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His heart ached strangely in his chest, and his head hurt with memories he couldn’t recall.
For some reason, during one of these musings, he thought of the Arctic fox.
He wondered where it went and whether it was all right. If it truly was the Dark Queen’s royal hunting fox, perhaps it returned to the citadel.
At that thought, a shiver of dissonance trembled through Ben.
Why did the fox follow him in the first place? In the beginning, it helped him find Zai and Sin.
What then?
If it were truly Queen Ashlu’s creature, could it have been responsible for the Dark soldiers’ ambush on the Beasts somehow? Logically, wasn’t its task to find the hidden animal spirits?
The betrayer of their location certainly wasn’t Zai; Ben would bet his life on it. Through his actions, Zai had proven himself to be honorable, a true protector, a man of his word, every step of the way.
And his…attachment to Sin was real.
As real as the Bond between Ere and Sorin, Ishtar and Tal, Inanna and Gabriel. Ben knew the soul-deep connection when he saw it.
Zai would never do anything to endanger or hurt Sin.
That wasn’t to say the betrayer was certainly the fox. It could have been a traitor within the Tiger King’s own ranks. It could just be that the Dark soldiers tracked them on their own.
But somehow, Ben’s mind kept coming back to the white fox.
It was something in the creature’s eyes. At times affectionate, playful, but they could also glint impishly, deviously. There was an unknowability about those strange, catlike eyes.
It was just a fox, yes. But it was also more. Its eyes seemed to expresshumanemotions even though they were clearly animal.
And yet, it went out of its way to save Ben from the wolf attack. It also fought the Dark soldiers when they came.
However…
If Ben truly thought about it, and if his memory didn’t deceive him, the fox only fought their enemies when Ben was in danger. He did not recall the fox jumping in to defend any of the others.
If it truly was an agent of the Dark Queen, perhaps it recognized Zai and Ben as part of the Dark Hunters in the Queen’s service. That was the ruse, after all. But to Ben’s knowledge, the fox never paid attention to Zai. It only stayed close to Ben this entire time.
He huffed and shook his head.
Why was he thinking about the fox as if it was a nefarious “agent of the Dark Queen” in the first place?
It clearly wasn’t an animal spirit. To Ben’s knowledge, there were only ever raptor, feline and serpent Beasts.
It could have been a shapeshifter, he supposed. There was plenty of magic in the universe that he had yet to encounter. So perhaps it wasn’t really an “it,” but rather a “he” or a “she.” Ben hadn’t looked closely enough to determine which.
And then there was the many tails of the fox.
Ben had never seen such a creature before, and clearly, he was the only person who saw it. Zai and Sin never noticed anything strange about the fox, though Sin was clearly not a fan of it from the first encounter, and the feeling was more than mutual.
Ben dug into his sponge-like brain for where he might have read about such a being before.
The closest he could come up with was the Chinese fox spirit, orhulijing. In Japanese folklore, it was thekitsune, and in Korean, it waskumiho. The mythology varied in the different cultures, but they all had an element of shapeshifting and potential for multiple lives.
Ben wished he could Google the hell out of this string of thought, but that would have to wait until he got home.
Ifhe got home.
At that thought, the fox was temporarily put on the back burner as Ben focused on the quest at hand.
