A Mortal Song

by Megan Crewe

  “Wait,” I said, and leaned toward Takeo. “There are foxes here. They like to involve themselves with human lives, don’t they? And they’re clever. If any creature would have noticed odd activity in the region, it’s them.”

  “Can we trust them?” Keiji asked. “If they’re like the stories say, aren’t they always playing tricks?”

  “They do often enjoy misleading more than guiding,” Takeo said. “I’ve preferred to avoid their kind.”

  It was true that most of the tales I’d heard of foxes involved them leading humans astray. But from what I remembered that had usually been out of mischief rather than true malice. And why should we assume that was all there was to them? Even Omori held more concerns and cares than I’d first assumed.

  “I think we should give them a chance,” I said. “They live on this land too—they could lose their homes. Do you really believe they’d prefer to play tricks on us now if they could help us?”

  Takeo grimaced. I grasped the door handle. “I’ll go ask them.”

  I hopped out of the car. As we’d talked, the fox I’d seen had vanished into the forest. I marched the way I hoped it had gone. “Foxes!” I called, as loud as I could. “If any of you can hear me, I beg you to come. I wish to speak to you on behalf of the kami of Mt. Fuji.”

  After a few moments, I strode deeper into the woodland. Takeo’s steady footsteps crackled over the dry leaves that scattered the ground behind me. I shouted out my summons again as he drew up beside me. My back tensed.

  “You are right,” he said quietly. “I should not let old prejudices prevent me from seeing solutions to our problems.”

  But the minutes stretched, and no answer came to my call. My heart sank. I was just turning back toward the car when a sleek, red-furred body rustled out of the underbrush. The fox halted in front of us and straightened up into the form of a lovely woman in a red kimono.

  “Kami,” she said with a bob of her head to Takeo, and then to me, “and you who speak for them. What is it you seek from us?”

  When Takeo didn’t immediately respond, I pushed onward, hoping I was choosing my words carefully enough to avoid mischief. “You can see Mt. Fuji is threatening to erupt. You may have heard that a demon has taken control of the mountain. We are searching for the one kami who can stop him and prevent the disaster. We believe those who took her, a group of ghosts led by a young man with red-streaked hair, have brought her somewhere in this area to imprison her. They would have arrived in a truck. They would have picked a location away from living humans. They would likely be using blood, lots of it, to help weaken her. The effects of the demon’s rule are hurting everyone, including you. We hope that the foxes will consider lending their efforts to our cause. Any clue you or your kind can find that might lead us to the one we seek, we would be immensely grateful for.”

  The woman’s nose twitched. She offered a sly smile. “Blood we could scent out. I have not seen those you speak of, but there are many I can ask. Kami, do you extend this request too?”

  Her bright eyes settled on Takeo. He bowed lower than she had to him. “I do,” he said, with only the slightest hint of an edge in his tone. “Indeed, if you are able to help us, I believe I can speak for my rulers when I say that they would welcome you to the palace to thank you personally.”

  I blinked at him, startled that he would speak that boldly on behalf of Mother and Father, though I had no doubt he was correct. The fox-woman appeared equally affected. “Well,” she said, with a brush of her slender fingers over her flowing hair, “I will do as I can. We will find you in your smoke-creating vehicle if we have news.”

  “Please hurry!” I added, but she’d already dropped into her fox shape to dart off through the trees.

  We hurried back to the car and continued our own desperate search. Every time I glanced back, more smoke-tinged clouds clotted the sky and shadowed the mountain. The sour taste of fear filled my mouth. Hold on, I thought at the mountain. Please, just a little longer, hold on.

  Had Omori even noticed how close his invasion had pushed Mt. Fuji to eruption? Even if he couldn’t bring himself to care about the people who’d be hurt, didn’t he at least realize there’d be no tourists to use in his plan now that the volcano’s fire was so obviously building? Or was he so caught up in the thought of regaining the power of life that he’d lost all sense?

  We passed another town, Takeo shaking his head. “Nowhere near here,” he said.

  “Can’t you ‘see’ anything?” I demanded of Rin.

  She turned her sunken gaze toward the road ahead of us. “This far from my valley, my vision is dim. I see... Water may put out a fire. That is all.”

  As I bit down on a noise of frustration, the earth trembled again. Keiji slowed the car. The ground had just settled when a fox sprang through the tall grass ahead of us onto the road. It transformed into a woman, a little older than the one we’d spoken to before but just as elegant. As Keiji stopped the car completely, she sauntered over to us. Takeo fumbled unsuccessfully with the window controls and then simply opened the door.

  “My cousins told me of your search,” the woman said, halting. Her black eyes and pale teeth gleamed in the rising sun. “There is an abandoned factory near Mishima that smells of blood where none was before. The chill of the dead is upon it too. I can show you.”

  Without waiting for our response, she slipped back into her fox form and loped ahead. My heart thumped as Keiji drove on.

  The fox trotted down roads that grew narrower and more pot-holed, and finally onto a gravel track that angled through a vast field of scrub. In the distance, a cluster of broad dun buildings stood around a concrete yard.

  Takeo jerked forward.

  “She’s there,” he said, and his mouth twisted. “They’re hurting her.”

  As we crept down the road toward the factory compound, a scattering of the kami Takeo had talked to earlier caught up with us, along with a few beings I wasn’t as familiar with: wolves that moved across the terrain like gauzy phantoms, the child-sized tree fairies with their slingshots and tiny crossbows, and a strange creature with a bear’s furry body, an elephant’s trunk, and the striped legs of a tiger. When it crossed the road in front of us, Keiji gaped for a moment before murmuring, “Dreameater.”

  At least we weren’t going into this completely alone.

  About a half a mile from the factory, Takeo motioned for Keiji to pull the car into the field. We stepped out onto dry soil and yellowed grass. The twenty-some allies who’d joined us trailed behind as we circled around the back of the compound. I eyed the buildings, watching for glints of ghostlight or shivers of movement in the dark, dusty windows.

  “She’s in that one,” Takeo said, motioning to the most easterly building. We crept closer, my hand tight around my ofuda. After a minute we stumbled onto a streambed, little more than pocked, muddy earth. A trickle of water little wider than my hand ran down its center. We hopped over and hurried onward.

  We were some fifteen paces from the building when several dozen ghostlights streamed out of its walls and those of the neighboring structures. They charged straight at us, so swiftly I didn’t have time to suck in a breath before I had to throw out my hands, trying to banish every one that raced near me. A few turned corporeal and tossed one of their gore-stained nets over the kami beside me, but one of the spirit wolves smacked it aside with its massive paws. The ghosts shuddered and turned ethereal again as the tree fairies pelted them with needles and stones imbued with their own sort of magic. And in the midst of us all, Takeo swung the sacred sword, breaking a dozen ghostlights into showers of shimmers with a single sweep.

  For a moment, I thought we were going to win. I thought it might even be easy. Then a ghost near the back of the group turned corporeal with a pistol in his hand and a sharp blast of sound.

  The bullet hit Takeo’s wrist. His arm flew wide, and his fingers slipped from the sword’s hilt. Before he could spring after it, the ghost who’d shot him fired again, catc
hing him in the chest. He staggered backward as his ki worked to dislodge the bullet from his flesh, and the horde of ghosts surged toward us. The kami monkey broke from his ethereal state with a wheeze, a knife stained with dried blood plunged deep into his stomach. The tree fairies scattered as another ghost took aim at them. I tried to hold my ground, but there were too many ghosts around me for me to fend off their blades as I tried to banish them. One sliced across my forearm; another nicked my cheek. I gasped, stumbling backward. They were pressing us farther and farther from the sword that was our salvation.

  We’d never reclaim it like this. “To the stream!” I shouted, hoping the others would understand. The running water, thin as it was, should provide us enough protection that the ghosts wouldn’t follow. Perhaps we could even draw them to it and dispatch some of them that way.

  But the ghosts clearly knew better than to fall for that ploy. As we dashed the last several steps to the streambed and leapt over it, they stopped, hazy lights churning around the few still corporeal forms. The sacred sword lay in the grass in a clear circle in their midst. I stared at it longingly.

  Takeo was hunched over, clutching at his chest. Though his breath was ragged, his bleeding appeared to have stopped. He was too tired to heal completely. Before I could speak to him, a tall form emerged from the crowd of ghosts and ambled up to the stream. He raked a hand through his crimson-streaked hair and smirked at us.

  “Look at this brave rescue force, cringing behind their piddly stream,” Tomoya said.

  “Hardly as cowardly as using hundreds of ghosts to attack one teenaged girl,” Takeo retorted.

  “One very powerful kami girl,” Tomoya said. “Who intended to disrupt our plans. You know that even with these new friends of yours, you can’t hope to overpower us now that you’ve lost that pretty sword, don’t you? Why don’t you take it easy for a few days, and then we’ll be done with your mountain, and we can all go on with our lives?”

  “You’ve already had your life,” I said. “You have no right to steal another. And can’t you see the mountain might not even hold until Obon? It’s about to erupt!”

  “Then Omori will bring us and your broken kami friends down to the cities, and we’ll find the bodies we need there,” Tomoya said, as if no other consequences mattered to him. “What isn’t right is the fact that I died at all.”

  Before I even noticed him moving, Keiji had jumped back across the stream to the ghosts’ side. “And whose fault is that?” he said, his posture rigid. “Who are you blaming?”

  “Kei,” Tomoya said evenly. “What did they do to you to make them lead you here?”

  “They didn’t do anything,” Keiji said. “I wanted to help them. This is wrong. Everything you’ve been doing— You know why you got killed in the first place? Because you listened to the wrong people, you believed what they told you, even though they were turning you into a criminal.”

  “I was making money,” Tomoya said. “Good money, so we could get out of that crappy house. So you could be happier. Where’s the gratitude, little brother?”

  “There are other ways of making money,” Keiji said. “Ways that wouldn’t have gotten you killed, so you would’ve still been there when Auntie was telling me how useless I was, when Uncle locked me in my room for two days. You’re making the same mistake all over again. Omori’s just as bad as the people you were hanging out with before. He’s worse! Do you really want to be a party to mass murder, Tomo? Because that’s what this means, really, what you’re planning to do to all those ‘bodies.’ Even I can see that.”

  His voice was so raw my heart ached, hearing it. Tomoya took a step toward him, and I shifted forward automatically, my hands rising. But Keiji glanced back at me, his gaze worried yet firm, sending a message I could read. Let me do this myself. I forced my body to still.

  “I have to follow Omori,” Tomoya said. “I need my life back. I left responsibilities unfinished. There are things I have to do.”

  “For who?” Keiji demanded. “Not for me—I won’t want anything to do with you ever again if you go through with this.”

  Tomoya blinked. A sort of daze softened his cocky expression. For the first time, I thought to wonder what he’d been focused on the moment he died.

  “But it’s all for you,” he said to Keiji. “I knew I couldn’t leave you alone. You need me. No matter what I do, Kei, it’s always to look after you. I know you know that.”

  “You really can’t believe that I might know it and still think you’re totally wrong, can you?” Keiji said quietly. “You can’t see anything except what you’ve already decided.”

  “I see you,” Tomoya said. “I’m your brother. I’ve always known exactly who you are, Kei.”

  “Are you sure?” Keiji asked.

  Tomoya took another step toward him as if to touch his shoulder, and Keiji jerked back. His feet tangled. He stumbled to the side, toward the stream. A memory flashed behind my eyes: the rabbit startling us, Keiji tripping, my attempt to catch him. But in the glimpse I caught of his face as he fell now, I saw no fear, only resolve.

  Tomoya lunged after him, catching his wrist. But Keiji was falling too fast, too hard, for even his taller, stronger brother to stop him. Because he’d meant to fall, and he’d put everything he had into the act. He curled his fingers around his brother’s hand and crashed into the shallow water, pulling Tomoya with him.

  A few of the watching ghosts solidified, and a voice hollered, “No!” One sprang forward, but there was no time to stop the fall.

  Tomoya toppled over Keiji, his red hair streaming like a flame, and his elbow hit the stream. His body burst with a crackle of ki so bright it left dark spots in my vision. A fine mist dispersed around us, but some of the ki shot off through the air in the direction of the mountain. I remembered suddenly what Takeo had said about Tomoya carrying a greater portion of Omori’s energy.

  And channeling it to the other ghosts. None of them burst, but before our eyes, the crowd shrank back, the ghostlights dwindling, the corporeal forms fading away.

  In their confusion, Takeo leapt across the stream and blazed through them to take up the sacred sword. The rest of our allies raced after him. In a matter of seconds, all the ghosts had scattered, fleeing or cut through by the purifying blade. Rin hustled on toward the building where Chiyo was imprisoned.

  I knelt at Keiji’s side as he pushed himself upright. Mud coated the back of his shirt, and his hair was dripping. His eyes were more watery than I could blame on the stream. I took his hand to help him up. He gripped it, standing, and tugged me forward into a tight embrace.

  “I destroyed my brother,” he said into my hair.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, wishing I had better words to give him.

  He laughed, a little strangled. “I’m not. Someone had to, and I knew how. He had no idea what he was doing, how he was hurting people, anymore. And he thought he was doing it for me.”

  “I think he really did care about you,” I said. “Even if everything else around that feeling had gone wrong.”

  “Yeah,” Keiji said. “I was counting on that. The trick wouldn’t have worked if he didn’t care. But it wouldn’t have worked if he hadn’t been so convinced he was right, either.” He shook his head. “I guess I’m looking after myself now. That’s what I’ve really been doing the last two years anyway.”

  Then he drew back just far enough to kiss me, so hard I forgot how to breathe, forgot everything except his cool hand against my face and his body pressed to mine.

  He broke away abruptly. “I’m getting you all muddy.”

  I looked down at the damp patches of stream water and splotches of mud that had soaked from his shirt into mine. As if my clothes hadn’t already been ruined a dozen times over. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Come on, let’s go get Chiyo.”

  We hurried across the field to the building hand in hand. Just as we came around the corner to the doorway, two figures swayed outside.

  The stench of rotting
gore seeped out into the early afternoon air, thick enough to turn my stomach. Chiyo clung to Takeo’s side, letting him take most of her weight. Her hair was matted with blood. Cuts she didn’t have the ki to heal mottled her face, arms, and chest. She held one leg as if her ankle were broken.

  Then she raised her head, and a familiar spark lit in her eyes when they found mine.

  “I hear,” she said in a halting rasp, “that it’s time for me to kick some demon butt.”

  “Yes,” I said quietly. A lump rose in my throat. From Takeo’s expression over the top of Chiyo’s head, he was feeling much the same as me.

  We’d found her. We’d rescued her. Nothing stood between us and the mountain now. But Mt. Fuji’s smoke was spreading across the sky, Obon would begin when the sun set tonight, and the girl before us didn’t look as if she could defeat a flea, let alone a demon.

  24

  FOR ALL HER BRAVADO, Chiyo fell asleep the second she sank into the back seat of the car. She’d told Takeo that the ghosts had taken Haru to the mountain, but the toll her imprisonment had taken on her ran deeper than even her desire to protect him. As Keiji turned the car around, I wondered if the short time it would take us to reach the mountain would be enough for her to recover. She didn’t stir even when the car bounced on the potholed road.

  Takeo and Rin fed as much ki as they could spare into Chiyo’s wounded body as we drove north. Rin had clasped the necklace with the sacred jewel around her neck. The stones emitted a warm, greenish glow that wrapped around her from head to toe. Slowly, her most obvious cuts healed. But I remembered how weak she’d been after just a few hours imprisoned in that bloody room in the keep. It had been at least a day before she’d regained even close to her full powers.

  A growing stream of cars roared past us, heading in the opposite direction—away from the mountain and the destruction it threatened. Smoke smothered the sky ahead of us. Twice the ground shuddered with fresh tremors, so severe Keiji had to pull to the side of the road to wait them out.