Oh great. Pulling out the overly-formal Kind-speak. Serious Kwaskwi meant things mattered more than I had the energy to care about.
“Japan’s Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere from World War II was built as a mirror to Kind politics. They wanted to create a bloc of Asian and Oceanic nations independent of European influence. The U.S. Atlantic states are autonomous, beholden to neither Europe nor anyone else, but the Pacific Seaboard bows to the Council.”
Another history lesson. “But the Allies won. And you have Thunderbird! How can the Japanese Council have so much power over the U.S. Pacific Northwest?”
“Thunderbird is free,” said Kwaskwi, a cutting edge to his voice I’d only heard once before back in Portland, when he’d berated me for betraying his name to Mangasar Hayk. It was easy to be fooled by that wide grin and his easy-going wit and forget that Kwaskwi was the boss of the Portland Kind. He most likely had a dark history of his own. “I forgive your insulting question because you are so cute. And ignorant. Our ancient ones are revered and not kept as magical batteries to swell the power of beings who were never meant to wield it.” Kwaskwi’s upper lip pulled up into a sneer. “We do not keep comfort women or force prisoners into death marches, or rape cities.”
I was too weary for Kind politics or more World War II talk. Especially since I’d left my cardigan in the museum, which meant my Tcho Mokaccino bar was out of reach.
Wait, I’d already eaten it back in the van. Without chocolate, the world was a meaningless, howling void. Rummaging fruitlessly in the plastic bags, I asked, “Is it like Kawano said about the low birthrate for you guys, too? Are there no baby blue jays or baby bear brothers running around Portland?” I put my head down on a pillow of crossed forearms. I needed chocolate, and I had to pee, but exhaustion weighed my shoulders like a clumpy, old comforter. There was no way I was going to visit a stinky outhouse before I fell asleep.
“Portland is different,” said Kwaskwi. “We are a vital community. You’ll see when we get back.”
If we ever get back.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Darkness. Complete and utter darkness. My eyes were open, but I couldn’t see a thing. My heart pounded rapidly, and a strange awareness prickled over my skin as if I were hyperaware of air currents.
I am dreaming.
The delicious, nutty richness of roasting coffee beans filled my nose with each inhale. The flavor coated my tongue like sipping freshly roasted coffee. A warm blanket of peacefulness descended. The darkness was not fearful at all, but strangely alive with possibility and shaped by unseen energy currents.
Coffee. Darkness. This is Enoshima’s fragment.
I startled awake with a massive flinch like jumping backwards off a cliff and hitting bottom—every muscle in my body clenched in charlie horse agony for a brief instant. My ragged pony tail stuck to my clammy neck, and my heart pounded a drum line competition beat.
Where am I? I propped myself up on an elbow, frantically trying to find meaning in the steep shadows of the thatched ceiling and the musty-smelling futon underneath. My bladder broadcast a message of bloated urgency. Half a gray-mottled moon, fuzzy like mothwings, loomed in the sky visible through a low window. The shack. That’s right.
I put a fist to my heart, pressing firmly to slow the drumbeat, and sat all the way up, untangling what felt like a terry cloth towel from my midsection. The last thing I remembered was falling asleep at the kotatsu table.
Underneath the window to my right, Kwaskwi lay half-naked on a futon with arms stretched out like wings, his sculpted chest gleaming faintly in the moonlight.
“Koi.”
I gave a startled yeep. Ken sat at the table eating a rice ball, hair gelled into perfect, upright spikes, dressed in jeans and an un-bloodstained gray Henley open at the throat. He arched an eyebrow and finished off the last bite, licking his fingers free of sticky rice bits.
“What?” I managed to gasp.
“You look a little frazzled,” he said in his slightly accented English.
“You’re sitting up?”
Ken put a finger to his lips and gave a melodramatic glance at Kwaskwi. I gave him the Marlin death-glare, eyes wide. My body was coming down from full panic mode and I really, really needed to find that outhouse, but the boy had serious explaining to do.
“Come outside,” he whispered and stood. Stood! He obviously favored his right leg, hopping along to the genkan in a painful-looking way. I grabbed my phone and shuffled after in the unreal-feeling moonlight, the tatami rough on my bare feet. I half-slipped on my sneakers, heels crushing the backs, as I followed Ken out the door. It was chilly, I wished I had my cardigan. Ken was definitely limping and after a moment’s search, he hopped off the path, leaned over, and picked up a sturdy branch. With his makeshift cane he surged forward on the path.
“You have two broken legs.”
Ken stopped, turned around and looked down at me, eyes shrouded in moonshadows and inscrutable in the darkness. “Outhouse or Museum?” he said.
“Museum, of course. Don’t dodge my question.”
“Kitsune illusion.”
I grabbed the crook of his elbow. His skin was as hot as a kotatsu heater turned on full blast through the Henley sleeve. “You faked broken legs? How is that even possible? Wouldn’t the other Kitsune have seen through it?”
Ken started walking again, tugging me along like a broken children’s toy. “Midori isn’t able to inhabit her Kitsune self, Pon-suma is oblivious, and Yukiko-sama doesn’t care.”
“You fooled me, too.”
“Yes, surprisingly,” he said gravely.
“You made Ben give you a blood transfusion!”
“Actually, that I needed. I lost a lot of blood.”
The museum’s cement walls and incongruous white church steeple reared up suddenly before us. Outside lights clustered over the doorway were abuzz with clouds of flying insects I hoped weren’t mosquitos. Crickets or locusts thrummed loudly in the grass.
Inside the building it was dark. Everyone was asleep. Still, I felt the need to tiptoe to Ken’s obvious amusement.
I let go of Ken’s arm and turned down the corridor leading to the restroom. A bright green exit sign and that crazy moon provided enough light that there was no need to flip the light switch. I bee-lined for the blessedly Western-style toilet at the end of a row of Japanese squatter stalls. Relaxing on the electrically warmed seat melted away the last vestiges of sudden waking panic.
The toilet flushed automatically when I stood, the loud sound making me flinch. Ken had fooled us all into thinking he was heavily wounded, but more importantly, had fooled me. I mentally swatted away implications about not realizing your love interest was faking broken legs. Clueless, taken to a new level.
What about the parts where he was supposedly unconscious? I replayed the conversation I’d had with Kwaskwi last evening, squinting into the mirror. Had I said anything I’d regret Ken hearing? I pulled the band from my ponytail in a painful clump of broken, sweat-tangled hair. I finger combed my hair loose around my shoulders, unable to see more than a dark blob in the mirror.
When I returned to the corridor, Ken had magically conjured up lattes in a cardboard drink carrier. “Peace offering?”
“Those better not be illusion, too, asshole.”
“I don’t have a death wish,” he said. “We have to get going.”
“Going? Where? Hell to the no. First you tell me why you were playing wounded martyr. I wasted guilt on you.”
Ken handed me the drink carrier so he could give me a one-armed shoulder squeeze. Just like the very first time he’d ever touched me in front of Marlin’s apartment back home, a warm wash of heat enveloped me, tinged with the illicit excitement of physical connection after a lifetime of avoiding human touch.
“Trust me, Koi,” he whispered, breath missing its usual delicious kinako scent, but making my toes curl with its familiar bitterness. “I’ll explain everything in the truck.”
“Truc
k?” I hesitated. I was no fool. He knew what effect sudden touches had on me. Should I trust him? Something hinky was going on here. I didn’t want to believe I was being hoodwinked into something, but then again, he could make me believe anything, apparently.
“The Council will return in a few hours. They will take your father back to Tokyo just to keep him far away from the Black Pearl. It’s unlikely they’ll leave you here, too. This is our only chance.”
“Chance?” God, I was repeating words like an airhead ingénue in an action flick, but things were moving too fast for me to keep up.
“To release the Black Pearl.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ken grabbed a black windbreaker from the coat tree near the door and went out. I thought about his text while creamy, bitter, microwave-hot coffee warmed my throat. That little flush Marlin got from her second glass of Pinot Noir, but that I got from a really good latte, soothed away the last bit of chill.
I’m sorry. Trust me.
Clearly that apology was for far more than letting me be kidnapped by The Eight Span Mirror. Should I go back and wake Kwaskwi? Refuse to play along with this dangerous game? Or should I follow Ken? I’d known him for bare weeks, but until now, I’d never doubted what he did was done out of caring. Japan had changed that. The face he wore in Portland was only the one he’d chosen to show me, and despite his confessions of angst over being the Council’s Bringer, somehow I’d overlooked what being the Bringer meant. It meant killing. Ignoring his motives for doing the Council’s dirty work meant now I was paying the price.
And there it is. My morbid, paranoid, old self. Getting in the way of midnight adventures.
Ken stuck his head back in the doorway. “Iku zoo.” Let’s move it.
The tangled mass of emotions writhing in my chest like a bunch of poisonous snakes was paralyzing. I couldn’t go forward, yet it was too late to go back.
“How old are you?” I blurted, and then clapped a palm over my mouth.
Ken made an exasperated sound. “Older than I look.”
“How can I trust you are who you say you are? You’re a Kitsune. And probably a hundred years old. Oh god, were you married?”
Pushing up a sleeve, Ken grabbed my free hand and pressed it firmly onto the bare skin of his wrist, tugging me outside into the chill night smelling of pine and the spicy smoke of someone burning incense.
I gasped. With his other hand he cupped my cheek and drew me close enough to press his forehead against mine with a little rolling motion. “Look. I get it. Just go ahead, you can see for yourself.”
The world spun 360 degrees as Ken’s deepest dreaming entered through our bare skin connection. The latte dropped from my hand, but I barely registered it. The dark night, the even darker danger of Ken’s eyes, the fuzzy moonlight blurred to a kaleidoscope. When things stopped spinning, the colors deepened into the vibrant greens and browns of an ancient cryptomeria forest at dawn, the sharp, clean scent of crushed evergreen needles stinging my nose.
This dream was like coming home. It had saved me from losing my primal, kernel-Koi self when I’d touched Ullikemi and the Black Pearl.
I was running, flying through the forest on sure feet, dodging stray branches, leaping over gnarled, exposed root clumps, and chasing the rising sun. At the center of my chest, within the striving and the rhythm of the pounding feet, was an utter peace, a centered knowledge of the rightness of the world.
Using this dream to get my trust isn’t fair. Heady stuff, yes, rooted where this journey started, back in Portland, and with the growing feelings between us, but could I trust the dream? What if this peace was an illusion, too?
Survivalist Koi spoke up, quelling the morbanoid part. I would know.
Then the dream changed. I burst from a copse of trees into a clearing containing a small village lane lined by traditional wood and thatch houses encircled by watery paddies and narrow strips of vegetable gardens, the lacey, green tops of daikon radish sprouting like mohawks from tidy, mounded dirt rows.
What is this? I’ve never seen this before.
A younger, less grizzled Murase stood in mud-streaked jinbei pajamas and traditional split-toed, black work boots leaning on a hoe. Beside him, beaming, was a short, round-cheeked woman with long hair pulled back into a messy bun at her neck. It was the same woman with the quilted vest from Ken’s dream fragment back in Tokyo.
Mother.
She cuffed me on the shoulder and complained with affectionate irritation about my lateness. Overwhelming love for this human woman and the small toddler clinging to the bottom of her gray linen yukata struck me.
Ben. She was such a cute baby.
The dream changed again.
I knelt in seiza in a room with a green-eyed tiger, emerald-feathered pheasants, and a long and sinuous dragon coiled in black-scaled rings on the walls.
I’ve seen this before, at the airport. This was the same room as in the stewardess’ dream.
But something felt weird, the angle from which the dragon stared down was shifted to the right. Across from me, sitting in the rows of robed people with bowed heads, I recognized Princess Stewardess but also Yukiko, Murase, and the black suits, now sporting indigo-dyed kimonos. Even Red Shirt was there sitting way in the back. I lifted my eyes to the lord on the raised platform. Tojo. Parallel feelings washed over me: a clenched misgiving in my chest and the swelling of prideful elation.
Ken’s feelings in this memory-dream.
I rose in a muscular, fluid movement to approach an old man that I recognized as a human servant sitting off to the side. Next to the man was a clean, metal tray with bundled steel needles attached to bamboo handles—tebori, or traditional tattoo instruments. I knelt in front of him and pulled open my formal, black kimono at the neck, shoving it down around my shoulders. I bowed, forehead touching tatami between the triangle my carefully placed palms made, and spoke in the most formal old-fashioned inflections. “I accept.”
Accept what?
The man’s eyes were cloudy with cataracts, but his hands were steady and sure as he picked up a bundle of needles, used one hand to spread the skin of my chest, and the other to tattoo the character that would make me Bringer.
I, Fujiwara Kennosuke, once scorned with all my siblings as cursed with a weak and diluted bloodline, was now the Council’s most respected servant. I’d shown everyone how dangerous Hafu could be—a flash of memory, a man with his throat cut, blood on my hands accompanied by a wave of revulsion and grief—I will be their sword. I will be their Justice.
I made my vows to the Council in a steady voice, despite the burning in my chest, despite Tojo’s angry glare, despite the meaning of the words made heavy by the weight of Kind power. I renounced all contact with my human mother, cleansing her taint from the pure line of the Fujiwara. A heat flared within, a flame that burned hungrily the fuel of my pride, the triumphant anger—
“That’s enough.” My voice, sounding oddly thin and reedy. Not from my own throat. Ken’s voice. Ken’s present day voice.
The world shuddered, fractured into spinning pieces of darkness, and then I felt hands on my shoulders, pushing me away. I was Koi again, standing in moonlight watching Ken gasp, sweat pouring from his temples, wilting his hair-spikes, bent over in pain. “No more. I can’t—”
I pushed past his arm outstretched to fend off the monster that I was, ripping living energy along with the memory-dreams from the very heart of my victims, and thrust two hands at his throat. I tore open the collar of his shirt. My foot squelched the abandoned latte cup, but I stared at Ken’s chest.
The dark strokes of the tattooed sigil showed stark on exposed skin. Worse than a secret marriage or the fact that he was old enough to be my great-grandfather.
I am not the only fucking monster here.
Migraine gathered at the back of my neck, gray static buzzing at the corners of my eyes. I hadn’t recognized the old-fashioned kanji character back in Portland. Now I knew it was two characters, artfully painted
, one inside the other in an old style of kanji as it had been imported from China: Dorei. Slave.
“What did you do? Why did you?” Anger choked my throat, coated my mouth with bile. The Council’s slave. Not the sensitive, funny, loyal Ken I’d come to know in Portland. Rejecting his mother? Murdering?
Ken moaned low in his throat, taking my punishing fingers scraping his flesh, not trying to escape the grip twisting his collar into the vulnerable skin of his throat. “I was proving something to the Council. Becoming their servant made Hafu valuable. I was convinced I could change the way everyone treated us.”
Tears streamed down my cheeks. Icepicks speared halfway through my temples. My heart was in shreds. I wrenched away, leaning against the doorjamb to stay upright.
That terrible joy at cleansing away the taint of his human mother somehow overlay my hospital memories of my own Mom. They were tangled together. As if Mom was garbage because she was human and not Japanese. As if I would throw her away or avoid her when she was dying in the hospital, all bones and loose skin and sores. Ken rejected his mother. Marlin accused me of rejecting Mom, just like Dad, by leaving at her first invasive ductal carcinoma diagnosis.
No. It wasn’t like that. Mom had released me—given me a priceless gift. She kept me from her hospital room at the end because neither of us knew what it would mean for me to follow her into that last, dying dream. She’d never been bitter about Dad leaving, either. That required a strength, a generosity of spirit I could only hope to emulate. It was a gift I could never repay. Nothing, no one, not Dad, not Tojo, not a lifetime’s supply of free lattes, could ever make me renounce her.
“This dream-memory is supposed to make me trust you?”
Black Pearl Dreaming Page 13
