Black Pearl Dreaming

by K. Bird Lincoln

  Ken began buttoning his shirt, covering the sigil. Teetering on one leg, he spoke in Japanese. “I didn’t choose what dream to show you, Koi. Even Kitsune can’t fool a Baku in the dreaming. What you saw was truth.”

  “That you’re Tojo and Kawano’s slave?”

  He flinched. My fists curled and uncurled, aching to hurt him, make him feel the pain blossoming inside me. “Bastard. How much of Portland, how much of that was real?”

  Ken looked up sharply. “All of it.” He reached out to caress my cheek, but I batted his wrist away.

  “You told me the Council could help Dad, help me. You—” I swallowed a sob, damn him for seeing me vulnerable like this, “slept in my bed.”

  Ken clasped his arms behind his back, making himself non-threatening, and then ruined it by stepping too close. Even with the limp and a wince he couldn’t hide, he radiated a hot menace that set off alarms all up and down my spine.

  “Look at me,” he urged, the planes of his cheeks sharpening under the bruises, bridge of his nose thinning, eyes going dark-on-dark feral. “I did not fully explain the political landscape, but sleeping next to you, kissing you, was never part of any illusion.”

  “A distraction, then, so I wouldn’t question your true intentions.”

  “Not even Kawano-san dictates where I sleep,” Ken’s voice came out low and rumbly. He leaned closer, lips millimeters from my ear, but hands firmly clasped behind his back. “I don’t share a futon lightly.”

  The past few weeks’ closeness had lulled me into relaxing, accustomed me to touching without invasion of my deepest, most private self.

  I had to remember his nearness wasn’t safety. It was precarious. I teetered on the edge of a high cliff with only jagged rocks at the bottom.

  I’d been changing my life back in Portland just when Ken appeared; finishing my accounting degree, working out a long term plan for Dad with Marlin, going outside my apartment every damn day. The Kind and the revelation I was Baku eclipsed all that hard work. Somewhere, deep down, I feared that agreeing to come to Japan was just another sly way to avoid real life. Piggybacked on the ache to trust Ken clung all my fears, but was it because I couldn’t trust his motivations or my own?

  “You were proud of becoming the Bringer.” A slave. A killer. Naïve fool that I was, I’d dismissed his tearful confession of that as more Kind over-dramatics.

  “Yes.”

  The night was growing colder. Every inch of my skin shivered with chill prickles except where his breath caressed the delicate outer shell of my ear. “Did you see your mother again after renouncing her?”

  “No.”

  I turned away from that heated breath, from the compelling draw of his eyes. “That’s not the answer I was looking for.”

  “Too bad,” he said and then drew back my hair with one hand and pressed his lips into my neck. Instantly I flushed head to toe under the chill, the migraine forgotten. On the heels of eating that memory dream there was no hidden danger of another fragment in this skin-to-skin touch. It took everything I had not to turn around, grip those wilted spikes of hair in both hands to hold his head steady so I could lose myself in the blissful sweetness of his mouth, feel the broadness of his chest like an anchor in the midst of this hurricane.

  Instead, I took a deep breath. “You’re such an asshole.”

  Ken nibbled my earlobe and then pressed his cheek to my temple. “Ben warned me you would see things that way,” he murmured in Japanese.

  “Ben? So now you expect me to believe all this time you two have been thick as thieves? Secretly in cahoots?”

  Another kiss at the nape of my neck, nudging away tangles of hair, and then Ken’s hands and lips dropped away. “It’s true. Ben and I have always been close. Like you and Marlin. Though the last decade we had to pretend otherwise.”

  “Why aren’t you waking up Murase and Midori and Pon-suma? This is what they want, right? To set the Black Pearl free?”

  “There’s no time to prove to them I’m not working for the Council here. Only Ben knows the truth.” And how much pain did that simple phrase conceal? His own father thinks him the Council’s toady?

  “They need to know!”

  “Too much explaining. I will not put them in danger for defying the Council’s direct orders while Tojo is right here with his black squad. Now there really is no time. We have to get to the Black Pearl.”

  I shivered. The migraine-vise had returned as soon as Ken’s lips left. My back was cold, goose pimples popping out all along my arms. So cold. Like this conversation extinguished some sure, steady warmth I’d taken for granted until it was suddenly gone.

  “Ah,” said Ken in an entirely different voice. “Good Evening, Yukiko-sama.”

  I jerked around. Yukiko stood under a copse of trees, dressed all in white robes like a shrine maiden, and dangling a silver key on an oversized ring.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Truck key, I presume?”

  The corners of Yukiko’s mouth curled up ever so slightly. Amusement at the situation she found us in? Or something else? I refuse to feel like a teen caught making out on the front stoop.

  Ken bent down to pick up his dropped makeshift cane. “Lead on.”

  Yukiko’s expression didn’t change, but the air grew a bit sharper with the scent of icicles. Ken’s breath made a frosty cloud. Slowly, Yukiko raised her other hand and pointed a slender, bone-white finger tipped with a sharpened, crimson-painted nail in my direction. She doesn’t want me along?

  Ken shook his head, eyes pleading, but Yukiko did not relent. Her hand closed into a fist like she held something by the handle, and then jerked toward her chest in a flap of billowing sleeve.

  Again Ken shook his head.

  The Rebel Alliance are not all on the same page.

  “What does she want, Ken?”

  Ken sighed, bringing his free hand up in a fist to rub his eyes, flinching at the pressure against the darkening bruise on his cheek. He squared himself off against Yukiko. “The Black Pearl has waited long enough. Do you really want to risk Murase-san or Tojo-san discovering us while I explain? We won’t get another chance.”

  Yukiko tossed the keys toward Ken. He snatched at them, but they fell just out of his reach into the wet grass. With a grunt, Ken leaned over to pick them up. Anger propelled me forward, stepping on the keys before his fingers could touch them.

  Ken looked up with a confused frown.

  “I am going nowhere without explanation.”

  “There’s no time.”

  “Make. The. Fucking. Time.”

  Yukiko arched an eyebrow in utterly condescending amusement.

  “The Council never asked my opinion. Murase didn’t tell me what he was sending me in to. Dad never explained. You all just assumed the good little Baku would march blindly along with your plans. Well, not tonight.”

  Ken straightened, eyes flickering from my mouth to Yukiko to the trees and back like he’d get burned if his gaze settled anywhere too long. “We have a truck,” he said quickly. “You and Yukiko-sama will keep the snake weakened long enough for us to muscle it into the truck. We will drive to the Aisaka River where we can release the Black Pearl and wake her completely from your father’s Baku-induced dream prison with some level of safety. From there it’s downstream to the Pacific Ocean at Hachinohe, and then through the Tsugaru Straits and west to Sakhalin Island where she can enter the mouth of the Amur River.”

  “The detailed itinerary wasn’t the problem I’m talking about.”

  Ken hobbled closer. “I know what the problem is. It’s not trusting your own heart. I know you, Pierce Koi AweoAweo.” My full name in that husky voice made little hairs stand all up and down my arms. “Your loyalty, your true caring. You are horrified by death. You value people, even ice hags and dragons. You freed Ullikemi from his long imprisonment, even though it cost you. You forgive, you are not overcome with bitterness and recrimination, and your intentions are without malice or greed. This gave me hop
e. For me. For the Black Pearl.”

  “Hate to interrupt the Oscar-worthy monologue, but Tojo’s kempeitai patrol is about to get lucky.” Kwaskwi dropped down from a low-hanging branch of the tree nearest Yukiko. She nodded gravely when he flashed her his usual wide grin. He nodded at Ken. “Looking mighty hale there, Lazarus.”

  Ken used my momentary confusion to tap me between the shoulder blades so I stumbled forward on the path.

  “Et tu, Brute?” I said to Kwaskwi. He held up his hands in surrender. “Whoa there, I’m just eavesdropping. I’m not mixed up with Emo boy’s nefarious plans.”

  “Now’s not the time for your brand of joking, Siwash Tyee,” Ken said gravely.

  Yukiko glided after Ken, unconcerned about our latest addition.

  “So you knew nothing about this?” I waved in Ken’s direction.

  “Just following along for the ride,” said Kwaskwi. “And protecting my assets.” He cuffed Ken’s shoulder. “Massive points for fooling the trickster.”

  “This is not your fight,” said Ken formally, but he continued herding us forward with his stick and palpable urgency.

  “I am a stakeholder,” said Kwaskwi, showing even more teeth. “And I’m curious, too—I can’t imagine any scenario where this plays out without you getting your asses handed to you by Tojo.”

  If only this headache would go away. It was hard to think, to muster up and arrange all the things I wanted to batter Ken with before I followed him to the Black Pearl.

  In my heart, I knew from the first time I touched her that I couldn’t leave the Black Pearl dragon chained here for Tojo and Kawano to use. She was a prisoner, in pain. It was wrong on so many levels and I couldn’t leave her without trying to help. For the same reason I couldn’t ignore Ullikemi’s wild ache to be free. But was I strong enough? Ken seemed to think so.

  Mom had also called me strong way before I believed it. When she was trying to tell me it was okay to leave the hospital, escape her dreams of dying. She’d been unable to sit up, but I’d tucked the Captain Adriamycin red satin devil pillow Marlin sewed for her underneath her head so she could look at me without craning her neck.

  “Do you know why I named you Koi?” she had said. “Because you were always so sturdy, so strong, even when you were just a keiki. And I wanted you to remember, when it got hard.” Here, Mom’s voice had cracked. She coughed, and I took her water tumbler from the side table and carefully held the plastic straw to her lips, inflamed with mouth sores despite the Biotene the nurses urged on her.

  She swallowed with such obviously painful effort my own throat ached.

  “Koi can live on any continent, in almost all temperatures. Survive even in the muddiest water. And that’s what you’ve got, yes?” I looked through the glass window where the OHSU nurses in their annoyingly flower-patterned scrubs hustled back and forth down the corridor.

  “Muddy water,” Mom repeated.

  “It’s okay,” I said, pulling down my sleeve to hold her hand again.

  She batted weakly at my sweater-covered fingers. “You’ve got to take care of yourself when you spend all day stirring up what lies on the bottoms of ponds.”

  I hadn’t understood then, just thinking she was spouting more of her Marine biologist pop psychology. But she’d been alluding to the family monster in the room: Dad’s and my weird dreaming.

  Then Mangasar Hayk shattered my careful world of denial and took Marlin to force me to help him use Ullikemi’s power to wield magic that messed with people’s memories. I got Marlin back and set Ullikemi free with a little help from Ken. Now I truly believed in my own strength. But that strength came with some attached strings that I don’t think Mom would ever call good.

  My Baku hunger had almost drained Kwaskwi’s friend the ice hag, Dzunukwa, of her life. The heady rush of energy I got from eating a living, waking Kind dream was invigorating and terrifying. Dad had chosen to stop eating dreams for years and risk living in a senile fog rather that give into the hunger for the Black Pearl. What was the Nietzsche quote? Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

  I shivered, wishing I had my cardigan or that terry cloth towel-blanket thing. Ken and Yukiko walked forward utterly focused, their eyes sharp as glass with determination.

  Why did I think Japan would hold the key to helping me figure out the Baku bits of myself when Dad had run away from Kawano and the Council decades ago?

  No more running away. That was my mantra now. No more hiding out in my apartment. No more relying on Marlin for social interaction. I was inextricably tangled in the Kind zaniness, unable to go back to my normal life. I have to see this through. Just not sure I know what I’ll be when I reach the other side.

  We emerged from the wooded path onto a gravel road. Everyone’s footsteps but Yukiko’s crunched jarringly loud despite the night chorus of crickets in the tall, plumed grass lining the sides of the lot.

  Restlessness like biting ants crawled up and down my spine, the energy from eating Ken’s dream fizzing and popping inside me like Marlin’s eighth grade experiment dropping mint candy into cola.

  I needed to do something.

  In the shadowed far end of the lot under drooping beech trees squatted a wattle-and-daub walled, traditional Kura storage building with a peaked roof of curved tiles. One high dark window peered down like an eye.

  All my years of horror movie watching told me this was the last place I wanted to be, but Ken strode confidently around the corner so I followed reluctantly, hoping spiders were the scariest thing the Kura contained.

  The other side of the Kura sported a weirdly modern, metal sliding door. Ken and Kwaskwi raised it slowly, minimizing the noisy rattle, to reveal the cutest little truck I’d ever seen. Covered in a green tarp on top, the bottom was yellow with the picture of a surprised Panda with huge eyes and ‘Sakai Moving Company’ emblazoned in hiragana block letters.

  “Get in the passenger side,” said Ken.

  “You’re driving with that gimpy foot?” said Kwaskwi. He exchanged a concerned glance with Yukiko. “We’ll meet you at Jesus’ Grave.”

  The two waded into the plumed grass and then disappeared under the beeches’ shadows, Yukiko a flash of white that was suddenly swallowed by the warm darkness. A flock of jays lifted in an eerily silent cloud from the tree canopy and headed east toward the sliver of rose horizon. Morning was upon us. Ken opened the driver’s side door. “Please, Koi,” he said in English. A concession. “This is not the way I wanted things. I regret much, but I can’t regret you being here.”

  The base of my throat tightened with anger, with a torrent of hot words about illusion and mothers and what else he could regret, but I was already moving toward the truck. He swung himself up into the cab. I slid into the passenger’s seat. Instead of buckling in, I sucked in all that Baku restless energy from eating his dream and slapped Ken across the face with an open palm.

  His head cracked satisfyingly against the driver’s side window, the red imprint of my palm rising up like a sunburn over the indigo bruises.

  There’s my strength, my pure heart. Bastard. “I regret being here.”

  Ken sat up, head bowed, breathing in gasps while his hands gripped the wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. Hurting.

  What am I doing?

  Part of me was glad. Glad to wield physical strength against him, while the sane part of me urgently whispering about becoming a monster was drowned out by the rush of satisfaction. Let him feel pain. Ken had muddied the water here, it was his fault we’d come to this. I was just taking care of myself.

  Without a word, he turned the ignition key, and pulled out of the lot slowly.

  The truck’s motor and open windows made talk blessedly difficult. The slap had released the pent up energy from dream-eating, but blowback hangover was happy to fill in the vacancy. Eating powerful Kind dreams made me super-cranky, kind of like PMS on steroids. If only I could remember that.

  My stomac
h informed me it was ravenous, and my throat felt dry and scratchy like I’d contracted strep. We jostled and jounced our way to the Tomb of Jesus while I pulled out my phone and caught up on Marlin’s texts. She was a shade less histrionic with the emojis since I told her Dad had several lucid periods. She had messaged a snapshot of Dad’s prescriptions and pill schedule laid out on her kitchen table. The familiar pineapple and palm-leaf patterned tablecloth underneath made my heart give a little twinge. I missed her affectionate bossiness but was simultaneously heartily relieved she wasn’t here. One less Pierce-Herai to worry about.

  Gosh, Dad hadn’t had his pills in over twenty four hours. They were back in Tokyo with our luggage. But did it matter? Yukiko’s freezing magic seemed to work better than actual Western medicine on keeping the not-eating-dreams-induced dementia at bay.

  The truck came to a stop. We were here. Ken pulled onto the concrete path leading to the grassy mounds and cut the engine. “You don’t,” he swallowed audibly. “If you are afraid—”

  “Keep digging that hole, buster,” I cut in. Then modulating my tone to something less knife-edged, I looked out the front windshield. “Don’t patronize. Don’t pretend this isn’t exactly why you cozied up to me in Portland. It’s insulting.” Ken reached for my hand, I snatched it away, pressing it close to my chest. “What the hell? No touching.”

  “There’s so much I want to…”

  The boy seriously needs to finish his sentences. “I get it. We’re here to release the Black Pearl before the Council can stop us. I don’t like how I got maneuvered here, but it’s clear this is the right choice. Tojo gives me the creeps. But somehow, despite the kidnapping, I like Midori and Ben.”

  “That’s good,” said Ken, folding his arms across his chest. Probably consciously mimicking my body posture or some other kind of psychological bullshit. At least he wasn’t using Kitsune illusion to make his face prettier. “So you’ll try?”

  “Yes, I’ll try. But don’t take it the wrong way. I’m not doing it for you.”

  “I know,” he whispered in Japanese. “But that doesn’t stop me from wishing…from wanting to be near you, or loving how you can’t keep from helping. No matter what happens, I wanted you to know that.”