“A bend in the river downhill from Tong Jiang. Does brushing your hair make you mindless? Baba just told you this morning about the Black Pearl. About how the Manchurians witness her yearly return singing for her god. I want to see the spotted kesike that come to sing harmony.”
I stared blankly at Dad. His sister’s memories weren’t mine. It was just dawning on me that he talked as if his family lived here in Northern China, although it would have been called Manchukuo by the Japanese settlers. Dad had lived in Manchuria? Before he became an army officer?
Frustrated with my empty stare, Dad grabbed my wrist. “Come on!”
Suddenly the gray and blue shapes flickered. A river bend bounded on both sides by tall grass took their place. I blinked. Upriver, a large black shape was swimming slowly our way, just barely visible under the water. The Black Pearl.
I rubbed my eye with my good hand and the gray landscape superimposed itself on the river like a hazy ghost-image. What was going on? It was like Dad had this all-purpose dreamspace he could fill with any memory or dream he wanted, even the Black Pearl’s river?
“Shie-chan, don’t ruin this. I’ll never take you along on Kind business again.”
“I’m not—” but Dad was pulling me along again, sliding down the river embankment, wading through the tall grass. Something in the grass coughed. I stilled. A leopard lifted its head from about thirty feet away and regarded me with a pair of unblinking yellow eyes. Tingles ran up and down my arms. I felt fear but also awe at the beautiful, sleekly muscled feline. This was the kesike Dad wanted to see.
I decided I would be happier seeing it from further away. It coughed again and gave itself an all-over shiver before bounding away upriver.
Dad slowed by the river bank, swaying slightly to a music I couldn’t hear as the Black Pearl drew closer and closer. “Yes, that’s it, old one,” said Dad. He bent to dangle his fingers in the silty water. “A rest. In your favorite place. Come.”
Something was odd here. The trees behind Dad shimmered strangely. Between one moment and the next they reverted to blue shadows that formed a mound-shaped blob topped by a cross. Jesus’s mound.
“You’re hiding the mound with this memory. You’re fooling the Black Pearl with this fake dream-memory. You’re luring her back to the cave.”
“Shie-chan, hush.” The Black Pearl was quite close now. A half dozen leopards lined both sides of the river, a chorus of quiet coughs punctuating a low-throated throbbing purr. The Black Pearl’s head broke through the surface of the river, rearing up as cascades of water streamed down the fringes under those mesmerizing emerald-and-aquamarine eyes.
And then the Black Pearl’s whalesong prayer vibrated up through the soles of the geta into my legs, swirled inside my belly, and lodged itself under my ribs.
“Oh, I didn’t realize,” I breathed. Tears streamed from my eyes. Dad didn’t hush me this time. He just gripped my hand in a painful squeeze causing delicate bones to shift.
I didn’t care.
Here in this dream-memory Dad had made, the Black Pearl sang her hymn to Abka Hehe out of joy. It made an eerie, breath-stealing harmony with the leopard’s droning purr. “She’s so beautiful.”
But underneath the hymn to life and the cradle of the river, to thanksgiving for the blue sky and the warmth of the sun, lurked an undercurrent of pain. Exquisitely sharp, gorgeously lush, a despairing, seductive loneliness I wanted to fold around myself. I could surrender the long hard work of surviving. A deep-boned ache for the Heilong Jiang shot through the melody. The ache was thick, formed like sedimentary rock, layer by layer all the years of imprisonment in the cold dark earth. This was the Black Pearl’s song as my father lured her back to prison.
“What are you doing?” I sobbed, tugging on the collar of Dad’s yukata.
Dad turned away from the Black Pearl’s looming, swaying head rearing out from the water. “It is Japan’s destiny to rule the Pacific Co-Prosperity sphere. Those weak Kind that have wasted their resources on Opium trade, who do not bow to divine will but look to decadent Western nations for leadership don’t deserve the guardianship of such a powerful ancient one. They must be taken care of.”
Taken care of? My jaw tightened. Dad’s words skimmed far too close to Nazi Germany propaganda I’d seen in history books. But this wasn’t history. This was Dad tricking the Black Pearl now, in my time.
“You’re imprisoning her again.” I jerked my wrist out of his grasp. The trees, the sun, the leopards disappeared. Only blue and gray shadows surrounded me again, blurring against the stark indigo of Dad’s yukata and the iridescent ebony of the Black Pearl’s scales. “What could Tomoe promise you for this?”
Dad’s lips twisted into a grimace. “Protection for you.”
I scoffed, a leopard cough. Ken and Kwaskwi aren’t strong enough? Is the Council all powerful even in the U.S.? “How can you trade our safety for the Black Pearl’s misery?”
“Your safety. Tomoe swore that the Black Pearl will suffer only a short while longer. Just enough time for the Council to accept her and for certain adjustments in leadership to be made. The Eight Span Mirror has been working a long time to get someone on the Council. In return, Tomoe promised you would get to choose where you live, and not bind you to the Council as a servant.”
I thought about the kanji for slave tattooed on Ken.
A tic in Dad’s jaw flickered madly. “It’s what I wanted for you, since the first time I held you in my arms. It’s the promise I made to your mother in the hospital.” He swallowed and looked over my shoulder into the endless, shadowed gray. “I will make sure you get to choose.”
And here we were at the same old impasse. My whole life he’d protected me by keeping me apart from the Kind, ignorant of what I was. How was I supposed to choose when Dad kept making decisions for me? “It’s not for you to make sure I’m anything. That’s my job, now.”
“Yes,” said Dad. He cupped my cheek, a warm, intimate gesture that brought back the endless blue sky, the lazy river, the amber eyes of leopards in the tall grass. I stilled, shocked. Touch wasn’t like him. Wasn’t like us.
Inside me, the throbbing energy of Yukiko’s dream roared into life. Breath exited my lungs in a whoosh as energy buzzed every cell, every space in my body. Dad’s fingers curled into my hair, holding me there.
And the energy flowed out of me into my father. The Baku was sucking Yukiko’s dream energy into himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“No!”
Dad’s grip in my hair had to have a real life analog; the sting of hair ripping out at the roots felt too deeply shocking.
“I won’t fail you this time, Koi-chan.”
Whatever dream he had going on here, this wasn’t reality. And I wasn’t this Shie sister of his. Tomoe had made a devil’s bargain with my father. I wanted no part of it.
Instead of fighting Dad, I took deep breaths. So this is what it feels like to have a Baku eat your dream. It wasn’t really my dream, but Yukiko’s, but still I shuddered at the wrenching feel of her energy leaving my body. It left my belly cold and empty and hollow.
“Don’t do this to me, Dad.”
Dad’s eyes focused. “You don’t understand the danger here. I will not lose you. Not like Shie, not like your mother.”
The Black Pearl glided to the shore, lowering her head so close that her breath bathed us in salty konbu and gym socks. Funny how much that stinks even in this memory dream. Or maybe this is real? Or both? Her gorgeous, aching song rushed into fill the space where Yukiko’s energy quickly was depleting.
“No one puts Baby Baku in a corner anymore,” I whispered. Dad’s strength was focused on keeping me from jerking away. Instead, I tucked my chin and pitched forward. My forehead caught the crown of his nose at a diagonal. There was a sickening crunch as my brain matter gonged like a bell, but Dad’s hands fell away.
At last, nothing between me and the mesmerizing aquamarine of the Black Pearl’s eyes. Her delicate nostrils fl
ared. The whalesong washed over me, a thousand brilliant, tiny cuts.
“I know how this has to happen,” I said quickly. “Just go ahead and do it.”
The Black Pearl delicately opened her jaw. The fringed gums fell away, revealing two rows of spaced, sharp teeth like an orca’s, and also a pair of thin curving fangs rearing over my head.
“I have Yukiko’s dreaming,” Dad gasped.
I straightened up, broken arm dangling uselessly, but trying with all my might to embody Mom’s calm, the iron-clad surety she had even when jumping head first into the unknown. Even with the chemo and the radiation, Mom had always unhesitatingly acted. “I have to try anyway.”
The Black Pearl’s jaw opened wider, unhinging like a python’s, and then dove swiftly to close fetid dark over my head.
I couldn’t help myself. I screamed. It won’t hurt you, Survivalist Koi said drily. You survived Ullikemi doing the same thing.
But that was in a dream. This was for real. Wasn’t it? I can’t tell anymore. And then no part of me could think because a tsunami made of whalesong and river water crashed over me. I was drowning, drowning in sorrow and flooded with putrid, silt-swollen water.
The Black Pearl’s dream. Her nightmare.
For a long suspended dreaming moment, I choked as my heart stilled under my breastbone, squeezed in an icy grip. The Black Pearl’s dream pummeled me like hurricane waves crashing over Haystack Rock on Cannon Beach. But even in the midst of that unrelenting attack, the flame that was Koi, my Baku kernel-self flickered into life.
With a gasp, the pain broke. My flame burned bright and eager. I’m getting better at not losing myself.
The thought was wholly mine—Koi Pierce, the coffee lover, the Portlandian, daughter of a sushi chef, and sister of a fashion diva. Baku.
Ullikemi had been whole enough to rail at me, even bargain, when I set him free back in Portland. But the whalesong was all that was left of the Black Pearl. Sorrow and loneliness had slowly eroded her mind inside the dream prison Dad constructed before he left Japan. Everything we’d done in the last day—taking her to the Aisaka River, my Baku touch forcing her to relive her capture—had only made things worse. This storm nightmare was the tattered shreds of her consciousness. But it was full of the Black Pearl’s magic and perfect for feeding a Baku.
Okay, then. Burn, little flame, burn.
I ate her dream.
I ate the pain. I ate the sorrow, and my veins hummed with the Black Pearl’s life-energy.
I felt so strong. Yukiko’s energy was small fry compared to the ancient, fathomless depths of the Black Pearl’s dreaming. Her nightmare fueled my flame, and my body turned the heat into a fizzing, zapping energy that raced loony circuits up and down my limbs. I was powerful. I was inevitable. Tomoe was something I might crush accidentally under a heel and Kawano was an irritating fly to swat away.
No one need suffer anymore. I would bust through all of Tojo’s goons with one hand tied behind my back. The Butcher of Nanking would bow before me, before the Black Pearl, and be humbled.
How did Dad stay away all these years? The Black Pearl’s dreaming made me as giddy as drinking a triple latte laced with Red Bull while sticking a finger in an electrical socket.
Koi-Chan, that’s enough. Dad’s voice. He must have managed to touch bare skin on my body in reality. That touch usually was a shockingly rare connection that centered me. An eye in the hurricane of my emotional life.
It barely registered now.
Power lit each cell of my body from within. Glowing hot, the pressure in my skull and under my breastbone almost was more than I could bear. But I was Baku. This is what I was made for.
You go too far.
Anger spiraled in from all sides. You kept me away from this ecstasy. I was in full control, despite the pain, and I would make everything right. Just as soon as I ate enough of the Black Pearl’s dream.
This is the tipping point. Stop now or you will take too much.
Senile old man. I am all that you are and more. I am Baku and this ancient one is mine. Every muscle in my body seized, the darkness became the iridescent scales of the Black Pearl, and then fractured, spinning around me in a dizzying dance. Still the energy poured into me.
Koi AweoAweo Pierce. See this!
The iridescent scales hardened into a shining, obsidian wall surrounding me. Reflected in the dark mirror was my own face, not Dad’s dream of his sister, but a dark mass of hair, the angular Pierce family nose, and the slight epicanthic fold above gently rounded eyes marking my mixed heritage. I tried to gasp and couldn’t squeeze breath into my lungs. The pressure built and built and built.
A cluster of agony shards burst like a supernova in the middle of my brain.
What am I doing?
Use the Kitsune’s dream as you did with Ullikemi or the ancient one’s dreaming will overwhelm you.
Kitsune? Pain’s jagged claws speared my brain and stopped all coherent thought. Somehow my little kernel-self, the flame of my Baku power burned on, and it was sucking the very life from the Black Pearl.
And me. I’m not ready to be a dead monster.
With the last shreds of coherent thought and the dregs of my willpower, I jerked away from the Black Pearl and our connection, tumbling backwards. My ravenous flame flickered, then went still. The energy turned off like a spigot. Strong arms caught me. I opened my eyelids, sticky with tears and dried mucus.
An utter absence of light was all I could discern. Panicking, I struck out wildly, open palm coming up against flesh and bone, bound arm waving in the air. I was blind. This happened before when I ate too much of Ullikemi’s dream back in Portland: blowback blindness.
“Koi.” A voice, not Dad’s. Hands holding my arm against my side. The Kitsune. Ken was the first man who wasn’t Dad who could touch me without giving me freaky fragments. He felt safe. I’d trusted he wanted to help me and Dad. That’s why his fragment had helped me before.
Now I shied away from Ken’s forest of cryptomeria cedars carpeted with primeval ferns as if it were rat poison. No, not Ken’s dream. I couldn’t. Japan had changed everything. I could no longer immerse myself in that dream with the same naïve trust. I needed something else; something warm and safe I could pull around me like one of Mom’s island quilts.
“What’s wrong with her?” Ken’s voice again.
“She went too far. She has to find a way to focus.”
“Use my dream,” said Ken, and then warm breath sour with bile bathed my face.
“No,” I said, cracking open chapped lips, my voice a faint rasp. Not Ken or Dad. Not a Kind fragment; not something foreign and twisty and false.
The blowback blindness was a small worry. It had healed on its own before. Hands helped me lay back, resting my head on hard thighs. Ken’s probably.
Someone made a frustrated hiss. Dad. “The Black Pearl is too weak. Even with Yukiko’s power I can’t finish this.”
“Koi,” said Ken, urgently gripping my good hand and squeezing. “Don’t give up. You have to take my dream.”
Now what flared hot was dream-eating fueled anger. “You don’t get to tell me what to do!” I could feel spittle fly from my mouth. “I’m not your tool, and I’m not The Eight Span Mirror’s pet.”
“I never thought—”
“Shut up! Just shut up!” I jerked my hand out of his grip and pressed a fist into my unseeing left eye. The pressure on the orbital bone did nothing to contain the mother of all migraines splitting my skull in a dozen pieces. This was a train wreck. Following Ken to Japan was supposed to help me figure out who I was, help Dad’s Baku-flavored dementia, but it had made me blind, blind as I was now in real life to the daunting truth.
The Kind weren’t a magical fix for a lifetime of feeling awkward in my own skin or for Dad’s anguish. Eating dreams was reveling in strength I had never known before, but it brought me to the brink of a nightmare chasm where I was a monster, killing Yukiko, hurting the Black Pearl when I meant to set her
free.
Pain made it hard to think, but I latched onto the need for a safe fragment, a human fragment without the distracting intensity of Kind dreaming, something I could trust in its simplicity. That felt right, returning to who I was before the Kind. The problem was, no humans, unless you counted Midori who was technically Hafu, had touched me in days.
Wait. Me, blind. I’m forgetting something about blindness.
Enoshima-san, the coffee guy with the test tubes. He’d given me a fragment when I picked up my coffee that day. It was just a flash, and most likely weak, but it was human.
“Help me up. Let me touch her,” I urged.
“She’s dying, Koi-chan,” Dad said in a tone as dry as the desert, his version of a sob. “Let her die in peace now.”
“Please, Oto-chan,” I said, using a diminutive form of poppa I hadn’t called him in ten years. “Take me to the Black Pearl!”
Muscled forearms pulled me up to a stand. Guided by Ken’s hand in the middle of my back, I slide-stepped through the grass until water soaked my toes. Water? We’d left the river. This must be the pond.
“Here,” Ken said, and plunged my good hand under water until fingertips brushed the hard surface of one of the Black Pearl’s coils.
“Now,” I said, elbowing him in the midsection with a short burst of dream-energy and anger, “You get the hell away from me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
There was a satisfying thump as if he’d gone tumbling into the wet grass. If only I could see his face. But if I was going to use Enoshima’s fragment, no Kind could touch me.
“I deserved that,” Ken said quietly from somewhere on the ground. “There was my mission, and then there you were, so fiery and strong. I couldn’t stay away.”
I snorted.
“But somewhere in there I relied too much on your strength and your heart. I… I broke this thing between us.” There was rustling. Ken made an angry scoffing sound. “You lost your sight again, didn’t you?”
I nodded my head. “Espresso eyes won’t work on me this time.” There was no time for Ken’s Hallmark moment. “This is for the Black Pearl. She’s the one who’s suffered. It has to end.”
Black Pearl Dreaming Page 21
