"And now you have your answers," Nix said, watching as Mik used the force of the woman's charge against her to flip her over his back and onto hers. She landed on the floor and came at me with a snarl, giving me just enough time to block her with my katana.
"Jesus Christ, Nix, you could've explained in advance!" I shouted as I shoved the woman back ... and found myself essentially pushing against a brick wall. I was a fighting a god here, not a normal kitsune, and I could already tell that I didn't have much advantage on my side.
"Not when a goddess has forbidden me to speak," he said, like I wasn't in the middle of fighting for my life here. Bennett stepped up and gave me the extra force I needed to shove Sakura Okami, one of Inari's wives, back a few steps.
"What the hell are we doing up here?" I asked as Sakura let out a scream that shook the trees, loosing gusts of pink cherry blossom petals into the wind. "Why would she ask us to come up here? So we can fucking die?"
"The goddess wants what the goddess wants," Nix said, like he didn't give a crap either way. But when the Fox Father stood up from his mat, weeping sores oozing onto the ground around him, and came after the coyote shifter, he changed his tune pretty quick.
"Let's get the fuck out of here," Mik snapped, grabbing my arm and dragging me toward the steps. But that's when I noticed that Revel wasn't moving. She was staring at the floor of the temple with a blank look on her face that scared the shit out of me.
"Mikhail, stop," I said, pulling away from him as Nix snatched up a staff from the hand of one of the statues and spun it in a circle before cracking the Fox Father in the face.
It was fucking sacrilegious.
"Revel?" I asked, grabbing onto her shoulder. With a snap of her arm, she flung her hand out and cracked me so hard in the face that my lip split and blood poured down my chin, dripping onto my kimono and staining the white silk.
When she turned to look at me, there was something in her face, her expression, that told me I was no longer looking at Revel Jones.
Some kitsune could possess others; it was innate skill that many of us were born with but that didn't fully set in until maturity. And maturity for a kitsune was around a hundred years old.
But a god?
A god was much older than that.
One of Inari's lovers had just taken over Revel's body.
"Oh fuck," I murmured as Bennett hauled me backward and Revel knelt, nice and slow, grabbing a traditional wooden fox mask from the foot of the shrine, its smiling face painted with a menacing sort of expression.
She stood back up and slowly, carefully, slid it onto her face.
Without a word, she stepped onto the dais and plucked the katanas from the hands of the Inari statue. I'd picked my choice of weapon with influence from my goddess.
And now I was going to get my ass kicked by one.
"We need to go now," Mikhail snapped, as both he and Bennett dragged me back and toward the steps leading to the car. Nix was holding off both Sakura and the Fox Father at the same time. Pretty goddamn impressive, I must say.
I left him behind, but I didn't want to leave Revel. Still, I knew that if I fought a goddess, I would lose. So I let the two alpha males drag me away, my katanas still clutched in my hands. But as we approached the steps, Inari appeared with her vulpine smile in place, dressed in the red and white outfit of a shrine maiden.
The three of us paused as Bennett cursed under his breath, something like the fuck am I doing all this for a goddamn fox?
The goddess and I stared at one another for a long, quiet moment, her purple eyes a match to my own. When she stepped toward me, both Mik and Bennett froze, but when my boss pulled out a knife and chucked it in her direction, it went right through her.
Inari stepped up to me, putting her hands on either side of my face before dragging her nails down my neck and then my spine. I could feel her, even though the guys couldn't touch her.
She continued touching me, moving all the way down to my tails, and when she got to them, she squeezed them as if she were my lover, making me gasp.
As she touched me there, I felt this wild burst of energy explode through me, like a volcano erupting, spilling molten hot magic into my veins. The sudden return of my power made me scream and collapse, even with the two men doing their best to hold me up.
That's when I really felt it, all of those connections I'd been making willy-nilly.
I felt Bennett inside of me, felt his magic connect to my own like a long-lost lover. With a snarl, he jerked back from me and clutched at his chest, like the power was tearing him apart the same way it was doing to me. My mind conjured up images of him, hot and sweaty, fucking me into the bloody bed. Our connection became bright and vibrant, like a sunray cutting through the center of my skull.
No wonder he was able to find me so easily; I felt like I could track him down on the other side of the world.
Didn't explain why he'd tracked me down, but at least I knew how.
On the opposite side of my soul, I could feel Mikhail, this intimate connection to him that was just begging to be explored. It made my neck burn, the spot where he'd bitten me throbbing like a snakebite.I clutched a hand to it even as I sensed an invisible rope connecting me to Nix, binding us together for the duration of our bargain.
No wonder Mikhail had called me an idiot.
As I writhed on the ground and tried to adjust to the flow of power, I thought of Riot and Fin. And I missed them so fucking fiercely in that moment that I knew I would be dating Fin again, that I'd be hunting Riot down and making him see sense. Because after all this, how could I let either of them go? How had I lived without them for so long?
What the hell was wrong with me?!
Someone—Mikhail, I believe—yanked me aside just in time to avoid Revel's katanas as they smashed into the stone where I'd been lying. My boss hauled me up to my feet as I struggled to blink through the rush of power.
As I was coming to, he yanked me toward the steps and ran smack into an invisible barrier.
“Son of a bitch," Mikhail snarled out, pulling me close against his chest in a protective maneuver. Didn't last. I had no idea what Inari's goal here was, but she gave me my magic back ... and then yanked me from Mik's arms, throwing him as hard as she could against a nearby outbuilding.
I could feel his pain radiating through our new connection. He was hurting, but he was still alive. That's about all the time I had to think before Revel smashed into me, my swords coming up at the last second and blocking her from lopping my head right off my neck.
Her sash came undone, billowing out behind her as her kimono gaped and revealed that beautiful naked body underneath.
My guess was that she was possessed by Aika, the second of Inari's two wives. The rest of her nine lovers were men.
Stepping back, I braced myself for another attack, a little woozy from the rush of power but happy as fuck to have it back.
"Bennett!" I shouted as the alpha wolf rose sluggishly to his feet. I probably shouldn't care what the hell happened to him, but this new, heady link of his power to mine was pulling me toward him with inexorable force. It was so powerful that I actually took two steps in his direction without realizing it.
He snapped to and dodged as the Fox Father came at him, spilling infection across the ground as he stumbled, blindly toward the alpha male. The fox mask on the god's face was skewed to one side, blood and fluid leaking out from beneath it. The two holes where his eyes should be were nothing but black.
Revel-Aika, or whatever you wanted to call her, came at me again, holding her swords straight back behind her as she ran, and then launching herself into the air at the last second. Using my magic, I threw up a small shield that she broke through as easily as if it were paper-thin glass.
At the very least, that gave me enough time to roll to the side and avoid getting stabbed.