Saturday Night Séance

seemed to think her answer over. "Your world has never been too kind to magic, and such abilities can make life difficult for those who possess them. All worlds are fraught with dangers both small and great. Some of the dangers are more easily fought than others. A world unkind to magic is vulnerable to magical dangers. I did not know exactly what would become of my children, but I did suspect they would possess abilities that might be useful in fighting magical dangers."

  "Thank you," she replied politely, taking this as a roundabout way of saying 'yes.'

  "But such information should show you how important blood is to magic, at least in my kind. Some of my daughters had a much stronger manifestation of magical ability than others, but none had no manifestation, until your mother." The kitsune shook her head. "The world was so much smaller when I first visited it. Sometimes it was too small and the blood mingled too closely and children did not survive. But technology opened up the world and your grandmother Ami married completely outside the historically available bloodlines. She had sons! Not until that generation did any of my daughters have sons! Two sons and finally one daughter and she had no manifestation of ability at all. I was greatly despaired. The line, I was certain, was broken."

  "But you must have hundreds of descendants. Grandmother Ami was one of three daughters, and Great-aunt Michiru and Great-aunt Reiko lived in Japan their entire lives," Isabella said.

  "It is true, but such a thing still worried me. Ami was the first but I had no doubt she would not be the last to move outside the family circle. Two sons and a daughter with not even the least expression of ability," the kitsune sighed. "And the sons had sons, but the daughter had a daughter. I had frankly given up hope but when I realized Ami was teaching you the traditional family magic, I took interest again. The manifestation of ability is fairly typical of my line. I'm quite surprised to see you have more than one tail. That's more than I ever expected, and you are so young. But you have fallen in with interesting people. My daughters have worked with others with ability, but only with family for a long period of time. Yet you travel with these other three young women and work with them to fight magical dangers. This may explain how you've so quickly grown into your power."

  "About my friends..." Isabella prompted.

  The kitsune sort of sighed again. "Such impatience. Although I am not necessarily happy with you straying from the traditional family magic, I can see how this would happen with such a large world and so much information open to you. But I know you have to find your own way in this world. These other women complement your ability, knowledge, and strengths. That is part of the reason I am helping you, and by extension them, right now."

  "Thank you."

  "Enough family history. To the problem at hand, which is why you are not in your human form and where your friends are. Have you ever heard of a type of spirit generally referred to as a collector?"

  Isabella shook her head in the negative.

  "Collectors come from a shadowy part of the spirit world that is also near the dream realm. The creatures that dwell there tend to express what you would consider darker human emotions such as hate, anger, greed, or fear. Collectors collect things. Their entire purpose of their existence is to collect one of whatever thing they've decided to collect."

  "Why?"

  "They think a complete collection will cause them to transcend into some new, better form. I don't know if this is true."

  "How do they know if their collection is complete? I mean, the Post Office issues new collectable stamps every year," Isabella said.

  "Well, I can only assume they know what is complete, but I agree it seems some collections could be infinite. I also don't know how they decide what they will collect but it must be something no one else is collecting or has collected. I do know they can stop collecting one thing and start collecting a new thing, but they don't like to waste time doing that. The ones that choose inanimate objects or knowledges are generally less dangerous than ones that choose sentient life."

  "Is that what happened to the others?"

  "Patience, Daughter, patience. You have encountered a particularly dangerous type of collector. This one collects certain kinds of human souls. Now, what does this suggest to you?"

  Isabella was frustrated the kitsune wouldn't just give her all the information, but she realized the kitsune probably valued cleverness, so she just took some deep breaths and gave the matter some thought. "Okay, so this spirit must have some way of finding souls that it thinks might be what it wants, but it doesn't know for sure or I wouldn't be like this. So it finds souls and then does some kind of magic to force the soul to take a shape." She looked down at her paws. "I'm not sure I believe my soul is actually this shape, but that doesn't matter. So either my body has been forced into this shape, or my soul has somehow been removed from my body, which I don't want to think about. The others' souls must have been whatever shape it wanted, and it just left me here. Which means when I find it I may find other captured souls. Oh, this could get ugly." She started pacing back and forth. "I don't have my charms or other props, but maybe my magic is stronger like this and in this spirit realm. Well, I'll have to hope so. Does that sound right?" She turned but the kitsune was gone. "Great." First, she drew a series of kanji in the air as a protection spell. To her surprise, the symbols visibly glowed as she wrote them and she hoped that was a sign she was right. Then she scratched out a series of kanji in the dirt as kind of a locator spell. The kanji glowed briefly and a breeze passed by her and picked up some fallen leaves. The leaves turned over and over in the breeze but did not drop or move, so Isabella decided her spell was working. "Wherever the wind takes me," she thought.

  The leaves did start to move in a direction and she followed them through the pathless underbrush and bracken. She was worried there were predators in the woods, but could only hope her protection spell was sufficient. It seemed like she followed the leaves for a long time before they finally halted around a large tree that looked to be oak but probably wasn't. The breeze wound the leaves up the tree and she could see a crude treehouse. Then the spell ended and the leaves settled gently on the ground.

  The trunk was straight and smooth for thirty feet. "Great. I'm pretty sure even here I can't fly," she thought. A flash of movement caught her eye and she looked up to see the kitsune sitting on a tree branch that was clearly much too high for jumping. The kitsune jumped and very clearly flew to another, higher tree branch. The creature looked down at Isabella and vanished. "Okay, so some traditions say that kitsune can fly, but I'm not really a kitsune." She looked at her paws. "But I guess it doesn't hurt to try." She thought for a moment. "I don't even begin to know how to do this? What was Leah told me in that Douglas Adams' book? Flying is jumping and missing the ground." She took a breath, jumped as high as she could into the air, and to her complete surprise, missed the ground. She got control of herself and flew to the crude treehouse.

  Her initial impression of a crudely constructed treehouse had been correct. It looked like one small hut made from badly sawn boards that weren't straight. The roof was made from boards covered with hay or thatch. The door frame was crooked and so was the door, and not in the same way so the door didn't fit. There were two holes in the walls that she assumed served as windows although there was no glass; they were covered with some kind of cloth.

  "Some other legends say kitsune can turn invisible. That would be really handy right now." She closed her eyes and concentrated. She felt a bit cold and when she opened her eyes she couldn't see her paws. "This is just too weird," she thought, and flew in through the open window.

  The inside of the treehouse was larger than the outside. She was in a room she might call a living room or a den. It had a fireplace with no fire, a chair and a footstool, and from the boards in the ceiling dangled crudely constructed birdcages of differing sizes. All of them were empty except for three. There was a common raven, a white ringneck
dove, and a red and gold bird the size of a peregrine falcon. As the red and gold bird appeared to be on fire, Isabella guessed it was a phoenix. She also guessed these were her friends. There were two doors on the right side of the living room area. One was closed and the other was open; she crept up to the open one.

  The small room was darker than the living room, although Isabella could see fine. There appeared to her eyes to be a four or five year old human child wearing Victorian-era clothes sitting cross-legged at a low, round table. Between the youth of the child and the oddity of the clothing, she couldn't tell if it was male or female.

  "It's not a human at all," she reminded herself. "This is just what I'm interpreting. This must be the collector." She flew up a little bit in the door way to see more of the table which dominated the room.

  The walls of the room were painted dark blue, although the paint job wasn't very good. There were no windows at all in this room. There were crystals hanging from the ceiling over the table. Now that she could see it properly, she realized it wasn't a table. It was more like a kind of compass or star chart. There was a complex series of glowing dots connected by thin, differently colored