Some fox said hatred smelled like burning trash, an overflowing cesspit and a battlefield rotting in the summer heat rolled into one. That’s what demonic miasma corroding the soul smelled like.

But it wasn’t the scent that made Kuro curl in on himself. It was their eyes. Always their eyes.

Kuro’s fox ears swivelled, but there was no murmur, no shuffle of sandals, no coughs to be heard on Merchant Road. The surrounding commoners held their breath, but their eyes said it all.

Black fur.

Misfortune.

Demon.

Night Parade.

Kill it.

He knew those eyes, like he knew humans. His fox ears pinned back, his shoulders hunching. Alone, a human would flee. But together, fear spiking their scent, they’d swarm.

The girl crouched on her feet, hands propping her up. The girl that Ren had revealed a sword to save, that Kuro had risked his life to shove out of the samurai’s grasp. The girl who had broken through Kuro’s disguise as easily as breaking twigs.

Her eyes were the worst of them all. Kuro had seen such hate, such disgust, only once. The last time he’d seen his mother.

Kuro bared his teeth at the humans. They all maintained their distance. But they only needed one human to step forward. One human to dare. Then like a pack of dogs, they’d leap upon their prey. Later, they’d explain away their cruelty by telling themselves they were protecting their homes and families from the Night Parade.

From the Black Kitsune. Because all Black Kitsune deserved to be killed just for existing. Deserved to be held under the water as the ice cold river stole his heat away, soaked through his fur and weighed him down, as he used up the air in his lungs, and no matter how much he squirmed and snapped his jaws, the hands were too strong on his scruff—

Kuro shook his head, ears flopping before they flattened against his head, ready for human claws to scrape across his skull. He couldn’t get lost in the past like this. He needed to think. He was a fox, cleverer than this pack of humans put together, cleverer than even an earth of foxes.

He reached into his kimono collar. The maple leaf he withdrew crumbled where the points had touched the cloth, but it was good enough. He placed it on his head and clapped. Smoke plumed around him, hiding his real ears and tail under a human veneer. He wasn’t stupid enough to try for a full human transformation, not in front of witnesses.

“Kuro.” Ren stepped and reached for him.

Kuro slapped his hand away. He bared his teeth at the nearest humans. They weren’t so far gone in their blood lust that they challenged him. One woman shrieked and the rest flinched away. Kuro didn’t bother to pretend he was human. He ran through them, using his hands as well as his feet. He moved faster that way.

The humans jumped away from his sudden attack. He spurted into the empty lane behind them.

How long did he have? The retainers would return with their superiors in minutes, perhaps less. The humans would trip over themselves to tell them that the very worst had appeared in their Capital — a Black Kitsune. They’d chase after him, and call for even more reinforcements. Perhaps every samurai in the Capital, even the Shogun. Especially the Shogun. Kuro shuddered as he ran. The Shogun was ancient for a human, but he had slaughtered hundreds of demons older and more powerful than Kuro.

If the samurai didn’t run him to exhaustion, if he somehow escaped, the notices would go out. His bounty would be enough for Kuro to buy his own mountain and build a shrine, if he were stupid enough to turn himself in. No corner of the Empire would be safe.

What was he supposed to do? Tears dotted his eyes as he ran. He was already so tired from the chase before.

Survive. That’s what he’d always done, and always would. Escape for now. Hide himself. Worry about the rest later, because if he thought about it, the future would crash down on his shoulders so hard he’d hesitate. Then he wouldn’t even have a future.

Kuro’s human ears only picked up half of what his fox ears did, but even with that disability, he caught sandals running after him. Already? He strained for the click of dog claws, but only one pair of sandals followed him.

He could take care of one samurai. He darted into an abandoned alley stinking of scat and urine. If Kuro stretched out his arm, he could brush fingertips along both rows of barred doors, the shop signs overhead ripped down as the rice famine destroyed fortunes. Lucky for Kuro, though, since the small space curtailed the samurai’s advantage.

He slid into a nook of a sliding door, the shop front jutting out to hide him. The nook would gift him precious seconds, perhaps long enough for him to pounce. He wasn’t naive enough to imagine the samurai would ignore the nooks a second time.

The footsteps pounded around the corner, lighter than the retainers’. More like a samurai of rank and skill. Kuro tensed. He should have kept running.

The scent of incense rounded the edge first. The human appeared seconds after.

Kuro groaned. “Ren!”

“Kuro.” Ren nodded. He held his sheathed sword in one hand. “We don’t have much time.”

Of course they didn’t. That’s what Kuro had been trying to tell him, but no, Ren had insisted they save the girl too. The girl who despised demons and stripped Kuro of his disguise. The girl who condemned him to death.

Kuro wrenched himself away from the human. The alley swerved into a not-so-fortunate lane of townhouses. Curious humans kneeling around their cooking fires craned their necks to gawk at him. Then, as Ren followed three steps behind, their jaws dropped.

His own jaw set against cursing, Kuro ducked another way, then another, trying to lose Ren in the maze of back alleys, but Ren dogged him.

Reaching another closed shop, Kuro slid to a stop and whirled on him with a high keening noise. “Stop following me!”

“We need to stick together.”

“No, we don’t!” Kuro shook his hands at Ren. “We need to get away from the samurai. I need to disappear. I can’t do that with you bumbling along behind me, flashing your sword for every human to see.”

“Then we need to get you somewhere safe.”

“Are you listening to me?” Kuro demanded. “There’s no we. ‘We’ ended when you insisted we save that girl. When you insisted on waving your bloody sword at the samurai! I was free!”

Damn, beads appeared at the corners of his eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his palm and glared at Ren. If Ren said so much as one word about it, Kuro would bite off his nose.

“I got away from those retainers. I tricked them off my trail. But oh no, idiot human Ren has to wave his arse in their faces.”

Ren remained placid, refusing to look guilt-ridden. “We couldn’t let them torture that girl.”

“Of course we could,” Kuro said. “She would have left you, even after you saved her.”

“Because she’s a servant and no match for the samurai—”

“No!” Kuro snapped the word.

Ren’s eyes widened in surprise. Kuro hadn’t bothered to soften his disavowal like any polite human or spirit would. Saying anything that might sound like agreement, but really saying no. Kuro had told him no with no room for wiggling.

“No, she wouldn’t have,” he continued. “And I definitely shouldn’t have bothered. I should have left you there for being so stupid. I should have looked out only for myself. This is what I get for trying to save a human. For looking out for someone else.”

Because that was the real problem. Ren was a stupid human, but that hadn’t been Kuro’s problem until it had rubbed off on Kuro. The problem was that Kuro had been stupid.

“But—” Ren started.

Kuro didn’t want to hear whatever stupidity Ren had ripped from the epics. He ran for the next crossroads, and down the left.

“Oi!” Ren called, chasing after him.

Yelling alerted the samurai to a disturbance. Kuro bit back a cry of despair. He snapped quietly over his shoulder, “Stop it.”

Ren shook his head, and stubbornly followed.

“Stop following me.” Kuro darted down another road.

But Ren continued behind him. “We’re better off together.”

Kuro wrinkled his nose and bit back a cry. “Then ditch the sword.”

Ren backed up a step, clutching the sword to his chest.

“Give it here.” Kuro held out his hand.

“It’s mine.”

“You stole it,” Kuro said. “So steal another one when this is over.”

“I can’t.”

“Look, I’m only going to explain this once, so listen. Carrying that sword around, you might as well be yelling at everyone, ‘Look at me, I want to be arrested and tortured and exiled. So please send the samurai after me.’”

Ren looked down at his sword. At least now he had the good sense to look guilty. But he tightened his grip on the sheath.

Kuro exhaled, then reached for the sword. One on one, he’d be stronger than this rice stalk excuse for a human.

“Don’t!” Ren warned.

Kuro rapped him on the knuckles hard enough to make Ren release the sword. He snatched it up before Ren fumbled for a new grip. Kuro jumped back two steps, then aimed the sword to throw it over the fence.

“That’s quite enough of that,” a spirit said.

Kuro glanced behind him, and his jaw dropped. It was a tsukumogami, a sword with a living soul. When an object like a sword or a comb or a tea bowl survived one hundred years, they developed souls. If the object had been treated poorly or discarded without being taken to a shrine, the spirit became a demon. If the object had been well taken care of, like this sword, then the spirit turned beneficent. The object developed special powers, making them extremely valuable. The Kusanagi, for example, the famous sword the Storm God had pulled from the Eight-Tail Serpent’s tail, confirmed emperors.

The sheath burned Kuro’s fingers, forcing him to drop the sword. But to Kuro’s fox eyes, the sword unfurled into a human shape, dressed with an Imperial-style surcoat with a rectangular black hat covering his top knot. The spirit looked little older than Ren, but that was no true indication of a spirit’s age.

“Good afternoon, little fox.” The sword dipped his head in greeting.

Kuro snapped his jaw together. “Good afternoon.”

“Kuro?” Ren furrowed his brow. He couldn’t see the spirit.

“You really are an idiot,” Kuro told Ren. “You stole a tsukumogami.”

“He didn’t steal me,” the sword said.

“You expect me to believe that a merchant’s boy just happened to inherit you?”

“I do not.”

“Who are you talking to?” Ren looked around him. “Is there a ghost?”

Kuro rolled his eyes. Just when he thought that the human couldn’t say anything stupider, out it came. Although nothing compared to stealing an antique treasure like a tsukumogami. Whomever the sword belonged to would have Ren’s head cut off and stuck on a pole to rot over the bride.

But that was a problem for later. That list kept getting longer. Kuro beckoned for Ren to follow him.

Ren reached down for the sword, whose physical form must be somewhere beneath the skirts of the spirit’s ghostly hakama.

“Leave it,” Kuro told him.

“I beg your pardon?” The sword’s tone was as ice cold as drawn steel in a winter battle.

“We’re running for our lives, in case you weren’t listening,” Kuro told the sword. “You’re a dead giveaway.”

The sword narrowed its eyes. “This is my master, little fox, and you’d do best to mind me.”

“I’m stronger than you,” Kuro told him. “I actually have a form. All you can do is lie there.”

The sword didn’t answer, only curled his lips up into a smug smile. The kind that the most powerful of demons in the Night Parade used instead of blustering words.

Just how old was this sword? More than a few centuries. Ren might not have meant to steal it, and with the way he stumbled through life ignorant of consequences, he had probably just found the sword in a treasury, thought it neat, and walked out with it. Walked out with a sword that acted like a high-ranked demon.

If only Ren knew what he’d stolen. If only Ren could use it. If Kuro had his fox ears, they would have been pinned against his skull with dark thoughts. Ren could have slaughtered every samurai who tried to chase Kuro, since apparently the sword considered Ren his master. That must be why Ren could wield the sword better than a samurai. One of the sword’s powers must have given Ren the skill.

But since Ren was an idiot who had no idea what he had, never mind use it to its full potential, the sword remained a liability. An eccentric liability, since the sword had given itself to a commoner, but one that Kuro wouldn’t tolerate.

“Kuro?” Ren’s voice was deep, his head cocked.

Kuro hissed in a breath. He’d been so caught up in the argument with the sword, he hadn’t noticed the clatter of samurai sandals growing closer. The samurai were on his tail.

Ignorant humans and ensouled swords be damned, Kuro wasn’t letting them drag him down to his execution. “Stay with the sword, or leave it and come with me.”

Kuro didn’t wait for Ren to answer, but ran for the nearest crossroads. Ren would have only argued and wasted more time.

He turned down the alley, and slid to a stop, his heart pounding in his chest.

The two retainers slammed the street gate closed behind them. As soon as the lock clicked into place, the barrier activated with an electric pulse. With the barrier up, neither Kuro nor any other spirit could even jump over it.

The retainers and another samurai marched on Kuro, one hand on their hilts, the other holding dog leashes tight as their hunting dogs strained forward. The dogs’ musk smothered the street, flooding Kuro’s throat until he choked. One barked, and Kuro nearly shot out of his skin.

Kuro whirled, but more samurai and commoners flooded the alley behind him. The only space left empty were the high courtyard walls.

And the dogs were there on each side, preventing Kuro from rushing the humans. If he tried, they’d unhook the leashes. Kuro shivered from head to toe, phantom fangs biting his skin.

There was no escape. His body shook too hard to move. He was surrounded and helpless and alone, all because he’d met a stupid human.