Thorn Queen Page 0,2

look. "Do you know how many boxes of litter I've had to change today?"

I poured a glass of milk and sat down at the table. "Kiyo says we need one box for every cat and then an extra one."

"Yeah, I can count, Eugenie. That's six boxes. Six boxes in a house with 1500 square feet. You think your deadbeat boyfriend's ever going to show back up and help out with this?"

I shifted uncomfortably. It was a good question. After three months of dating between Tucson and Phoenix, my boyfriend Kiyo had decided to take a job here to save the hour and a half commute. We'd had a long discussion and decided we were ready to have him simply move in with me. Unfortunately, with Kiyo came his menagerie: five cats and two dogs. It was one of the woes of dating a veterinarian. He couldn't help but adopt every animal he found. I couldn't remember the cats' names any better than the dogs'. Four of them were named after the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and all I could really recall was that Famine ironically weighed about 30 pounds.

Another problem was that Kiyo was a fox - both literally and figuratively. His mother was a kitsune, a sort of Japanese fox spirit. He'd inherited all of her traits, including amazing strength and speed, as well as the ability to transform into an actual fox. As a result, he frequently got 'the call of the wild,' making him yearn to run around in his animal form. Since he had downtime between jobs now, he'd left me to take a sort of wild vacation. I accepted this, but after a week of not seeing him, I was starting to get restless.

"He'll be back soon," I said vaguely, not meeting Tim's eyes. "Besides, you can get out of chores if you want to start paying rent." That was our deal. Free lodging in exchange for food and housework.

He wasn't deterred. "Your choice in men is questionable. You know that, right?"

I didn't really want to ponder that too much. I abandoned him for my room, seeking the comfort of a jigsaw puzzle depicting a photograph of Zurich. It sat on my desk, as did one of the cats. I think he was Mr. Whiskers, the non-Apocalyptic one. I shooed him off the puzzle. Doing so took about half the puzzle pieces with him.

"Goddamned cat," I muttered.

Love, I decided, was a hard thing. Well aware of my grumpy mood, I knew part of my anxiety over Kiyo stemmed from the fact that he was also passing part of his sabbatical in the Otherworld, spending time with his ex-girlfriend who just happened to be a devastatingly beautiful fairy queen. Fairies, sidhe, shining ones...whatever you wanted to call them, they were the tall, long-lived rulers of the Otherworld. I and most shamans referred to them as gentry, an antique term. Maiwenn, Kiyo's ex, was almost nine months pregnant, and although they'd broken up, he was still a part of her life.

I sighed. Tim might have been right about my questionable taste in men.

Night wore on. I finished the puzzle while blasting Def Leppard, making me feel better. I was just shutting off the music when I heard Tim yell: "Yo, Eug. Kujo's here."

Breathless, I ran to my bedroom door and flung it open. A red fox the size of a wolf trotted down the hall toward me. Relief burned through me, and I felt my heart soar as I let him in and watched him pace around in restless circles.

"About time," I said.

He had a sleek orange-red coat and a fluffy tail tipped in white. His eyes were golden and sometimes bore a very human glint. I saw nothing like that tonight. A purely animal wariness peered out at me, and I realized it'd be a while before he changed back. He had the ability to transform to a wide range of foxes, everything from a small, normal-sized red fox to the powerful shape before me. When he spent a lot of time in this bigger form, turning human took more effort and time.

Still, hoping he'd transform soon, I dumped another puzzle on my desk and worked it as I waited. Two hours