What is Your Desire?

Chapter Three

Takehiko

"Hello, Kazumi," I greet him as if it's a perfectly normal thing to wander into a petal-strewn grove of a kitsune while on a class trip.

His gaze lifts slowly from the shamisen resting delicately in his lap. And my breath catches. His eyes are not the amber or earthen color you would expect of a fox. Instead, they're a striking cornflower blue like a cloudless summer day.

"Hello, child of man," he greets me in return.

His hair is just as brilliantly red as his tail and ears. The bright rust color of harvest leaves.

He sets the shamisen gently beside his feet. "And by what name are you called?"

I expected a monster—I don't know why. But he is no monster. In fact, he's probably the most beautiful thing I've seen in my whole damn life. And I think he knows it.

Jingle. Jingle jingle. Jingle.

He asked me something—what was it? Oh, my name.

"Takehiko. Takehiko Fujioka."

Kazumi's blue-eyed gaze drifts from mine as he extends a hand. "I see that you have come to return what was lost to me."

I follow his gaze and realize it is fixed on the gold bells. My bells. The ones that always hung in my Gran's little room of treasures as she called it. The ones she kept beside her shamisen until the day she...

Died.

"I have," I reply cautiously as I sweep my gaze back up toward him. But I make no move to hand them over.

Kazumi's cornflower blue eyes drift back up to mine. There's a hunger in them that is almost terrifying. Like he might devour me whole if I hesitate too long in handing them over to him.

Devourer of Hearts.

"You'll want a boon, no doubt, for their return."

It's not a question.

He continues on after a moment, "Since you're here I'll assume you're aware of what I can do."

"You grant wishes." I try not to sound stupid as I say it. It sounds too impossible to be true.

He laughs. A trilling sound like water splashing over rocks in a stream. It makes me want to come closer.

It makes me want to do anything to hear it again.

Kazumi smiles at me in a way that makes my heart beat faster. "I can grant your heart's fondest desire, Takehiko."

I swallow hard. "Alright."

We both stand there in a silent moment.

Finally, he sighs. "I'll need that back first," he says nodding toward the bells.

"These?" I hold them up. "Why?"

He raises a brow. "Why do you think?"

It hits me like chilly water thrown in your face.

"They hold your power."

His smile is crooked and only slightly smug. "Clever boy."

I'm not clever at all. I'm downright suicidal. I just waltzed into a kitsune's den and jingled the source of its power in its face. Power he's been bared from for gods only knows how long. I'm lucky I'm not bleeding out at his feet already.

I am supremely screwed.

He saunters toward me and my heart starts thumping an ever-quickening drumbeat.