Lucas breathed in the cool air of the hotel room, letting it settle deep into his lungs as he allowed himself to relax into the mattress. Nic slept peacefully beside him, Lucas only just able to see the slight rise and fall of his back. Coming here had been a spur of the moment decision, and he still didn’t know how he felt about it. Nic hadn’t asked him any questions when he had shown up, and only let Lucas in with a faint smile.

They hadn’t spoken about why Lucas was there, instead they had talked about anything else. Everything from world news to whatever stupid commercial played on the TV in the background. Sex had come eventually, and it had been as pleasurable and easy as it had been the first time Lucas had spent the night here. They had barely spoken before both had slipped off to sleep, shortly after finding their release. Lucas had woken up an hour ago, finding comfort in Nic’s body, something that Nic woke up to happily reciprocate. Now he was asleep again, but Lucas was wide awake, his mind rested enough to run over all the thoughts he had hoped to avoid for a little while longer.

Everything in his life seemed to be pulling apart at the seams. Rather than huddling in some hole with Shaun while they tried to figure out what might be after them, he was hiding from his partner. Lucas had turned his phone off after about the tenth call from him. It lay dark and still on the couch in Nic’s sitting room.

Unable to stop himself, he slipped out of bed with a quick backward glance toward Nic. The other man never stirred as Lucas quietly padded out of the room, looking for his phone. He found it, but didn’t turn it on. Instead, he sat on the couch, naked, with the phone clenched in his hand. The ugliness between Shaun and him tore at his insides, even as he still held onto the anger he had been feeling when he left. It seemed like they were falling back into old habits, now fueled by familiarity and intimacy that made it worse. Their anger at one another was coming too quickly and struck too deeply. They were drifting away from each other with a vengeance that left him confused and more than a little bitter.

He groaned, leaning back against the couch as he tossed the phone onto the cushion beside him. Closing his eyes, he attempted to let his mind wander away from his angry thoughts. Drifting from the present into an almost zen-like state had been effortless for him, once upon a time. Now with something actively trying to hunt him down and this shared vehemence between the both of them, it was almost impossible for him to do so.

His senses did eventually stretch out though, the mental sensation of spreading out across the space around him. Even if it never stopped being a jarring sensation, it was at least a familiar one. The distant feel of a spirit a couple of rooms over was actually soothing. He could feel the spirit’s confusion and bitterness, being closed off from life and not understanding why. It was another lost soul, unable to reconcile its own death, nor make itself take that anger out on the world. Perhaps one day it would move on, or perhaps it would be a threat. Lucas could never quite tell which way they would go.

With a mental flick, he drew himself back, now able to distance himself from his thoughts. This was always a reliable way for him to regroup mentally. He supposed it counted as meditation, but he thought of it more as sinking into a different world. One filled with sensations and impressions that allowed him a glimpse into a realm that most humans never knew existed. So long as he didn’t push himself too far, he would come back to reality with a refreshed mind. He didn’t need to power nap, not when his thoughts could drift to what he felt was an entirely different, yet parallel, realm.

At the edge of his senses, something shimmered, the mental equivalent of the air above hot pavement during the summer. It was elusive and he had almost missed it. Yet when he turned his senses toward where he had spotted it, there was nothing there. It was somewhere else now, that much he could sense. He couldn’t tell where it was exactly. It was a slippery feeling, as elusive as it was hard to recognize in the first place.

With a jolt that tightened his chest, he realized it was the exact same effect he had felt in Toby and David’s hotel room. Unlike there, where it had simply avoided his sensory gaze, though always in the same place, this time it was everywhere. The closest thing he could think of it was that it was something always there, but only in the corner of his proverbial eye. It had avoided his direct sight when he had been in the brothers’ room by only being in the spot by the door. In here, however, it was everywhere.

Whatever had been in the motel room had focused a lot of its time and energy on that door. Which meant that whatever it was had been in this hotel room as well. His stomach tensed as he realized there was only one way that bizarre effect could be everywhere in this room. Whatever had been so intent on the brothers’ door had spent a lot of time in this room, and there was only one person who could have spent that much time in here.

Reality came rushing to the forefront as he pulled his senses back into just the customary five normal human ones. Those same senses picked up the faint sound of movement behind him, just as his eyes opened. Without thinking, he ducked his head down and pushed forward. His shoulder hit the low table as he rolled, twisting about so when he landed on his feet, he was facing Nic.

His chest tightened once more as he took in the sight of glowing golden eyes staring back at him through the darkness of the room. There was a faint glint of steel in the dark as well, resting against the back of the couch. Nic hadn’t done anything, only rested the blade against the couch as he stared at Lucas intently. As Lucas watched, the glow of his eyes faded, though they still remained that unnerving and unnatural golden color. Nic’s head cocked, the momentary glint in his eyes now reflected from the light outside the window behind Lucas, in the same way a cat’s would.

“Hiya Lucas,” Nic said by way of greeting, his tone sly but casual.

“Nic,” he didn’t move as he glanced around, assessing his surroundings, trying to establish a plan. Nic was armed, and he wasn’t. Nic was most definitely not human, and Lucas definitely was. He was naked and unarmed, leaving him more vulnerable than he had allowed himself to be in ages. To make matters worse, his only backup had no idea where he was, and now his phone was closer to Nic than it was to him.

“Looking a little tense there, bud. Looked like you were having one hell of a dream. That what keeps ya up, bad dreams?”

He didn’t like the casual way Nic was talking to him. “I take it you like to play with your food?”

“Playing with food is for children and artists. But if you’d like to stop pretending that I’m not about to kill you, we can do that.”

“Try, you’re going to try to kill me. Get it right.”

Nic grinned. “And here I thought Shaun was supposed to be the arrogant one out of the two of you.”

It was the only warning he was going to get, and he knew it as he watched Nic leap forward. He was glad that he had years of training and combat experience, otherwise he would have been too preoccupied by the smooth grace of Nic’s movements to defend himself. As it was, he was already rolling to the side. He turned after the roll, pushing himself to one side with a startled yelp as he saw Nic had already recovered from missing him and had leapt at him a second time.

Now that Nic was close, he was able to keep up with him, twisting away from the next thrust of the blade. His hand wrapped around the bottle of wine they had left on a side table and he brought it up. It whistled as close to Nic as the knife did to Lucas, both men narrowly missing the other and regrouping before moving together again. Their elbows slammed into one another as Nic slashed with the knife, and Lucas attempted to smash the bottle against him.

Nic hissed at the pain, stepping back with a smirk. “You’re certainly a lot quicker than that other guy was.”

“Toby. His name was Toby, you murderous bastard,” Lucas spat at him, taking a moment to break the end of the bottle on the table. It was a terrible weapon, but it was better than trying to use his bare hands to fight Nic. The guy was good with that blade, possibly better than Lucas was with a knife and definitely good enough to take him on.

“A hunter, calling someone murderous. That’s rich.”

“If you have a better name for someone who breaks into someone’s room to gun them down and gut them, I’m all ears.” If he could buy some time, he might be able to come up with a better plan than to try knife versus broken wine bottle.

“I believe you humans have something you call ‘self-defense’, don’t you? Or is that only something you believe in when it’s another human?”

They were side-stepping in a circle now. “You’re going to try to sell me on the idea of self-defense when you ambushed them?”

Nic gave a careless shrug. “So, I wasn’t killing them in the middle of a fight. Like I was supposed to defend myself in a fair fight? That would be like me taking on you and Shaun and calling it fair. I’d lose every time. I got them before they got me, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Just like you’re going to try to get us, huh?”

“You gotta do what you gotta do to survive.”

“Don’t give me that, we didn’t even know you existed until you killed Toby and David. We didn’t know who you were or what killed them before you came after us.”

A suspicious look crossed Nic’s handsome features. “You’re going to try and sell me on you not knowing what I am? I don’t buy that shit, Mr. Psychic.”

It was Lucas’ turn to be suspicious. “How the hell do you know about that?”

The knife wavered in the air for a moment before steadying once again. “That’s how you hunt. You’re Shaun’s little supernatural radar. You figure out what you’re after, and you’re able to get the jump on it without having to do a lot of research or tracking.”

Lucas gave him a disbelieving look. “If I knew what you were, do you really think I would have come back here to sleep with you a second time? This would have been a trap, not me standing here naked, holding a broken wine bottle as my only weapon.”

“You’re telling me you had no idea what killed those two idiots?”

“They weren’t idiots, and yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

“They were pretty stupid, but that makes you worse than them, because they figured out what I was when they were after me.”

His mind whirled as he tried to run through the limited facts that he knew. There was no magic being used, so Nic’s eyes had to be the result of a physical transformation. He was no witch or warlock, obviously wasn’t a ghost, and he was capable of going out in the sunlight. They had already tried to fight it out, and Nic had shown no signs of blood lust or battle rage. The only indication that he was anything but human was the inhuman color of his eyes, the length of his canines, and the strong sense of the supernatural that was coming off him in waves now.

Nic squinted at him, the knife lowering a half-inch. “You seriously have no idea what I am, do you?”

Lucas shook his head slowly. “You’re showing up to my senses the same way that your residual aura outside of their room did. It’s a mystery to me. I literally can’t focus on it because it always…slips out of view, is the best way I can put it.”

“No, there’s no way you don’t know what I am. Why else would you lure me into the city, rather than where I was already established?”

“To get away from the asshole that was stalking us, you know, you.”

“And the golden knife in your bag?”

So, that’s where that had gone. “That’s a gold layer, it hides the core of iron inside it. Good for tricking fae into letting me stab them, since they seem to think that most hunters are stupid and believe them weak to gold.”

Nic breathed deeply. “You’re telling the truth.”

“I really have no reason to lie at this point.”

“Except for saving your own skin, but you’re not, are you? All these jokes I’ve been pulling, and they’ve been on people who weren’t even going to be a threat to me. Are you shitting me?”

Nic lowered the knife slowly, still watching the jagged bottle in Lucas’ hand. Lucas however, barely remembered he was holding a makeshift weapon as he tried to puzzle out what Nic was saying. With an almost careless gesture, Nic backed away, moving to the other side of the bar to retrieve another bottle of wine.

“I’m sorry,” Lucas said as he watched Nicolai warily. “Did you say jokes?”

Nic looked up at him, the gold of his eyes cautious. “Bad choice of words, I meant traps.”

“No, no you didn’t.”

It was dawning on Lucas now, and his brow raised as everything started to come together for him. The physical transformation that seemed to come with ease, but none of the characteristic signs of rage. The glint of Nic’s knife hadn’t been steel, he could see that now as Nic flicked on a light to grab a couple of glasses, it was silver. Silver couldn’t be handled by a werewolf, but he gave every sign of being a werewolf, or at least a were-creature of some sort.

Golden eyes, and a silver tongue hiding behind a wicked grin. The graceful way that he moved and fought, even the long and lithe body. They were all strange characteristics for a werewolf, and didn’t point to any one other were-creature on their own. It was the comment about jokes that had slapped the last puzzle piece into place in his mind. Add in the fear of the golden blade that Nic had at some point pilfered from his and Shaun’s room, and he snorted in disbelief.

“Those…those don’t exist,” he said finally, eyeing Nic.

“Yeah? That’s what they say about werewolves and vampires, now isn’t it? Wine?”

Lucas shook his head at the offered glass. “There have been no reports of a were-fox, none that I’ve heard of.”

Nicolai wrinkled his nose. “Were-fox sounds so ugly. Makes us sound too much like werewolves, and trust me, no one wants to be associated with a werewolf. Kitsune is a lot better.”

“You don’t look Japanese to me.”

“Well, that sounds a lot like racial profiling to me.”

“Kitsune are urban legends. I haven’t heard of a single hunter ever coming across an actual kitsune in all the research that I’ve done. Trust me, I’ve had to research a lot of random old stories whenever we come across something I couldn’t identify on my own. There hasn’t been one story, not one.”

“Yeah, well, we prefer it that way. We’re not exactly large in numbers, you know. Never have been, but after hunters became a worldwide affair, we had to play dead. We’ve never been very popular, even by supernatural standards. There’s not a werewolf alive who wouldn’t sell us out if they knew we were around. They’ve never liked us because we don’t ‘fight fair.’ And we both know a vampire would sell their mother out to save their own skin, and most probably have.”

He kept the bottle gripped in his hand as he took another step back. “So, here’s my first question, why do all this? Why not just kill us? You had me here twice, vulnerable and easy to kill.”

“Would you believe me if I said because I wanted to play with my food?”

“What, changing your story already? You said you don’t do that.”

Nic sighed. “Fine, fine. Part of it is because I couldn’t help myself. One little sneak peek through your files and you two fled here. I was a little intrigued and wanted to see what I could get away with. That and, I don’t know, maybe I wanted to see if you guys really were a threat to me. Those other two? They knew what I was, and they were trying to kill me. I knew that for a fact. You two, though? I wanted to be sure. Don’t see the point in killing a couple of bumbling hunters who don’t know any better.”

“So, yes, you were playing with your food.”

“Look, werewolves can’t help but try to kill things that get in their way, vampires can’t help but play games with one another, and kitsune can’t help but play tricks and mess with people. It’s what we do.”

They were supposed to be trickster spirits too, but that was obviously only partly true since Nic was definitely corporeal. The story of them being afraid of gold was true too, since Nic had been afraid of that blade. They were also supposed to be punishers of the vain and greedy, the capricious and slippery.

“You could throw off my senses,” Lucas stated simply, realizing now that he could definitely sense something supernatural about Nic.

“If I tried, we’re good at hiding and disguising ourselves. Kinda gave myself away a bit at the other two hunters’ room. I thought you were following the trail or something.”

“You were able to hunt us down wherever we went, but you didn’t know I couldn’t sense what you are?”

Nic sighed. “Look, every supernatural creature doesn’t know everything about every other supernatural creature. I don’t know much about you except you can sense non-humans, and that you can make a good guess about what those non-humans are. That’s about it, I was working with limited info.”

“Where did you get this information?”

“A…source.”

Lucas frowned. “A person.”

“One of my own,” Nic admitted slowly. “She’s been giving me information for years.”

“Information on hunters.”

“Not just hunters, but she helped me a lot with those two I got in the motel. She knew they were onto me before I did, and then warned me about you two. I don’t hunt hunters, just those that go too far. Though I gotta say, your boy seems like the type who would go too far. I was raised to believe everything has a place, and only those that step out of their place deserve to be punished or killed. But he just wants to kill everything that isn’t human.”

It was a philosophy that Lucas had heard before, though not from anyone who had actively practiced the belief. It was an old-world school of thought that believed even the supernatural had a place in the world. That just as humanity might view a spider or shark as a danger, they were still part of an ecosystem, and a necessary part nonetheless. To throw even one species into extinction could tip the balance and send everything into chaos. He wasn’t quite sold on the idea and never had been, though he could understand the logic behind it. These creatures had been around for as long as humans could speak and write about them, so it could make sense to think of them as an unknown and dangerous part of the world.

“You leave him out of this,” Lucas growled, realizing suddenly what had been happening. “You’ve been playing us against each other.”

“Hey, to be fair, you two haven’t required much work in that area. You guys are the weirdest duo ever, you know that? It’s like, you two are tight, really close, and dangerous together. But I stir things up a little and you’re at each other’s throats, even while you’ve got each other’s backs. Hell, you raised your stupid bottle when I brought him up. You two have serious issues to work through.”

That was true, but it didn’t mean he wanted to hear it from Nic. “You heard me.”

“Look, my element of surprise has been totally ruined, and I went and ran my mouth off about what I am and a bit of what I’m about. I’m obviously not looking to kill you guys at this moment. I mean, are you still a threat to me?”

Lucas leaned back to ease his butt onto the back of a plush chair, not willing to relax just yet. “If what you’re saying is true, I’m not an immediate threat. I’m not a fan of the fact that you’ve tried to kill us and get between us. But if what you’re saying is true, you’ve been getting some misleading information on what we were there for. We were there because two hunters had been killed, and we were trying to figure out what had done it, without too much success at first.”

Nic tapped the bottom of his glass on the bar in a steady a rhythm. “Until I show up and spook you guys because I thought you guys already had all you needed to come after me.”

“Which you believed because…”

“My contact told me.”

Lucas raised a brow. “The same contact that told you Toby and David knew what you were?”

“And that they were after me, and knew how to kill me, yeah.”

“Sounds as if you were setup, and us along with you.”

Nic frowned, releasing the glass with a push of his fingers. “That doesn’t make sense. She and I have worked together for years and she’s never led me wrong.”

“As far as you know.”

“Okay, as far as I know. But why set me up? Why send me after two pairs of hunters? What the hell did I do? Or what the hell did you two do? Or those other two for that matter. She’s always had accurate information; the woman has a whole world of information she gives out to me. I can’t read her since it’s only over the phone. She might be one of my kind, but a kitsune can read another kitsune pretty good.”

“So, you speak to this woman over the phone and that’s it? And she just gives you this information? There must be a lot of trust between your kind.”

Nic laughed, the same wild quality to it that he’d had from the beginning. “Give it to me? Naw, it’s not as free as you think. We’re really big on information, and we trade it around. I give her tidbits that I find out, and she gives me tidbits of her own. She gets really personal sometimes though, when she’s not being sassy about it.”

It felt as if ice ran down Lucas spine, and he straightened. “This woman, what’s her name?”

Nic eyed him, his eyes almost seeming to glow again as he caught Lucas’ tension. “I don’t know her actual name, just what I think is her code name. Kitsune aren’t exactly known for being free about their names and…well, anything personal really.”

Lucas gripped the bottle tighter, praying silently he was wrong. “The code name, what is it?”

Still looking at Lucas like he had lost his mind, Nic shrugged as if the answer was as irrelevant to the conversation as the price of tea in China. “Ana.”