Magnetic attraction that went against Thom’s rule—no displays of affection when unchaperoned. I forced my feet to stop at what Thom had, in the past, considered an appropriate distance. But he reached out to interlace our fingers, tugging me closer and settling our joined hands against his chest.

  “I’m asking,” he rumbled, “as a friend.”

  Unfortunately, even friendship wasn’t simple between Thom and me. If I told him I’d lost my place to sleep, he’d pull strings within the pack and find me a bed in a heartbeat. Or he’d offer up the third story of the Full Moon Saloon, the one above his personal quarters that was currently devoted to storage of his father’s excess possessions. Either choice came with its own pitfalls and its own seductive appeal.

  It wasn’t fair to lead Thom on when I couldn’t provide the requested commitment. So I shook my head. “No. I’ve got it covered.”

  “I can’t tell if you really mean that. I’m so tired I’m not thinking straight.”

  His breath kissed my forehead, proving that Thom really was fog-brained. Usually, by now, he would have pushed me away, creating buffer space between our bodies.

  And, much as I wanted to, I couldn’t take advantage of his exhaustion any more than he had taken advantage of my moon craze. So I slipped out of his hold, which was becoming more like an embrace by the moment. And I considered the way Thom was swaying, barely upright. “Do you want me to call someone to help you back to the bar?”

  “It’s just a few blocks. I can manage.”

  Still, he didn’t turn away from me. Instead, he stood and watched as I gathered up every bit of self control I could muster. In the end, I was the one who spun on my heel and strode off down the sidewalk away from everything that felt like home.

  I HAD NO IDEA WHERE I was going, but I did know what I needed to do this afternoon. Eventually, I’d hunt for Kaito’s murderer, but I currently lacked researchable leads. Instead, I had a more pressing puzzle—finding a place to stay now that the gray sky had opened up into an icy rain.

  Well, finding a place to stay and reassuring my sister. Mai had texted to demand proof of life, and as I hunkered down on a cafe stool I winced at the selfie I’d just snapped. The rain had at least washed away the stink of smoke, but I looked more like a drowned rat than a fox.

  Still, I shrugged and hit send, and thankfully the photo did the trick. My phone didn’t ring with a demand that I take Gunner up on his convoluted plan of sneaking me into Fairwood territory via the pack-princess-hunting Randolphs. Instead, my sister reciprocated with a photo of Grub and Chipmunk napping, their pile of intertwined limbs tugging at my heart strings.

  I replied with a stern admonition that she keep both children on pack land and within her sight line for the foreseeable future. “There might be someone hunting those of us with kitsune blood,” I warned.

  “You’re in a lot more danger than they are if that’s the case,” Mai answered. “Take care of yourself or I’ll never forgive you.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  The emoji she sent back made me grin.

  So that was good. But finding an apartment didn’t go so well. I sipped hot chocolate while working my phone so hard the screen should have sizzled, but I kept slamming into dead ends.

  Which is how I ended up backtracking to Charlie’s to collect my car then parking in the back lot of the Full Moon Saloon. The interior lights were off, unsurprising since the bar closed on most Sundays and Thom had looked tired enough to fall asleep the moment he climbed the stairs to his apartment. But there was a shower in the Moon Room that was always accessible and no one would hassle me after that if I curled up in the back seat of my car.

  The moment I flipped on the single tier of industrial fluorescents, however, the flicker of overhead lights led me not toward the bathroom but deeper into the dim gathering space. I stopped near a spot where, three months ago, rotten floorboards had dropped me into a pit housing a cemented-in-place kitsune skull. At my request, Thom had hidden the artifact beneath a trap door then a wardrobe that appeared crazy heavy while actually rolling easily on hidden wheels.

  When I pushed aside the wardrobe and lifted the door now, the pit exhaled musty darkness. A scritch of claws prompted me to flare my nostrils and I caught the sharp hint of rat.

  Rodents, of course, weren’t a problem for a shifter. So I dropped down into darkness, landing fox-light even though I was currently two-legged. Sinking to my knees, I felt around in search of the skull.

  My emotions were stretched taut, yearning for people I wanted near me but couldn’t afford to allow there. My sister. My niece and nephew. Thom.

  Something told me this inert and silent skull held the answers. Assuming I could find it....

  My eyes finished adjusting to the darkness, revealing the pale gleam of bone off to my right. I reached forward, only to jerk my hand away at a hint of movement from the direction of the bar entrance. The angle was bad from down in my hole, so I could only see the very top of the door swinging open, not the person who had pushed through it.

  Whoever had entered, they were in a hurry. As quickly as the door had opened it now slammed very loudly shut.

  Chapter 19

  I froze, trying to guess who was there. Trying not to remember Thom’s doubts about his pack mates.

  Yesterday, with our raucous dinner fresh on my mind, the idea that a Gate City wolf could have killed Kaito had seemed ludicrous. But how well did I know all of those wolves, really? Most had been loners, showing up on Thom’s doorstep with no past they cared to admit to. Could one have a history with kitsunes? A bone to pick that led to murder?

  It did seem more likely than a random stranger killing Kaito. Mai’s suggestion that I was at greater risk than her family suddenly made sense.

  Still, I found myself more concerned for the fox skull than for my own skin. Limestone had cemented the artifact into place, so I couldn’t move it somewhere less public. And I’d made the mistake of rolling aside the wardrobe. I could only hope the gaping hole in the floor would be overlooked....

  Then my concerns were derailed as a young, female voice burst out with a single word: “Meanie!” The second syllable strangled upon itself as the speaker burst into sobs.

  I unfolded myself from around the artifact I’d been instinctively trying to protect with my body. Not a hunting wolf but an upset child. In that case....

  The smart thing to do would have been to hide in my hole until the girl headed back to the bar proper. But I wasn’t about to let a kid cry alone.

  Instead, I straightened, my head still too low to broach floor level. “Ava?”

  Feet pattered toward me, then Dixie Lee’s daughter was leaning over the edge of the hole. The bit of her body I could see was backlit against the fluorescents. For one split second, she looked like a fox with a long fluffy tail.

  But, no, that was just her hair tied up in a scrunchy. The plump vulpine body I’d thought I’d seen was just a child’s head. “Can I come down?” Ava asked, voice far too tentative to emerge from any sort of shifter.

  And even though I should have said no, I instead pressed myself against the slick rock wall to make room for her. “Sure.”

  She landed as lightly as I had in the bottom of the pit, bringing the musky scent of fox along with her. And her eyes latched onto the skull even more quickly than mine had. Reaching out to run one finger across the domed crown, she jerked backwards with a yelped “Ow!”

  My eyebrows shot up. The skull had shocked me too the first time I touched it. There’d been no electricity on subsequent contact, though, and Thom had seemed immune.

  Then I lost track of that data point as Ava turned to face me. It was almost as if the skull had given her backbone because her statement came out like a demand. “Mom says I can’t ask, but I want you to teach me to be a fox!”

  BACK WHEN I WAS AVA’S age, shifting came as second nature. Unlike most kitsunes, I’d had a star ball from birth, a gift from my dead mother. But that wasn’t the ordinary turn of events.

  In contrast, my older sister told me she’d woken on her thirteenth birthday to a warm glow above her pillow. Mai had learned to use her star ball at the same time she was wrapping her head around puberty, which, frankly, seemed like a terrible combination. Still, it was the more usual path for a kitsune and was better than the alternative.

  The alternative which I suspected the girl beside me suffered from. Ava might smell foxy, but she was entirely human. Human and sensitive enough that she often found it hard to face the world’s ugliness, instead disappearing behind books.

  I hated to be the one to break the news, but the truth would have to be faced eventually. So—“Do you have a star ball?” I asked.

  “Star ball?”

  Rather than explaining in words, I drew my magic into its purest form, letting the luminous orb bounce lightly up and down above my fingertips. “This.”

  Ava’s face, lit by the glow of my star ball, turned ethereal. She shook her head, glossy curls bouncing within their ponytail. “No.”

  “And you’re thirteen already?”

  Ava’s voice took on the tone of a teen being asked a question the adult already knew the answer to. “You came to my party. You saw the candles.”

  Which meant she lacked what it took to be a full kitsune. Still, I found myself hedging instead of answering outright. “What does your mom say about shifting?”

  “She says I shouldn’t want to.”

  A clatter of pots from the other side of the wall suggested the mother in question was close enough to catch us at this forbidden conversation if we weren’t careful. In response, Ava lowered her voice back to our former conversational murmur.

  “She says kitsunes are trouble and my father was a mistake that led to a wonderful daughter.” Ava’s nose wrinkled up as she repeated words I suspect she’d heard many, many times. “But you’re not trouble. You’re a hero.”

  “I’m pretty sure I am trouble.” I mean, I was talking to a kid whose mother clearly didn’t want me in her vicinity. But if I was going to sneak around behind Dixie Lee’s back, the least I could do was prevent Ava from running off to cry alone in the dark again.

  The pit suddenly felt too small for the two of us, so I hoisted myself out and offered Ava a hand up. She barely needed it.

  Unfortunately, the leap to floor level didn’t manage to knock her off the scent of her preferred topic. “Well?” she demanded. “Will you help me learn to shift?”

  There it was—I’d either have to tell the truth or lie to her face. “I don’t think you can,” I admitted. Then, as Ava’s face started to crumple: “But shifting has no bearing on being a hero. Being a hero means sticking up for the underdog. Which, yes, can mean fox teeth or swords, but it can also mean cleverness. Sometimes a well-timed laugh is all it takes to turn the tables.”

  Ava was still digesting my assertion when her mom called through the wall. “Ava! You ready?”

  The girl was halfway to the door when I remembered the fox skull she’d been shocked by. The one that Thom and I had so carefully kept hidden for the past season.

  “You can’t...”

  “...Tell anyone about the skull. I get it. We kitsune keep our secrets.”

  “And be careful,” I demanded.

  Ava shrugged, a thread of fox scent hovering in the air behind her as she scampered toward the public side of the bar.

  Then I was alone in the Moon Room. Well, alone for a few more minutes until I retreated to my car, pulled on my warmest winter clothes, and settled down in the backseat. Eventually, Pumpkin found me and provided a much-needed lump of warmth near my belly.

  I’d finally stopped shivering and started drifting off when a fist pounded on the glass above my head.

  Chapter 20

  I jolted upright so quickly my head banged against the side of the car. And for one long moment, I couldn’t focus on the face pressed close to the glass.

  “Well, are you going to open this door or aren’t you?”

  I recognized Dixie Lee’s voice before I managed to blink the tears out of my vision. Recognized her complete lack of patience when she didn’t wait for me to obey and instead yanked the door open, letting out all of my hard-won warmth.

  “You can’t sleep here,” she continued, as if we were taking part in a conversation rather than a monologue. “You’ll freeze to death, which would be bad publicity for the bar. I have a spare room available. And a shower, which you clearly, badly need.”

  I blinked. Maybe this was some sort of nightmare? Dixie Lee would morph into a monster who bit my head off at midnight, crunching up my bones with long, sharp teeth. Or she’d lead me to her house only to laugh in my face and lock me out in the cold afterwards.

  Still, the human woman who’d taken a dislike to me months ago appeared very corporeal as she tapped her foot, waiting for me to say something. Eventually, I obliged her.

  “Last I heard, Bertrand was staying in your spare room.”

  The other woman’s lips pursed, the elbows of her crossed arms jutting out aggressively. “You clearly haven’t been paying attention. Bertrand slept there for a couple of days last fall to keep Ava safe. That’s everything going on between us.”

  “Are you sure? He doesn’t seem to think that’s everything.”

  “Well, we may be dating occasionally. But we’re certainly not moving in together. I have a child.”

  “Taking things slow, eh?”

  “Pot meet kettle.”

  We glared at each other for one long moment, then Dixie Lee circled back around to her point. “Do you want the bed or not?”

  I did. The honest truth was that I’d been wiggling my chilled toes ever since I woke up, hoping to work some feeling back into them. And Pumpkin, my backup foot warmer, had fled toward the bar as soon as Dixie Lee opened the car door.

  But—“You don’t like me. Why are you offering?”

  “Because you’re desperate.”

  I waited, knowing there was more to it. And, finally, Dixie Lee rolled her eyes. “Plus, I have an infestation. I don’t want Ava exposed to pesticides and I can’t handle the bugs in my house any longer. You seemed like the lesser of two evils.”

  Which is how I came to spend the rest of the week snapping up stink bugs, which were even more vile tasting that the name suggested.

  STINK BUGS WEREN’T all I hunted that week either. I hunted Kaito’s killer as best I could, visiting the burned-down hulk of the house he’d died inside and sniffing around the exterior. Unfortunately, the villain hadn’t handily dropped a business card with a name and address on it. And when I got Ito’s number from Charlie and tried to call him to press for more information about his brother, he hung up at the sound of my voice.

  Which left the pack to investigate. Something that Thom accidentally made easier.

  I wasn’t thinking about investigations, though, when we ran into each other on the street that first Monday. “I have a proposal,” Thom said, drawing me out of the flow of pedestrians.

  “Yes?” The word emerged breathier than I meant it to. My back straightened, my chin yearning upward. I had a sinking suspicion my posture was just as adoring as Ava’s had been an hour earlier when I gave her tips on midair splits.

  I half expected Thom to step away. To at least put emotional distance between us. Instead, he leaned in closer, dropping his voice to a deep rumble.

  “The pack bond. It feels strange to you because you haven’t spent unstructured time around any of us. How would you feel about hanging out before my shift begins?”

  My reluctance to commit to Gate City and its alpha didn’t stem from unfamiliarity with the pack bond, but I would take whatever time Thom was offering. “Alone?” I asked, expecting him to shake his head and mutter about family curses.

  Instead, blue eyes pierced mine, Thom’s smile warming my insides. “Alone,” he confirmed, before adding: “In fur.”

  And, yes, four-legged we couldn’t get up to any hanky-panky. The first day, we spent the entire time watching an action flick, Thom’s huge wolf tongue licking invisible dirt out my erect fox ears while I struggled not to yawn at the total lack of character development on the screen. The whole time, his pack bond curled around me like a curious puppy and I neither avoided nor accepted its advances.

  When Thom’s work beckoned, he shifted in the bathroom, waiting longer than I needed before coming back out to join me. But his question then was as warm as the stolen heat that lingered within my body. “Tomorrow? Same time, same place?”

  I nodded. Boring movie or no boring movie, I was definitely up for more of the same.

  But the next day, Thom didn’t just put on something he thought I’d like. He considered me while scrolling past streaming options then paused when he came to my favorite show. Raising one eyebrow, he asked, “More your style?”

  I hesitated. Family drama wasn’t the sort of thing tough swordfighters watched during their downtime. Plus, “How’d you know that’s my secret indulgence?”

  “I’m a bartender. I pay attention.”

  And I paid attention, half an hour later, when the lights went briefly dark and Thom shifted back to two legs to fix the technology. This wasn’t a date and Thom was trying hard to keep sex off the table, so I did my level best not to stare at his butt.

  I tried so hard that I experienced a minor epiphany in the process.

  The Gate City pack bond that had once again danced around me all evening might not be something I was comfortable accepting now, or maybe ever. But it was a tool worth utilizing, a way to find out whether the local werewolves had anything to do with Kaito’s demise.

  Because I could feel hints of emotions coursing down the bond as connections flowed toward Thom and past me. Tidbits of surface thoughts. Nothing incriminating or Thom would have noticed. But I was a fox; I could recognize when a thread was shielded by subterfuge.