I woke up to a tickling feeling. Something thin and light was brushing the side of my face; I twisted away and buried my head in the pillow and duvet. There was a moment’s pause, and I had just enough time to vaguely register a presence on the bed before something round and cold was shoved into my ear.

I woke with a yelp and opened my eyes to see a long face with red-brown fur and a pointed muzzle ending in a black nose. The eyes were yellow and less than six inches away, and they were staring right at me.

I glared. “Will you stop doing that?”

The fox pulled its head back and sat on the bed, blinking twice at me. “Alex?” Anne called from the kitchen. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” I called back. “Just Hermes.” Apparently satisfied that I wasn’t going back to sleep, the fox jumped off the bed, trotted to the door, then looked back at me expectantly.

Hermes is a blink fox, a magic-bred creature with human-level intelligence and the ability to perform short-range teleports. I met him last year at about the same time that I ran into Richard, and after making it out of the shadow realm he followed me home. Ever since then he’s dropped by at irregular intervals, expecting a meal. I probably shouldn’t have fed him the first time.

Finding out the fox’s name had been less straightforward than you’d think, since while blink foxes can understand human speech, they can’t talk. Luna had wanted to name him Vulpix, but I’d put my foot down and gone to Arachne instead. After a private conversation with the fox, Arachne had told me to call him Hermes, though she’d been evasive about how she’d found out. “Seriously?” I said. “You want me to feed you now?”

Hermes blinked.

Grumbling, I got up and dressed. Anne was already in the kitchen when I got there, cooking something on the stove. “Morning,” she said. “Hi, Hermes.”

“’Scuse a sec,” I said. Anne moved out of the way and I opened a cupboard, rooting through the cans. “You didn’t see how he got in, did you?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Goddamn it.” I pulled out a can of cat food. “I have gate wards specifically to stop stuff like this.”

“Um, I don’t think he wants the cat food,” Anne said. “He’d rather have some of the bacon.”

“How do you know?”

There was a soft thump. I turned around to see Hermes sitting up on the kitchen counter, tail curled around his feet. He was ignoring me and looking at Anne. “Just a guess,” Anne said.

“We don’t have any bacon.”

“I bought some this morning.”

I glared at the fox. “Why exactly did you wake me up again?”

“Maybe he just thinks you sleep in too much.”

“I got stabbed!”

“Actually, you’re completely recovered.”

“You know, that lifesight of yours really takes the fun out of acting injured.”

“You seem to get injured often enough anyway.”