by Megan Crewe
“How were you even telling your brother things?” Chiyo said abruptly. “Secret meetings in the woods?”
“My phone,” Keiji said. “He did something to it, with ki I guess, so it always works for him no matter where I am.”
“All right.” Chiyo held out her hand. “Give it here.” As Keiji passed over his phone without argument, she added, “I don’t think we should be talking secret plans with you around until we’re sure you’re really sticking with us. So…”
She made a dismissive gesture. Keiji blinked and then ducked his head as he ambled toward the shrine building.
“Do we want to head for Ise right away?” Chiyo said to Takeo and me.
“I don’t want you that close to Omori’s army until you’ve recovered more of your power,” Takeo said. “As much as I hate to delay, I think we should hold off on our travels. I suppose... if we leave first thing tomorrow morning, that should be sufficient time.” He didn’t sound entirely sure.
“We can do everything possible to prepare in the meantime,” I said. “Make more ofuda, collect salt and lotus flowers and whatever else can repel the ghosts...”
Takeo rubbed his chin. “I could speak with whatever kami live here in the city. Perhaps there are a few powerful enough to be of service in a fight, and willing.”
Would that be enough? Tomorrow, with just two days left, we’d have only one real chance at retrieving the mirror and making it to Mt. Fuji before Obon. And it wasn’t just the huge force that would be waiting for us at Ise that we needed to worry about. We’d assumed before that Omori and his ghosts would be predictable in their attacks, that they’d try to overwhelm us with brute force alone, but they’d surprised us today. Out-thought us.
He’s as human as the rest of us, Tomoya had said about Omori. In the moment, I’d dismissed that remark as delusion, but there was some truth to it. The demon and his ghosts, none of them were straightforward—they were all at least partly human too. I should know better than anyone else here how annoyingly complex a human mind could be.
And we still didn’t know what Omori was truly after.
“Maybe,” I said tentatively, “we should also try to learn more about Omori as he was before he died. At Chiyo’s house we didn’t have time to do very much searching, and we weren’t even sure yet we had the right man.”
Chiyo’s eyes lit up. “Yeah! We could go back home. I could—”
“No,” Takeo said firmly. “Omori will definitely have ghosts watching that place, especially now that they know we’re back in Tokyo.”
Chiyo opened her mouth, and then stopped and looked at her hands—the hands that had failed to hold a simple ball of ki for more than the length of a breath.
“Right,” she said. “And if they caught me with my parents, they might attack Mom and Dad too. So we could find an internet cafe instead. There are tons of those around the city. We won’t have to go far.”
“And if we see any ghosts, we can run straight back to the protections of the shrine,” I said. I would have offered to go alone, but I’d never used a computer before. I didn’t even know what an internet cafe looked like. And from Takeo’s frown, I doubted he’d have liked the idea of me wandering the city alone either. “We have to find out more about Omori,” I went on. “Either the information will help us understand what he wants and what tactics he might use next, or... or maybe it’ll lead us to someone who knew him, who could tell us those things. Keiji’s brother came to him—Omori might have visited his family since his death, told them what he was doing. We’ll be so much better prepared if we can predict his next move.”
Takeo sighed, and I knew I’d pushed the right button. “We would,” he agreed. “All right. But please, be careful.”
“Of course,” Chiyo said, linking her arm around mine with a renewed smile. Haru stepped forward, but before he even spoke, she reached up to give his shoulder a playful push. “You go rest some more. You need it even more than I do. I’ve already had to save you once.”
“Sorry,” he said, wincing.
“There’s nothing to apologize for. Those ghosts got me too, didn’t they?” She let go of me long enough to give him a quick kiss.
“Okay,” I said when she rejoined me. “Let’s see if we can turn the tables on this Kenta Omori.”
The shrine’s forest had blocked out all sight and sound of the city around it. I’d almost forgotten we were still in the middle of Tokyo until we stepped past the gate onto the bustling sidewalk. People were peering through store windows, ambling in and out of restaurants, and crowding the intersections. The trill of bicycle bells and the rumble of engines filled the air. Traffic lights glared and advertisement screens flashed. With the sun beating down on my head, a wave of dizziness washed over me.
Chiyo sauntered forward, apparently undisturbed by the hustle and the noise, but after several steps her legs wobbled, and she caught herself against a signpost.
“Chiyo!” I said, but she waved my concern away.
“I just have to stretch these muscles a bit,” she said with her usual cheer. My stomach remained knotted as we continued down the street at a slower pace.
Chiyo stopped once to paw through a rack of dresses by a shop door, and again to ogle a display of silver jewelry. I suppressed my impatience, suspecting that she was pausing not so much out of idleness as to rest her feet. My gaze slid over the display and caught on a charm shaped like a streaming kite. Glinting in the sunlight, it looked almost like the one I’d made from ki for Takeo in our last little game. Or the one he’d made for Chiyo, or the one she’d made this morning. That shape wasn’t mine anymore.
“You want to get something?” Chiyo asked. “I picked up a ton of cash from the shrine—they had a huge box for offerings in front of the altar. We can use it for train tickets and amulets and all that, but we should be able to have a bit of fun too.” She pushed a wad of bills into my hand.
“But... it’s shrine money,” I said, my fingers curling around the textured paper. Offerings to the kami didn’t include me.
“It was,” Chiyo said. “And then it was mine, and now it’s yours. Even if you don’t buy anything now, we should all have some on us for emergencies, right?”
That made sense. I shoved the money into my satchel.
On the next block, Chiyo nudged me and pointed upward. A sign protruding from the second floor of a building up ahead read, High speed internet.
We squeezed up a narrow flight of stairs beside the first floor shoe store. An erratic beat filtered down to us, threaded with a winding, dipping melody. As we emerged into the cool artificial-smelling blast of air conditioning at the top of the stairs, my body swayed with the music, drawing resolve from the rhythm.
Bright orange paint covered the room’s walls, broken by posters of cartoon figures, hulking beasts, and soaring spacecraft. Several customers, most of them our age or a little younger, clustered around a few of the flat-screen monitors on the tables that lined both sides of the room.
As we approached the front counter, the floor jumped and rattled beneath us. I grabbed Chiyo’s arm, keeping us both balanced until the tiny quake faded.
“Another one,” the thinly bearded man behind the counter said, eyeing the ground uneasily. “All these tremors and a rainy season with no rain—I don’t care what they say on the news, it’s kind of freaking me out. And now there’s that gigantic typhoon that looks to be brewing near Okinawa. Crazy summer, isn’t it?”
Okinawa—the Nagamotos had talked about their son heading there on vacation. But of course, Omori didn’t care any more about that than he did about the forests and farms dying or the fire growing in Mt. Fuji. My hands clenched.
“It has been,” Chiyo said. “Can we get on one computer?”
“Sure. 300 yen for fifteen minutes, 500 for half an hour.” The guy tapped the glass-doored fridge behind him with his heel. “There’s water, tea, and soft drinks if you want.”
“Thanks.” Chiyo handed over a few bills from h
er wad of cash. She tugged me to a computer in the far corner, away from the window overlooking the street. “Don’t want any spooks spotting us while we’re busy,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. “Okay, let’s do some digging. Who do you think Omori would be talking to?”
“If anyone, his family?” I suggested. “Or maybe—he seems to still have ties to the yakuza, so someone who was part of his gang?”
“I’ll start with the wife,” Chiyo said, typing into the search box.
“I might have her name in that article we printed,” I said. By the time I’d pulled it out of my pocket, Chiyo already had a page of results in front of her. She clicked on one of the links.
“Hey, this is kind of sweet,” she said. “He organized and paid for a bunch of workers to bring supplies to Sendai after the big earthquake, and he dedicated the emergency aid effort to his wife. Emiko. Maybe we can find out where she’s living now.”
Why would someone who’d once tried to save people from natural disasters now be causing them without a care? Maybe he’d never cared, only put on a show to cover up his criminal activities?
I glanced at the print-out I’d unfolded in my lap, and all those thoughts fled my mind.
The papers were smudged from my first charcoal-drawn ofuda, and somewhere along the line they’d gotten a little damp, so the edges of the image had run. But Omori still grinned at me with that warm blast of a smile, and beside him his wife...
…looked shockingly familiar.
“I don’t think Emiko Omori is living anywhere right now,” I said, setting the pages on the table between us. “She’s dead.”
18
“WHAT?” Chiyo said, peering at the printed photo. “How do you know?”
Those soft eyes, that gentle mouth—I couldn’t have forgotten them if I’d wanted to. “When we were trapped in the keep…” I said. “There’s this sparrow that’s been following Takeo and me since we left Mt. Fuji. It has a spirit in it. She appeared to me for a moment. It was Mrs. Omori—she looked a little older than here, but I’m sure it was her.”
Chiyo’s eyebrows leapt up. “The ghost of Omori’s wife has been following you? That doesn’t sound good.”
“I don’t think she’s on his side,” I said. “If it wasn’t for her help, I wouldn’t have been able to escape. And...” The horrified expression she’d made when I’d suggested she was working with the other ghosts. “Maybe she doesn’t agree with what he’s doing. Maybe she’s scared of him. He wasn’t a demon when she married him.” Seeing us escaping Mt. Fuji, she must have assumed Takeo and I were her best chance to see him overthrown. “She couldn’t exactly explain. Someone had cut out her tongue.”
“Yikes,” Chiyo said, wincing. “That sounds like a yakuza move. They can be really vicious.” Her fingers flitted over the keyboard again. “Emiko Omori, death... Oh.”
Prominent Tokyo businessman and family slain in daytime attack.
“This is from an independent paper,” Chiyo said. “They’re less scared of talking about yakuza stuff.”
My stomach twisted as we read through the article Chiyo had found.
“It sounds like Omori was in with the yakuza big time,” Chiyo said after a moment, her tone more subdued than usual. “Probably just below the big boss of his syndicate.”
“But why would someone have killed his wife and children too?” I said. I swallowed thickly, still feeling sick, though few details of the deaths had been given. It was the housekeeper who’d called the police after finding the bodies. The attackers had left no one in the house alive. “It says none of the yakuza groups would take responsibility for his death.”
“Look.” Chiyo pointed to a paragraph farther down. “The writer thinks that because Omori’s syndicate didn’t step up and take anyone down afterward, they might have killed him themselves. Maybe he did something that made the head boss angry. But wow, being murdered by your own colleagues—I bet his plans now have something to do with that. I’ve heard that ghosts can get stuck on whatever they were feeling right before they died. Like, this girl who drowned herself because her boyfriend cheated on her, her ghost could only think about how betrayed she was, nothing else. If that’s true for demons too, Omori could be stuck on that betrayal. Maybe he’s bringing back ghosts from all the other syndicates to get back at his own.”
“Keiji said something about that,” I said, ignoring the twinge that came with the memory. “That a person could become a demon if they were so angry when they died that it consumed them.”
“There!” Chiyo said. “That’s got to be it.”
“But how does Mt. Fuji fit in?” I said. “Why wait until Obon when he already has so many spirits with him? He doesn’t need kami to get revenge on the people who killed him and his family—he could murder any of them himself if that was all he wanted.”
We scrolled through several more pages of search results, but none told us any more details about the circumstances around Omori’s death. Chiyo sat back in her chair and sighed. “Well, we can’t ask his wife what he’s thinking, but maybe he has been in touch with someone he worked with—someone still alive.”
“But the articles don’t give the names of any of his yakuza coworkers,” I said. “And even if we found some out, we don’t know who might have been involved in murdering him. What are they going to do to us if we start asking questions?”
“I can take on any yakuza jerk,” Chiyo declared, but I remembered how she’d faltered on the way here. She wasn’t even strong enough to walk at full power yet.
If only we had something to direct us... Or someone. My gazed darted to the window, seeking a small, feathered form. I didn’t see the sparrow, but she’d stuck close to us every step of the way before now. She had to be nearby.
“Omori’s wife might not be able to tell us anything, but maybe she could point us in the right direction,” I said, standing up.
We hurried down the stairs and back along the street the way we’d come. “Emiko!” Chiyo called out, drawing a few stares. “Emiko, we need to talk to you!”
We’d just come into sight of the shrine gates when a brown shape fluttered over them. “There she is,” I said, my heart leaping. The sparrow landed on a window frame beside us and bobbed its head.
For a second, I had trouble finding words. “You’re Omori’s wife,” I said. It gazed back at me, its black eyes glinting. “You helped me before,” I went on. “Now... we want to understand everything we can about what Omori wants with Mt. Fuji, what’s driving him... If there’s anything you can show us that might give us some answers, we’d be incredibly grateful.”
The sparrow bobbed its head. Then it chirped and glided across the street to a telephone pole on the opposite corner.
“Do you think she understood?” Chiyo asked.
“We’d better go with her and find out,” I said.
I was worried Chiyo wouldn’t be able to handle an extended walk, but we’d only gone a couple of blocks before the sparrow veered into a small train station building. It tapped a spot on a route map by the ticket vending machines, and Chiyo bought our tickets.
The train rumbled south for twenty minutes before we got off. The sparrow rejoined us and led us down a series of broad streets between towering apartment buildings in shades of ivory and peach. “Pretty posh neighborhood,” Chiyo said.
She’d paused for a moment to catch her breath when the sound of piano notes drifted from a second floor balcony door. The player stumbled, and the music cut off with a mumbled curse. Chiyo gazed up toward the apartment, her fingers moving against her hip. Her face had taken on an oddly melancholy cast.
I thought of the piano in the Ikedas’ living room. The one she might never play again.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t go see your parents,” I offered. “It must be hard.”
She pulled her eyes away. “Takeo was right. And I can call them again tonight. They know I’m okay, and I know they’re okay. That’s what really matters.”
But
then, as we followed the sparrow around a bend, she wiped the sweat from her forehead and said, “This probably sounds silly, but... my other parents, the ones on Mt. Fuji—I keep trying to picture them, but I don’t know anything about them really. Not even what they look like.”
Because I’d tried so hard to avoid talking about them with her. An ache swelled in my chest as I finally let the jumble of memories rise up.
“Your mother is tall and thin and graceful, and very beautiful,” I said slowly. “She’s kind and calm. And very smart. Whenever there’s a disagreement among the kami, she sees the best way to solve it so everyone’s satisfied. And she has the most lovely voice when she sings.” A voice that still echoed in my head. “Your father is large in presence and in body, tall but broad, like Fuji itself. He has this way of making everyone who talks to him feel as though they’re the most important person in the world, and he can’t stand to see a single kami mistreated. When he laughs, you can hear him right across the palace. Everyone looks up to both of them—that’s why they were chosen to lead.” I hesitated. “I’m sure they can’t wait to meet you.”
Chiyo lowered her gaze. “You didn’t have any idea either, did you? That they weren’t your real parents.”
The ache rose up. It took me a moment to answer. “No.”
“Well,” Chiyo said, “you should know that your actual parents are great people too. They did everything right for me—always looking out for me, but never too bossy or strict. I think you’ll be really happy with them after all this is finished.”
She beamed at me, but I’d heard the hint of a quaver in her voice. An uncomfortable sort of acceptance opened inside me as I looked back at her.
She might have taken my life, but I had also taken hers. And even if her cheerful nature was too ingrained for her to acknowledge it, I wasn’t the only one missing the home I’d thought was mine.
The sparrow swooped right past my face, jerking me from my thoughts. It alighted over the front door of a pale yellow apartment building. When Chiyo and I pushed into the entryway, it fluttered in after us and pecked one of the entries on the list of apartment numbers. Kobayashi.
