“Well, we stop fighting, for one. Let’s drop this other stuff and go out.”

“Now? Like on a date?”

“Sure.”

“Just like that? Is it that easy?”

“For now. And really, it’s only as easy or hard as we choose to make it.”

We took Kiyo’s car, a pretty sweet 1969 Spider, to one of my favorite restaurants: Indian Cuisine of India. The name sounded redundant, but the latter part of it had been a necessary addition. Considering all the local restaurants that served Southwest and American Indian cuisine, a lot of tourists had come in expecting to find Navajo fry bread, not curry and naan.

The tension melted between us-the hostile kind, at least-though he did have one pensive moment in which he asked, “All right, I have to know. Is it true you kissed him?”

I smiled enigmatically. “This is as easy or hard as we choose to make it.”

He sighed.

After dinner, he drove us out of town but wouldn’t say where we were going. Almost forty minutes later, we were driving up and around a large hill. Kiyo found an area with other cars but saw there were no spots left, forcing him to drive back down and park a considerable distance away. Twilight was giving way to full night, and it was hard to find the path up the hill with no lighting. He slipped his hand in mine, guiding me. His fingers were warm, his grip tight and secure.

It took us almost a half hour, walking until the path finally crested to a small clearing. I hid my astonishment. It was filled with people, most of whom were setting up telescopes and peering up at the clear, star-thickened sky.

“I saw this advertised in the paper,” Kiyo explained. “It’s the amateur astronomy group. They let the public come out and hang with them.”

Sure enough, everyone there was more than happy to let us come and look through their telescopes. They pointed out sights of particular interest and told stories about constellations. I’d heard a lot of them before but enjoyed hearing them again.

The weather was perfect for this kind of thing. Warm enough to not need jackets (though I still wore one to hide weapons) and so perfectly clear that you could forget pollution existed. The Flandrau Observatory, over at the university, had fantastic shows, but I loved the casual nature of this one.

While listening to an older man talk about the Andromeda galaxy, I thought about just how vast our existence really was. There was so much of it we didn’t know about. The outer world, the universe, spread on forever. For all I knew, the inner world of spirits continued on just as far. I only knew about three worlds: the world we lived in, the world the dead lived in, and the Otherworld, which caught everything in between. A lot of shamans believed the divine world was beyond all of this, a world of God or gods we couldn’t even imagine. Looking up at that snowstorm of stars, I suddenly felt very small in the greater scheme of things, prophecy or no.

Kiyo shifted beside me, and I felt his arm brush mine. My body kept an exact record of where we touched, like some sort of military tracking system. He caught my eye, and we smiled at each other. I felt at peace, almost deliriously happy. For this moment, all was right in the world between us. Maybe I’d never fully understand what pulled two people together. Maybe it was like trying to comprehend the universe. You couldn’t measure any of it. It just was, and you made your way through it as best you could.

“Thank you,” I told him later, as we walked back down the hill toward the car. “That was really great.”

“I saw the telescope at your house-er, what was left of it anyway.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Being up here had sort of taken me away from reality. I’d forgotten that my home was in a state of disaster. “Mine couldn’t really compare to any of these. Maybe I’ll have to upgrade now.”

We passed the other cars and finally finished the long trek back out to his car. The temperature had cooled down a little, but it was still nice out. Kiyo wrinkled his nose as we walked.

“Smells like…dead fish out here.”

I inhaled deeply. “I don’t smell anything.”

“Consider yourself lucky. You probably couldn’t smell how many people hadn’t showered back there either.”

I laughed. “I remember how you smelled my perfume back in the bar that night. I thought it was crazy. So super-smell is another kitsune perk?”

He shook his head. “Depends on what you’re smelling.”

We got into the car. He started to put the keys in the ignition, then decided he wanted his coat.

“Can you reach it? It’s behind my seat.”

I unfastened my belt and shifted around, practically hanging through the seats to reach his coat. It was crumpled and lying on the floor.

“Jesus,” I heard him say.

“Are you staring at my ass?”

“It’s practically in my face.”

I snagged the troublesome coat and leaned back, but his arm caught me and pulled me onto his lap. It twisted me in an awkward position, and I squirmed to straighten out my legs. I finally ended up sort of straddling him.

“I can’t believe you lectured me earlier about the dangers of losing control,” I chastised. His hands had slid down to the ass he so admired.

“What was I supposed to do?”

“Hey, I’m not complaining. Just surprised, that’s all.”

“I think it’s the fox in me.”

“Never heard that excuse before.”

“No, it’s true. You’d be amazed how simple the instincts are-and how strong. Sometimes I have to fight to not jump every woman I see. And then I always want to eat. Like I have this paranoid fear if I don’t stock up now, I could be starving later when winter comes. It’s really weird.”

It was compelling too, but wrapped up against him, I realized this conversation was wasting perfectly good make-out time. I unfastened his seat belt and then put my hands palm down on his chest. Leaning forward, I kissed him, pushing myself harder into his lap. His grip on me tightened.

“I thought you didn’t want to get involved with a kitsune.”

“Well…I happen to think foxes are cute.”

I wriggled out of my coat and then pulled off the tank top underneath, neither of which was easy to do with the steering wheel behind me. I rose up on my knees a little, putting my breasts near his face. His mouth showered my cleavage with kisses while his hands tried to undo the bra.

Meanwhile, my own hands unfastened the button on his pants. I reached down and slid my hand into his boxers.

“Eugenie…” he breathed. He managed to combine a cautionary tone with an utterly turned-on one. “We don’t have condoms.”

I moved my hand farther, suddenly very turned on myself by the thought of having nothing between us. “The pill, remember? Besides, contraceptive technology is a-”

The car suddenly lurched dangerously onto the side we weren’t sitting on. My back jammed into the steering wheel, and we half-tumbled onto the other side. Kiyo’s arms went around me, pulling me toward him in an effort to shelter me with his body and keep me from falling. Guess I shouldn’t have undone his seat belt earlier. Fortunately, the car didn’t flip all the way over, and a moment later, it slammed back down on the side we were sitting on with a jaw-rattling crash.

“What the-” I began.

In the dark, I could just barely discern Kiyo’s wide eyes staring beyond me, through the windshield. “I think we should get out of the car,” he said quietly, just as something heavy and solid slammed down on the hood behind me. I heard headlights smash. The entire car shook.

I didn’t need to be told twice. We kicked open the driver’s side door, and I scrambled out. A smell like rotting fish slammed into me. Kiyo started to follow me out, and then the car was lifted up from its front end and slammed back down to the ground. Glass and metal crunched as the motion tossed Kiyo back in the car. The windshield cracked like a spider’s web.