#6 I'm not sure I love Kira anymore.
Central Park played so much havoc with his senses that after ten minutes, Scott decided he hated it. It wasn't the size. He had been in larger urban green areas. He had spent one very annoying weekend trying to minimize the casualties in a battle between Monroe's hunters and a hostile pack in Topanga State Park.
It was the contrast. Those other parks had blended in with the geography of their city. Here, he had been walking down the street between skyscrapers before suddenly being in the middle of the woods. He could see the lights of those monolithic buildings through the branches of the dead trees, like artificial stars.
If he had been back home in the Preserve, he would have been able to pick out individual scents much easier, but the city's aura intruded even this deep into the park. He could still smell exhaust from an endless amount of cars and the glass cleaner from a million windows among the thousands of industrial chemicals that permeated this city. He had spent a few hours after he got off his flight sightseeing, but he was so nervous about this meeting that he barely remembered any of what he had seen. He wondered if he could come back sometime in the future and do it right.
His breath frosted in the air; it had clearly dropped below freezing, though the cold didn't bother him much. If he had been human, his leather jacket wouldn't nearly have been heavy enough to keep him war, but for a werewolf, it was more than adequate for this early January night. There were only a few patches of old snow between piles of dead leaves. In the sky, they dying crescent of the moon raked through the tops of barren trees.
To his left, he heard a group of men walking together, crossing the park, joking with each other. For a second, the vestigial human in Scott felt a shiver of fear. He was a suburbanite alone in a city far from home, and Central Park didn't have the best reputation for safety. Fear flashed lightning quick across his consciousness for a moment, only to be immediately replaced with a wry assurance. He was very probably the most dangerous thing out here.
They were still far enough away that they wouldn't see his face clearly, so he let his eyes glow. Surprised and confused, they retreated, now in possession of a new story to tell their friends. Scott chuckled and headed toward the edge of the Conservatory Water.
He'd come here earlier in the evening, when there were still people about, to make sure he wouldn't get lost. He had no idea why he had to come here so late at night, but he absolutely did not want to have to call the person he was meeting and ask for directions like an ignorant teenager.
Scott sighed. That's right. He wasn't an ignorant teenager anymore. He was an ignorant adult. "Did you think that was wise?"
Adult or teenager, he nearly jumped right out of his skin. He hadn't even been aware of her presence. "How did you do that?"
Noshiko Yukimura arose from where she was sitting on one of the stone benches. "I'm nine hundred years old. I've learned a thing or two about remaining undetected, even from alpha werewolves."
He guessed she might have, considering that he hadn't caught her scent at all. She had waited downwind and made use of the all the powerful aromas surrounding them. The ambient noise of New York City had concealed her heartbeat from him as well.
"Congratulations." He looked back in the direction where the men had gone. "No, I don't think it was wise. I don't think it was unwise either."
"You don't think that it could lead to trouble with the authorities?"
"I think that if more than a half-dozen murder sprees and massacres up to and including a multi- million dollar hit list, the kidnapping of the son of a federal agent across international lines, and a reenactment of the Crucible with live ammunition didn't lead to our discovery by humanity at large, me scaring a bunch of hoodlums at ass-o-clock in morning in the center of one of the largest cities on earth isn't going to do it."
"You are most likely right, but those weren't the authorities I was talking about." "Oh."
"Yes, Scott, there are things you don't know about the world. There are four werewolf packs that I personally know who live in this city alone, and they are all much more circumspect than the packs of Beacon Hills. There are at least three other kitsune who live in this city beside me, and they enjoy the freedom which anonymity gives them. Those are the representatives of supernatural races you've met before. There are others. For example, you should never enter Chinatown after dark unless you are invited. Entities dwell there who would take it as a dire insult."
"And they might get angry."
"Angry enough to try to kill you. By unspoken agreement, we creatures of the night keep things very quiet in this city."
"And how am I supposed to know that I've gone somewhere I shouldn't? No one saw fit to give me a copy of the manual." As much as Scott hated dealing with Monroe and her particular brand of fear peddling, he despised supernatural superiority bullshit even more.
"Keep acting in that manner, and they will most likely let you know soon enough. Some will be gentler about teaching you the rules than others. The Colony, for example, often takes lethal offense at simple behavior no matter how innocent."
"What are you talking about?"
"The Colony is an entity composed of rats who have formed a hive mind. It can be quite vicious when it feels threatened. No one finds the victims of its wrath when that happens."
"All the rats ... there are two million rats in New York City."
Noshiko chuckled. "Not all of them. Only about five percent of them."
"Okay, I get it. I screwed up again."
The kitsune shrugged, unwilling to offer any comfort to him. "So you wanted to meet with me. Why did you come all the way to New York?"
"I wanted to check up on you and Ken."
"You couldn't have done it on the phone?" Noshiko walked to the edge of the lake and started walking along the side.
Scott caught up to her, taking a very carefully considered position at her side. "I wanted a real answer, rather than being brushed off."
She glanced over at him, frowning.
"You have this tendency to keep our discussion short and to the point, but I could never shake the feeling that you were answering my inquiries with as little information as you could possibly give me."
"That should have told you something."
"It did. You resent me. Like asking me to meet you here tells me that you resent me." The kitsune snorted in response.
"When I asked to visit you and you said okay, you made it very clear that I wasn't to come to your home. You didn't want to meet me at a coffee shop or a restaurant. Instead you wanted to meet me in Central Park in the middle of winter during the Witching Hour. Perhaps you wanted me get lost. Perhaps you wanted me to change my mind. Neither happened."
"Or perhaps," Noshiko said haughtily, "my decision had nothing to do with you at all. Perhaps I did not want to remind my husband about his missing daughter, which would be hard to do if I brought the person responsible for her predicament into our home."
That landed like a punch to the gut. "I'm sorry." "What are you sorry for? Do you know?"
Scott glared at her. He wasn't going to give her a rundown of her failures. "I'm sure you already have a list."
"It is shorter than you might think. Your romance with my daughter is nothing to be sorry about. Your inclusion of her in your pack, in your circle of friends, is nothing to be sorry about. You didn't destabilize the balance between her and her fox spirit; the Doctors did. What you should be sorry is the inspiration you gave her."
"I didn't—"
"Of course you did. She didn't look to me for guidance when enemies came. She looked to you. She believed as you believed, that helping people who needed it was an important part of life. The Doctors saw that she had the potential to stop them, so they acted. But even after all that, she's not in the desert because we couldn't find a way to stabilize her; she's in the desert because she made a deal to help you defeat Theo."
What could he say to deny it?
"I don't hate you, Scott." Noshiko says, moving once again to walk along the shore of the Conservator Water. "I just don't like you very much."
"Stopping them was the right thing to do."
"But I am kitsune, formerly of eight tails. Kira has told you we do not tend to care much about
right and wrong. For my part, I care about my family, and now my daughter is beyond either my care or my protection. That offends me."
"So ..." Scott finally came to it. "So this is your way of making me pay? Meeting me in the middle of the night to see if I mess up?"
"Among other things. You need not worry, though, about me hurting someone you care about. I'm not that offended."
At least Noshiko was being honest with him. He thought about it as they walked. Suddenly, he had an epiphany and stopped, watching her as she moved ahead.
"Is that why you did it? Is that why you gave Liam Kira's sword?"
She turned around, attempting to keep a straight face but the corner of her lips curled up slightly. "I gave him the sword because he felt he needed it."
"But you did it without talking to me."
"I thought you trusted Liam."
"Oh, bullshit." Scott clenched his hands. "This was about freeing the person who murdered me, who tore me open and left me to bleed out on the library steps after pretending to be my friend. Liam was sixteen. You, as you like to claim repeatedly, are a great bit older. You didn't think, given the situation that you should see if I was okay with it? You couldn't have used a phone?"
"Theo is your ally now."
He pointed at her. "That doesn't change anything. You gave him the sword that because you were upset that Kira chose to make that deal with the Skin-Walkers to reforge it to save people, so you enabled Liam to do something with it that would make me just as upset." Scott dropped his hand. "Admit it — it appealed to your sense of irony."
"She didn't make the deal with the Skin-Walkers for any principle of altruism. She did it for you." Scott was breathing heavily. "You think her being in the desert doesn't hurt me?"
"Apparently not, since you so quickly found a replacement!"
"Are you talking about Malia?"
Noshiko turned away sharply. "I do not hold anything against her."
"That's good, because we didn't do anything wrong. It had been almost a year since Kira had had to leave to go with the Skin-Walkers."
"One could argue that your devotion to my daughter didn't last very long."
"I was going to die!" Scott shouted across the expanse of the park. His voice took on the timbre of a roar. Noshiko immediately turned around to look at him, shocked at the outburst of emotion.
"I was afraid I was going to die. There's not many people who know what dying feels like, but you're one of them."
The kitsune nodded sharply, once.
"The first time there's a part of you that simply doesn't grasp that the other person is going to kill you. The idea that it could happen is ... it comes at you like an explosion inside your skull. You remember?"
"I do."
Scott swallowed. "I was in the woods. I had tried to stop Derek from killing Jackson and Kate and her hunters shot up the place. I got hit ... here." He touched the place on his abdomen. "And I was bleeding and I was running, but I couldn't run anymore. And I fell down in the leaves, and I called out Allison's name. She was my first anchor you know."
"Kitsune don't have anchors; the spirit has the human and the human has the spirit. We're one."
"Yeah, that's right, but I'm coughing up black blood, and as my eyes slipped shut the last thought I had was — oh, God, I'm dying. I'm dying and I'll never do anything. That will be exactly five years ago in four weeks."
"What has this to do with Kira?"
"It has everything to do with Kira!" He turned away from her. "It has everything to do with everything. I'm standing there and I realize that Gerard has amassed an army. This is a man who stuck a knife here." He moved his hand to another part of his stomach. "He shook it a little to make sure I was paying attention. This time I was sure he was going to kill me. I know that most of that feeling was the Anuk-Ite's influence, but all I could think about was that this time — this time was going to be for real. Gerard wouldn't let me get back up."
He laughed out loud.
"With the number of times I've stopped breathing, you might imagine that I would be used to it. But actually that makes it worse, because you know. There's oblivion beyond the morgue drawer. So I wanted to be with someone who cared for me again before that happened."
"You believed that no one cared for you?
"I believe that my own mother told me to not run, but to fight. Me being a good leader was more important than surviving to her."
"I'm sure your mother didn't mean it that way."
"No one ever means it that way, but they damn well expect it. The problem with inspiring people, Noshiko, is that after a certain point, that's all you become for them. An inspiration. You stop being a flesh-and-blood person. You're the True Alpha."
Noshiko tilted her head to the side while listening. "I once said to you that foxes and wolves don't get along. This is why. We don't need people as much as wolves do."
Scott gritted his teeth at her nonchalance. He was baring his soul and she was taking the opportunity to tell him that she had told him so. He wanted to hurt her. He wanted to sneer and congratulate her that she should be happy because he didn't love Kira anymore.
The worst part was that it might not be something he had had to make up to cause her pain; it might be true. He no longer felt the same way about Kira; he didn't know what he would feel when she finally came out of the desert. He certainly couldn't make any promises, because Noshiko was right — Kira had did what she did because she believed in him. She may spend decades out there, and when she came out everyone she cared about would be old or dead. He didn't know if he could
deal with that.
She was still studying him, coolly. "Why are you here, Scott?"
"I'm here because you're older than me, wiser than me, and you know more about the Skin- Walkers than anyone else I know."
She nodded.
"Well?"
"Hmmm."
"Is there any news? Is there a hint? Is there a sign? She's been gone for a little over twenty-six months. I came here so I could hear it straight out of your mouth."
"No, Scott. There has been no sign. Even if there was, I would not tell you. You're going to have to be patient, just like Ken and I will have to be patient."
Nothing was there to indicate she was lying, though it was possible she knew tricks to conceal even that. He had hoped she'd be different. "Then I came all this way for nothing."
"Nothing? I think we both learned a little more about each other. No lesson is worthless. There's no need to come back here, Scott. I imagine you'll be among the first to know when she's free."