I didn’t know which one looked more horrified, Ozma or Jacky. Shell was even spitting.
That argument carried us through a lot of stops and a few hundred miles. Eventually Shell went back in the bag and Jacky stopped doing her vamp-thing so others could sit near us, and we ate lunch on the train—little bento boxes full of rice and bite-sized things. I won the debate before we got the taxi.
* * *
“Well,” Jacky observed, “this doesn’t look like the start of every horror movie I’ve ever seen.”
I opened my mouth to say something upbeat, and closed it, defeated.
It was absolutely certain that Tenkawa’s shinigami only roamed the graveyard, but it was easy to see that its shadow lay across the whole town. Tenkawa had never been big—less than fifteen hundred souls—but it had depended on tourism: pilgrims coming to hike and view Mount Omine. It had a ryokan, a small, pseudo-period hostel converted from the largest house in town, and lots of little shops. At least half of them were closed now, and the equally period main street was almost empty. The village shrine looked neglected, paint flaking from its red gate.
I couldn’t see another obvious tourist, but nobody looked at us directly or even seemed curious. We collected our bags, and offered our driver good yen to stay until we were ready to leave; he regretfully but firmly refused and bowed apologies before reversing to get around and back down the road as fast as possible. I got the feeling that, if he’d been an American cabby, he’d have been calling us every kind of idiot.
Looking at each other, we pulled our bags behind us down the street. There was absolutely no sense in trying to blend in or look inconspicuous.
The graveyard lay beyond the shrine, a compact stretch of ground carved out of the woods and full of the Shinto-style gravestones—tiered stone blocks sitting on small plots, with a recessed bowl in the stone in front of each for offerings. The plots looked too small to me, especially for family plots, but that was because Japanese practiced cremation; the ashes of the entire family would be in a box-sized chamber under the stone.
“Yeah, not at all like the movies.” Shell agreed from her bag on top of my luggage. “The pet always dies. Let’s go eat.”
The ryokan was still beautiful and kept up, but we were the only guests. Checking us in, Mister Ushida gently inquired as to why we were here. Ozma explained that we were here to look after a family matter, and though he obviously wasn’t certain what to make of that, he didn’t push. We paid with yen and under names not on our IDs, and took the largest single room (we’d sleep on futons laid out on the tatami-mat floor). The Ushidas treated us like royalty; soon we were wrapped in yukatas after washing and soaking in the ryokan’s hot spring, being served with a multi-course meal (even Shell, who the Ushida girls just loved).
Dinner came with sake—rice wine—and I tried a little out of curiosity. Sake tastes very sweet.
No city lights to cut the darkness when night fell, and that worked just fine for us. The Ushida girls had laid out our three futons and wished us goodnight, and we prepared for bed and then bibbity-bobbety-boo’d into our uniforms before slipping quietly out. The sliding walls of our room made it easy and we went over the wall behind the hot spring like stealthy ninja. Not that we couldn’t have left by the front, but I had the distinct impression that if we’d tried the family would have done everything in their power to try and keep us safe inside.
Chapter Fourteen
(Shell’s comment after [redacted])
* * *
Jacky drifted, unseen mist over Tenkawa’s empty streets, and I flew Ozma and Shell. We touched down on the street running by the graveyard, and I could feel the psychic chill. Either that, or my imagination was working overtime, trying to tell me to Be Smart And Leave. Because scenes like this always turned out so well, right?
Bright side; if Casper came for me I could always get elevated really fast. No running around tripping over graves for me. Downside, it was a graveyard.
“The civic records have the Miyamoto plot almost in the center,” Shell whispered. “But it’s along the main walk so we’ll be able to see you.”
“Great. Ozma? Do you have something for me?”
She handed me a tiny silver box and spade. “I won’t need much.”
“Okay.” I took the box and tool in one hand, kept myself from drawing Cutter, and started walking.
Anyone else would have needed a flashlight, but my super-duper vision got enough light from the low-hanging Moon to read the shadowed names carved into the stones. I really hoped that the shinigami decided to give me a pass, because I knew that whatever Jacky had said she’d be doing her best to kill something already dead if it tried for me.
In the pale light the shadows were deep under the still trees, and after a few steps I realized I wasn’t hearing any of the usual night-noises. No insects, no small animals making their way under the safety of darkness.
Not spooky at all. Nope. Just a young girl alone in a graveyard. What could possibly go wrong?
I kept walking and checking until I thought I’d gone too far, and nearly missed it. The Miyamoto family marker was big, rising above most of the rest, but it was also old, weathered, and almost unreadable. Even if Mr. Miyamoto had left home to build his post-war business in Tokyo, the family had been part of the village for a long time.
Still no killer-ghost. I knelt in front of the plot. Shell had explained that the chamber for the ashes would be under the front, likely beneath the stone the offerings were laid on. Feeling under the lip of the stone, I realized it wasn’t mortared to the marker; I could easily lift it aside, and I did. Beneath was a rectangular chamber filled with ash and bits of bone—the generations of the Miyamoto family.
Picking up the spade, I looked around one more time and—
“Hope!” Shell yowled as the spectral hand reached for me and
* * *
“What are you looking at?” John asked.
“The doe and her fawn are back.” I let the curtain drop and leaned back into his big chest. I loved how we fit, my head over his heart, but I frowned to feel his muscle-molded uniform. He was dressed for work. “Babe?”
He wrapped me tight, holding me against him. “Blackstone says we’ve got movement on the newest Villains Inc. and that Fisher has the warrants. I hate to leave you here.”
“We’d get in the way, you worrying about us and all.” I raised up to tilt my head back and kiss his chin, then giggled when his big hands dropped to slide over my stomach. Littlest-A was barely here but John couldn’t resist and I was ticklish; if he kept up the habit I’d be giggling my way to motherhood.
He let me go with a final squeeze. “Back soon, promise.”
“You’d better.”
I watched from the upper deck of our cabin as he flew away, pouring on the speed until he was just a spot of blue and white on blue above the mountains, flying higher than usual so that I could still see him (one of my whims he happily indulged). He thought I was being all hormonal and fanciful, and maybe I was but half the silly things I asked for were just so I could watch him, laughing at how much I loved the man. We were such a cliché.
“That’s right,” I said to Littlest A, stroking where John had laid his hand. “Your silly daddy’s gone to beat up Bad Guys. Mommy will too once you’re safe.”
That made me frown a bit. Littlest A would probably never be as safe as she was right now, even with Aunt Jacky and Shelly and the Bees to watch her not to mention the entire team (all the teams if I included Rook, Seven, and the rest of the Hollywood Knights and Heroes Without Borders East). Two years in LA with the Knights and then two years in Asia with HWB East before coming back to the Sentinels and finally getting officially engaged, had given me such a big circle of brothers and sisters in arms and we didn’t have enough room for all the baby presents.
Bright side,
they were making the world safer for her bit by bit, and we had promissory notes for enough babysitter nights that she was going to grow up knowing all of them.
“C’mon,” I whispered to my baby. “Let’s go watch Bambi and his mom some more.”
* * *
I could barely move, my whole body clenching to wrap around my empty core with each spasming silent wail. My mouth stayed open in a frozen scream as my lungs rejected air and my heart tried to stop. No no no nonononononononono—
It had been real, as real as anything I’d lived in the past two years—my future without the California Quake. My perfect future, my castle in the air, where I’d finished my training gone and off to get experience and make my own name while engaging in a long distance romance so hot that by the time we got back together my journal and our texts would never be published. I remembered the wedding and the wedding-night and the discovery of our pregnancy a year later, I remembered it all.
Every breath tasted of the dirt I lay in. You lost that. You lost that and how are you still alive?
People were counting on me and it didn’t matter. I was Catholic with a Catholic’s horror of suicide and it didn’t matter. I wanted to die and a tiny piece beneath the screaming part of me finally understood how Jacky had felt when the Teatime Anarchist had given her her mind back and she’d understood everything she’d lost and what her master had done to her…
It was that tiny piece that made me breathe, broke the convulsions stopping my heart. Jacky lived. I lived. I had to live now because Jacky was shooting at something that couldn’t be shot and she was close.
I pushed myself up, saw the old man. Old man, half shadow, half sickly light, a few strings of hair left to fly around his bald head, dressed in a filthy business suit and laughing at Jacky. Ignoring me. Why? It didn’t matter—he floated towards Jacky as Shell crouched spitting behind her, back arched and tail bottled out, but what drew my eye was Ozma, standing at the boundary of the graveyard with her wand-baton held high, shouting nonsense words as the Magic Belt beneath her sash flashed so bright the black fabric might as well have not been covering it.
The flaring silver light turned night to day and even the old man shielded his eyes, cringing back, only to straighten with another laugh when Ozma finished and the light died.
Until I pulled myself to my feet to grab him, wrapping numb and aching fingers around his now very real and solid neck. He screamed with mindless, animal rage, then screeched in pain as Shell landed on his face after leaping so high I thought for a second that Jacky had thrown her at him.
“No don’t—” I protested uselessly, reaching to grab the old man’s hands before he could touch Shell. Jacky pre-empted me by ripping him out of my weakened grip and throwing him face-down to the dirt to pin him helplessly. I spun at the sound of running footsteps, Ozma dashing up.
“What did you do?”
She almost fell on top of Jacky. “A wish to turn an image to flesh! I had no idea it would work!”
My mind skipped right over the impossibility and to the important bit. “How long?”
“Minutes!”
“That’s long enough,” Jacky growled. And bit him.
The old man screamed again, then went limp as Jacky whispered in his ear. She kept it up, crouched atop him like a wolf over her prey, hissing airless words I barely caught, repetitions of rest, forget, rest, it’s over, rest, you’ve won, forget, you can rest…and pushing so hard with her power that I sat back down in the dirt and wondered for a moment where my chilling tears had come from. Even Ozma relaxed and Jacky wasn’t aiming the whole weight of her will at us.
A wracking shudder ran through the horrible old man, and then Jacky wasn’t holding anyone. He was gone. No drama, no fading or…just gone and with him the freezing void that had burned every breath I took. I burst into wracking sobs, and when Shell pushed against me I grabbed her up and pulled her in to curl around her warm body. Five choking gasps shook me before I got control and could hear Shell yelling “Hey hey hey! Squishable cat!”
“We will have company presently,” Ozma said quietly behind me, hand on my shoulder. Leaving me, she quickly retrieved the silver box and spade, scooping ashes from the family chamber, and then tried to push the stone back into place. Shaking myself, I set Shell down and finished for her.
And just in time, because she was right. However the villagers felt about the idea of coming here after dark, Jacky’s shots and then Ozma’s light show had pulled at least some of them out of their homes. One of them was Mister Ushida, and the man beside him had a bald head and concerned look that said “priest” to me. The rest stayed behind them at the edge of the graveyard.
There was no way that Mister Ushida wouldn’t recognize us, dark shades or not. If we were lucky, he wouldn’t tell everyone our assumed civilian names. I helped Jacky and Ozma to their feet (Shell had vanished), sighed, and bowed.
“We are Hikari, Mamori, and Kimiko. Please forgive our intrusion.”
* * *
Ten minutes later we sat in the priest’s home beside the shrine. Outside, every front light was lit and most of Tenkawa’s residents seemed to be out in the street, a respectful mob. The priest, Guiji Sohda, served us green tea as we sat around the low table that centered his main room. He’d had to clear it of his shrine accounts and ledgers first.
Jacky looked corpse-pale, like she’d been without blood for weeks, and I was a little worried she was just going to fall over. Ozma watched her and let me lead.
I made appreciative noises and put down my cup. “Thank you. Guji So—”
“Please. Sohda is fine outside the shrine.”
“Sohda-san. Thank you for your hospitality. You have questions you wish to ask?”
“Yes, forgive me.” He exchanged looks with Mister Ushida—who had turned out to be Tenkawa’s mayor. “The shinigami is gone. What did you do here, tonight?”
“We—” I had no idea where to start that didn’t end with grave robbing.
“The shinigami could not harm you?” the priest pressed carefully.
“It could. It did, but I’ll survive. We broke its power and— We gave it peace.” That was one way to describe what Jacky had done; if shinigami were fueled by past grudges and Jacky had made it forget why it was angry in the first place… “I don’t believe it will return, although we really can’t be certain.”
The priest’s eyes sharpened, focused entirely on me with a frown of concern. Did I look that bad?
When I didn’t elaborate, he smiled. “Thank you. So, you came here to rid us of the shinigami? When the government’s onmiyoji failed, we thought there would be no more attempts.”
“We—” I could hardly claim we’d come questing for a good deed to do. “We are ronin.”
“Ah. I see.” he nodded—and that was nice, because I didn’t. “Please, tell us how we may repay you.”
“Letting us leave quietly tomorrow will be more than enough, thank you.” I mentally crossed every finger; if they had a responsibility to report us to the government…
“There is another matter, Sohda-san, Ushida-san,” Ozma spoke up. “I hesitate to mention it.”
“Please. Go on.”
“We did not come to Tenkawa to rid it of your shinigami, this was merely a happy outcome of our mission.” She held up the little water-filled crystal ball I’d seen her take from her box before on the beach, the one occupied by a clownfish. A very confused, frantically darting clownfish now.
“We must find a person, Miyamoto Yoshi, and came to borrow a pinch of his family ashes with which to locate him. But as you can see, we have failed.”
Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games Page 13
