The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox

Chapter 98: Rock Macaques Are Smarter Than They Look

For the first time since I'd met her – and apparently since the farmhand, Floridiana, and even the Jeks had known her – Bobo looked like the venomous viper she was.

Balancing on her tail, she raised herself to eye level with the ex-soldier. "Why did you run away during the battle?"

Maca actually backed up. "I didn't run away! I didn't!" she insisted, but her defensiveness confirmed that she had. "I was there all the way until the end! I saw that turtle get eaten. I was on the ice when it happened!"

Bobo swayed from side to side in a hypnotic "no." "I don't mean the end of the battle. I mean the beginning. You abandoned the Emisssary in the river and ssswam away. Why did you ssswim away?"

"Oh, that – I – it was the middle of a battle! I had to make an on-the-spot decision! That turtle already got Lord Silurus out of his hole. We didn't need her anymore!"

A gasp from all the humans present. Jettisoning the Emissary from Heaven like last night's garbage? O, the sacrilege!

I, on the other hand, wasn't the least bit surprised. Maca was a demon, after all. What else would you expect from a demon?

"You thought we didn't need the Emissary from Heaven anymore, so it was okay to feed her to Lord Silurus?" Mistress Jek demanded.

A demon shouldn't have bothered justifying herself, but Maca fumbled for words anyway. "No – no? Look, she was just a turtle! It wasn't like she could fight or anything! And – and – she was sent by Heaven! Heaven wouldn't have let her die!"

(How very naïve if that were how she thought Heaven operated. I could almost forgive her for abandoning me – if it hadn't gotten Stripey killed.)

In the face of all the incredulous stares, she hung her head.

"You got Ssstripey killed." Bobo's voice was raw. "You abandoned her, so he had to go to sssave her, and Lord Sssilurus ate him. You got Ssstripey killed."

"Stripey?" The name didn't ring any bells for Maca, and for a moment, I thought Bobo was going to strike. "Oh, you mean the duck demon bandit?"

"Yesss. Ssstripey. The whissstling duck. He was my bessst friend."

"He saved us from starving to death," Mistress Jek added.

"He was also a member of the taskforce," Floridiana put in.

Maca looked blank at that. She must have ranked so low that she hadn't known what her leadership was up to. But while I could pardon her for not understanding what Stripey had meant to the people of Claymouth, I could not forgive her for getting him killed.

"Hold on." The farmhand, who'd been watching silently up until now, finally realized that this job interview wasn't going well at all and that maybe he should step in. "That's not fair. Maca didn't kill him on purpose. In fact, she didn't kill him at all!"

"But ssshe ran away, didn't ssshe? Ssshe abandoned her duties and ran away. What kind of sssoldier runs away at the firssst sssign of danger?" In a flash, Bobo was in his face, making him flinch too.

"See here! Her duty was to get the catfish out of his hole! Which she did! The duck demons were there to get the turtle out!"

The ducks were there to get me out? What was he talking about – oh. That was kind of true. That had been why Stripey and the ducks were in the river in the first place. But they were supposed to be backup, there to extract me only if everything went not only sideways but also backwards and upside down. Which, I supposed, it had, from Maca's perspective, after Lord Silurus ate two of her comrades and started chasing us up the river.