Page 24 of Found in Obscurity

Lorin smiled, grabbing his phone and getting back to his feet. “How about we make some food, Kit?”

Kit padded over and pawed a cupboard open, sticking his nose inside. Lorin hooked him back out with a hand under his belly and hind legs.

“I meant ‘we’ as in me. Get your snout out of there, it’s unsanitary and I just spent hours cleaning.”

Kit seemed offended by that.

“What? I don’t know where you’ve been. No one knows where you even came from.”

The fox still gave him a baleful stare.

“How about I make it up to you by making you an extra big dinner? We kinda skipped lunch, and crying makes me hungry.” He tried for levity, but it fell flat.

Why was he trying to tell jokes to a fox in the first place?

He rolled his eyes at himself and walked to the cupboards. There were some cans of soup and some fresh bread hisgrandma had left him that looked appetizing enough until he could go to the store himself.

But that left him with another dilemma.

“Uhhh…what do you actually eat?”

He looked down at the fox, who simply stared back up at him, his right ear twitching.

Lorin consulted his phone again, refusing to call his grandma and getting another earful from her. He pursed his lips as he read through the info. “The arctic fox’s main source of food is…lemmings. What the hell are lemmings?”

He looked back at the fox as if he could tell him the answer and found Kit had disappeared from his spot. Lorin glanced around himself in panic until he spotted the end of a fluffy tail in the same cupboard Lorin had pulled him out of earlier.

The little brat.

Lorin stomped over and pulled the door open, not actually going so far to pull the fox out by his tail, though it was tempting. He found Kit sniffing around a nondescript container, trying to scratch and gnaw it open with sharp little teeth. He didn’t even have the decency to stop when Lorin caught him.

Lorin pried the container out of his cheeky grasp.

“What’s even in here that you want so bad?”

He unclipped the plastic clasp and the smell that greeted him made him gag. Raw fish. He held it away from his face at arm’s length, watching as Kit tried to hop up and grab the bottom of it.

Holding one hand over his nose and mouth, Lorin set the thing on the floor. “Knock yourself out.”

Kit did, shoving his face into the container and gobbling down the fish. Lorin noticed that they had been deboned, but the heads and tails were still intact.

Ugh.

He turned away from the ravenous eating, grateful his grandma had at least prepped that much. Lorin would have tofigure it out for the future, but she hadn’t left him high and dry while giving him her tailor made ‘sink or swim’ tough love.

He located a saucepan and checked that the water collector was working. It was, so he washed the pan and dried it before setting the soup to boil. He cut some bread while he waited, nibbling on a few crunchy corner pieces as his eyes strayed back to Kit. Just watching.

It was soothing in its own way.

He wondered if other witches got as much calm just from watching their familiar eat. The knowledge that he was taking care of Kit was a warm and bright light inside his chest. His fingers twitched with the urge to pet, and he looked down at them, realizing then that he hadn’t put his glove back on his left hand—the one the fox had pulled off.

He stared down at his fingertips for the first time since he’d found his familiar and cemented his power irrevocably. The black creeping over his nail beds was noticeably a little higher, the coloring darker, a sooty black. Not as abyssal as his grandma’s, but definitely stronger.

His nails had grown too, sharp and dangerous looking. He could feel the dull ache from his right hand where the nails there were still confined, longing to be free.

He moved each finger slowly, like playing keys on a piano, catching a glimpse of something new crawling over the space between the second and third knuckles on his pinky finger.

A splash of hot soup bubbling up and spitting on his arm tore him away from his observations. He hissed at the sting, moving the pan off the small electric burner and rubbing at the spot on his forearm.