Page 24 of Nope, No Regrets
My mother was built exactly like me, and had her long white hair pulled up high and tight into a bun. Our facial features were similar, including my violet eyes, and it was clear that what I didn’t get from her came straight from my father. This was seriously happening. After so many years of wondering what they were like, they were suddenly right in front of me.
Supernaturals reached a certain point and stopped aging. My birth parents didn’t have a single gray hair or line around their eyes, unlike like my adoptive parents. Still, I could see kindness and wisdom in my father’s eyes. I’d wondered about them for so long, but I still had parents who raised me and supported me, even if they were super anal about me ever leaving our small town.
I was looking at two strangers with tears in their eyes who never had any of that. They had to send me to an entirely different realm to protect me from their other child. They didn’t bring another sibling in here. If it wasn’t safe for me, it probably wasn’t safe for future children either. They’d spent the last two decades worried about me, missing me, and wondering where they went wrong with Kudan.
I didn’t care if it wasn’t considered proper. I didn’t care if he was the emperor, and they probably tortured people here for just touching him. Every single scenario I ever planned… when I met them, I threw all those thoughts out the window. I jumped to my feet, burst into tears, and ran all the way across the room to fling myself at my father.
He caught me and squeezed me so tightly, I could hardly breathe. My mother joined in on the family hug, and this just felt soright. But I did have some questions. I understood why they did what they did, but I had a family back on Earth. We had our arguments, but I knew they loved me. I knew now the whole fight about me going away to college was because it was part of my adoption agreement, but something else had to have been said, because I was over eighteen then and so was old enough that no one could have taken me away from them.
They were intelligent people, so surely they would have known that. Something else had to have been said to them. Even though we argued a lot as I got older and wanted more freedom, they wouldn’t have just cut off all contact with me and disappeared like that, would they? When I found out I was adopted, they didn’t give me a ton of information, but they did tell me how much they wanted a child, and how hard it had been for them to adopt. They wouldn’t have just thrown eighteen years away because I wanted to go to college in another state.
I needed answers, but I also needed to just enjoy this. My father pulled away from me and tucked my hair behind my ear.
“We can’t tell you how proud we were when we found out you were the Silver Fox that stole from the Aether Circle… and three tails, already! That’s more than I had at your age, and I earned my nine fairly quickly.”
“We need to have a celebration. Rei-Sama is home, and she’s already a powerful Kitsune. She’s marked a wolf and will have strong mates at her side. We chose Sota, but I always knew she’d want to pick her own as well.”
Demon parents were fuckingweird.My human parents didn’t even like it when I wanted to go to a school dance with one boy, much less being up all night fucking and biting one. They didn’t want me dating at all. They certainly wouldn’t have thrown me a party because I made a prison harem! My human parents would have thrown my ass back in jail, not fawned all over me for successfully stealing from one of the most dangerous covens in the entire world.
“Heath and Marie are here, and they’redyingto be reunited with you again,” my mother said.
“Hold the fuck up a minute! What are my very human parents doing in Hell?”
My father led me back to the table and calmly started plating this food.
“Did you ever ask Heath what exactly he taught at the university?”
“He said political science, which sounded super dull so I wasn’t interested in infiltrating his office to snoop. He never talked about his classes around me either.”
My father winked at me, and my mother started laughing.
“That’s because your father was a professor of occult studies. We knew we wanted to place you with humans, and his papers and blog were pretty astute considering all the real things that go bump in the night and somehow stay hidden from humans. Heath and Marie were desperate to adopt, but all the agencies kept holding his brilliant work against him and claiming him being a Satanist made him unsuitable.
“Heath and Marie knew the truth, Rei. They wouldn’t announce anything and put you in danger, but they would have been honest if you came to them with questions. Didn’t you ever notice their backyard was such a wonderful place for a little fox to play in?” my mother said.
I think this was the most fucking stunned I’d even been in my entire life, including the time I turned into a fox for the first time. How did my dad run an entire occult blog and teach it every day, and I not know that? Was Ithatself-absorbed?
“I think you broke her,” Wren said.
“How?We ate dinner together every night. They were always so weird about me leaving, and things got tense as I got older, but we talked all the time. Why didn’t he tell me the truth about what he taught or at least let me read his blog?”
“That was his idea,” my father said. “He spent his life writing about the supernatural, but he didn’t expect it to send him an encoded message through his blog, offering his family the precious baby they so wanted if they would agree to keep her safe from other things that go bump in the night!
“He took the news with great honor. There was no terrified shrieking like you would expect from humans. He seemed more concerned that a demon baby was in danger than with getting all of his questions answered. We frequently emailed as you grew. You didn’t tell him, but he suspected your fox came out and had questions. Kitsune children are a handful, especially when other Kitsunes are raising them. You seemed to save your mischief until college.”
“We left things on bad terms, but why did they cut off all contact with me? Faust did some digging when I ended up at Silverhold. They moved, and he couldn’t find them. Are you telling me they were here?”
“They didn’t want to, Rei, but they are fragile humans. They protected you when you were too small to do it yourself. Then it was our turn to protect them. Sota fiercely hunted down your brother, but he proved slippery. He tried sending minions at me again, but eventually, he accepted he’d never get close enough to end my life.
“He started hunting you after that. You were going to be how he got close. Hell is a vast place, but we couldn’t discount him trying to get out and search other realms. IlikeHealth and Marie, and I appreciate them being there for you when we couldn’t.”
“Then I got busted, when I shifted into my fox so I could bite a witch and steal the amulet she was trying to steal, to get answers aboutyou.Thenmy mugshot ended up all over the news.”
“Most people try to look at least a little bit sorry in their mugshots,” Faust said.
I winked at Faust.
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t sorry.”
“Get used to it, you’ll have to if you’re mated to a Kitsune,” my mother said. “I thought it was a beautiful mugshot. I have it framed in my bedroom. We stopped getting photos after Heath and Marie came to Hell.”
That was fucked up, and also kind of adorable. I could have everything here. My birth parents were extremely cool, and our first meeting went way easier than I ever pictured it in my head. I got Heath and Marie back, too. I didn’t ruin everything because I wanted my freedom to leave the small town I grew up in. I had a million questions, and I wanted to read that blog.
All we had to do was still my brother, and stop the murderous coven who wanted me dead and had been trying to get into Hell for a long time.
