‘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.
