Chapter 10

“May I help you?” she says, her voice silky.

Tsuyoshi slips a silver case from an inner jacket pocket, flips it open, and slides out a meishi, or business card, with a calculated slickness that can come only from decades of practice. I know from Dad that Tsuyoshi only half-retired so he could keep the honorary title of Chairman and the prestigious meishi that go with it. The temple fox murmurs her thanks, then whips out a meishi of her own from her kimono.

Clearly they mean business.

I glance at the myobu’s meishi. It’s elegantly printed in gold on fine rice paper. Her name: Shizuka. Her rank: some Japanese I can’t entirely read, but I recognize the characters for miko, shrine maiden.

The two of them bow again, and then Tsuyoshi looks at me. His cheeks darken. “And this is my grandson, Octavian Kimura. I spoke of him earlier.”

Despite being a meishi-less embarrassment, I try a charming smile.

“Yes.” Shizuka blinks, her thick eyelashes like black wings. “Follow me.”

She glides beyond the Inari shrine and opens a small gate. Behind the gate, a narrow path winds through the bamboo. I follow close behind her, trying not to sniff the air, wondering if she can tell that I’m also a kitsune.

We reach a greenhouse topped by a high-arching glass dome. Shizuka unlocks the door and waves for us to enter before her. Inside, the air is the perfect temperature of a May morning, thick with the sweet scent of citrus leaves and the musk of earth. Shizuka slips off her shoes, and we do the same, moss squishing beneath our feet. A jade pool glimmers beneath the apex of the dome, shaded by an exquisitely gnarled lime tree no taller than I am, but likely five times as old.

“Please, sit.” Shizuka settles on a mossy boulder by the pool.

Tsuyoshi pinches his trousers at the knees and tugs them up as he sits on another boulder. His posture is ramrod straight, the briefcase still clutched in his hand, but his forehead is slightly creased, like this is improper somehow. I’m left with the floor itself.

Shizuka looks at me, her eyes half-closed. “Your mother or your father?”

“Excuse me?” I say.

“Who was human?” she says.

“His father.” Tsuyoshi says. “His mother was a nogitsune.”

“Ah.” Shizuka’s face remains calm, but in that one little word there’s a delicate touch of scorn. “May I see the papers?”

Tsuyoshi slips an envelope from his briefcase and hands it to Shizuka. When she opens the envelope, I glimpse the word “orphanage” clear across the front. Blood rushes into my face. My adoption papers. If this myobu wants to know my pedigree, she’s going to be disappointed. My parents didn’t leave much of a trace.

Shizuka squints as she reads. “Hokkaido. Few kitsune live there.”

I shrug. “I met one or two when I was young.”

She glances at me over the top of the paper. “Do you have any recollection of your mother’s name?”

“No.”

“Your father’s?”

“No. I never met him.”

This is sounding really bad, isn’t it? Poor little kit-fox Tavian, raised like a wild thing by a delinquent field fox mother who was crazy enough to live in the frigid north.

I keep my face carefully empty. “She promised to tell me her true name once I had one of my own.”

“I see.” Shizuka’s eyes glimmer brighter. “You are nameless.”

I press my fingernails into the palms of my hands. I don’t need her to tell me this is bad. Like faeries, kitsune guard their true names zealously. A true name unlocks a kitsune’s innermost power and can be used to control the kitsune itself. That’s all I know, humiliatingly enough.

“Octavian,” she says, like she can tell my mind is wandering.

“Yes?”

“Watch.”

Shizuka flicks back the long sleeves of her kimono, all twelve layers, and dips her fingers into the jade pool. She lifts a fallen lime leaf, glossy with water, in the palm of her hand. With a sideways glance at me, she flexes her fingers ever so slightly. The leaf shimmers in her hand, its emerald color lightening to silver. A coin.

Tsuyoshi grunts appreciatively. “Beautiful.”

Beautiful? A simple illusion. Though I’d rather not tell them how my kitsune mother tricked vending machines, or how I copied her once I found out counterfeit coins could pay for street food, as long as I ran fast enough after the silver faded away.

“Now you,” Shizuka says.

She drops the coin into the pool, and it sinks for a second before bobbing back to the surface, a leaf once more. I fish out the leaf from the water and hold it in my hand.

I concentrate on the color of the leaf, imagining how the greenness will bleed away, baring gleaming silver. And the shape of the leaf… that will ripple like molten metal, reforming into a circle. One, two, three seconds pass. Sweat breaks out on my forehead. A little air hisses from between my lips, and at last the illusion takes hold.

Shizuka looks first at the coin, then at my face. “Fascinating.”

“It normally doesn’t take so long.” I toss the coin into the pool. The moment it’s no longer touching my skin, it returns to a leaf. “Illusions have been harder since… my sickness.” I assume Tsuyoshi already told her.

Shizuka studies my face, then reaches into the pool and pinches the water between her fingertips. She lifts the water, shaping it into a fine silver chain that sways and flashes. Not silver—the links are water. She drapes the chain over my hand, and I feel its cool slipperiness before it dissolves into a trickle of liquid a second later.

“Try that,” she says.

I nod, but my mouth fills with the metallic taste of fear. I’ve never even seen that before, and working with nothing but water looks impossible. What does she want to prove? That I’m a half-breed nogitsune upstart who can’t compete with her myobu talent?

I clench my jaw and dip my fingers into the pool. I focus on the water clinging to my skin, dripping into perfect tiny links… interlocking links… my chest tightens with pain. I glare at the pool, blood flaming in my face.

Damn it. I’m not this weak. I can do this.

Darkness edges my eyesight. My face goes cold as the blood drains away. My heartbeat flops inside my ribs and I slump, my limbs as limp as jellyfish tentacles.

“Octavian!” Tsuyoshi grips my shoulder.

Shizuka’s hand descends upon my wrist and warmth flashes through my skin. Slowly, my heartbeat returns to its normal rhythm.

“That is enough,” she says, her voice low.

I clench and unclench my jaw. “I know I could have done it, before…”

“It is amazing,” she says with an arched eyebrow, “that you have managed to do so much with so little. You are a half-breed, and undoubtedly completely untrained.”

I guess that’s a compliment? “Thank you,” I say.

“Are you aware,” she says, “of how rare half-breed kitsune are?”

Tsuyoshi shakes his head. “We know of no others like Octavian.”

Shizuka folds her hands in her lap, her gaze downcast. “That is because the others are dead.”