Shadow of The Fox (Shadow of the Fox #1) - Julie Kagawa Page 0,152
two fingers, meant for me, I realized. Of the amanjaku, nothing remained but a few bits of stolen weapons and armor. The replicas were gone as well, pieces of straw blowing limply across the floor.
I took a deep breath and let it out in a puff. “Well, that was...exciting,” I remarked, as Reika lowered her arms, the ofuda vanishing somewhere into her robes. Chu shook himself, and shrank down to a normal dog again. I was trembling, not with fear, but with the thrill of using so much fox magic all at once. Never in my sixteen years had I been allowed to unleash my full power, to really see what my magic could do. It was exciting and heady and a little bit frightening, knowing what I was capable of. Was this the power Master Isao warned me about? What the others were afraid of?
Kitsune magic is the power of illusion. You might think it useful only for mischief, but seeing something that isn’t there, or making people believe you are someone else entirely, can be a dangerous, terrifying force. Use it carefully, lest you become an instrument of chaos.
“Your ears are showing,” Reika remarked in a flat voice, bringing me out of my thoughts with a start. “I can normally see a faint outline, but they’re fully exposed now. Probably a side effect of using so much of your power.”
I swallowed, resisting the impulse to reach up and touch them. “Do you think they’ll go away eventually?” I asked, knowing that, if my ears were visible, my tail probably was, as well. That would be a definite problem if Tatsumi or any of the others saw them. “What will we do if they don’t fade before we leave the castle?”
“Worry about it when we get there,” the shrine maiden answered. “We have to keep going.” She looked at the hitodama, who still hovered near the ceiling, glowing faintly. “If you are truly here to help us,” she said, as the glowing orb trembled, “then lead on. And let us hope that there are no more ‘surprises’ ahead.”
The hitodama hesitated a moment. Then it floated from the ceiling, circled the room once and flowed out another door.
No more demons ambushed us on our way through the ruined castle; either they had fled or we had killed them all. The light wove unerringly down narrow hallways, through more empty, destroyed rooms, and finally led us to the top of a wooden staircase that led down into the dark.
“He’s close,” Reika murmured, as Chu glanced up at her and wagged his tail. “I can feel his presence now. Hurry.”
After descending the flight of stone steps, we came into a large room. Torches stood in the corners, flickering with ominous red flames, and cells with thick wooden bars lined the walls, but all were empty.
In the center of the room, a man in a tattered, once-white robe sat cross-legged on the hard stone floor, hands cupped in his lap as if in meditation. His head was bowed, his shoulders hunched and he didn’t move when Reika called his name. Manacles encircled his wrists, rusty black chains that shackled him to the stone floor. A small white dog, nearly identical to Chu, lay motionless beside him.
Both were encased in a flickering, nearly invisible dome of power, a barrier much like the one I had seen the night the Silent Winds temple was attacked. But this one was much more menacing, radiating evil and corruption, making my skin crawl the closer we got.
“Blood magic,” the shrine maiden whispered, sounding furious and horrified. She pulled out another ofuda and raised it before her, paused a moment while the paper flared with energy, then hurled it at the barrier. It flew through the air and struck the dome flat, the word for purify written across its surface, before the barrier flickered once, twice and then shattered like wasps swarming from a hive.
“Master Jiro!” Reika and I hurried forward. As we drew close, I saw that the black chains around the priest had vanished, melting into a line of dark reddish sludge across the floor.
“Master Jiro,” Reika said again, kneeling before him, while Chu whined and shoved his nose against the crumpled form of the white dog. “Master, can you hear me? Are you all right?”
A shuddering, wheezy breath came from the hunched form, and his shoulders trembled as he raised his head. His face was gaunt, his cheeks sallow and his eyes were sunken pits in