07 The Return_ Midnight - L. J. Smith

There was also a picture of a pair of kitsune statues, in their fox forms. Each had a front
paw resting on a star ball.
Three years ago, Meredith had fractured her leg when she was on a skiing trip with her
cousins in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She had run straight into a small tree. No martial arts skills
could save her at the last minute; she knew she was skiing off the groomed areas, where she could run
into anything: powder, crud, or iced-over ruts. And, of course, trees. Lots of trees. She was an
advanced skier, but she had been going too fast, looking in the wrong direction, and the next thing she
knew, she was skiing into the tree instead of around it.
Now she had the same sensation of waking up after a head-on into wood. The shock, the
dizziness and nausea that were, initially, worse than the pain. Meredith could take pain. But the
pounding in her head, the sickening awareness that she had made a big mistake and that she was going
to have to pay for it were unbearable. Plus there was a curious horror about the knowledge that her
own legs wouldn’t hold her up. Even the same useless questions ran through her subconscious, like:
How could I be so stupid? Is this possibly a dream? and, Please, God, can I hit the Undo button?
Meredith suddenly realized that she was being supported on either side by Mrs. Flowers
and their sixteen-year-old, Ava Wakefield. The mobile was on the cement floor of the basement. She
must have actually started to black out. Several of the younger kids were screaming Matt’s name.
“No—I—I can stand up alone…” All she wanted in the world was to go into the
darkness and get away from this horror. She wanted to let her legs go slack and her mind go blank, to
flee…
But she couldn’t run away. She had taken the stave; she had taken the Duty from her
grandfather. Anything supernatural that was out to harm Fell’s Church on her watch was her problem.
And the problem was that her watch never ended.
Matt came clattering down the stairs, carrying their seven-year-old, Hailey, who
continually shook with petit mal seizures.
“Meredith!” She could hear the incredulity in his voice. “What is it? What did you find,
for God’s sake?”
“Come…look.” Meredith was remembering detail after detail that should have set off
warning bells in her mind. Matt was somehow already beside her, even as she remembered Bonnie’s
very first description of Isobel Saitou.
“The quiet type. Hard to get to know. Shy. And…nice.”
And that first visit to the Saitou house. The horror that quiet, shy, nice Isobel Saitou had
become: the Goddess of Piercing, blood and pus oozing from every hole. And when they had tried to
carry dinner to her old, old grandmother, Meredith had noticed absently that Isobel’s room was right
under the doll-like old lady’s. After seeing Isobel pierced and clearly unbalanced, Meredith had
assumed that any evil influence must be trying to travel up, and had worried in the back of her mind
about the poor, old, doll-sized grandmother. But the evil could just as easily have traveled down.
Maybe Jim Bryce hadn’t given Isobel the malach madness after all. Maybe she had given it to him,
and he had given it to Caroline and to his sister.
And that children’s game! The cruel, cruel song that Obaasan—that Inari-Obaasan had
crooned. “Fox and turtle had a race…” And her words: “There’s a kitsune involved in this
somewhere.” She’d been laughing at them, amusing herself! Come to that, it was from Inari-Obaasan
that Meredith had first heard the word “kitsune.”
And one more additional cruelty, that Meredith had only been able to excuse before by
assuming Obaasan had very poor sight. That night, Meredith had had her back to the door and so had