A Fox's Love (American Kitsune Book 1) (3 page)

The first thing Kevin did was grab one of the cotton balls and pour a good deal of disinfectant on it. Carefully rolling the fox over a bit so that the injury on its torso was more easily accessible to him, Kevin began to clean the wound and surrounding fur.

The fox whimpered in pain as the ethanol did its work, killing off whatever harmful bacteria were around the wound. Being an alcohol based disinfectant Kevin knew that the stuff stung something fierce and was quick to apologize once more despite the fox not being awake to hear it, much less the fact that it wouldn't be able to understand what he was saying even if it
was
awake.

As the blood and grime covering the fox's torso got wiped away, Kevin was finally able to see the injury more clearly.

His stomach churned.

It was a rather nasty looking gash that reminded Kevin of the time he had been bitten by a pit bull that belonged to this grumpy old man. When he tried to pet it the animal had quite literally clamped its jaws onto his hand and tore into his flesh. He had needed somewhere around half a dozen stitches on each side of his hand for the damage to heal.

That was the only time any animal had ever bitten him before. He still had a memento of the wound in the form of a white scar on both sides of his hand near his thumb, a jagged, white line that stood out starkly against his tanned skin.

The longer he continued cleaning the wound the more he realized just how horrible the injury truly was. It was more than just a ragged gash. Whatever had done this had actually torn through some of its muscles as well, or was that just fatty tissue? It was hard to tell, since Kevin didn't know much about fox anatomy. Either way, he wasn't even sure stitching the wound shut would allow it to heal properly. And even if he had the necessary supplies, he knew next to nothing about stitching wounds.

This would require professional help.

Unfortunately, the nearest veterinary office was over fifteen miles away and he didn't think he would be able to make it on his bike before the kit died of blood loss. Maybe it was just him, because really, he couldn't see the fox's skin beneath all that fur, but the creature was beginning to look kind of pale.

Not knowing what to do, Kevin just kept cleaning the wound until he felt it was good enough to begin bandaging it up. He ended up going through eight cotton balls because there was so much blood and dirt covering the injury. Truth be told, he had expected to use more.

It was right after he had grabbed the bandages, but before he began wrapping the wound, that his eyes caught sight of something startling.

"What the heck...?" The young teen looked more closely at the wound, his eyes squinting.

He blinked several times, then rubbed his eyes to make sure he wasn't just seeing things. When he convinced himself that, no, he was not suffering from any kind of hallucination, and that, yes, what he was looking at really was happening, his eyes widened. The wound was healing! Slowly but surely the large gash on the fox's torso was closing up fast enough that Kevin could actually see the process happening. Small lines of skin that looked more like thread slowly stitched themselves across the fox's wound. There had to be at least six or seven of these 'threads' that were slowly weaving through the other threads and leaving behind perfect, unblemished skin that began growing sparse amounts of bright red fur soon after.

"What is this?" he asked under his breath. It was a question asked in rhetoric, as there was no one near him who could answer.

It was like watching a video of how a wound might heal if someone used a Curaga spell or something else from one of his video games. It was fascinating to watch, but Kevin wasn't thinking about how amazing the sight was. He was more startled than impressed.

What was going on? Was this fox some kind of ancient and powerful creature like those half demons he read about in his manga? Or was it some kind of government experiment that had managed to escape from a top secret lab somewhere? What if it had been injected with the T-virus and granted super human... um... super fox, healing abilities?

Kevin had obviously been playing way too much Resident Evil.

As he continued watching Kevin noticed that the wound was still very large and that the fox was beginning to breath much more heavily as the constant loss of blood began taking an even harsher toll on its body. If this kept up, super healing abilities or not, the fox wouldn't last much longer.

Deciding that he could think on what he was seeing later, Kevin began dressing the wound as best he could. He pressed the gauze against the bloody gash, putting as much pressure on it as he dared without aggravating the injury further to keep it from bleeding out anymore than it already had. After that he used the bandages and wrapped them tightly around the fox's torso to keep the gauze pad in place in an effort to help stem the flow of blood.

Several times while he worked the fox whimpered or yelped as he was forced to turn it over or accidentally pressed on the gauze and bandages too hard. Each time this happened, Kevin would flinch as if he could feel the fox's pain, and he whispered apology after apology. After what felt like hours of some of the most heart stopping and stressful work of his life (but in truth was only around five minutes) the wound was dressed to the best of his abilities.

Leaning forward with a frown of concentration Kevin checked over his job of dressing the wound. It was a pretty good patch up for an amateur if he did say so himself. Several gauze pads were pressed securely against the fox's torso where the injury was, and the bandages were wound around its body tightly enough to keep the gauze in place, but not so tight that it constricted the fox's breathing. If nothing else, it didn't look like any blood was leaking out, so Kevin felt he was in the clear.

Of course, that could be just because the wound itself was healing at an astounding rate. Sure, it was still pretty slow in some ways, comparatively speaking, but it was far above and beyond anything he had ever seen in anything less than a video game or anime. In either event, the bandage job should keep the fox from dying of blood loss until its healing ability could finish the job.

He very briefly thought of calling a vet, or taking the fox to the veterinarian himself, but in the end decided against it. If that fox was some kind of government experiment, then he didn't want to let anybody know about its existence.

Especially because it was such a cute little thing. There was no way he would let something so adorable get sent off to the labs to be experimented upon. Not in this life, or the next.

Kevin could only imagine what would happen if the government found out he had one of their experiments. He could just picture them beating down his door, arresting him for harboring a government project and taking the fox back with them to continue committing their inhumane torture on it.

In case you haven't already figured it out, Kevin's got a very...vivid imagination.

Sighing, Kevin rose to his feet and left his room. There really wasn't much more he could do right now―it would be up to the fox's strange healing powers to do the rest―and this whole incident had taxed him far more than he had realized.

Kevin found himself walking into the living room. As was the case with most apartments, the living room was connected to the kitchen via an open entryway that changed from beige carpeting to white tiles to show the shift in rooms. There was not much to note about the room other than the couch sitting against the northern wall near the entrance and the large, 62 inch, flat screen TV that hung from on opposite end, complete with several gaming consoles and surround sound speakers. Between the two, but closer to the couch, was a glass coffee table and on either side of the television was a pair of tall, steel lamps.

Kevin went to the couch, collapsing on it with an exhausted exhalation of breath. Raising a hand to cover his face, he closed his eyes and felt himself slowly drift off. He would just get a couple minutes of shut eye before deciding what he should do next.

He didn't know how long he had been asleep, but it must have at least been a couple of hours. When he woke up and looked at the clock, he saw that it was 12:30 in the afternoon. Having been in such a panic when he arrived home, he had lost track of what time he'd gotten back and how long he'd been trying to bandage up the fox, so now he couldn't say how long he'd been sleeping.

A growl alerted him to the fact that it was well past the time he normally ate lunch. Not being one to ignore his stomach, he got up from the couch and walked into the kitchen where he made himself something to eat: a plain ham sandwich with a lot of toppings that he scarfed down like a man dying of starvation.

Once satiated, Kevin went back to his room to check up on the fox. It was exactly where he had left it, laying on his bed, seemingly still unconscious. Walking over, he noticed immediately that the bandages had bleed through and would need to be changed. Glad that his forethought kept him from putting the first aid kit away, he got to work.

As he unwrapped the bandages, Kevin saw something that made him pause.

"Oh...!" he sounded surprised, "So you're a girl." He must have really been panicking if he had missed something like that. Naturally, the fox didn't reply, and Kevin finished unwrapping the bandages. Taking out more cotton-balls and disinfectant he began the task of cleaning the fox's skin and fur of blood again. Once all the blood was cleaned away, Kevin took a glance at the wound. Like last time it was closing up. In fact, it looked like the speed at which it was healing had increased. Where before it looked like the wound was closing in slow motion, now the skin was knitting together at an astonishing pace. The wound itself was almost healed over. The once jagged gash was now just a thin, red line. At the rate it was healing, Kevin doubted the fox would even have a scar.

With the fox seemingly out of danger, Kevin decided he needed to get out and do something to take his mind off all he had seen. A lot had happened today and he had been hit with quite a few surprises. And in moments like this, there was really only one place he would go to clear his head.

His decision made, Kevin stood back up and walked out of the room. As he shut the door behind him, he didn't notice the fox raise her head and watch him leave.

Too bad for him.

Chapter 3: Love at First Sight?

Kevin's finger automatically squeezed the trigger to the red, plastic gun he was using to shoot down the baddies on the screen, but neither his heart nor his mind were truly into it. The normally cathartic release that came from blowing the heads off of the zombies in his favorite arcade game was just not keeping his mind off the injured fox.

There was just something off about that fox. Granted, the super healing abilities kind of made that obvious, but still, he couldn't help but feel there was even more to that fox than he had already seen. Some secret he had yet to uncover, something so incomprehensible that it could cause his entire view of the world and even reality itself to shift in a way that would change his life forever.

Or he could just be acting paranoid. That was also a possibility.

"Hey man," Kevin turned his head to see a pair of brown eyes staring at him with brows furrowed in barely concealed annoyance. "Pay attention. You've nearly had your head bitten off by a bunch of zombies in just the last minute, and I'm not going to save your sorry ass every time something tries to kill you.”

Eric Corrompere was Kevin's best friend since childhood. They had met each other in elementary school and just sort of clicked. The two had been thick as thieves ever since. Or at least, they were, until Eric discovered the wonders of women, but that was a story for another time.

Eric had a head of short cut brown hair and dark eyes. He was very tall for a sophomore, standing nearly a head and a half taller than Kevin himself, and he was also very lanky. If Kevin was lean then Eric was a twig, with long, gangly arms and legs, and large feet. Like Kevin, Eric was very athletic and was on the Track and Field team with him.

He was also the biggest pervert Kevin had ever, and likely would ever, meet, and he had no compunctions against proclaiming it to the world. There had been many times when Eric had freely told anyone who was willing listen that he was a proud Super Pervert. Yes, he was
that
kind of person.

Personally, Kevin just thought he was trying to emulate his favorite anime character, Jabidaia, the mentor of Natsumo from
Shinobi Natsumo
, by acting like a perverted idiot, but that was a theory.

Eric's outgoing and perverse nature were probably the biggest difference between the two of them. Where Kevin was shy and could not talk to girls without his tongue getting tied and his stomach rebelling in the most unpleasant of ways, Eric would chase after girls like a dog chasing its tail, only he was ten times more lewd then dog could ever be.

And much like a dog can never seem to catch its tail, he had absolutely no success when it came to picking up girls, probably because most girls (and maybe even
all
girls) didn't like his open perverseness.

It didn't help his case that he had been caught trying to peek into the girls locker room several times since the start of the school year. Kevin was honestly surprised his friend had not gotten expelled for that. Then again, his dad was the Principle of their school so...