Flowers,
Stefan—who’d helped move large furniture into it—and now Matt, no
one had even been in for as long as Mrs. Flowers could remember.
Matt clung to this. He had been, slowly but surely, reading through
the material Meredith had researched and one precious excerpt had
meant a lot to him and Mrs. Flowers. It was the reason they were able to
sleep at night, when the voices came.
The kitsune is often thought to be a sort of cousin to Western
vampires, seducing chosen men (as most fox spirits take on a female
form) and feeding directly on their chi, or life spirit, without the
intermediary of blood. Thus one may make a case that they are bound by
similar rules to the vampire. For example, they cannot enter human
dwellings without invitation…
And oh, the voices…
He was profoundly glad now that he’d taken Meredith and
Bonnie’s advice and gone to Mrs. Flowers’s first before going home.
The girls had convinced him he’d only be putting his parents in danger
by facing up to the lynch mob that awaited him, ready to kill him for
allegedly assaulting Caroline. Caroline seemed to have found him at the
boardinghouse immediately, anyway, but she never brought any kind of
mob with her. Matt thought that perhaps it was because that would have
been useless.
He had no idea what might have happened if the voices had