Kitsune Tales: Two Short Stories (2 page)

Yuri swallowed hard and forced
herself
not to take a step backward. Her stinging arm and fear-frozen insides made it
hard to think. Why would the man say something in a language that didn’t exist?
Why would he turn down her offer of two thousand dollars for this mangy animal?
She would have thought he was drunk, except that she didn’t smell alcohol.
Another idea made her
bite
her lip.

“Your magic’s already eaten his mind,” she whispered. “Or at
least part of it.”

The sphinx didn’t answer except to smile at her. With the
cat-like illusion still in place, the expression looked stretched and macabre.

Yuri tried not to shiver. With the man’s mind already prey to
Flipside
magic,
Yuri had to somehow convince the
sphinx to come with her. She cleared her throat and rocked back on her heels.
“Um. If you come with me, Sphinx, I’ll tell you a riddle you’ve never heard
before.”

“I doubt that. And I know the herring one, so don’t try.” It
sniffed and drew its paw over one ear. “Foxes never have good riddles.”

Damn. A breeze plucked at the ribbon around her ponytail,
tickling the back of her neck. Yuri allowed
herself
a
small, slow smile. If bribery didn’t work, maybe distraction would. After all,
a sphinx shared quite a lot of personality traits with normal cats.

She reached up and untied the green ribbon. “Hey. You like
chasing things, stinky?”

The sphinx straightened. “What did you call me?”

“You heard me.” She waved the ribbon at the sphinx, glad she
had chosen the long one that morning. This had to work. She couldn’t let
herself think about what would happen if it didn’t.

“That’s not fair,” the sphinx whined. Its eyes widened,
pupils dilating. First one paw then the other twitched and flexed sharp claws
into the man’s shirt. “You can’t trick me like some cat.”

Yuri tried not to let relief show in her smile. “Looks like I
can. Come and get it.”

The sphinx yowled as it launched itself off its human perch
and leapt toward the waving ribbon. The bum began cheering for his ‘cat’ like
it was playing some sort of major league game.

Yuri continued swishing the strip of silk back and forth
until the sphinx was within reach. Then she let the creature pounce and clamp
sharp teeth onto its prey. While it was distracted, Yuri leapt. She grabbed its
scruff and hoisted it up. With a bit of struggle, she managed to pin the
sphinx’s hindquarters between her elbow and ribcage and grab its front paws
with the hand under its belly.

The man’s cheers stopped abruptly.

As hard the sphinx squirmed, it couldn’t find leverage to
free itself. After a moment, it seemed to settle for vehement cursing in a wide
variety of languages.

“You can’t take my cat,” the man on the bench whimpered. He
looked at Yuri, complete loss written across his face. “Please don’t take her.
She’s all I have.”

She met his gaze and shook her head. “Trust me. You’re better
off without it.”

The sphinx cursed and spat and yowled all the way back to
Colfax.

An hour later, Yuri stalked along the
sidewalk with the sphinx tucked under her arm. Passing humans stared, but no
one tried to stop her. Maybe it was the angry determination in her eyes. Maybe
humans were just too wrapped up in their own heads. She didn’t care either way.

She had the sphinx, but her job wasn’t over
yet. She still had to find the hole in the wall between the worlds before it
disappeared, and she hadn’t even caught a whiff of it after an hour of
searching. Gaps in the wall typically only lasted one or two days, and she had
already wasted the better part of that time searching for Piccolo and the
sphinx.
 

“Do you remember where you came through?”
she asked for the tenth time.

The sphinx tried to squirm its paws away
from her fingers and growled when she tightened her hold.

She jostled the sphinx until it went limp
again. Wandering around like this was a waste of time. She had a little under
an hour left to find a hole in the wall and toss the sphinx through before the
humans around them started going murderously insane. “You know what’ll happen
if you stay here, right? Your magic will eat away at reality and drive all the
mortals bonkers.”

“Compared to gods and
kitsune
,
my magic is dust,” the sphinx spat. It hung limp beneath Yuri’s arm now, though
its tail continued to switch back and forth. “And yet you all live on this side
of the wall.”

“We’ve all been here since before the wall
was built. Humans are used to a tiny bit of magic, just us remnants of a time
when Earth and the Flipside were more connected. Any more magic shows up
and—poof! The whole world starts to fall apart.”

“
You
?
Here since before the wall was built?” The sphinx laughed its high, nasal laugh
and Yuri grit her teeth. “You’re still a kitten!”

For a moment, Yuri considered throwing the
sphinx into the street just to make it shut up. She hated to be reminded of how
young she was, or that her birth on the mortal side of the wall had warped
reality. And she definitely wasn’t going to tell this obnoxious cat that the
human world had accepted her power after decades of struggle, and only with the
help of gods like Piccolo.

“Just tell me where the hole is,” she
demanded, her fingers tightening on the scruff of the sphinx’s neck. “Tell me
where you came through and I won’t toss you under the next truck. Deal?”

The sphinx laughed again. “Not at all!”

“Listen,
harebrain
.”
She stopped walking and yanked the sphinx’s scruff until its head tilted back
to look at her. “My job is to get you back through that wall before it fixes
itself and before you start causing trouble for me and my friends. I’m going to
do that. And you’re going to help me.”

The sphinx smirked. “I really don’t think I
am.”

This whole assignment sucked. Still, it
could be worse, she supposed. At least the cuts from the sphinx’s claws had
stopped bleeding, and there didn’t seem to be any real danger for Yuri at the
moment. Though there might be if she didn’t manage to get the sphinx back where
it belonged. She didn’t like the idea of several thousand crazy people drawn to
any sources of magic in their vicinity.

With a heavy sigh, she loosened her grip on
the sphinx’s scruff once more and kept walking. The wall between Earth and the
Flipside ran straight along Colfax between City Park and the Anschutz Medical
Campus—the hole where the sphinx came through was likely along that
stretch. But that was six miles long and she was running out of time.

Two blocks down, people were gathering in a
knot at the edge of the sidewalk. Someone pointed at something on the opposite
side of the street. Yuri couldn’t see what they were looking at from where she
stood, but a gaggle of mortals was as good a sign as any at this point.

The hum of magic started to tickle her ears
when she was a block and a half away. By the time she was half a block away,
the scent of the Flipside overwhelmed the burning smell of car exhaust. At
least the smell of wet grass, hazelnut, and skunk was more pleasant than human
vehicles.
 

She stopped on the edge of the crowd and
attempted to see what the humans were looking at. It still looked like a blank
brick wall, but there had to be something magical close by. She could smell it
so clearly. She just couldn’t
see
anything.

With a deep breath, she steeled herself to
dive into the jostling crowd,
then
thought better of
it. Jumping in without all the details was what nearly got her killed the last
time. Piccolo was always telling her to gather information before she acted.
This time, she was going to remember it.

“What’s going on?” she asked the woman who
stood beside her.

The woman pointed to the blank wall across
Colfax. “We saw a mural over there. At least, we thought it was just a drawing.
Then it moved, so we thought it must be a video of some kind, but we can’t find
a projector, and it’s only visible from the right angle. It’s incredible, really.”

That sounded like a hole in the wall to
Yuri, especially with so much power buzzing in her ears and assaulting her
nose.

“You’re not really going to go in there,
are you?” the sphinx asked, its voice even higher than normal. “You’re going to
get us killed!”

“I’m going to get you home, you little
jerk.” All the same, Yuri didn’t truly want to dive into a crowd of humans on
the verge of brawling for a spot at “the exact right angle” to see the hole.
She was smaller than most of them and didn’t have the power to charm or trick
more than two or three people at a time-—both things she tried to ignore
on a daily basis. It was easier to forget her troubles until she ran into
things like this.

She took another deep breath and dove into
the writhing group of people. Someone elbowed her in the eye right away. She
swallowed a curse and kept pushing her way through. For once, her smallness
might have helped a bit, but the squirming sphinx in her arms overcame any
advantage of size she might have had on her own.

By the time she finally reached the front
of the crowd, she could feel bruises forming all over her body, and her left
eye was beginning to swell shut.

The sight of the hole in the wall swept all
the pain away. She had never seen something so beautiful, like a masterful
chalk drawing on the brick, all intense colors and wide, artistic strokes. The
“painted” scene showed a beautifully stark desert, sandy hills rolling into the
distance. An eagle circled above crumbling ruins and a snake slithered from the
shadow of one dune to the next.

As Yuri watched, the edges of the image
shimmered and shifted. The hole was already closing, sooner than Piccolo had
anticipated and faster than Yuri would like. She adjusted her grip on the
whimpering sphinx and lifted her foot to step into the street.

A traffic light at the end of the block
turned green and cars started trundling past, inches from Yuri’s face. The
sudden noise and stiff wind from their passing made her wince.

“No, no, no.” Between cars, she could see
the edges of the hole curling in on itself like a piece of burning paper. She
had to get across the street before it closed. But how could she without
waiting for the long light to turn red again or using her magic to blow out the
light altogether?

You’re
a fox,
she reminded herself with a deep breath.
Run.

She wasn’t going to fail another attempt at
a solo assignment. She wouldn’t give herself that option.

“Don’t throw me back,” the sphinx
whimpered, trembling in her arms.

Yuri snorted in reply and forced
herself
to focus on the run, on dodging cars, and finishing
this job. The humans on either side shuffled away from her. She was vaguely
aware of a few of them giving her strange looks.

They didn’t matter. All that mattered now
was getting across Colfax and shoving the sphinx through the opening in the
wall before it finished repairing itself.

Space between cars.
There.

She leapt into the street in the split second between
vehicles. Her legs pumped and her heart thumped so fast it felt like one
endless beat.

Someone screamed. A car horn blared, deafening.

She leapt into the next lane and felt another car zoom past
behind her.

The sphinx whimpered under her arm.

She ignored it, angling to her right as she raced for the
center island, hoping to give herself a few more seconds before the next car.

Another horn nearly made her stumble. She fought to keep her
balance and made it into the last lane before the island. This one was clearer,
allowing her a straight shot to the concrete strip.

She jumped onto the island and took a second to catch her
breath.
Halfway there.
The hole in the wall still
looked wide enough for her to climb through, but barely. Time was running out
and there were more cars headed west, crowding the three lanes between Yuri and
her goal. Damn.

Without giving herself time to contemplate
how idiotic this was, she threw herself back into traffic.

Brakes screeched. Horns shrieked. Yuri felt
certain her ears would start bleeding if the noise didn’t stop.

She jumped and ran and dodged, always trying to reach the
sidewalk but sometimes running sideways or backwards to avoid getting hit.

By the time she finally reached the other
side of the street, she could barely breathe and the hole was maybe two feet
across. Chest and legs aching, she struggled to catch her breath as she lifted
the sphinx up to meet its gaze.

It swiped at her, claws raking across her
cheek just below her bruised eye.

She yelped and dropped it. Stinging pain
made her eyes water, but she shoved it aside.

The sphinx turned and tried to scamper
away, the magic of its illusion spell rippling and failing.

Growling curses in a mix of Japanese and English, Yuri
grabbed the sphinx’s tail and yanked. She didn’t care that it screamed, or that
she felt the tail dislocate in her hand, or that the stupid creature’s illusion
had completely disappeared, exposing that eerie human face on the cat body. All
she cared about was finishing this damn job.

She yanked the yowling sphinx back to her and lifted it by
the scruff of its neck. “Don’t even think about coming back, stinky. Not until
this wall comes down. The humans are under our protection. Got it?”

The creature glowered and bared razor-sharp teeth.

“Good enough.” She tossed the creature through the hole in
the wall.

The image rippled and shimmered as it swallowed the sphinx.
Just before the hole closed altogether, Yuri saw the sphinx glance over its
shoulder, looking both furious and betrayed, then slink away.