The blue jay squawked, fluffed out its feathers and made a bobbing motion with its beak. Putting my hands to my temples, I pressed thumbs into the indentations above the jawline. It didn’t help the increasing pain. If I could just think. “You and Ben against everyone?”
“I am the Bringer,” said Ken with a shrug. I glanced at Pon-suma, looking for back up on how stupid that sounded but instead he gave a little nod, as if Ken’s assumption he could take on a whole bevy of Council guards was unquestionable. Tojo had overpowered Ben so quickly—was Ken’s reputation really that deadly even though he was Hafu? And injured? When he went all feral-Kitsune, I assumed it was illusion making him fierce, but was that version of Ken his true face? What the hell do I mean by a true face anyway? It wasn’t like the Baku part of me was any truer than the student/sister/painful introvert Koi I’d lived for twenty-three years. Maybe trying to pare Ken down to a single truth was just an excuse to stop making the mental effort to understand all his parts.
I’d missed part of the conversation. Princess Stewardess was saying “…even with Herai-sama, how can you be sure Kawano-sama won’t stop you again once the Black Pearl gets to the river?”
“I miscalculated,” said Ken. He put a hand on my knee and squeezed almost painfully tight. “The river is the Black Pearl’s element, and I thought that would balance Kawano-sama’s power.”
What he didn’t say was that if I hadn’t been such a wish-washy, whiny Baku about trusting Ken’s dream enough to make it my focus for all Yukiko’s power, I would have released the Black Pearl before Kawano got there.
“Your mistake was attempting this without The Eight Span Mirror,” said Pon-suma gravely.
Ken bowed his head, closing his eyes. “Yes,” he said simply, accepting judgment. Admitting his responsibility without descending into a maelstrom of unhealthy self-recriminations.
A soft bell chimed. Princess Stewardess gave us a stern warning look and pressed a button on the armrest. A panel in the divider slid down, revealing our burly driver’s thick neck.
“We are close to arrival, Gozen-san,” said the driver formally. Something oily and slick twisted in my stomach. A sharp throb in my head answered. The car glided to a stop.
I grit my teeth. “Let me out,” I said.
Ken gave me an earnest look. “Koi, listen—”
“Seriously, let me out!”
I pulled the door latch frantically. It clicked, useless. I pounded my fist on the window and the door swung open to reveal a stern face, not the driver’s but somehow familiar in an unpleasant way. I leaned over and threw up all over the expensive-looking, shiny leather shoes belonging to the legs blocking my way.
A string of yakuza curses in male Japanese stung the air as wings clipped me on top of my head. The jay winged away, a bright blue dart in the fluffy cloud-littered sky. There was a grunt of dismay and I looked up, already turning red with embarrassment and wiping my mouth with the windbreaker’s smelly sleeve.
Recognition slid into place along with a nauseating, acidic smell. Red Shirt from the airport. He kicked off his ruined shoes, gripped me above the elbow and hauled me roughly out. Fresh pain shot up my arm. I couldn’t breathe for a long moment.
Red Shirt lunged back into the limo. There was a scuffle. What was happening? Inside the car the thrashing of limbs stopped. Pon-suma got out first, Red Shirt pricking him in the back of his neck with a wicked-looking bowie knife so hard that the shrine boy’s pajama top had a spreading dark stain.
Princess Stewardess emerged next and smiled. “Nice work,” she said. “And the Council guards?”
“They know nothing,” said Red Shirt. “We will make short work of them.”
Red Shirt was working for Princess Stewardess all along?
Pon-suma straightened, uncaring of the knife. “Gozen Tomoe-san,” he said formally to Princess Stewardess. “I abjure thee.”
Princess Stewardess was Tomoe Gozen? Like the historical onna-bugeisha? From that Jessica Amanda Salmonson YA fantasy series? No way. I had to focus. Something was going down here. Tomoe was breaking away from The Eight Span Mirror and making her own political move.
“It’s too late to convince me Murase-san and his détente with Tojo will change anything. It’s time for The Eight Span Mirror to stop sitting on its ass,” said Tomoe.
“He’s not trying to change your mind,” said Ken’s voice. He scootched himself onto the edge of the seat, revealing arms bound behind him in a way that wrenched his shoulders painfully. “And I abjure thee as well.”
Pon-suma smiled, showing unnervingly long canines. “Just getting prepared.”
Tomoe gave another exasperated cluck, but her glance lingered too long on the shrine boy as if unwilling to turn her back on him. “Don’t be stupid,” she told Ken and then turned on Red Shirt. “Make sure the Bringer takes care of all the guards.”
“Hai!” He all but clicked his heels before handing over a set of keys to Tomoe and then prodding Pon-suma under the archway. Burly Driver jerked Ken out of the limo and pushed him along behind. I made to follow after, but Tomoe stepped in front of me.
“No, not you, Baku,” she said. “You and your father are needed elsewhere.”
As soon as this was over, I was going to sit down with Dad, Marlin, and Ken to discuss consent, free will, and how to pound the idea through pompous Kind craniums that kidnapping was not the answer to every little problem.
“Take me to Dad,” I said. It hadn’t escaped my notice that my brain was lumping Ken in with “family” when postulating about the future. So I probably should have been concerned about where Red Shirt was taking him, but I was just too exhausted. And sick. And aren’t Tomoe and Ken supposed to be on the same god damn side?
“The limo is too flashy to fly under Tojo’s radar. We’ll have to take Murase’s K-car.”
“Where?” I said, swallowing stinging bile. I called up every ounce of sarcasm I possessed. “No, wait, let me guess. The tomb of Jesus?”
The blue jay swooped overhead, circled us three times, and then alit on the metal chain-top of the rain catcher decorating the front left of the archway’s gutter. The long chain tinkled as it chittered. He turned a beady eye on us.
“Apparently, she’s got her own plan that doesn’t involve Murase or Ken,” I addressed the bird—Kwaskwi? Or one of his minions?—not feeling a tiny ounce foolish, no siree.
My molars ground together at the thought of this bird actually being able to turn human. Dragons and dream-eating I could handle. But this, this was weird shit. It was anti laws of mass conservation and crazy in some indefinable way that made hysterical giggles lurk in the back of my throat. “She’s got Dad stashed at the Jesus mounds.” I turned to Tomoe Gozen, who had, according to Dad’s TVJapan samurai dramas, fought with a katana in the Genpei wars during the late twelfth century and carried her defeated master’s head into the ocean to drown herself so it wouldn’t be defiled. Seriously bad-ass. Still, she was messing with the wrong Baku.
“And you think, what? That me and Dad will somehow convince Tojo and Kawano to suddenly include you in the Council?”
The jay chortled, and Tomoe’s face turned a bright pink. She gripped my collar at the throat, jostling my arm in a way that made stars of bright pain explode across my vision. “We have bigger plans than just joining the Council. We are not limited by the Bringer’s narrow focus.”
Her breath was sour, but it was hard to care when ten foot ice spikes were being driven slowly, inch by inch, into my temples from the pressure of Yukiko’s life energy. I was going to upchuck all over Tomoe if she didn’t let me go.
I needed to release this power. If my arm hadn’t been broken and useless, I would have punched her. The fierce desire to connect my knuckles to her face must have leaked through because she pushed me away, and then adjusted her chiffon blouse and pencil skirt. “Let’s go, Koi-chan.” Her acid tone made it clear invoking my nickname was not a signal of affection.
Feeling’s mutual, bitch.
Ignoring the mad cawing of the jay, I gritted my teeth and followed her to the small car Murase had used to take me to get coffee a million years ago. Man, I could have used some of Enoshima’s magic brew right now but I needed to make sure Dad was okay. Hopefully he could tell me what to do to keep my head from exploding.
Anger-charged silence filled the car the entire ride to the Tomb of Jesus. Even crunching over the driveway gravel sent flights of fiery pain up my arm. Was waiting this long to get it set going to make things worse? Should I have insisted she bring Midori along?
“Get out.” Tomoe stood in front of my door. I gave her the look Marlin had perfected when we were teens sharing one bathroom and I was blocking the mirror. With a mad huff of air, she opened the car door. “You want to see your father, right? Get out.”
I got out of the car without hurling this time. Tomoe gestured me away from the car, and then spent a few seconds muttering and waving her arms in the air like a crazy woman. Between one blink and the next, the car disappeared and in its place sat a small dumpster. I reached out to the rusted metal and felt the cold glass of the K-car window. Freaky on so many levels.
Tomoe had little patience with my open-mouthed staring and soon we were trudging down the path toward the mounds and crosses without any sign of the jay or anyone. We had even arrived before Kawano and Tojo. Tomoe looked pleased.
“Dad!” He was standing in front of the smaller mound reading the black-painted characters on the wooden sign. At my shout, he walked toward us and put an arm around my shoulders, hugging me close while I gasped in pain. People need to seriously stop touching me.
Dad released me quickly. “Koi-chan?”
“Alive and relatively unharmed as discussed,” said Tomoe.
He was lucid, so I cut to the chase. “Yukiko tried to help release the Black Pearl by forcing me to eat her primal-self dream.” My voice broke. “I didn’t know how to stop. I think I went too far, I think she might be dead.”
Dad bowed his head, closing his eyes. “The Bringer’s feckless actions have upset many plans,” he said quietly. He ran trembling hands through his hair, making gray tufts stand up like a bristle brush. “You were not supposed to bear the weight of Yukiko-sama’s sacrifice.”
“You knew she was going to do that?”
Dad nodded.
“She can’t be dead,” said Tomoe at the same time as I exclaimed, “Wait, you knew about Yukiko betraying the Council?”
“Many years have we walked this earth together,” intoned my Dad in the sing-song words of a Buddhist funeral rite. “And many years shall I mourn her loss.”
Tomoe swiped through the texts on her phone. “They’re almost here. Time to present a united front as we discussed.” She grabbed my shoulder, and I hissed with pain. “Tojo-san broke her arm. You deviate from the plan and it will slow down the process of Midori-san seeing to her care.”
Dad straightened. Stiff spine, military erectness of his head and neck, and awareness crystalized from within the frail dementia patient he’d become.
Mom’s master’s thesis had been on the polarizing scales of the open ocean dwelling big-eyed scad who could all but disappear by reflecting the sun’s rays, but when passing into shadow emerged solid, heavy, and unmistakably vibrantly alive. The quiet dignity Dad carried in the set of his shoulders, the strong presence, as if his spirit saturated each cell in his body like a shining force—this was Dad emerging in the shadows borne of years of pain. The Black Pearl’s pain.
I’d been grieving Dad for years. My heart clenched seeing him now, here in this impossible situation. I had the barest glimmer of an understanding of the years of experience he must have lived.
“My head’s going to explode,” I blurted.
Tomoe scoffed.
Dad cupped his hands in front of his belly and spoke in formal intonation. “Are you able to bear the weight of Yukiko-sama’s dreaming for a while longer?”
Could I?
“Yes,” I said, as much to fool myself as to please Dad, so achingly familiar and whole from my earliest childhood memories. He should have been this version when Mom was in hospice, or to explain I wasn’t a freak doomed to a hermit’s life, or to do something other than the epic failure of protecting me from the Kind by keeping me in the dark.
“I’ve lived a long life,” he said. “Many regrets, but now there’s you and Marlin-chan.” A lifetime’s worth of interpreting stoic old-Japanese-man-speak made the unspoken obvious. He’d do anything to protect us, including help Tomoe with whatever political maneuver she was trying to pull. She must have come to the same conclusion because she turned away, mouth curving into a self-satisfied smile.
“Midori will be here soon,” said Dad. “She will tend to your arm.”
I cradled my arm closer. Was it a good or bad sign that the pain was lessening to a dull throb? My fingertips tingled with numbness. “What is the deal you made with Tomoe? I thought she was going all rogue vigilante?”
“Many of The Eight Span Mirror are more comfortable with following a middle path over Murase-san’s outright rebellion.”
Outright rebellion is in the eyes of the beholder. Murase drank tea with Tojo and Kawano and wouldn’t say boo. If that was outright rebellion, then Ken stealing the Black Pearl out from under their noses was a heinous death-penalty offense.
“Middle Path?” I raised my eyebrows toward Jesus’ mound where Tomoe was sliding open the panel door. Even with conditioned trust in parental authority, topped with a dollop of unease due to my sketchy Kind political knowledge, I wasn’t just going to sit back and let Dad direct me. Yukiko’s life-power throbbed insistently in my veins like blazing ice, and I had the Black Pearl’s fragments reminding me in Technicolor and Dolby Stereo what it felt like to be imprisoned far from home. This was not right. And Dad was going along with it. Went along with it for years.
I couldn’t go along with it.
This realization was like swallowing a foul-tasting medicine.
“Tomoe-san has sworn that she will negotiate for the Black Pearl’s release within a decade. She will ensure you never touch the dragon again.”
“But Yukiko forced her life energy into me! She made me… she made me into a monster.” A scream built in the back of my throat. Somewhere lurking underneath the last dregs of Pon-suma’s dope in my bloodstream was the full, soul-shredding, unavoidable realization that I was the instrument of Yukiko’s death. But for now, the dope held back that waiting ghost.
Tiny muscles around Dad’s eyes tightened. Two furrows appeared between his eyebrows, the only indications of how deep a wound I’d inflicted with my words.
“Yes,” Dad said. “And we will not waste that sacrifice. But releasing the Black Pearl is my task. You were lucky with Ullikemi.” He said a phrase in Japanese I’d never heard before. “Settai jikko seigyo.” I shook my head, a tear trickling down my right cheek.
“I don’t know the English word,” Dad said. “It’s like…washback? From the energy required to release an ancient one.”
“When I set Ullikemi free from his Vishap stone the biofeedback should have, what? Given me a mega hangover?”
“Without me there it would have scrambled your brain,” said Dad. A light sheen broke out across his forehead. He rubbed the back of his neck vigorously with one hand. “I will not risk you again to fix mistakes caused by my self-deceptions.”
Funny how everyone was willing to sacrifice themselves today; Ken, Yukiko, and now Dad. My stomach clenched. And if my arm wasn’t broken and we weren’t both liable to give each other nightmare fragments, I would have captured his hands and gripped them to my chest, trying to convey the overwhelming fear and love I felt. “No,” I said.
“Too late,” said Dad. “They’re here.” He frowned. “That took longer than I expected.” He walked toward Tomoe, who straightened into a sentry’s position at the cave entrance, defiant and alert.
Gravel crunching signaled the truck’s arrival. A trio of shiny, black s
edans trailed behind, stuffed to the brim with Council black suits. The truck revved its engine, monstering clumsily over the concrete parking bumps and crushing manicured grass and daffodils before coming to a stop in front of Jesus’ mound.
The passenger door opened and Tojo jumped from the cab, a sodden white bundle draped in his arms. My toes curled into tight knots of denial inside my tennis shoes. My good hand balled into a fist and pressed against my ribcage. Not a bundle. Yukiko.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Tojo strode over to Dad, dropped Yukiko’s body on the grass, and gripped Dad by his collar, forcing him down on his knees so his nose was inches away from her pale, wet skin. “This is what happens when half-breeds interfere with centuries of Council guidance. Are you proud of her? Your little American?” Spittle flew from Tojo’s mouth but Dad didn’t flinch, didn’t struggle.
Stiffly, I moved closer. “Let him go.” The hot wash of Tojo’s anger met a little bit of my own as I pushed at his shoulder, allowing a bit of Yukiko’s energy to leak out.
Tojo rocked sideways, letting go of Dad in surprise. Spots of tension flickered along his ruddy cheeks and jaw. “You dare,” he roared and lunged. A star of pain burst in my left cheek as his fist connected to my face. My knees crumpled, and I just managed to twist onto my unbroken arm as I landed hard on the grass.
Sour melon-flavored foil taste welled over my tongue. Blood. A small pain lost in the general clamor and jangle of bones shifting and a throbbing ache on my cheek. A hand reached into my sphere of vision. I jerked away, heart pounding, reeling from the physical reality my brain refused to accept; Tojo hit me. Survivor Koi piped up. He breaks your arm and you get salty over a punch? Tojo was officially the top, and only, name on my hate list. He would never touch me again.
“Herai Koi-san. Please. Stand up.” Kawano’s calm rumble. I wasn’t ready to be reasonable. “We are understandably in shock over The Eight Span Mirror’s rash actions, but I don’t think we need devolve into squabbling children.”
Yeah, tell that to your playground bully. I lurched onto my knees, gritting my teeth at the rush of adrenaline and screaming nerves. Where was Pon-suma with his giant syringe? I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to stand. No, doping wasn’t what I needed now. I needed Survivalist Koi with a clear head. A pair of hands gently slipped under my armpits and lifted me from behind. Hopped up on Yukiko’s energy, even with layers of clothing between us, my Baku senses identified the steadying absence of fragments that had been my only safe human touch for so many years. Dad.
Black Pearl Dreaming Page 19
