the planet’s throat to whatever terrible fate awaited.

The white fox came running with the circular currents of sand, using them to catch up with me.  He dug in and slid against me, getting his head and shoulders under me, lifting me up cross his back as he rose with my weight. 

The ghost monster collided with the grit face, tentacles winding into the hovering funnel of sand.  Anchored against being dragged down, the ghost-thing kissing the face in the sand.  Screaming maws fused.  Green and violet lightning curled back from them both, arcing to the golden sand, leaving islands of crystalline slag in the currents.  One of the bolts sliced past Tukka’s head.

And then the two monsters were sucked into each other.

The sand stopped whirling.  The hole to the underground closed.  The wind fell silent.  The sound of my pounding heart leaped out at me.  A third of Tukka had sunk into the sand.  Fenn was scooping it away, helping the fu dog get traction. 

And the Trickster was gone.  In the final moment, he’d chosen to save himself, leaving even Fenn behind.  The way Fenn clenched his teeth, his jaw knotting with rage, assured me that this had not gone unnoticed.  In sympathy, my heart ached for him.

What the hell is wrong with parents today?
I wondered
.

They weren’t beaten enough as children
, the white fox’s thoughts flowed like water through my own. 
Now in my day…

“This is so not the time.”  Hearing my voice, I was stunned at how raw and gruff it sounded.

I stared at the ghost monster and the crystal mask of a woman’s face he now wore.  The two things sank into the depression as Fenn and Tukka hurried away, coming toward fox and me.  A moment later, there was no sign of an enraged earth or a phantom monster. 

Tukka saw me mounted on fox, staring at the sand where the double threat had disappeared.  He nudged me in the ribs with his muzzle. 
No time for sightseeing
. 
Really, really bad is about to get worse.

I looked at him.  “What do you mean?  It’s over, isn’t it?”

You
never that lucky
, Tukka said. 
Grace cursed, remember?

Fenn reached my side, standing beside Tukka.  Fenn’s eyes were amber now, flecked with brown.  There was a great deal of weariness in his face and in the slope of his shoulders.  Leaning into me, he put one hand over mine and another hand on my leg.  The scorched cloth of my improvised toga stank of smoke so my heightened senses found his odor elusive.

“Are you all right, Grace?”

“I will be if we can get out of here.”

“No, you must fix the problem you’ve caused.”  The female voice came from behind me, causing me turn on top of the white fox.  It was Inari and her two-fox escort.  The robes she wore were grass green trimmed with lavender.  Her sash was a wide band of saffron.  A painted fan was tucked into it.  She wore the same beaded sandals as before.  Under her, the sand had turned into rich, black loam, and was starting to push up stalks of grass thick with wild flowers.  Like an expanding pool, the blessed earth rippled out, consuming the sand.  A wild olive tree grew behind her, providing shade.  Her eyes were emerald stars as she glowered at me, her voice a high-pitched yammer.  “You have poisoned this world.  It might very well die.”

I smiled sweetly at her.  “Plenty of others out there, and isn’t harvesting part of nature’s cycle?”

Fenn muffled a laugh. 

Tukka looked away like he didn’t know who I was, but he was humming the
Circle of Life
from the Lion King movie.

Really, just because some people once called her a goddess, people walk on eggshells
. 
Well, I’m done taking crap from the universe. 

“
Besides,” I said,
“whatever ‘poisoning’ you’re talking about isn’t my fault.  Every living thing has the right to fight for their life—tooth, nail, and claw hammer.  That’s all we’ve done here.”

There was screaming in the stands from the newly arrived Hysane.  They dropped to their knees, tearing at themselves.

“It’s started,” Inari said.  “Their tie to this world spills its poison into them.”

“Complete genocide,” the white fox said.

Inari’s gaze was drawn to the fox.  A look of utter surprise washed across her face.  “Argent, you’ve been here all this time?”

“Like you didn’t know,” he muttered.  “Thanks for rescuing me.”

She stepped forward, hand reaching for his marred face.  “Let me fix that for you.”

He swung his head away.  “No, thanks.  I’ve gotten used to being half-blind, and my missing eye gives me something to remember you by.”

She drew her hand back.  Her lips white, pressed together in anger.  The emerald glow of her eyes intensified.  “Have it your way.  I free you from my service.”

“You can’t fire me,” Argent said.  “I quit.”

The two celestial foxes with Inari growled at Argent’s disrespect.  He bared teeth at them in return. 

Can’t we all just get along?
Tukka asked.

“Come see what you’ve done.” Inari shifted her green-star stare to me.  The light of her eyes gave her skin a sickly hue, hazing the air between us.  There was sense of movement though I stood still.  The arena blurred, then changed colors.  I grabbed on tighter to Argent’s fur, feeling like a prisoner on a high-octane carousel.  The spin-cycle stopped and the scene was different.  The arena had been left far behind.  We were on a mountain road overlooking a green valley.  A blue snake of a river wound through it, branching into a hydra
-head pattern.  Beyond were low hills that shone golden-brown in the sun.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“Not for long,” Inari said.

She was right.  Even as I watched, the far hills dimmed to a greenish-black.  The river turned yellow-gray.  Fish floated to the surface, belly-up.  The green valley withered to dust, a wave of contamination sweeping through.  There was a shuddering I felt all the way up the mountain.  The valley cracked.  Chasms gaped open, their depths steaming with magma.  Yellow fumes of sulfur clouded the lower terrain, the merciful hazing of a dying world.

“This is going on everywhere,” Inari said.  “The underground cities are caving in.  Without their power to move the earth, the Hysane are dying by the thousands.  Your apparition has possessed the planet’s living energy, tainting it.  This is all a reflection of that change.”

Incredulous, I stared at her.  “And you expect me to fix this?  How?”

“You brought the apparition from the realm of the dead.  You must take it back.”

Stiffening my spine, I sat up straighter on Argent.  “You’re joking.  I don’t have the strength to pop open a can of soda right now.  And like I keep telling you, it isn’t my mess to clean up.  This world made war on me, and a lot of people that died in the arena.  What’s happening is simple justice.”

“So you are turning to the path of the demon fox after all,” Inari said.  “When word travels and you become known as a destroyer of worlds, the fearful will come hunting you.  Armies will track you from world to world, to destroy you before you grow into your full strength.”  Inari wore a triumphant smile.  “Are you sure you want to open yourself up to that just because you’re unwilling to temper justice with mercy?”

“I love chaos as much as the next cosmic force,” Trickster said, “but she’d got a good point, Grace.”