Eight Million Gods-eARC

by Wen Spencer

  “Yes, sir.” Leo put away his phone, shaking his head.

  Nikki knew why he wasn’t telling his organization about her—the moment he did, he would have to turn her over to the man on the phone. Any normal sane person, though, would have to ask. Would want to know. “Why didn’t you tell him that you found me?”

  He glanced at her, worry in his dark eyes. He looked away, radiating unease. “There are things in the world that that can move unseen and kill without mercy.” With seeming reluctance, he defined “things.” “Monsters. Spirits. In theory, Shiva protects people from evil that a normal man would be helpless against.”

  “But in truth, they don’t?”

  He shook his head. “Shiva is self-serving when it comes to defining who is a monster and who isn’t. There are people with special abilities—people like you . . . and my father. Shiva sees anyone with a gift as a possible monster—as someone to be controlled, contained, or eliminated. To protect ‘normal’ people.”

  Nikki really wished the Japanese were more into chairs. She had a sudden need to sit down. “So if they find me . . .”

  “If they don’t know about your ability, they’ll assume you’re just accidently caught up in this mess. You can’t tell them about your writing—or that the kami can take you over. Both make you valuable and dangerous.”

  His scene as a child made more sense now. Shiva had captured him when he was young, decided he was monster, and would have killed him if his father hadn’t intervened.

  “My father had dreams of being a doctor,” Leo said. “He was in his third year at medical school when Shiva discovered him. They yanked him out of college and never let him go back. He wanted to heal children, not run around signing off on kill orders.”

  One of those kill orders had been seven-year-old orphaned Leo, locked in a cage, dying of thirst. No wonder Simon had adopted Leo. It explained, also, why Leo was rebelling against Shiva and all the veiled threats they were leveling at him.

  Her hands fluttered slightly at the thought of being caged. Shiva sounded like her mother, only with guns and literal cages instead of doctors and mental wards.

  She dug into her backpack, looking for a pen. She found one and clicked it repeatedly. Note to self: avoid being questioned by Shiva. She had years of experience at trying to convince people that she was completely normal—but so far practice hadn’t made perfect.

  “What do they want with me?” Atsumori murmured into her ear, reminding her that she wasn’t alone with Leo. The boy god had been quiet the entire trip and she had wondered if he’d gone to sleep. Had healing Nikki exhausted him? Did gods get tired?

  “Why is Shiva looking for the katana in the first place? What do they want with Atsumori?”

  “Kami like him are considered ‘tame monsters’ and aren’t dangerous if they’re in the right hands. Shiva is focused more on whose hands he is in than actual concern about him, especially if yokai like the tanuki at your apartment are involved.”

  She remembered Leo’s reaction to Harada’s driver’s license. “Shiva will stomp on the yakuza for working with the tanuki?”

  Leo nodded. “Yokai can’t be policed by normal humans. Shiva uses tame monsters to go after the dangerous ones.”

  Was Leo one of the tame monsters? Shiva was sending him after her because they thought she might be dangerous. As long as Shiva continued to think that, Leo was free to “find her.”

  Of course, once they found Simon, she would have to explain the weirdness around her. Leo had taken down her Post-it Notes before the cleaners arrived. He’d snagged both of her flash drives and all her notebooks. That covered all the evidence in her apartment. What else?

  Well there was the dead tanuki. Lots of dead tanuki if the fight at the castle was uncovered. How could she explain all the hacked up raccoon dogs in business suits? Click. Click. Click.

  If she said that she knew kendo—the Japanese style of fencing with a katana—she could explain using the sword to kill the tanuki both at the castle and at her apartment. She had taken a semester of martial arts with Miriam at Foxcroft. She was fairly sure that school records would be vague enough after nearly five years to give her wiggle room there. How hadshe gotten the katana? She could say she had lied to the police and that she knew Gregory . . .

  “Shit!” she cried.

  Leo whipped out his pistol so fast it seemed to materialize in his hand. He searched the room for something to shoot. “What is it?”

  “The police know about my writing.” She took a deep breath, trying to stay calm. Don’t lose it in front of the man with a gun. “An officer overheard me talking about Gregory’s murder with Miriam. That’s why I was arrested.”

  He cocked his head, frowning. “That wasn’t in the police reports.”

  “I blogged the scene. Not all of it, but enough. It was on my website until the police had me take it down.”

  He frowned deeper, eyes tracking as if reading over the reports in his mind. “Someone sanitized the report before I saw it.”

  “Shiva?”

  He shook his head, holstering his pistol. “I don’t think so. I was lead agent on Winston’s murder. Normally, I would have been the first person from Shiva to see all police reports. I would have been the one to issue a request for the report to be sanitized.”

  It left an obvious candidate: her mother. Walcott must have filed a report with the State Department; naturally her mother would send her own cleaners to remove evidence of Nikki being “crazy.”

  Okay, she was going to completely freak out. She needed Leo gone so she could do it in private.

  “I’m going to take a bath.” She hoped he’d take the hint and make himself scarce. “I haven’t washed for days, and I’m feeling really gross.”

  Leo moved toward the door, pulling out his pistol to check its clip. “I’m going to make sure this hotel is still safe. If I don’t come back, take the train and keep the katana close to you. The god will protect you.”

  He was gone before she could form a good answer.

  An entire page of dots did nothing to make her feel comfortable with her level of sanity, but it did relieve the stress-related need to write. Since evidence was mounting that she wasn’t insane, then whatever had blocked her from writing about Simon was back in place. Her hypergraphia, though, had been fed enough that she could consider the implications that her mother knew she was in Japan.

  Unlike Shiva and the yakuza, her mother had studied her habits and had already found her weaknesses and knew how to exploit them. How had Miriam contacted the American Embassy? If she had used her cell phone, then all calls out of her cell were being tracked. Since Miriam had mistakenly posted to Nikki’s public forum instead of the Team Banzai forum, it was possible that Miriam hadn’t thought of using a public phone to make the call to Walcott.

  In a panic, Nikki found her cell phone and checked it. She had remembered to turn it off in Osaka. Time to ditch it completely; this was why she always carried the cheapest prepaid phone she could find. She took the battery out, making it untraceable. She considered pitching it into the toilet’s reservoir tank, but there was a slim chance she might need the phone. She checked for her favorite hiding space, the inside lintel of the closet door. There was a narrow ledge. She chewed a stick of gum and used it to tack the phone onto the ledge. She experimented with sliding the door open and closed. Hopefully the phone would stay hidden for years before being discovered.

  By law, the onsen staff should have asked for her passport. Residents of Japan, however, were circumvented; Leo must have checked in with ID that claimed he was a citizen of Japan. Since he had told them Nikki was his wife, they probably assumed she was a resident. It made her feel guilty—he’d made her untraceable, and she’d snapped at him.

  Of course, she could be worrying unnecessarily. Her mother didn’t trust outsiders to corner her; she always supervised the capture. According to the news on Sunday morning, her mother was in D.C., defending the separation of church and state.
(Her mother was weirdly agnostic. She maintained that there was a God but viewed him with a suspicion that Nikki had inherited.)

  Regardless, Nikki needed to lay low for a while. It meant limited posting to even her secret forums, keeping to public phones, and being careful when she used her bank card. Both Shiva and her mother were probably monitoring her bank accounts, so withdrawing money would put her instantly on everyone’s radar.

  With that in mind, she counted her cash in hand. She had fifty-two thousand yen, or in the neighborhood of six hundred dollars. She could get to Tokyo, but the combined train tickets would probably eat half her money. She should hit an ATM just before she left Osaka. Every yen she could pull out meant a longer time she could go without setting off signal flares.

  She wasn’t sure what to do about the katana. If she gave the sword to Leo, Shiva would stop looking for her. The yakuza wouldn’t, unless Shiva killed them all.

  Of course there would still be her mother to worry about. It was sad that of all the scary people chasing after her, her mother frightened her the most.

  When Leo searched her apartment, he had suggested that kami couldn’t be filmed. The security system at her apartment building hadn’t shown her while Atsumori was merged with her. It seemed to indicate that if she kept the katana, she could move invisibly through Japan. Shiva would still be chasing after her, but it might be safer not to give up the sword.

  Until they found Simon, though, it was a moot point. As far as anyone could tell, she’d vanished off the face of the Earth.

  She was running out of time before Leo returned, and a bath actually seemed like a good idea. Hoping for some privacy, she stuck the katana in the closet, behind a set of rolled-up futons. Not that it actually meant that Atsumori couldn’t spy on her, but it made her feel better.

  There wasn’t a Western-style shower. The “private” bathing area was an open-air hot tub for five. Like all Japanese baths, there was an area where one sat on a stool and washed using a hand-held shower and bucket. Only after you were clean did you step into the tub. It felt dangerous to be sitting naked among rocks out in the garden, washing her hair. Logically she knew that the garden was constructed so no one could spy on her, but she felt like someone might walk up the garden path at any minute.

  Had all the unaccountable bruises faded since they left Osaka? She peered at them, unsure. Under the bandage, the thumb-wide scar was still angry red but looked weeks old. It cut a groove along her rib cage just beneath her breast. The bullet had come frighteningly close to hitting in the heart, but luckily it’d hit bone and deflected.

  The water in the grotto was deliciously hot. She had to slowly ease into it, but once immersed, she felt like she was melting in the heat. Despite doing nothing but sit in a car all day, she was exhausted. It was tempting just to nod off in the baking water.

  “If you stay in too long, you will faint,” Atsumori murmured in her ear.

  She yelped and scrambled out of the grotto, cursing, to pull on the hotel’s yukata. “Don’t do that!”

  “You looked as if you were going to fall asleep.”

  “I would have gotten out before I did.” She pulled the thin cotton tight around her. Apparently tucking his katana into the closet wasn’t far enough to give her privacy from the god.

  There didn’t seem to be a point to hiding in the bathroom to get dressed. She pulled on clean clothes as quickly as she could. Once she felt decent, she considered her dirty underclothes. Blood stained the left side of her bra and the band of her panties. She considered just throwing them out, but they were her favorite matched set. She realized that her biggest reason for not simply washing them was because Leo would see them drying.

  “Oh, grow up,” she muttered as she ran cold water into the sink. “So a boy will see your undies. Big deal. I’m sure he’s seen lots of girls’ undies.”

  She added shampoo to the cold water and scrubbed at the bloodstains. Considering she had woken up in the yukata from the Inari Shrine and not the shirt and jeans she’d been wearing at the castle, Leo had already seen her undies.

  She caught a glimpse of Atsumori out of the corner of her eye as she hung up her panties. He was smirking at her underwear.

  “What?” she snapped, embarrassed.

  “Why do you have her on your underthings?”

  “Her” was Hello Kitty. The bra and panty were a matched set with the iconic cat on them.

  “Because I can.” She eyed the underwire for blood. “I never got to pick out my own clothes when I was growing up. I know my mother has excellent taste in clothes, but she only seemed to buy me ugly things. They made me feel worse about myself. It wasn’t until I saw this television show about models to realize why I felt so ugly all the time. These girls would be sitting around in pajamas and their hair up and no make up and they were as ugly as me. The only difference was that they got to put on pretty things and makeup and be beautiful.”

  “But why her? Why not beautiful underthings?”

  She was slightly surprised by the question until she remembered that Misa had a slight fetish for lacy underwear. The shrine maiden probably unknowingly gave the boy god an education on such things. “Hello Kitty is beautiful by always being herself.” She hung up the bra beside the matching panties. “She is not skinny, does not dye her hair, or wear fancy clothes. All she needs is to be clean, clothes that fit her well, a cute hair bow, and she’s set.”

  She suddenly realized that it wasn’t Atsumori that she was seeing out the corner of her eye but Leo. She flinched in surprise and then cursed. “Will you two stop doing that?”

  Leo gazed down at his feet in silence for a minute before saying, “The hotel appears safe.” He retreated into the bedroom to pace with grace. He’d brought the kitten in, and it chased him as he strode back and forth. “One of the girls is a minor Sensitive; I’m the only guest that has scared her in the last few weeks. I didn’t find any signs of tanuki or other yokai.”

  “That’s good.” She turned off the bathroom light, cloaking her underwear in darkness.

  “Can you try to write more?”

  “I tried already.” She remembered then what was in her notebook. With heart thumping hard, she dropped a towel onto the tablet to hide it. She didn’t want him to see it, pick it up, flip through it, and find the scenes with him as a child. She scrambled for another distraction away from the notebook. What were some of her tricks against writer’s block that might work? “Do have all my Post-it Notes?”

  “What do you need those for?” He rumbled.

  “Being able to see all the elements of my story sometimes helps me see places where I need witnesses.” She held out her hand and twiddled her fingers in what she’d been discovering was a universal “give me” sign.

  He huffed but pulled the stack of Post-it Notes from his coat’s breast pocket. He passed all but Simon’s to her. He stood a moment, fingering the turquoise paper like it was a lifeline to his father. And then, reluctantly, added it to the pile in her hand.

  She sorted through the scraps of paper and started to stick them to largest blank wall. The hotel room was larger than her tiny studio apartment, so she could spread out her plot tree. The wider separation between the characters made the interconnections more obvious. “These are all my characters. They’re in the story for a reason—I just don’t know why. Your father is part of my story, and I think more than just so I can meet you.”

  “Pardon?”

  She blushed furiously and focused on sticking up the notes. “I need to find other characters that interact on the same plot thread as your father so I can use them as a witnesses.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “See this cluster of characters? This is the katana branch.” She had up three of the six colors that she knew were definitely linked to the katana. “Gregory—who I was calling George—killed Misa in Kyoto to steal the katana. Harada killed Gregory in Umeda trying to take the katana from him.” She found Natasha’s white notes and added them
to the wall. “I find the katana and kill Harada in Otemea. If most of those people weren’t dead, I could use one of them to find out about the others. Like I could use Harada to witness Gregory—only they’re both dead, and my writing doesn’t work on dead people.”

  She hadn’t completely intertwined the branches in her apartment, so Leo hadn’t grouped the rest of the Osaka characters with the first four. She still wasn’t sure how the next few Post-it Notes were related.

  “The thing is, this branch isn’t the whole story, it’s just one little piece of it. All these other characters aren’t tied into the katana.” She named the people as their Post-it Notes went up onto the wall, spread far apart to emphasis the lack of connections. “There’s Haru and Nobu, who are eight-year-old twins that live in the Shimogyo Ward of Kyoto. Haru has been picked to be the Chigo or celestial child for the Gion Matsuri this year. It means he supposed to ride in the Naginata-hoko in the parade, but he’s scared of heights and the float is three stories tall.” She understood his fear completely. “Nobu is going to take his place and has been learning the dance Haru is supposed to do on the float.”

  She’d picked yellow for the twins. She put them close to Misa’s pink since they lived in Kyoto, too. She wasn’t sure, though, if they were related in any way. Misa had been excited about the Gion Matsuri, as the month-long festival meant an increase of tourists visiting all the shrines of Kyoto. Misa hadn’t been involved in the parade and the twins hadn’t visited Atsumori’s shrine. With the fire and Misa’s death, the possibility of their stories intertwining was even more remote.

  “There’s Chitose; he’s team captain and starting pitcher for Tohoku High School baseball team. They’re going through the regional tournament, trying to get to the National High School Baseball Championship.” Chitose’s color was teal. She put him close to the Osaka branch because the playoffs were held in nearby Kobe.

  “And the real crazy outlier, Kayo. She’s a war widow in Hiroshima with her two children and elderly father who repairs watches.” Nikki stuck the pale green at the far edge of the wall. “Her scenes are all in August of 1945, a few days before the atomic bomb is dropped. She lived about a half mile from the Aioi Bridge, which was the allied aiming point. Talk about ‘this will not end well’ written all over a character.”