Eight Million Gods

by Wen Spencer

  “Delany!” Leo shouted behind her, and his gun roared in the night.

  The men yipped in terror as Atsumori struck again, amputating an arm holding a gun before cutting the nearest man in half. “It’s the kami! The kami!”

  Atsumori whirled, ducking low, and Nikki heard a gun thunder and saw the muzzle flash inches above her head, and then they struck the gunman, slicing through his legs with a sweeping cut. A backward stab took another man in the throat.

  Nikki barely registered that the other three men had been shot dead, when Atsumori lunged at Leo.

  “No!” Nikki closed her eyes, trying with every fiber of her being to stop.

  They jerked to a halt and stood poised, panting in the cold rain.

  She opened her eyes. The blade was pressed to Leo’s neck, blood trickling from the razor cut. He watched her, tense and expressionless. “Don’t hurt him. Please, don’t hurt him.”

  “Who is he?” Atsumori used her mouth to growl.

  Leo’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

  “He’s Leo Watanabe.” She realized that the name meant nothing to Atsumori. “He’s the Scary Cat Dude.”

  “Is that why you left me behind?” Atsumori shouted. “So I couldn’t stop you from calling him?”

  “We need help,” Nikki said. “They’ll kill me and take you. We can’t take the yakuza alone.”

  Atsumori glared at the man and Leo stared coldly back.

  “You trust him?” Atsumori asked.

  Did she? If she said no, Atsumori would probably kill him. “He feels honest.”

  “I asked if you trust him!” Atsumori roared.

  “Yes!” she cried. She’d been inside of Leo’s head; he wanted to protect her.

  “She’s hurt,” Leo said quietly. “If you don’t let me help her, you’re going to lose her.”

  Atsumori jerked back and looked down at her body. There was a hole in her shirt, and the fabric was dark red. Atsumori touched her shirt and then stared at their bloody fingers. “Oh, Nikki, what have I done?”

  “Let me help her.” Leo’s voice was low and urgent.

  “Keep her safe,” Atsumori said.

  The kami slipped out of her, and her legs folded like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She saw Leo leaping toward her, trying to catch her before she hit the ground, and then everything went dark.

  14

  Let Me Pass

  They were on holy ground. It was the only way to explain why Atsumori was sitting beside her futon when she woke up. Her hand rested on the katana, and his fingers were interwoven with hers. Sunlight danced on the ceiling, reflected from something that shimmered and moved. The air was heavy with the smell of cut grass from tatami mats, and a cicada droned loudly somewhere close by. Her throat hurt and her side throbbed with pain.

  She tried to ask where they were, but nothing came out. She swallowed, wetting her mouth and raw throat, and tried again. “Where?”

  “Osaka,” Atsumori said.

  She pulled her hand free so she could smack him. “Where?”

  “I am not sure.” Atsumori admitted unhappily. “I have not dared to leave your side. I have leant you all of my strength that you could safely bear.”

  Guilt twisted inside of her as she remembered that she had tried to hand over his katana without worrying about what Leo might do with him. She laced her fingers with Atsumori again.

  Someplace in Osaka, on holy ground, with one very unhappy boy god.

  Presumably in the protection of the Scary Cat Dude, who was not an FBI agent, who probably was named Leo Watanabe. Maybe. He’d been so leery of her at the castle; how did he feel about her now that she had tried to whack off his head and then had a screaming fight with herself? He probably thought she was stark raving mad.

  She ran her fingertips over the katana’s sheathe. No, if he thought she was crazy, he wouldn’t have left the sword. In the scenes she wrote, he’d known all about tanuki and kami. He knew about her ability; he’d figured out that she had written Gregory’s murder before it happened. He’d talked about Talents and Sensitive as if all this weirdness was normal.

  Did he realize that he was one of her characters?

  All his scenes were in the notebook she had with her. She hadn’t typed them up. Unless he read the last few pages of her current working notebook, he couldn’t know for sure. Could he guess? Well, there was the note on her wall, but he might think that was spillover from Misa or Gregory. She tried to remember what they had talked about at the castle. Had she accidently let it slip? She hadn’t explained how she had his number, but she did tell him that she knew about the kitten. Would he realize what it meant?

  One thing was certain: he had taken her to a shrine instead of an emergency room because he was hiding her. She supposed that it would be worrisome to some people, but the last place she wanted to be while helpless was a hospital. It was too easy for her mother to find her there.

  She noticed that everything Leo had returned to her was piled next to her head. She reached up with her free hand to pick up her phone, wincing as the movement lanced through her with pain. Obviously Leo didn’t know her mother—the phone was on, transmitting her location to anyone determined to find her. She deleted all the calls from the log and powered off, making it untraceable.

  She drifted to sleep and woke again sometime later as a shadow moved over her face. She opened her eyes to find Leo kneeling beside her futon. She wondered if he ever shaved, as he still had two or three days’ worth of stubble. He had amazing eyes; dark and expressive. He peered deep into her eyes as if he could look straight to her soul.

  “That’s just you right now, isn’t it?” Leo asked.

  “Huh?” She blinked at him.

  “I’m talking to Nikki Delany, right?” Leo said. “Not the kami who tried to behead me.”

  “Oh! Yeah, I’m just me now. Sorry about the whole head-whacking thing.”

  He looked surprised at her word choice, and a slight smile flashed across his face. “It’s—It’s fine. What matters is that you trusted me.” He hesitated before adding in his low, rumbling voice. “I—I need your help.”

  A surprisingly Japanese “Eh?” slipped out, one she would have been more pleased with if she wasn’t so confounded. “Me? You’re the one with a gun and the ability to speak Japanese.”

  “I’m looking for this man.” Leo pulled a stack of Post-It Notes from his breast pocket. The top one was turquoise and read “Shiva? Vishnu? Kali?” She remembered then that he had fixated on that particular plot thread in her apartment. Of course that was back when she thought he was just a character in her novel.

  “Do you know where he is?” Leo asked.

  There was something very surreal about sitting in a room without a single modern fixture in sight, the cicadas drowning out all traffic noise, and considering the whereabouts of a man she hadn’t thought was real.

  “The Brit? No,” she said. “I don’t know what happened to him. His storyline just came to a dead end.”

  “He was killed?” Grief filled Leo’s dark eyes.

  “No. No. His part of the story just—stopped. He was in Izushi and in the middle of a sentence, his scene ended. I’ve never had that happen before.”

  “But you don’t think he was killed?”

  “Usually if a character is killed or dies, I write it out.” In full gory detail and then occasionally post it to the Internet. “I write in third person with occasional shifts to omniscient, so even after a character dies, the scene can continue. Usually I—I show what the killer does to the body afterwards.”

  It was really quite morbid now that she knew they were real people, real deaths, and real bodies.

  Leo produced a Campus notebook and a pen, exactly like the ones she bought for herself. He held them out to her. “Can you write more about him? Where he is now? Why hasn’t he called?”

  She eyed the paper and pen. It had been unsettling to write about Leo as he searched for her. She didn’
t want to write about a real person who was possibly dead. She knew that she wasn’t really responsible for her characters’ deaths; she fought too many times trying to keep them alive to know that it wasn’t in her control. She didn’t want to write out the words that confirmed the Brit’s death, knowing that he was real. “I—I don’t know.”

  He pressed the notebook into her hands and laid the pen on top of it. She stared at it with dismay. There was a little whispering of longing to open up the tablet to the crisp blank paper, click the pen down, smell the ink, and lose herself in writing. The most horrifying part was that she knew sooner or later she would cave in to the desire. It was what kept her from being able to totally convince every doctor who ever treated her that she was sane. She couldn’t stop writing.

  But twenty years had given her some control over the need. “I’m not sure if he’s still part of the story. It could have been he was just a witness.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Witnesses aren’t fully fleshed characters, because they interact with only a small part of the story. They just observe a plot point that none of the main characters experiences. A witness is an old woman whose goats have been stolen for a ritual sacrifice. A cemetery caretaker who notices a grave has been dug up. A child who was in the graveyard on the wrong night and is killed. They—” She closed her mouth on the words “don’t matter,” because these were real people. Of course they mattered, just not to the story.

  “So, sometimes witnesses live and sometimes they die?” He collected all the Post-It Notes with her coded death masks together. He ruffled the stack like a little flipbook, and the expressions stuttered past, making a film of character deaths. Some slow, some sudden, some unexpected, some not. The last face was that of “the Brit.” Like Leo, he had been hiding his true identity, and she hadn’t been able to assign him a name. She clipped the pen to the notebook and carefully put them down.

  “I can’t just write about any old thing. I’ve tried that for school.” And for her mother and for many, many doctors. “I can’t get much past ‘See Dick and Jane run’ when I’m not focused on a horror story.”

  He flinched slightly at the word “horror.”

  She dropped her gaze to focus on the pale blue futon cover. The print had small dragonflies scattered few and far apart. She traced one with a finger. “It’s just how I work. When I start a novel, all the characters, no matter how random and scattered they seem, they always connect together to one common story. A horror story, filled with death and monsters and magic.”

  “But not all your characters die,” he growled.

  She nearly said, “Most of them do,” before she realized both of them were now characters in her story. She clenched the cover tight. “Some of them get out alive.”

  Not the ones that stayed and fought to the gory end. The ones that stopped the monster never got out without taking a deadly wound. The characters that survived were usually the ones that never even realized they were in danger. They waltzed into the story, sidestepped danger, and left well before the final fight.

  “So Simon might still be alive,” Leo stated.

  “Who?”

  He gave the Post-It Notes a slight wave to draw her attention back to the square of turquoise-colored paper. “Simon Fowler. He’s the man you were tracking with these.”

  “I was?” She still couldn’t quite wrap her brain around the idea that all her characters were real.

  “He arrived in Japan two months ago and disappeared. I’ve been looking for him for six weeks. This note is the only clue I’ve found so far that indicates that something happened to him.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to be found.”

  Leo shook his head. “He wouldn’t have done that to me. Even if he wanted to vanish, he would have left me some kind of sign.”

  “He’s your friend?” she asked cautiously, thinking of the friends she had left clueless in her wake.

  “He’s my father.” Then, seeing her confusion, he added reluctantly, “I’m adopted.”

  Children fleeing from parents she could fully understand, but would a father hide from his son? Leo was some sort of assassin and certainly the type of kid you might want to hide from. It reminded her that when she was young, she’d mistaken the word “estranged” as another form of “strangled.”

  “Please try,” Leo said.

  “If he’s not part of the story anymore, I won’t be able to write anything.” She warned him against disappointment.

  “I understand, but I don’t have any thing else to go on.”

  She sighed and picked up the pad, opened it, and clicked the pen. With the point hovering over the pristine paper, she considered her character: the Brit. She had written his scene on her flight to Japan in May. Her hypergraphia had been at full throttle. For once in her life, she had welcomed her disorder because it meant the start of the novel with the tight deadline. Nearly fifteen hours in the air, the flight seemed perfect to wallow in the writing. Somehow she decided that her first character would be on the same plane as her, heading into danger, and thus “the Brit” came into being. She’d written out dozens of pages of story before it suddenly came to a stop in midsentence. She tried several times during the flight to finish the scene but couldn’t. It literally felt like he’d fallen off the face of the planet.

  There had been no indication that the Brit—Simon Fowler—had planned on disappearing. Had she written anything about Leo from his father’s viewpoint? There had been something about an angry storm on the other end of the phone, a person rumbling like thunder over something mildly amusing to Simon. Yes, there had been warm affection mixed with mild exasperation for Leo, but no fear. Simon would have left Leo some sign if something had unexpectedly sent him fleeing.

  So where was he now? What was he doing?

  The pen dipped, touched the paper, dotting it with black ink. After a minute she raised the pen and lowered it again. A second dot joined the first.

  It wasn’t going to work. Simon vanishing had been an inciting incident, pulling Leo to Japan so he could be part of the story that Nikki had entangled herself with when she was arrested for Gregory Winston’s murder. There was no real indication that Simon had anything to do with Nikki’s horror story.

  She raised her pen again. A third dot. She needed some way to tie Fowler mentally to her story so that whatever weird juju her ability could trigger could be fueled. If Leo had come looking for Simon, then surely as the hero, his goal was to find his father. It was important to the plot, she told herself, to know if Simon was alive or not.

  . . . fragile pale dawn shone through an open window. Like always, he was bound and gagged, but this was yet another strange bedroom. He had lost count of the beds and the mornings. Behind him was the odd omnipresent sound that had been in every hotel room: the rattle of stone against wood. As he listened intently, trying yet again to identify the mysterious noise, he heard the mechanical tones of “Toryanse” playing at some distant crosswalk. He was still in Japan but impossible to tell where. He felt impossibly tired and hollow and light. When was the last time he had eaten? He lay helpless, unable to move, as the lyrics played in his head.

  Let me pass, let me pass

  What is this narrow pathway here?

  It’s the narrow pathway of the Tenjin shrine

  Please allow me to pass through

  Those without good reason shall not pass

  To celebrate this child’s seventh birthday

  I’ve come to dedicate my offering

  Going in may be fine, fine, but returning would be scary

  It’s scary but

  Let me pass, let me pass

  Seventh birthday made him think of his son. Leo had to be going mad with worry. Knowing his boy, he was burning bridges to find him. He wasn’t sure if he wanted him tangling with this crowd. His boy was deadly, but even he would be getting in over his head.

  Simon tested his bindings. Someone knew their knots. He couldn’t move an inch; sti
ll, he spent several minutes trying. The distant crosswalk started playing “Toryanse” again, and he found himself thinking of the more sinister second verse.

  Let me pass, let me pass

  Here is the underworld’s narrow pathway

  It’s the narrow pathway of the demon’s shrine

  Please allow me to pass through

  Those without sacrifice shall not pass

  To bury this child at age seven

  I’ve come to offer my services

  Living may be fine, fine, but going back would be scary

  It’s scary but

  Let me pass, let me pass.

  He had to get out of this nightmare, but he wasn’t sure how. Every morning had been the same: trussed up like a suckling pig waiting to be roasted and served. The mystery rattle grew louder and faster. There was a small muffled explosion. Sharp stone fragments rained down on the bed, and a sudden cloud of dust drifted through the room. He had run out of . . .

  Nikki blinked at the page. It had stopped in midsentence again. Why?

  She clicked the pen to retract the point and realized that Leo was leaning against her back so he could read over her shoulder. His body was a strong, solid wall wrapped around hers, filling her awareness with his warm strength. His scent was like expensive musk cologne on the summer wind, light to the point of elusive.

  He growled softly in anger as he pressed fingers to the paper. “This tells us nothing.”

  “He’s alive.”

  “This could have been weeks ago.”

  She considered the scene. There was no real time marker, but she had started out wanting to know Simon’s condition now. Currently it was nearly noon, judging by the play of the light and shadows. “This takes place tomorrow morning.”