I didn’t know what I yearned for, except that I wanted to be near that little boy who was so warm and smelled so good. My infant bones were still rubbery, my muscles weak, but after a few tries I managed to stand, grasp the wooden crib rail, and pull myself up and over into his bed—
No. Not that. I didn’t want to feel what was coming next. I shook myself out of Miko’s memory and fought back onto the ice. My hot tears melted the frost over my flesh eye, and I caught a glimpse of something like a rock dam or mostly submerged wall a few feet away, but the ice was cracking again and I reached desperately for the stones but that just made me plunge into the deepest memories when I fell …
chapter
fourteen
Uncle Roy
The stranger talking to the orphanage director in the reception area was a tall man in a gray hat and suit like some of the Americans wore. But even at a distance, I could tell he wasn’t like any of the other adults I’d ever seen. His skin was like the belly of a fish, his hair yellow like straw, and his eyes so pale a blue they looked almost white. The nurses who thought they were outside his earshot whisperingly called him gaijin, but some of them called me gaijin, too.
The director, a balding man with thick black-framed glasses who was normally quite stern with everyone, even the soldiers, gave the stranger a nervous smile and several short bows. And then he led the gray man through the maze of cribs toward the back wall where I sat watching through the wooden bars. The staff had moved my crib well away from the others after the second baby mysteriously died in the night beside me. They suspected a contagious disease, and had the army doctor examine me three times, but he could find no evidence of fever or cough or any other sign that I was worthy of quarantine.
The whispering nurses had then thought of smothering me, but none were brave enough to try. Next they plotted to take me away and leave me on the hillside, but the director overheard them and shouted at them for being heartless and superstitious. He threatened to dock everyone’s pay if anything happened to me.
Still, he hadn’t objected when they moved my crib. And I couldn’t quite make the climb down to the floor, so my body was grudgingly learning how to digest milk and gruel.
“Here she is.” The orphanage director swept his hand expansively toward my crib, as if I were some kind of precious jewel instead of a half-breed baby. “Perfectly healthy, as you can see.”
“Oh, thank the good Lord, my little niece is safe,” the stranger said, smiling down at me. His teeth were deeply red and very, very sharp, not at all like the teeth of any of the adults I had ever seen. He pushed his gray fedora back on his head, and I saw two shiny, curved black horns poking from his thick yellow hair. But the orphanage director did not seem to see them.
“My church took up a collection back home when we got word from the other missionaries that my sister’s baby miraculously survived.” The stranger reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out a fat roll of green American money. This the director certainly did notice, and his eyes went wide behind his glasses.
“This is just a token of our appreciation,” the stranger said, offering the cash to the orphanage director. “Poor Maggie may have gravely sinned in conceiving this child, and surely the Lord struck her down for her harlotry, but He also showed His mercy in letting my only niece live so she can grow up in a righteous Christian house and witness to His glory.”
His words sounded heartfelt and I could tell the director was convinced, but I knew every one of them was a lie as big as the battleships in the harbor.
“Oh, Reverend Jones, you and your church are most generous,” the director exclaimed, breaking into another series of excited bows as he took the roll from the stranger’s pale fingers. The man’s thoughts were so loud I couldn’t help but hear them. He was imagining all the fish and rice he could buy for the children, and better medicines for the hibakusha babies who still suffered from their burns. There would be new diaper cloth, and maybe even a couple of new cribs, too.
Entranced with his charmed windfall, the director was gradually forgetting I’d ever existed as the stranger wrapped me in my thin blanket and carried me away in his wiry arms.
Once we were out in the bright sunlight of the busy town street, the stranger grinned down at me.
“You can see me for what I really am, can’t you?” He sounded like he was sharing a mischievous joke.
I hadn’t learned to talk yet, so I nodded.
He laughed. “I knew your mother wouldn’t have spawned a fool! Well. Maybe she would, but she certainly wouldn’t have bothered to bring me here if she had, eh?”
His thoughts were closed to me, and I couldn’t guess what he meant. I must have looked confused, and he laughed again.
“I’m your very own Mary Poppins!” he said. “Though I don’t suppose they read that story to the kids on this side of the pond much, do they? Well, your mother is dreadfully preoccupied with that unfortunate war with your brother, Kagu-tsuchi. She’s far too busy to raise a half-mortal demon child. But she needs you brought up right, and she knows I’m just the one for the job.”
I still didn’t know exactly what he meant, but I was glad to be outside where there were so many interesting things to see and new people to smell. I’d been carried down this road a few times before when the director had ordered the nurses to take me along for walks in the fresh air with the other babies; we were heading down to the docks. One nurse had thought of casting me down into the water and pretending it was an accident, but I grabbed her blouse and refused to let go until we were back in the orphanage.
“Just so you know, I’m not really a minister,” the stranger confided. “I do have that Master of Divinity from Yale, but I’m afraid it’s forged. If you ring up the school, they’ll have me in their files, though, and that’s the important thing, yes? It’s handy enough to be a pastor when it suits, and a murderer when it doesn’t, because both are fine ways of parting men from their money. You and I, we can go a lot longer between meals than humans can, but it’s much more pleasant to have food in your belly at the end of the day.”
The stranger, apparently hungered by his own patter, stopped at a street vendor’s cart to buy a skewer of teriyaki chicken.
“It’s all about money and work, sad to say,” he said between mouthfuls of char-grilled bird as he strode on toward the ships. “We’re all born for a reason, and it’s usually to serve someone else. Sure, in these modern times, people talk of having children for the sake of love—ah, love, sweet love!—but that’s horse apples to feed the middle class. A dirt farmer raises a dozen brats because he needs extra hands come harvest time; a banking baron grooms an heir to secure the family fortune. And your mother spawned you to wreak her vengeance on America, but that’s a chat for another day.”
He had eaten almost all the chicken. I whined, reaching for the bamboo skewer. The stranger briefly looked annoyed, but then he smiled indulgently and tore the last chunk off for me.
“I suppose I should give you a name. Your mother didn’t bother to give you a familiar alias, I’m afraid, and she certainly won’t share your true name with me. She probably won’t reveal it to you, either. Goddesses of her stature don’t maintain their positions by giving up their leverage.” He stopped to toss the stick into the bushes. “But since she’s Izanami, and you’re a little adorable version of her, that might make you … Izanamiko?”
The stranger frowned, pondering. “My Japanese may be off. And that name’s much too long for everyday, don’t you think? How about … Miko. Yes, that’s much better. And fits; your body will be her temple, and you its sole priestess.”
He looked down at me thoughtfully as I gummed his chicken. “Men will look askance at me if I say I’m your nanny, or even your father, because there’s precious little resemblance here. Even if I claimed the prettiest whore on the whole island, I doubt that our ruttings could produce anything half as fetching as you. I can work up enough magic to cover my mother’s lamentable contribution to my ph
ysiognomy, but I can’t make myself into Errol Flynn. So, the avuncular fabrication must remain, and you and the rest of the world shall know me as your dear uncle Roy.”
I gazed up at his teeth and horns and frosty eyes. I wasn’t really sure what an uncle was; I had only a vague sense of what parents were. Mothers and fathers were people who claimed children from the orphanage, that much I did know, but there had to be something else special about them. I wondered who his parents must have been.
He heard my thoughts and laughed.
“My mother is a goddess among whores, which doesn’t make her much of a goddess at all, but she has her charms. At least I’m aging well, thanks to her. My father was a man known to most as Jack; he tried to steal her heart, but she took his, instead … I believe she still has it in a jar in her wardrobe. Anyhow, his sauciness impressed her, and she kept the best of him to create me. Apparently just so she’d have someone around to fetch towels and pisspots for her, although she did introduce me to the fine art of assassination. Which is what I’m going to be teaching you, once you’re strong enough to hold a weapon. No guns, alas, since firepower is your brother’s specialty. Anyone you kill even indirectly with flame might be claimed by him.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pretty folding knife the length of his hand; the upper and lower bolsters were sterling silver, and the handle was made of polished bone. He pressed a round nub on the upper bolster and the stiletto blade sprang open, gleaming in the sun, far more tantalizing than any brightly colored toy or lollipop. I cooed and grabbed for it, but he held it well out of my reach.
“Ooh, yes, it’s shiny, isn’t it?” he said. “I had this special made in Frosolone a few years ago … lost my old blade in a fight in Naples. But this one’s much better, surgical steel, holds a fine edge and never rusts. Don’t fear, you’ll learn to use a knife like this soon enough …”
Miko’s old memory lost its grip on me and I came back into myself, felt the pressure of the water against my eardrums and the muddy bottom sucking at my boots, and I pushed up, trying to reach the surface, but another current caught me and pulled me sideways, farther under the ice—
—I dropped the bloody butcher knife on the stained garage floor and stumbled backward, my head buzzing with the old man’s memories. So much pain in his soul: his only son’s slow, wrenching death from childhood cancer, his wife’s suicide, and endless loneliness and regret afterward. Uncle Roy said I had to learn to savor these moments, but this was horrible.
I looked at the old man, his shabby clothes, his slashed throat. He’d had such a rotten life and had done nothing to deserve his hardship. And after all that misery, I had given him a painful, shameful death. In that moment, I saw the world through my victim’s eyes, and the terrible unfairness of it all hit me. I fell to my knees, weeping.
“Girl! No crying!” Uncle Roy’s voice carried a sharp warning.
“I am damned,” I whispered to myself in kyōtsūgo. The nurse who’d thought to drown me had whispered that to herself under her breath over and over as she carried me down to the dock. In the eight years since I’d left the orphanage, I had thought of her and her words practically every day.
“No Japanese!” he thundered, jumping out of his steel folding chair in the corner and striding toward me. “You’re an American now, speak English! Get up!”
I knew I should stop crying and do what Uncle Roy told me, but the old man’s sadness had spread through me, a soft rot of emotion I couldn’t purge.
“Stop crying, Miko.” I heard his switchblade flick open behind me.
Instead of steeling my nerves, the fear I felt made me sob harder, the tears flowing freely down my cheeks.
Uncle Roy rammed his knife into my back between my ribs, directly into my left kidney. As I gasped at the astonishing pain, he twisted the blade out and jabbed it into my other kidney. I fell to the oil-stained concrete floor, unable to do much but whimper and tremble as hot blood poured from my wounds, plastering my thin cotton shirt to my shivering skin.
I’d never experienced this kind of agony before, not even in the memories of the people Roy had made me kill. I’d tasted death twice as a toddler, once when I’d been knocked overboard and drowned, and again when the wind had blown me off a third-story ledge and I’d snapped my neck in the fall. Those fatalities were nothing compared to this.
“A kidney wound is one of the most painful ways to die.” He dragged his chair over so that he sat where I couldn’t help but see him. “A ruptured spleen, that’s very painful, too, and it takes longer, possibly a dozen hours or more.”
He wiped his steel off on a dipstick rag, folded the switchblade, and put it back into the pocket of his tweed jacket. “Creatures like you and I don’t have the luxury of emotions. We demons don’t cry, Miko. It’s just not done. You need to learn to master yourself, master that pain, today, because the next time I see a single tear in your eye and we’re not in the middle of a dust storm, I will stab you in the spleen. And if you cry again after that? I will disembowel you. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
I nodded weakly. My vision was starting to go dark. I hated dying, but I hated returning to life even worse, despised the grinding ache in my joints, the bone-deep chills, the burn in my heart as it strained to pump half-congealed blood. I couldn’t catch human diseases like influenza or polio, but coming back from death surely felt a hundred times worse.
Uncle Roy pointed at the old man’s corpse. “You’re going to kill a lot more sad sacks just like this one, broken oldsters who don’t have so much as a spoonful of sugary life left to help their bitter spirits go down. You need to develop a taste for them if you’re going to harvest enough American souls to make up for what your mother lost to your brother in the atomic fires. At my estimation, you still have over 236,000 to collect. Even my mind boggles at the enormity of that, but it’s what you were born to do. And it’s my job to make sure you’ll do it.”
He paused, leaning forward, watching intently as my heart struggled, shuddered, and stopped.
“If I have to go through Vlad Tepes’ entire repertoire to bleed your father’s disgusting weakness out of you, my sweet child,” he said, “then that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
I got free of Miko’s memory, saw a crack in the ice I knew I could break through with my sword and shield, kicked as hard as I could to reach it, but the black water was taking me down again—
“Miko, I told you, you mustn’t block your thoughts around me.” Roy turned away from the kitchen window and faced me. He looked and sounded perfectly calm but I knew that wouldn’t last. “It’s a clever trick you’ve learned, and it will serve you well around others of our kind, but you must never do it around me.”
“Why not?” I had to steady my heart; it wanted to jump with terror in my chest. Part of me still couldn’t believe I was challenging him like this. “You’ve never left your mind open for me to read.”
“That’s quite a different matter, and you know it.”
“How is it different?” My voice was hard. “I don’t think it is.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw the switchblade flash open in Roy’s hand, but that bastard wasn’t going to get the better of me again. Not ever again. I grabbed his wrist and twisted his hand up and over, pushing the knife into his shoulder joint, and he actually looked surprised, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that I was no longer a skinny little girl, a rag doll he could toss around whenever he felt like it.
“Miko, come now,” he said as I backed him up against the kitchen counter. I could tell he was trying to sound stern but he was grinding his teeth from the pain. Dark red blood, nearly black, was spreading in an irregular circle across the shoulder of his gray dress shirt. “Be nice to your Uncle Roy.”
I almost laughed out loud at that. Nice? When had nice ever even cast its frilly pink shadow on our relationship? He’d taught me how to rob, murder, blackmail, cook dope, forge documents, dance a burlesque, fuck like a street whore …
and how to die stoically when my efforts didn’t please him.
Still keeping my thoughts to myself, still steadying my heart to hide the elated terror I was feeling, I stared into his ice-white eyes. Genuine fear lurked behind his careful mask. And that’s when I had an epiphany: my reflexes were faster than his now, and I was stronger, too. If he couldn’t read my thoughts, couldn’t anticipate what I was going to do, he was completely at my mercy.
It was his own shame, then, that he’d taken such pains to beat the mercy right out of me. I yanked the blade out of his shoulder, out of his clutching fingers, and drove it guard-deep into the side of his neck. He gave a surprised gasp that was quickly choked off by the blood filling his mouth.
I could have slowed his death and tortured him for hours; I’d earned that kind of revenge a thousand times over, and Mother knows he taught me how to exact it. But I didn’t want to. I was done with him, done with his abuse and his lectures and his hypocrisy, and that’s all there was to it. Best to make a clean cut and move on.
He was still standing there bubbling through his own blood, still wearing that stupid look of disbelief, so I grabbed a handful of his scarecrow hair and threw him down on the linoleum. It took me only three minutes to cut through his tough sinews and vertebrae to sever his head from his body. There wasn’t much blood in him, at least not compared to full humans. Slit a man’s aorta and he’ll spurt all over the walls; Roy’s artery flowed like a forgotten garden hose, slicking the kitchen floor in his sticky merlot. For good measure, I cut his cold heart from his chest and stuffed it into his mouth. He didn’t have a proper soul, and I was glad, because I didn’t want to have to harvest it. The stunted ones that were no good to Mother just slipped away, like sardines through a tuna net.
My vision blurred toward the end, and when I wiped my eyes in the unbloodied crook of my elbow I realized I’d started to cry, fat briny drops darkening the front of my silk chemise. I made myself turn off my waterworks as I washed up at the sink. I’d gotten good at that. He of all people didn’t deserve my tears.
Switchblade Goddess Page 9
