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A heartbeat later, the red thread he’d created between himself and Chen became visible. For a few seconds, it stretched across the lawn, through the bushes, up the front stairs, and disappeared into the house. Shiny, blood red, and strong.
Huli sat next to it, pawing at it before it vanished from sight. “I tried chewing on it, but I couldn’t get it to break.”
Moon slapped his empty left hand on his face and moaned, “Please, don’t chew on the thread binding my soul to Chen’s.”
The fox’s mouth opened, revealing sharp fangs as well as his long, pink tongue. It took him a moment, but he realized the damn fox was laughing at him.
“Can you shift into a human being? Or can you only be a fox?” Moon demanded.
“You’d rather I be a human?” There was a brief flash of light and the fox was gone, replaced with a small, curvy woman with long black hair and a very short skirt. Her top was equally tiny, barely covering her breasts. She smiled at him with bright-red lips. “Oh, wait. You’re mated to that vampire. You’d prefer this.” There was another flash, and a man replaced the woman. He sat with his legs crossed in the grass, wearing the world’s tiniest red speedo. The man was pure rippling beefcake, like he’d just walked out of a gym. Handsome, but not his type.
It must have shown on his face because the man huffed. “Seriously? You’re prefer this?”
The light flashed, and Moon swore he was seeing spots. He blinked a few times to find Chen standing in front of him.
“Chen-ge.” Moon sighed with relief. He took two steps toward him and stopped when this wicked grin spread across his lips, twisting Chen’s features in a way he’d never seen. He gasped and jerked away. “Huli!”
The fox in his Chen face cackled and spun. Yep, there was the mischief he’d been warned about.
“You know what? I was wrong. You be whatever you want to be, I’ll adjust. But you can’t be Chen. No one can be Chen but Chen.”
Another mad chuckle rose into the night air. When the light faded a final time, Huli was a fox again. Moon had thought talking to Huli in human form would be easier because it would allow him to read the creature’s facial expressions. But that wasn’t fair to Huli. He wasn’t taking into consideration what made Huli most comfortable.
The fox sat with tails dancing and tongue half hanging out. Huli didn’t need to be human for Moon to see that the fox was feeling quite pleased with himself.
Oh…that was another thing.
“Since you can change forms, how do you identify?”
Huli stiffened, his smile disappearing. “I identify as Huli. I thought we covered that.”
Moon huffed a laugh and flopped down to sit on the ground with his back against the wall opposite the fox. “No, I mean gender. I keep thinking of you as he and him, but that might not be how you identify. Are you he, she, or they?”
The fox’s tails all gathered close, wrapping and holding the animal’s body as if in a hug. “No one has ever asked me that.” Huli glanced toward the house and snorted. “They call me ‘it.’ Except for Xiao Dan. He calls me Huli.”
“Well, tell me, and I’ll make sure they stop using ‘it.’ ”
“I am…” the fox’s voice drifted off to nothing. “I was reborn a fox spirit. Born a fox. I am Huli, and Huli is whatever I want to be.” The strength returned to Huli’s voice with each word until the earlier haughtiness had returned.
“Agreed.”
“But I understand your conundrum and appreciate your compassion. You may use ‘he’ for me. It is the form I take most often, and I enjoy it because it makes Xiao Dan most pleased.”
Moon was not touching that without a medical degree in psychology.
Moving beyond the question of gender identities, Moon smiled at the fox and let out a chuckle. “I never in a million years thought I would talk to a fox, let alone a nine-tailed fox spirit.”
“You were talking to yourself earlier. Why should talking to me more be unexpected?”
Moon held on to his smile. There was no point in trying to explain the weirdness of the situation to a creature that thought this was all normal. Thankfully, it didn’t seem as if Huli was interested in an answer from him.
The fox stood and walked over to the ward he’d been inspecting earlier, which raised even more concerns. Shouldn’t he have felt something when Huli moved inside the property? Unless Huli entered the property from the far side, where he hadn’t touched yet. The other explanation was that Huli had been inside the grounds when he started.
“Huli, you’re not related to the fae, right?”
The fox’s ears snapped back and sharp fangs were bared in a growl. Huli spat out a string of furious Mandarin that Moon would have had zero hope of translating even if he’d studied for a decade.
