I looked around our small group. “I need to shift into my fox form, and search Brock’s land for the gate.”
“Our land,” Brock corrected.
“What?” I frowned.
He grinned at me, making me go all gooey inside. “We’re pack now. It’s our land.”
Marry me now.
That crazy traitorous thought came out of nowhere, and I hurriedly shoved it to the back of my mind.
‘So you went ahead and joined the pack?’ Cass’ terse words entered my mind.
I swallowed hard. I’d been avoiding telling him. ‘Yes,’ was all I said.
He made a face but let it go. For now. “Should you shift so soon?” he asked aloud. “Remember what the witch told you.”
I shrugged. “I think I have to shift. We need to know where the gate is so we can guard it, and Brock doesn’t know where it is. That giant demon that came out of it last night could have been Calista’s lost sister, and then where would we be?”
Brock sighed in resignation. “Alright, but I’m calling Sabine to monitor you.”
“Fine,” I relented.
Three sirens as powerful as Calista? I wasn’t sure I could handle such a thing.
“It seems likely that Calista’s only recently bound herself to the witch. It’d explain her sudden surge in power,” I concluded.
Molly raised her hand. “I actually have a theory about that. Since you caught the two sirens, we’ve had a rare astrological event. A super blood blue moon.”
I frowned. “A what?”
“It’s like a blue moon and a blood moon at the same time. It hasn’t happened since 1866, and we all know sirens are heavily influenced by two things. Water and—”
“The moon,” I completed. What Molly said made sense. Trying to catch a siren on a full moon was akin to attempting to wrestle a werewolf during one. They were significantly more powerful at the peak of the lunar cycle.
Brock cleared his throat. “When I was trying to deal peacefully with Calista, she said she needed me to find the gate before the Hunters’ moon.”
Molly gasped. “That’s in two months. In October.”
My wide eyes flew to Molly. “You are a walking supernatural encyclopedia.”
Molly grinned. “Does that mean I get a badge now?”
Cass and I shared a look. “No,” we answered in unison.
Everyone had to go through the typical bounty hunter hazing. It was a rite of passage. Withholding cool shit like badges and guns was part of it, but I knew right then I’d made the right choice in taking Molly on as my apprentice. She was quick-witted and book smart, something lacking in most meat-headed hunters.
Stretching out my back, I prepared to shift. Would I really sprout another tail? Gain another power? I grew queasy just thinking about it.
Sabine stepped onto the porch then, looking sleepy but still carrying her black leather doctor’s bag. “Evie, would you like to shift insi—”
Pulling Brock’s long t-shirt off, I let it fall to the floor.
“Okay, then,” Sabine added.
I was a shifter now, so nudity was going to happen a lot. When I slid off my panties, I caught Brock grinning.
With a smirk, I called forth my furry beast. Having shifted a couple of times already, I expected the pain to lessen. But if it did, it was only marginally. The breaking bones weren’t what hurt the most. It was the stretching of my skin, the tearing of muscles. The burning sensation made me want to escape my own body.
A whimper escaped me as my flesh broke down, twisted, stretched, and put itself back together. Brock dropped to the ground to meet me at eye level. He could sense the extent of my pain through the pack bond. “Breathe through it,” he encouraged. “Think of nothing but your breath.”
I did as he said and breathed in and out, until my skin didn’t feel like it was on fire anymore.
Then Sabine gasped. “Three tails!”
Molly waved her hand. “Oh yeah, that’s totally normal. She’s going to get one each time she shifts until she has a total of nine.”
Whoops, we’d forgotten to clue in the doc.
“Any new powers?” Molly dropped to the ground next to Brock. I caught a whiff of her coconut shampoo and it tickled my nose. I backed up a step to get away from the overwhelming scent and I sneezed.
“Oh my God, you’re so adorable,” Molly cooed. “I want to hug you.”
I growled a little for comedy, and Cass laughed, but Molly stumbled back a pace.
Brock’s large, strong hand slid down my back as if petting a dog, and damn it felt good. I had to resist the urge to roll over and offer him my belly. As he moved his hand past my face again for another rub, I identified multiple scents at once. Lotion, strawberries from breakfast, me.
‘I think I can super scent or something,’ I told Cass.
“She’s got super scent,” Cass told everyone.
Brock and Sabine shared a look, and the doc jotted down the fact in her notebook.
The wind picked up, delivering a scent that had all the fur on my body standing up. Sulfur, oil, and something inherently evil brushed past me, reminding me of the giant demon from last night. I raced down the porch steps, and burst onto the field in front of Brock’s house.
“Evie!” Brock yelled before I heard the cracking of bones behind me.
‘Wait for me, woman!’ he shouted inside my head.
I skidded to a halt when I noticed everyone scrambling to catch up with me. Brock was tearing his clothes off, and already half shifted into his wolf form.
‘I smell something. I think it’s the gate!’ I told him. Some part of me realized those smells were coming from the underworld. Some weird, long lost “kitsune whackary” was going on inside of me.
Without warning, a blur of gray streaked past me. ‘Betcha I’m faster,’ Brock taunted as he flew by me.
Motherfucker!
I took off like my tails were on fire, giving chase in the direction where we’d killed the giant last night.
‘Cheater!’ I shouted as I caught up with him, shocked by how comfortable it was to speak into his mind.
I was smaller, lighter, and more nimble on my feet, but damn he was fast. A powerhouse of muscle and fur, the ground shook when he ran, something I could feel now that I was in fox form.
A look behind me revealed that Cass was riding his hover board while Sabine and Molly—both holding shotguns—were jogging toward us.
Brock and I reached the place where the giant’s remains lay, already melting into the earth, decaying. The stench of the dead demon was enough to make my breakfast threaten to come up again. I scrunched my nose and backed up a few steps, trying to position myself upwind.
But movement to my right caught my eye and I froze. At the far edge of Brock’s property, something was moving.
‘Don’t worry, those are just my border patrol wolves,’ Brock told me.
I released the breath I’d been holding, and on the inhale, I caught that scent again—oil and decaying leaves. I took off to the left, around the creature’s shredded pieces, and darted into the thick woods behind Brock’s house. The pack’s land, just outside Eugene, Oregon, was sandwiched between Wild Hog Creek, and the Willamette River—a hundred-and-fifty acres total. I knew because Gran always hollered about how the greedy bastards took so much land, and she only had an acre.
Running the length of his land, I headed in the direction of Wild Hog Creek, where the scent was taking me. As a general rule, werewolves hated water, so I always wondered why Brock’s dad bought land nearly surrounded by it. Now it made sense. The gate was here and that’s why he bought the land. To think this whole time Gran and Brock’s dad were both trying to protect the same thing and never realized it.
My paws whisked over dried pine needles, and damp ferns until I slowed my sprint to a crawl. I ceased following the scent as a bright phosphorescent green mist, which reeked worse than a demon’s armpit, trailed through the air.
‘What do you think that is?’ I asked Brock, mystified at the stuff floating through the air.
‘That smell? Definitely underworld in nature,’ Brock replied, parking his wolfy butt next to me.
I shook my head. ‘No, that green stuff. Is it magic?’
Brock turned his wolf head, looking at me like I was crazy. ‘Green stuff?’
He must not see it! It must be a kitsune thing.
‘I’m going to check it out,’ I informed, and crept closer.
My head jerked around at a whirring sound until I spotted Cass, crouched low on his skateboard. ‘That smells rank,’ he stated as he whizzed by me.
I nodded my little fox head. ‘Do you see the green mist?’ Maybe since Cass was part demon he’d see it.
My bestie shook his head.
Okay, definitely a kitsune thing.
As I neared Wild Hog Creek, the green mist grew thicker, viscous. I was practically wading in the stuff. Brock and Cass, who flanked me, appeared unaffected by it. Molly, and Sabine—in human form—brought up the rear, shotguns in hand.
But when we all crested a small hill, and looked down in the direction of the creek, I was the only one to see it.
‘Holy Mother of Mercy,’ I told Cass and Brock.
The gate wasn’t a physical entrance. It was magical.
A large bright green shape, a sacred geometrical symbol or maybe a mandala, floated in the air, hundreds of Japanese characters interspersed with it, helping create it. I knew enough to realize the characters were a mixture of the Hiragana and Katakana lettering systems, but what it said was beyond me. In an effort to learn more about my Japanese heritage, I’d taken a few Japanese history classes in school, but nothing I’d learned would help me decipher that.
Inching closer, I discovered that the left side of the symbol had been wrenched open, and green phosphorescent fluid seeped from the crack.
‘I see the gate. It’s cracked open a bit,’ I told Brock and Cass, who relayed to Molly and Sabine.
“Can you close it?” Molly asked. “Then our problems would be over.”
Wouldn’t that be nice? But no, it wouldn’t be that easy, I was sure of it.
I padded closer.
‘Be careful,’ Brock commanded, as if I couldn’t already tell this gate was bad news no matter how pretty it was.
I stopped six inches away from it, tipped my little fox head down, and tried to nudge the gate. The second my skull connected with the force of the gate, a zap of electricity zipped through my body, and forced me to leap backward, falling awkwardly onto my side. My yelp brought Brock down to his two front paws. He growled ferociously as he readied to pounce.
‘Are you okay?’ he screamed.
Ow. I felt as if I’d just shoved my paw into an electrical outlet, but I was okay. ‘Yeah,’ I told him before he attacked the gate to protect me. I stood and shook myself, peering again at the gate and its leak.
‘I’m going to peek inside,’ I informed, and moved forward again.