A Mortal Song

by Megan Crewe

  I meant to approach the ghosts quietly to give them as little warning as possible. But after a couple of steps, my heel hit a thick, tacky patch on the floor. It made a little sucking sound when I raised my foot.

  The blood the ghosts had splashed here. I’d been breathing through my parted lips, but even so, a rancid metallic smell started to fill my nose. Fighting the urge to gag, I hurried on. If I didn’t have the element of surprise, I’d have to rely on speed.

  “Who’s that?” one of the corporeal ghosts said to Keiji, and Keiji shrugged and said, “Oh, just a friend.” Before any of them had time to wonder where his “friend” had come from, I was smacking ofuda into their midst.

  Two of the ghostlights blinked out in an instant. Keiji whipped out his own charms, banishing the last ethereal ghost and slapping the closest solid ghost’s face while her attention was on me. I was raising another ofuda when the final ghost grabbed my elbow. His other hand wavered translucent and dipped into my chest.

  My lungs seized as he caught the thin thread of ki inside me. He squeezed, and my fingers spasmed, the ofuda slipping from my grasp. The rest of the ghost’s body started to fade. He grinned at me, twisting the core of my spirit so my pulse wobbled and my legs sagged. An icy haze washed over me. I shook my head against it. If I let fear overwhelm me this time, I really would die.

  As I wrenched against his grasp, the ghost’s head snapped forward. He winked out of the world of the living, revealing Keiji behind him lowering the hand he’d thrust an ofuda with before the hall went fully dark.

  I stumbled against the wall. In an instant, Keiji was at my side. “Sora?”

  “I’m all right,” I rasped. Or at least I hoped I would be soon. Pain was searing through me as if my internal organs had been scraped raw. I fumbled for the key. “Let’s get them out. Is there a light around here somewhere? I can’t see a thing now.”

  Sticky footsteps pattered down the hall. I traced the wall to the edge of the doorframe, a handle, a narrow hole beneath it. Keiji made a triumphant sound, and electric lights hummed on overhead. I pushed the key into the lock. For a second it jarred, and my heart stuttered. Then the deadbolt slid over. I shoved the door open.

  The smell hit me first: a rotting stench that made my stomach lurch. Chiyo and Takeo were huddled together a few feet from the door, surrounded by a cracked red paste that coated every inch of the walls, floor, and ceiling: layers of blood and gristle and I didn’t want to know what else. Chiyo was shivering, Takeo wheezing, their faces wan and shining with sweat.

  Dropping the key, I held my breath and rushed inside. As I took Chiyo’s arm to help her to her feet, Keiji burst in. He jerked to a halt and stumbled out again. Through the doorway, I heard him heave and a splatter of vomit hitting the floor.

  “Sora,” Chiyo murmured. She clung to my shoulder, swaying as she stood. She was still clutching the sacred sword in her other hand, as if she didn’t dare let go of it. “Where’s—where’s Haru?”

  “Downstairs,” I said, trying not to remember how he’d looked when I left him. “Don’t worry about him yet. You have to—”

  A tremor passed through her as I helped her to a patch of untainted floor in the hallway. “I’m fine,” she said, her voice faint but brighter. “He needs me.”

  She nudged past me and started to shuffle down the hall. I glanced between her and the door, judged that it would be a while before she made it there, and ducked back into their prison room to assist Takeo.

  He was even weaker than Chiyo had been. My knees jarred when I tried to support the weight of his much taller and bulkier body. Keiji slunk back in, his face pinched, and leapt to help. Together, we hauled Takeo out of the room and set him on the same clear patch I’d brought Chiyo to. He coughed, slouching over.

  Chiyo had made it partway down the hall, quivering as she darted around the splashes of gore. What was she going to do when she saw Haru? She wasn’t in any condition to heal him.

  “Walk Takeo outside,” I said to Keiji, and he nodded.

  “Chiyo!” I called, running after her. I caught up with her just as she reached the stairwell. She paused, wiping her damp bangs from her forehead. Her eyes were slightly glazed, but no less determined.

  “He’s down here?” she said.

  “You have to rest before you can do anything for him,” I said.

  “I can handle this,” she insisted. She shoved aside the door and trudged across the landing. The walls and floor were unbloodied there. As she headed down the stairs, her posture drew straighter, but she still had to push three times to open the door to the basement.

  While the bloody prison had sapped her ki, I was battered and aching from head to toe. I was afraid if I tried to hold her back, she’d use up even more of her energy fighting me, and then still keep going. So I just followed.

  I didn’t need to tell her which door Haru was behind. She hustled down the hall on teetering legs as if he were a beacon only she could see. When we reached the room I’d escaped from, she charged right in. Then she dropped down beside his slumped body with a cry.

  “No,” she said, finally releasing the sword. She pressed her hands to his face and shook her head. “No no no no. You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying here with me.”

  “Chiyo,” I said around a catch in my throat, “I don’t know if he’s even—”

  “He’s alive,” she said. “I can feel it. Right...” Her fingers skittered down to his chest. “But it’s slipping away. I have to catch it.”

  She inhaled with a gasp, and the room exploded with light. Haru’s body twitched. A breath rattled over his lips. He groaned and rolled over, and Chiyo collapsed beside him.

  17

  I CROUCHED at Chiyo’s side for several long minutes, feeling her back tremble under my anxious hand and wondering how long it would take for Tomoya’s lieutenant to discover our lie and come charging back here with the rest of Omori’s ghostly army. Rescuing Haru from the brink of death had left Chiyo completely drained, and Haru, though alive, was so weak he crumpled over the first two times he tried to sit up. There was no way I could carry both of them, and no way Chiyo would allow me to separate them. Finally, Keiji came for us with the oak kami.

  Takeo met us outside in the early afternoon heat, his tan skin still off-color. “We should leave here immediately,” he said. His gaze fell to the wrist I was holding limply by my side. Before he could remark on it, a gangly figure appeared on the path behind him: the pine kami who’d tricked us into entering the keep.

  Chiyo managed to spring onto her wobbly feet, raising her sword, and my hand dropped to the hilt of mine. The young kami bowed as low as his waist allowed, stretching his arms toward us. Cupped in his hands was a necklace composed of sparkling curls of green jadeite.

  “The Imperial jewel,” I murmured.

  “I most greatly, greatly am sorry,” the kami stuttered. “They—my tree—they started to cut, to chop—they said if I did not say what they asked—”

  “If you’d told us that,” Takeo said, “we would have stopped them.”

  Chiyo wavered forward, and Takeo accepted the necklace to fasten it around her neck. “Thank you for bringing this to us,” she said to the pine kami in a reedy voice. “I’m not angry. I know you must have been very scared.”

  She beamed at him despite her weariness, and he bowed his head again, blushing. Then she turned her grin on Takeo.

  “A little more trouble than we were hoping, but we got what we came for in the end.”

  “Let’s make sure we don’t lose it,” he replied. “Omori’s forces could return at any moment.”

  He and the few other kami who’d come with us to the palace gathered around Chiyo and the three of us humans. As their ki swept through me, my thoughts started to fragment. I hadn’t realized how weary I was, but between my injuries and the fight and so many nights of sleep cut short, it suddenly took all my energy just to stay upright.

  We whisked through the city streets to a wide fo
rested park surrounding one of the largest shrines I’d ever seen. In the separate sanctuary building off limits to the average visitor, Takeo bent over me and slid his fingers across my broken wrist. That was the last thing I remembered before sleep dragged me under.

  When I woke up, my head felt clearer. Sunlight was filtering through the paper panels of the door near my feet. The sounds of a ringing bell and clapping hands carried with it. That would be the human visitors at the worship hall nearby. We hadn’t taken shelter at an active shrine before. Takeo must have arranged with the resident kami some way of preventing the priests from noticing our presence.

  Beside me lay my satchel and a bundle of clean clothes: a green tunic of a similar shade to the now-filthy shirt I’d borrowed from Chiyo and a pair of pale jeans. Brought by one of the kami as well? Had I only slept a few hours, or had we lost another day?

  I dressed quickly and slid open the door. Before I could step out, a tremor rippled through the floor. The door rattled in its frame. I waited, gripping the wall and counting off the seconds. I reached ten before the ground stilled.

  Oh, Fuji, I thought. What are they doing to you? I pictured the walls of the palace I’d grown up in splattered with gore, and shuddered.

  I hurried to an entranceway that led to a grassy yard behind the building. From the angle of the sun, it was late afternoon—the same day, then, not the next morning. Still three days left until the first night of Obon.

  Haru was sitting on the steps leading down to the yard, watching Chiyo and Takeo, who were standing by a small pond. They both looked well enough. The pond’s water was low, the soil dry and cracked along its edge. Keiji squatted on the bank, tossing bits of bread to the koi.

  I stiffened when my eyes fell on him. I hadn’t told the others yet. They didn’t know the part he’d played in leading us into that trap.

  Keiji had to realize I would tell them, but he was still here. I didn’t know what that meant.

  “It was too great a risk,” Takeo was saying. “However important he is to you.”

  “It wasn’t a risk at all,” Chiyo replied, smiling. “I knew I could do it. We still have time, and there’s only the mirror we still have to get, right?”

  “Your ki was already exhausted and you pushed yourself even further,” Takeo said. “Omori will be sending every ally he can spare to Ise to stop us from reaching the mirror. You’ll never be able to fight through an army if you have nothing left.”

  Chiyo rolled her eyes. “I haven’t lost it. Look.” She raised her hands, and a ball of glinting energy formed between them. But after a few seconds, its surface quivered. Chiyo’s fingers tensed as the ball fizzled away into the air.

  As I pushed myself on toward them, Chiyo frowned at her hands and then shrugged. “I just need a little more rest, and I’ll be good as new.”

  “We have little enough time as it is,” Takeo said. “We can’t be sure the mountain will even hold until Obon.”

  Chiyo turned at the sound of my steps. “Sora!” she said. “I never really thanked you before. So thank you, thank you, thank you.” She threw her arms around me. “When you got us out of that horrible room, the only thing I could think of was saving Haru.”

  “I know,” I said, awkward in her embrace until she stepped back. “How are we going to tackle Ise?”

  “We were about to discuss that,” Takeo said, his voice softening. “But first, how are you?”

  With his familiar gaze on me, my scrapes and bruises prickled. I could have asked him to heal all of them as he had my wrist, to make every ache and pang disappear—at least, the physical ones. But then I’d be suggesting I couldn’t carry on without help. I needed to get used to the limitations of my human body.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “And you?”

  He grimaced. “Recovering. I should have realized the ghosts might resort to trickery.”

  My hands balled. I should have realized. I’d known something was wrong.

  Except I hadn’t known, not really. I’d only had a feeling that something was off. I’d had lots of other feelings in the recent past: the fear that froze up my mind, the... whatever it was that had blinded me to Keiji’s lies. Even if some of my instincts were right, how was I supposed to tell which inclinations to listen to and which to ignore?

  “How did you manage to get rid of all those ghosts anyway?” Chiyo asked. “Can we do the same thing at Ise?”

  My eyes darted to Keiji, who had gotten up to join us. He met my gaze uncertainly.

  “It wasn’t really me,” I said. “Keiji convinced most of them to go. I only had to fight a few. But I don’t think that trick will work a second time.”

  Chiyo’s eyebrows leapt up. “‘Convinced’ them to go? Have you got some super power of persuasion you forgot to mention to me, Mitsuoka?”

  A flush crept up Keiji’s neck. He lowered his head, his hair falling over the top of his glasses. For a second, I thought he was going to make me say the rest. Then he forced himself to look up again.

  “They listened to me because the ghost who planned the surprise attack was my brother,” he said, his voice strained but steady. “It’s my fault. That they—that they knew where we’d be and when, the whole time. That they knew about Chiyo and the treasures.” His mouth twisted. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt, I promise you. He’d never said anything about Mt. Fuji or Omori—it never occurred to me, at the beginning, that he could be involved in that. I was only telling him things and answering his questions in case he knew things about ghosts that I could use to help, and I was hoping if I helped enough, then afterward maybe the kami could help him somehow. He wanted his life back. That’s all I wanted.”

  Takeo’s hand had leapt to his sword. “Omori knows everything because of you? This morning... Nagoya... Sora almost died. Any of us could have died. Fuji could be lost completely now because of you!”

  Keiji cringed. “I know. I should have figured it out sooner. I just didn’t want to think he could be part of something that awful.”

  “Wait,” Chiyo said, sounding amused even as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Your brother’s a ghost? You figured that out right away, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I knew he was a ghost,” Keiji said. “He... died two years ago. He’d gotten in with a bunch of guys running a lending company, and he was going to make enough money so he could get his own place. A place for him and me, to get away from our aunt and uncle. But—I don’t know exactly what happened—the group he was with was connected to one of the syndicates, and someone there must have pissed off someone in a different syndicate. There was a big fight and...”

  He made a jerking motion with his hand, as if it were a figure toppling over. Dead.

  “A little while after that, he appeared in my room—he told me he’d wanted to keep an eye on me still, and he thought since I already believed in spirits and all that, maybe I could handle talking to him. I freaked out a bit, but, well, it was so good to have him back.”

  “The syndicates,” Haru said in his abrupt way. I hadn’t heard him walking over. “You mean yakuza.”

  Keiji nodded. “When you mentioned some of the ghosts were yakuza, that was the first clue I had,” he said to me, a plea in his eyes. “I know I should have said something, even if I wasn’t sure. I wish I had.”

  But he hadn’t. Those regrets didn’t mean much when the damage was already done.

  “Wow,” Chiyo said. “It sounds like Omori’s set himself up as the big boss, then, recruiting all the dead yakuza members he can find.”

  Recruiting. The word brought back Tomoya’s odd comments. “We already know he’s helping them by lending them his power,” I said to Keiji, “but how is he finding so many of them at all? Your brother talked about Omori saving them. What does that mean?”

  “Yes,” Takeo said, still gripping his sword. “We need to hear everything he told you about Omori’s intentions.”

  “Tomoya didn’t tell me much this morning,” Keiji said. “
He said he’d explain more later, when everything was in place. I just know he’s proved himself to Omori and been put in charge of a bunch of the other ghosts...” He paused. “He did mention something before all this started, though. Months ago. He said he’d made friends, and that one of them was so powerful he could guide spirits right out of the afterworld. Maybe he was talking about Omori.”

  My mouth fell open. “Then Omori isn’t turning just to spirits who’ve lingered here—he’s dragging back those who passed away properly but haven’t been dead long enough to fade away. No wonder he was able to raise such a large army.”

  No wonder that army felt so indebted to him. He had saved them, if only temporarily, from the cold, dark emptiness I’d glimpsed as my life drained away.

  Keiji nodded. “You’re right. It must be. But Tomoya didn’t give me any details back then either. I just know he was trying to find a way to come back for real. He was always talking about how there might be forces in the world that could make that happen.”

  “Hmmm,” Chiyo said. “So where is your brother now?”

  “I banished him,” I said before Keiji had to answer. Maybe it was more weakness, but I didn’t want to see the expression he’d make saying it. “But... if Omori knows how to bring spirits over from the afterworld...”

  “He could come back,” Keiji filled in, his eyes widening. Then his jaw set. “If he does, no matter what he says, I swear I’m not going to tell him another thing. I never would have in the first place if I’d known the whole story. I’m on your side. I want to keep helping, better this time... if you’ll let me. I’ll do whatever I can.”

  He was watching me as he said those last words. I looked away. Being near him was making my chest increasingly tight. But maybe his brother had let something slip that we didn’t realize was useful yet. That was more important than my wounded heart.

  We stood there in silence for a moment, Takeo looking as if he were still considering driving Keiji out of the shrine at sword point.