by Zoe Marriott
The doctor shuffled slowly around the bed. He peered at the monitors, peered at Jack, made a notation on the clipboard and then offered us an apologetic shrug. “We’re still waiting for the test results to come back. Until then it’s hard to pinpoint the cause of her reaction.”
He’s stalling. He doesn’t want to tell us.
“Some form of … of meningitis?” Rachel asked. One of her hands reached out to touch the lump in the blue hospital covers that was Jack’s feet.
The doctor was peering at his clipboard again, as if the information on it might have changed since the last time he looked. “Hmm? Oh, the rash. No, the symptoms don’t point to any kind of infection. Our current theory is that this is a severe systemic anaphylaxis.”
I could feel my face crumpling with confusion. Rachel frowned. “Like … an allergic reaction? To what? Jack doesn’t have any allergies.”
Jack’s head moved in a pained twitch that might have been a nod of agreement.
“I take it you youngsters don’t watch the news?” the doctor said, still not looking at us. “There are … several similar cases at this hospital, all admitted since this morning. We’re not sure yet what is causing the reaction.”
Next to me, Shinobu shifted his weight. The movement caught the doctor’s eye, and he jumped, gazing at Shinobu in surprise and consternation. But then his eyes slid away from the space Shinobu occupied. He frowned, shook his head slightly, and shrugged. It seemed Shinobu was still mostly imperceptible to normal humans – ones who’d been lucky enough to avoid direct contact with the monsters and magic that the katana had set free.
“Ah – Jacqueline is a minor. Where are her parents?” Dr Singh asked.
Rachel squared her shoulders. “Our mother is not available. I’m taking care of Jack.”
Something relaxed inside me. That was the end of that argument. No parents.
“Ah. I see. Well, we’ll let you know when the test results are in.” He nodded vaguely, then walked back out of the little cave formed by the curtains without another word.
Rachel flopped into the moulded plastic chair by the bed; the legs squealed on the lino floor. Jack flinched.
“Allergies my arse. That thing did this,” Rachel hissed. She didn’t look at me, but her resentment was like a wall between us. I couldn’t even blame her.
“So stupid,” Jack whispered. “Walked into it—”
“Hush,” Shinobu said firmly. Jack’s eyes peeled open into a surprised squint. “We all relaxed our guard this morning,” he told her. “The fault is shared equally. And you have been the one to suffer by it.”
A pair of nurses passed by the gap in the curtains, pushing a trolley. I caught a fleeting glimpse of the patient and stared as I saw that the pale cheek was marked with a vivid purple rash, just like Jack’s. The ward’s air of quiet frenzy was explained now. When the doctor had said “several” cases, he hadn’t meant three or four, had he? It was much more – much worse – than that. I’d vaguely noticed that in the time we’d been here at least half a dozen new patients had been squeezed into the ward, many of them on trolleys. They must be suffering with the same thing as Jack. Probably if the nurses weren’t desperately trying to keep up with the influx of patients, we’d have been kicked out by now.
Shinobu pushed at me gently, and I realized he wanted me to sit down again. I eased onto the rickety plastic chair next to Rachel’s, tucking my feet under so that my leg didn’t brush against hers.
“I don’t understand why all these new cases are still coming in,” I said softly. “The thing is dead. We killed it after it got Jack. So how can it still be … infecting people?”
Shinobu dropped his hands onto the backs of our chairs and leaned in so that his broad shoulders seemed to shelter us from the rest of the ward. He hesitated, clearly debating whether to speak, then finally said, “There may be more than one.”
“Of those monsters?” I said, appalled.
“I could be wrong. But I think the creature that attacked Jack-san today is one I have heard described before in stories and myths.”
“Spill,” Jack said weakly. She had rolled her head towards us, and I could hear the faint crackle of her breathing over the heart monitor.
“I think it was a Shikome. A Foul Woman. They are denizens of Yomi.” His jaw clenched. “They are also known as Izanami’s Handmaidens.”
Jack said, “Shit.”
Izanami. Her name just kept cropping up, over and over. The Nekomata had been a denizen of Yomi too – and it had never shut up about its “Mistress”. A Mistress so powerful that when the Nekomata called on her power, it had created a portal into the underworld. And now more creatures from Yomi had found me and hurt my friend.
Could that possibly be a coincidence?
“Yomi is hell, right? And this Iza-person is the god that lives there,” Rachel said, clearly running back over the rushed account of events we had given her this morning.
“Izanami is the queen of the Underworld. The Goddess of Death,” Shinobu told her grimly.
She was more than that. Izanami and Izanagi were the mother and father of Japanese gods – a matched pair, created for each other – identical in their perfection. They had loved each other passionately. But Izanagi had a weakness. He was obsessed with beauty, and repulsed by anything ugly or imperfect. So strongly repulsed that when he was unsatisfied with his first two children, he tried to fling them into the sea to drown, and only gentle Izanami’s intervention had saved them. After his wife died, he followed her down into the Underworld, and told her that he loved her and wouldn’t leave without her. He persuaded her to follow him back into the light. But when he saw the change that death had wrought in her and the decay and rot of her once perfect form, he fled from her in disgust, and blocked the entrance to Yomi so that she could never follow him.
Broken-hearted Izanami had sworn vengeance. Sworn that she would kill and kill and kill until he returned to her.
Shinobu met my eyes. I could see him making the same connections in his head as I had.
This is bad. Very bad.
“So you really think this god is after the sword? Mio’s sword? That’s … I mean, how powerful would a weapon have to be for a god to want it?” Rachel’s eyes strayed to my left shoulder, where the katana’s hilt protruded from the leather harness on my back. Both sword and harness were hidden under a baggy sweatshirt – one of my dad’s – that I had shrugged on over the rest of my clothes before we ran out of the house, but a slight bulge was just visible. The sword’s energy throbbed against my back, as if it could feel Rachel’s gaze. I shrugged restlessly.
Shinobu reclaimed our attention. “Izanami’s Handmaidens, the Foul Women … the stories say that they spread a plague wherever they go. Their feathers are diseased, and a single touch of one of those feathers marks the victim with foulness. They are mindless monsters, as stupid as animals, but they love destruction. And when enough of them gather, they will swarm like locusts, ruining everything in their path.”
“So if we’ve seen one…?” Rachel began.
He finished, “Then others may already be here.”
CHAPTER 4
TREACHEROUS REFLECTIONS
The hospital was packed now. Every bed in Jack’s ward was occupied, and most of the gaps between had trolleys jammed into them. There were a lot of anxious relatives wandering around. Near the doors, an old man lay in his bed all alone, curled up on his side with one hand over his face. The skin of his hand and lower arm were marked with the swirling patterns of the rash, so dark they looked almost black. His shoulders jerked as if he was silently crying. I averted my eyes and moved past.
Out in the corridor, more rash-marked patients on trolleys lined the walls. Through the Perspex windows, I could see into other wards. They seemed crammed full, too. A handful of harried-looking nurses and auxiliaries scurried here and there. They must be stretched to breaking point.
A low, agonized moaning noise came from behind one of the walls
. The sound clawed at my nerves.
God, I hate hospitals. To me, they were places that people – people you loved, like my ojiichan – went to die. The moment you went through the doors, control was wrenched away from you, whether you were the patient or someone who cared about them. Hospitals wrapped the ill up in layers of medical-talk, wires, tubes, and hospital gowns until you could barely see them any more, and before you knew it, they had slipped away from you – stopped being a person and become a list of symptoms and drugs, a piece of paperwork just waiting to be stamped and filed and forgotten about.
I won’t let that happen to Jack.
The visitors’ toilets were past another couple of full wards, at a T-section in the corridor. They were empty, and predictably disgusting. One of the sinks, blocked up with wads of paper towels, was almost overflowing with cloudy water, and two of the three fluorescents overhead were flickering, making that odd buzzing noise.
I was alone.
Shudders scurried down my back like a handful of millipedes. I hurriedly picked a stall and shut myself in, plonking down on the wobbly toilet seat and drawing my knees up to my chin. With my arms wrapped around my legs, I took a couple of deep breaths, struggling to think past the terrible weight of panic and worry. Of responsibility.
If Shinobu was right – and I had no reason to doubt him, even if I wished I could – then Jack and everyone else in her ward was sick right now with some … supernatural disease. A plague that baffled medical science. And it came from the Foul Women.
The Shikome had to be here to steal the katana, like the Nekomata. There was no other explanation for their presence in this realm. But this time Izanami – if it was really the Goddess of Death behind this – hadn’t sent just one monster to do the job. There could be any number of them out there, dropping infected feathers everywhere while they combed the city for the scent of power that the katana exuded. The plague that they spread and their “mindless” love of destruction had all been set loose on London because of the katana. Because their Mistress wanted them to hunt me down. Which meant every single infected person in this hospital was, in some way, my responsibility.
My fault.
Realizing that was like lying under a giant rock, a rock so big I couldn’t see the edges. Like being slowly crushed alive even while I was desperately fighting to hold it up. I found myself clinging to the katana’s hilt, where it rose above my shoulder. The blade’s energy hummed against my palm, and I hated the craven, senseless part of myself that found the hum comforting. I hated myself for cowering in the toilet when my friends needed me to be strong. I had to stop melting down like this. I had to start thinking like the person that Jack and Shinobu and Hikaru thought I was. Like the sword-bearer.
If I removed the blade from its saya, would it speak to me again? Would it tell me what to do? How to defeat this terrible new threat?
I had thought that I could handle the blade. I had fought with the katana several times without losing myself. But when I summoned the sword’s power in the spirit realm by calling its true name, it had seemed to … invite it to do more, somehow. Change my body. Take hold of my emotions. I worried that it had come dangerously close to actually controlling my actions.
It was a terrible, slippery slope. Every time I spoke to it, every time I fought with it, its hold on me seemed to become stronger. But it wasn’t human and I couldn’t trust it. I might not understand all of the katana’s powers or what it was capable of, but I did understand that.
I had to work this out for myself.
I quickly used the toilet and exited the stall. At the row of sinks, I shoved my sleeves up to my elbows to wash my trembling hands, then held them under the cold water tap and splashed my face. Maybe the chill would shock my brain into alertness. My reflection stared back at me through the gaps in my fingers. The yellowish, flickering light made my skin seem alarmingly grey, and my eyes were too dark, too full of secrets and screams. I had that look. The look you see in photos on the front of newspapers. An expression that belongs to war refugees, kidnap victims and, sometimes, kids who are already dead by the time anyone cares enough to start looking for them.
The Kitsune had told me that people like us, people who were born with magic or stumbled on to it, walked with a foot in two worlds, never fully a part of either. But to me it felt like since this whole thing started, the other realms – the spirit realm, the Underworld, and whatever place nightmares came from – were constantly reaching up and grabbing at my feet, trying to catch hold and drag me under. I was hanging onto the real world by my fingernails.
What happens if I let go?
I closed my eyes and rubbed my face with my damp, chilly hands. What I needed was for Jack to slap some sense into me. But this was not the time to go and snivel on her shoulder. It was my turn to be strong for her now. In the meantime, I had to stop looking in mirrors. These days it was just never a pleasant experience.
Sighing, I opened my eyes – and stared.
The reflection in the mirror didn’t show a row of dingy grey stalls. It didn’t show flickering fluorescent lights. It didn’t show a pasty-faced, wide-eyed teenager.
Soft golden light radiated from the smooth surface. Where it fell on my skin, I could feel its warmth just as if I was standing in front of a sunny window. A bent tree, its twisted, spreading branches heavy with autumn leaves, was silhouetted against the sun. The leaves spiralled gently downwards into the tall, waving fronds of ripe yellow grass below. Beyond the tree, not far away, there were low green hills and a shape that I was sure was the roof of a house – a steeply pitched, thatched roof, with the suggestion of a curl of grey smoke rising from some unseen chimney.
My throat ached with inexplicable, irresistible longing. It was the same feeling that Shinobu gave me at times, as if I was looking at something too beautiful to be real, too wonderful to last. Somewhere deep inside me something recognized this scene. It felt like … home.
A gleaming copper leaf drifted towards me, passing through the mirror with no more than a tiny ripple on the glass surface. The leaf landed in the water of the hand basin to float in the cup of white porcelain like a glowing jewel.
One of my hands lifted involuntarily, reaching out for the golden warmth beyond the mirror. Distantly I was aware of the sword snapping and fizzing a warning against my back, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t help myself. I had to touch.
My fingers found the glass … and passed through.
She lies back in the long grass, pillowing her cheek on Shinobu’s knees. His legs – along with the rest of him – have grown as quickly as the grass itself this past year, and the girl feels more as if she is curling up on a pair of solid logs than on human flesh. The wind stirs the grass into a soft murmur around them, making dancing patterns of light and shade on the insides of her closed eyelids. A sleepy smile tilts her lips.
“Are you laughing at me?” he asks, his voice a low rumble. “What makes you smile?”
A blunt, callused finger brushes the stray wisps of hair gently behind her ear. Her smile creeps wider as the girl remembers all the times that finger has played with her hair just so. Even the very first day she met him – as mere strangers, mere children – he had been unable to resist those rebellious, untidy strands of hair.
The girl praises her ancestors a dozen times a day for granting her the blessing of hair that he loves so well.
“Tell me,” he commands, his voice tickling her ear as his shadow falls over her like an embrace. Laughter trembles the edges of his words. “You know you cannot keep secrets from me.”
She opens her mouth to frame some careless, teasing phrase – and freezes as another voice, a terrible voice that does not belong here in the living world, falls upon her ears.
Sunlight, it hissed. Oh, the sun. I had forgotten how it felt…
I cried out as the light disappeared, snuffed like a candle doused with water.
Blackness. Without shape, without shade, without end. It flooded my eyes and ear
s, poured into my mouth like smoke. Trying to see anything was like … like trying to outstare the vacuum of space.
Something dripped near by. Thick, slow drips that landed in more liquid. The sound echoed, giving me a sensation of space, vast empty space all around me, like standing on the top board at the swimming pool.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Someone was watching me. I could feel their gaze on my face, like fingers grazing my skin. They could see me. I couldn’t see anything but they could see me. Was I blind? Was this what being blind was like? I didn’t dare move. Not even an inch. I knew – somehow I knew – that if I moved, I would fall.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Cold breath, scented with rust, ghosted against my cheek.
Yamato Mio…
I bit a scream in half. I wanted to flinch, to back away – but I couldn’t move. I had to be still. I had to stay still. My fingers curled and uncurled.
You are frightened again. The blood-scented whisper caressed my ear. Always so afraid, little mortal. I can hear your poor heart, pitter-patter. A tiny bird, trapped in an ivory cage. Poor thing. Poor birdie. Little wings, so fragile. Snap. Crunch. All broken.
I knew that singsong, child-like voice. I knew it from a dream.
Was that a dream?
Was this?
“I can’t see you.” The words came out as a harsh croak.
I know, she said, pleased as if I’d praised her. You did not like seeing me before. It distressed you.
I remembered. The mirrors all around me. The reflection. The woman who had my face, and eyes like a shark. “When you … you looked like me?”
I could not look like me. Too much. Little birdie would have stopped beating. Snap. Crunch. Broken.
That was almost – almost – lucid. Even in the midst of my fear it seemed as if she was making more sense this time around. That, or I was getting closer to insanity.
