“Now you see why the Council is so keen on making sure Herai-san is under their control,” said Ben.
“The Council’s ambitions are thinly disguised fear,” said Murase. “Fear of having to listen to new voices, fear that their outdated world view will crumble. If we release the Black Pearl, the Council loses the luxury of fear. They will be forced to find a more inclusive way to survive.”
For a moment, I wondered at the passion behind Murase’s words. I had an inkling of what it must be like to be ethnically Hafu in Japan—I’d heard the stories about the Zainichi Korean, the second largest ethnic majority that was still treated like outsiders. Was it the same for Kind Hafu? Did the Council unfairly treat those with a human mother or father? Ken had never talked about that. Like he never talked about a lot of things. Important emotional things.
I bit my lower lip. Okay, Dad. Now would be a massively superb time to wake up. But no, relying on Dad was just as bad as waiting for Ken to rescue me.
“Let me talk to my father. When he wakes up, I can ask him the same questions.”
“Yes, but he may not wake up for hours,” said Ben. “You are awake, here, now. Ken just texted me two minutes ago. He’s already in Morioka. We need to do this.”
Murase gave me a smile with eyes filled with slow-moving currents of grief. “It’s time for you to meet the Black Pearl.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Dad seemed desperate to avoid this,” I said.
“Herai abandoned his responsibilities. He left,” said Ben. “Will you also turn your back on an ancient one’s suffering?”
“Look, you don’t know everything about me,” I said. “Back off.”
Midori put a gentling hand on Ben’s arm. Murase drained the dregs of his tea. “You will have to excuse Ben-chan’s passion. The Eight Span Mirror has lived with the Black Pearl’s pain for a long time. You will understand when you see her.”
I can do this. I can make decisions about who I will help. And figure out who is right and what is wrong. But first there needs to be coffee.
“Is there time for coffee first?”
Murase blinked. Ben gave a scoffing sigh but stopped bristling like a hedgehog.
I couldn’t take Dad with me. He’d been so afraid of the Black Pearl. I’d tasted Pon-suma’s dream. The nature of it made me trust him on an implicit level I didn’t trust Murase and Ben. I looked to the silent young man, sitting correctly erect on folded knees. “Will you make sure nothing happens to my father if I go with them?”
Murase answered. “You will need Pon-suma. Can you be content with Midori’s care? She is a trained nurse. You have my word no harm will come to him while you are gone.” He extended his hand palm up on the table. “If you wish to taste one of my dreams to see if I speak true, I consent.”
“No thanks. That isn’t really a good idea right now.”
He withdrew his hand, bushy eyebrows drawing together in a disconcerted way. Yeah, well, this didn’t make me happy, either. But him offering had to count for something. All eyes watched me, the weight of unspoken hopes and Ben’s edgy excitement almost a palpable roughness on my skin.
“Don’t make me regret trusting you,” I said. I’d tried for a gangster threat, but my tone was more of a plea. Midori busied herself making Dad comfortable in a reassuringly grandmotherly way.
Pon-suma, Murase, and Ben herded me into a small, black sedan with Pon-suma at the wheel.
We pulled out of the private drive and drove past a few residential streets where aproned women were hanging sheets from second floor verandahs and old men puttered around in carefully tended gardens behind latticed concrete walls. We hit the Shotengai, the main drag lined on both sides by stores and slightly rundown mom-and-pop cafes. Pon-suma maneuvered into an impossibly small parking spot between planters full of blooming cactus and a lavender backhoe. Ben kept up a stream of directions and comments until Pon-suma sighed in frustration. “Stuff it, Kitsune.”
“It’s my car, I should be driving,” said Ben.
“No!” Murase and Pon-suma yelped in unison. Pon-suma kept the keys after we got out of the car.
We walked along the street until it narrowed into a covered walkway. Shopkeepers were just lifting the sliding shutters over their stores despite it being almost ten o’ clock. Drugstores and convenience stores were interspersed with more colorful rice cracker vendors, tea, and cake shops that called out to me with perfectly wrapped, glistening cakes flavored with matcha and lychee. Colorful banners and vending machines crowded every spare inch between stores.
At last, Pon-suma lead us around a corner and into a nondescript, wood-shingled store with no banner or sign. Inside was a narrow, long room with three bistro tables on the right and a mad chemist’s wooden counter on the left. Test tubes, Bunsen burners, burlap sacks, and tubes intertwined around gleaming brass stands.
There was not a menu or sign to be seen inside the shop, either. Murase cleared his throat. At the far end of the counter a man pushed through the hanging noren doorway curtain and stepped stiffly into the room. “Irrashaimase,” the man gave the usual shopkeeper welcome. “Who are your friends, Murase-san?”
“Just museum flunkies plus a visitor from America.”
The man stepped carefully closer and gave a slight bow in Murase’s direction. His eyes didn’t seem to focus. I realized he must be blind.
“Welcome,” he said this time in English without a trace of the usual Japanese issue pronouncing ‘l’. “May I make you some coffee?”
“To go, unfortunately,” said Murase.
The man sucked air through his front teeth in disappointment.
Coffee! Saliva filled my mouth. “Yes, please,” I answered back in English. “Can you make lattes?”
This time Murase hissed in disapproval. “Herai-san, we will trust Enoshima-san to make us delicious coffee without interference.”
Enoshima reached for a burlap bag with confidence, knowing exactly where it was. The sleeve of his soft, gray Henley rode up at the movement, revealing wrists with the kind of intricate colorful dragon and cherry blossom tattoo I’d only seen in Yakuza movies. He poured beans into a grinder and arranged test tubes and water in one of the contraptions in a flowing, deliberate tea ceremony way. In no time at all, the most heavenly aroma filled the room.
Ben fiddled with her phone, and then shuffled closer to Murase with a serious expression. She tilted the screen for Murase to see.
“He’s close now,” Ben said quietly. “Maybe twenty minutes away.”
Ken. My heart gave a little flip. The smell of coffee and Ben’s disturbing resemblance conjured him out of thin air. Dark-on-dark eyes, the sly arch of one eyebrow, the way his breath always smelled like kinako cinnamon. I couldn’t stop the upswell of relief at the knowledge he’d soon be here, even if I did intend to make my own decisions about the Black Pearl and these Eight Span Mirror nutzoids.
The man poured coffee into porcelain travel mugs, somehow judging when they were full without seeing or touching the coffee. No Styrofoam or paper cups for Mr. Coffee Whisperer.
A thick crema sat on top despite the lack of added dairy product.
“Enoshima-san,” said Murase. “Forgive us for hurrying your art.”
He went to the counter and made the goodbye hand wave that meant come here in Japan. Just as I reached for a mug, Enoshima pushed it forward—our fingertips brushed.
The tingle up my spine and a flash of warm, espresso-scented darkness told me I’d gotten a fragment. Funny how it seemed so weak in comparison to the Kind fragments I’d been getting lately. I probably wouldn’t even experience it until I next slept, whenever that would be. I used to freak out about such casual touches, and now it seemed about as annoying as a mosquito.
No money exchanged hands, but Mr. Coffee Whisperer stood back, hands clasped behind his back in military style. “Your American guest will have to return the mugs and tell me if my coffee satisfied her craving.”
Ben and Pon-suma got their
own mugs and then hustled us out the door back to the car.
Ben and I settled in the back seat and the most beautiful, dark, rich, smell I had ever experienced wafted up from my mug. Like someone took windblown moors and angsty, aristocratic British actors in period costume, covered the entire thing in dark chocolate, and then somehow distilled the whole mess into an essence, and that essence was the exact color and compelling promise of Ken’s eyes.
I gave myself a little shake and brought the mug to my lips.
This was the most delicious coffee I’d ever put in my mouth. It was as full-bodied and complex as the scent, as deeply satisfying as a physical embrace. A wave of peace, like my entire body exhaling this trip’s accumulated stress, swept me from head to toe. I sighed, feeling tears well up behind my eyes. All these years I’d been drinking lattes and missing out on this little piece of distilled heaven?
Overly dramatic much? I must be ovulating.
We’d left the Shotengai and seemed to be headed back to the museum. Sure enough, we pulled into the tree-lined lane leading to the main building, but instead of pulling up in front of the entrance, this time we passed the museum and entered a narrow, dirt track with a faded wooden sign I couldn’t make out.
Pon-suma drove slowly through the trees, the car jiggling over ruts as we all frantically balanced our mugs in the air to keep coffee from spilling. He pulled onto an area of flattened grass. “Bring the coffee with you,” said Ben as he opened the door.
“As if I’d leave liquid gold behind.” What were those test tubes? Why didn’t Stumptown in Portland work alchemy with their coffee in test tubes and Bunsen burners?
Beyond the scruffy grass was a concrete path bordered on both sides by carefully tended clumps of spiky grass and purple pansies. We followed the path for a few moments, all of us contentedly sipping. It was the first time I’d seen Pon-suma’s alert calm relax. The path passed by a pond deep enough to be home to some truly monster koi fish, and then emptied out into a bigger clearing with agricultural fields on the far side. In the middle of the clearing were two big mounds of grass-covered dirt encircled by low, white-picket fences and topped by huge wooden crosses.
“Jesus’s tomb,” said Murase, all seriousness.
I stifled an inappropriate desire to guffaw. This was all so nutzoid. The large, wooden sign board to the left of the biggest mound detailed more or less the same story Murase and Ben had told me—this was the final resting place of Jesus of Nazareth and a brother who had spent their last years here in Aomori as rice farmers.
Ben swung a culotte-clad leg over the fence and got down on her knees in front of the cross. For a horrified moment, I thought she was going to start praying, but after bowing her head, Ben clicked something at the base of the cross. A large panel of grass at the top of the mound slid away, revealing a hole just big enough to fit one, typically-sized, slim Japanese person. Ben held her phone out, so the light could penetrate the hole and reveal steps leading downwards.
“Oh, hell no.”
Murase gently tugged the empty coffee mug from my resisting fingers. “The Black Pearl.”
“Under Jesus’s tomb? Just like this? No guards? No password, nothing?”
Pon-suma made a clucking noise. “Doesn’t need a guard.”
Does he realize that makes this worse?
Ben made a hurry-up waving motion.
I was entirely unprepared. I had agreed to meet the Black Pearl and perhaps try to release her as I had Ullikemi but all of a sudden it struck me that I was about to go down a hole in a mound in Northern Japan with people who, granted, knew how to score orgasmic coffee, but had kidnapped me and Dad.
“I’m kind of having second thoughts. I’m sure Ken will be willing to listen to your concerns. Can’t we wait just a little bit for him?”
Murase and Ben exchanged a loaded look. Murase’s eyes flickered toward Pon-suma. He sighed, rolled his shoulders like a professional wrestler, and bared his teeth in an expression not at all a smile.
“Here,” he flung his mug at Murase who scrambled to juggle all three, grabbed my arm above the elbow in a grip like a blood pressure cuff and pulled me over to the fence.
“Sorry,” said Ben, with a cute, sheepish grin. God damn Fujiwara siblings can go suck eggs. “The Council will be hot on my brother’s heels. We can’t risk them stopping us.”
Pon-suma’s other arm scooped around under my knees and I was lifted bodily over the fence and shoved feet-first into the hole.
Oh god, oh god, oh god. I twisted and kicked but the boy was built like a wiry Mack truck; all ropy muscle and fierce will. He propelled me further down the steps by simply advancing.
Ken had called him a wolf, but he was more like a wombat or badger in his den. The boy’s abs were seriously of steel.
“Sorry,” said Ben again from above. I glared up. She gave a little wave and then slid the panel shut—leaving us in utter darkness.
I halted. “What the hell?”
Pon-suma stopped pushing me. I immediately sat down on the step, my heart beating a mile a minute. “This isn’t making me sympathetic to your cause.”
“Doesn’t matter now.” Pon-suma’s voice rose in the darkness. “Black Pearl knows we’re here. She will get restless if we do nothing.”
Pon-suma must have pulled out his phone because a rectangle of light appeared, casting just enough illumination to show a metal door at the bottom of the long flight of wooden stairs. I briefly fantasized trying to grab the phone and rushing past him up the stairs but who was I kidding? Pon-suma was too strong. And I had no way to get Ben to open the panel at the top, anyway. I rubbed at my arms, feeling an itchy, rising panic.
“Why aren’t Murase and Ben coming?”
Pon-suma gave a little cough. “Kitsune are susceptible to the Black Pearl’s atmosphere. I am Horkew Kamuy, born of the eternal snow and perma-frost of the great North.”
Ah. There is that overly dramatic Kind-speak I was missing. So Pon-suma was some kind of superwolf? And what did he mean by atmosphere?
But I already had an inkling. I had been rubbing my arms so vigorously that I was causing a rug burn, but the prickly queasy feeling had spread, like slime-covered ants crawling all over my body.
Pon-suma manhandled me down the rest of the stairs and reached past me to wrench open the metal door with a painful squeal of protesting hinges.
My lungs couldn’t seem to get enough air, my heart pounded fit to break a rib, and a chill sweat broke out at my temples. Inside my belly was what felt like a frantic gerbil desperately clawing to get out and run the fuck away.
“No,” I said, but Pon-suma pushed us through the door. I gave a kind of strangled yelp and froze, trembling.
Dark, a cavernous dark. And cold. Like walk-in freezer cold. Long stripes of faint, green light in unimaginably huge, tangled coils filled the space. Each of my inhalations brought in the smell of moldy old socks cut with fresh wakame seaweed miso soup. Our breath formed ghostly clouds around our mouths.
Pon-suma’s phone-light flicked off. “Bioluminescence,” he said. “Beautiful.”
So glad his immunity to the slime-ant distress gave him the opportunity to appreciate biodiversity. Somehow I couldn’t summon up the same appreciation.
“What’s that?” A soft, moist sound was growing louder and louder. The coiled green began to slide in all directions. I shivered. Pon-suma coughed again in answer. The door rattled as if Pon-suma clutched the handle for support.
He is scared. The superwolf is scared. Awesomesauce.
My eyes were adjusting. The green streaks of light resolved into an understandable whole—the giant coils of a snake as big around as a sequoia tree trunk. My memory flashed to the final confrontation with the dragon, Ullikemi. He’d taken the shape of a giant snake in the dream world I’d created out of Ken’s forest fragment. But this was real, this was here and now, not a dream.
“Go on. Do it.”
“Do what?”
“Most likely she�
�s not really aware of us,” said Pon-suma.
“Most likely?”
The soft sliding stopped. “She never fully awakens…yet. She is lost in dreaming. But in her half-waking restlessness she strikes out at petty annoyances.”
“I’m all good with not being a petty annoyance.” I stifled my own bout of coughing. It was truly rank in here. A bunch of friends had joined the terrified gerbil in my belly, and my lungs felt raw from trying to breathe the thick air.
I really, really, really do not want to touch that giant snake. But Pon-suma was between me and the door, and this imprisoned dragon situation wasn’t right. No one should be locked in an underground cave.
Okay, time to put my Baku where my mouth is. I could touch this monstrosity, take in some dreaming, and figure out if The Eight’s version of what was going on here rang true or not. And maybe consume enough of the dream to get the strength to barrel straight past Pon-suma and back to Dad.
No one will get hurt. Not like sucking the energy out of Dzunukwa ’til she almost died or Thunderbird trying to drown me in his own dreaming out of a desire to control.
I tiptoed closer to the nearest coil and reached out. My fingertips made contact with freezing, wet leather. I gasped, wanting to jerk away, but the world was spinning, and I was hammered by the deluge of a gale-force fragment. Awake, I dreamed a living dream—the Black Pearl’s memory dream.
Pressure on all sides. I swam through murky, deliciously cool shadows. The sun’s scalding heat sent fingers of light to glimmer in shifting patterns in the uppermost layer of water. Muscles flexed in a ripple up and down my spine, tail thrashing back and forth to startle a school of bang huahua yu flitting away as fast as their spotted bellies and tails could move.
The dream froze, then the world juddered around me, seeming to skip. Now there was blood in the water, more salt-copper than I’d drunk in years. Men in machine-made cloth, not tanned fish skins, fought along the river. With them invader Kind floated on flimsy rafts of brown bentgrass and young ash. I would taste the flavor of outlander blood.
Black Pearl Dreaming Page 8
