by Wen Spencer
They were greeted at the door by an elegant kimono-clad hostess. The woman was beautiful, with creamy skin and glossy long black hair coiled into a bun. She greeted them with a graceful bow. Nikki was instantly aware that she hadn’t bathed since Inari’s shrine, that her hair was oily and lank, and that she was wearing the same underclothes she’d been shot in.
One look at Nikki and, despite Leo’s attempts to keep the discussion in fluid Japanese, the hostess insisted on speaking very broken English.
“Tsuma desu.” Leo waved a hand toward Nikki.
Nikki understood enough Japanese to translate: this is my wife. She stiffened as all the unhappy endings of her relationships collided with the word. The woman smiled gently at them, pleased with their fictional happiness.
The hostess led them to their room tucked in the back of the hotel. Apparently their room had been vacant because it was the most expensive suite in the place. Not only did it have a Japanese-style porch with wooden sandals waiting, but also a private open-air hot spring bath carved into a rock grotto. She couldn’t imagine how expensive the room was. She had priced out stays at similar onsen-style hotels. A standard room with access only to communal baths often ran over two hundred dollars per person a night.
“Why did you tell her that?” Nikki whispered after the woman bowed and left.
“Tell her what?”
“That we’re married?”
He blanked his face. “I did not think you would understand what I was saying.”
“I know enough to understand that.”
“I see.”
He didn’t see. He couldn’t understand how much she had always wanted a normal life. To go to high school. Attend the prom. Go to college. Date. Marry. She had spent eighteen years dreaming of being free of her mother, only to have it all snatched away. She’d spent the last two years running and hiding like a wanted criminal. Miriam was the only friend she would recognize face-to-face. Team Banzai was all women she had met online through a shared interest in manga and fan-written fiction. The few guys she’d met since she turned eighteen had turned tail and run after they got to know her. If it wasn’t the hypergraphia or the graphic nature of what she wrote, it was all her hang-ups from growing up in mental hospitals. The only men she knew growing up were doctors or orderlies. One ordered that she be given drugs “for her own good” and the other stood over her, making sure she took them. Then there was the small issue of being tied to a bed while the woman in the next room was raped.
The likelihood of her ever getting married was slim to none.
“Don’t say we’re married,” she said. “Just don’t.”
“Okay, I won’t.” His phone started to ring. He took it out and stared at it.
“You’re not going to answer it?” she asked.
He took a deep breath and answered it. “What is it, Ananth?”
The caller apparently was one of those men who shouted at their phone. She could hear him clearly even from two feet away.
“You’re to check in every eight hours,” Ananth barked. “See that you do. Where are you?”
Leo closed his eyes and was silent for a minute before saying, “Izushi. I have a lead on Simon.”
“You’re to find Nikki Delany!” Ananth shouted.
Leo glanced at Nikki and then turned away. “This is the first lead I’ve had on my father in six weeks. It will only take me a few hours to check out.”
The voice on the other end sounded like whatever sympathy he had for Leo had worn off weeks ago. “You’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that he’s most likely dead!”
“I’ll believe that when I see his body. I will look for him until I find him.”
“You’re utterly failing to prove that you can be trusted without Simon as your handler! Shiva cannot allow you to run amuck!”
Leo pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “It’s late. I’m tired. I’ll return to Osaka tomorrow.”
There was a long silence on the other end, and then something murmured that Nikki didn’t catch.
“Yes, sir.” Leo put away his phone, shaking his head.
Nikki knew why he wasn’t telling his organization about her—the moment he did, he would have to turn her over to the man on the phone. Any normal sane person, though, would have to ask. Would want to know. “Why didn’t you tell him you found me?”
He glanced at her, worry in his dark eyes. He looked away, radiating unease. “There are things in the world that that can move unseen and kill without mercy.” With seeming reluctance, he defined “things.” “Monsters. Spirits. In theory, Shiva protects people from evil that a normal man would be helpless against.”
“But in truth, they don’t?”
He shook his head. “Shiva is self-serving when it comes to defining who is a monster and who isn’t. There are people with special abilities—people like you . . . and my father. Shiva sees anyone with a gift as a possible monster—as someone to be controlled, contained, or eliminated. To protect ‘normal’ people.”
Nikki really wished the Japanese were more into chairs. She had a sudden need to sit down. “So if they find me . . .”
“If they don’t know about your ability, they’ll assume you’re just accidently caught up in this mess. You can’t tell them about your writing—or that the kami can take you over. Both make you valuable and dangerous.”
His scene as a child made more sense now. Shiva had captured him when he was young, decided he was monster, and would have killed him if Simon hadn’t intervened.
“My father had dreams of being a doctor,” Leo said. “He was in his third year at medical school when Shiva discovered him. They yanked him out of college and never let him go back. He wanted to heal children, not run around signing off on kill orders.”
One of those kill orders had been for seven-year-old orphaned Leo, locked in a cage, dying of thirst. No wonder Simon had adopted him. It explained, also, why Leo was rebelling against Shiva and all the veiled threats they were leveling at him.
Her hands fluttered slightly at the thought of being caged. Shiva sounded like her mother, only with guns and literal cages instead of doctors and mental wards.
She dug into her backpack, looking for a pen. She found one and clicked it repeatedly. Note to self: avoid being questioned by Shiva. She had years of experience trying to convince people that she was completely normal—but so far practice hadn’t made perfect.
“What do they want with me?” Atsumori murmured into her ear, reminding her that she wasn’t alone with Leo. The boy god had been quiet the entire trip and she had wondered if he’d gone to sleep. Had healing Nikki exhausted him? Did gods get tired?
“Why is Shiva looking for the katana in the first place? What do they want with Atsumori?”
“Kami like him are considered ‘tame monsters’ and aren’t dangerous if they’re in the right hands. Shiva is focused more on whose hands he is in rather than having actual concern about him, especially if yokai like the tanuki at your apartment are involved.”
She remembered Leo’s reaction to Harada’s driver’s license. “Shiva will stomp on the yakuza for working with the tanuki?”
Leo nodded. “Yokai can’t be policed by normal humans. Shiva uses tame monsters to go after the dangerous ones.”
Was Leo one of the tame monsters? Shiva was sending him after her because they thought she might be dangerous. As long as Shiva continued to think that, Leo was free to “find her.”
Of course, once they found Simon, she would have to explain the weirdness around her. Leo had taken down her Post-It Notes before the cleaners arrived. He’d snagged both of her flash drives and all her notebooks. That covered all the evidence in her apartment. What else?
Well there was the dead tanuki. Lots of dead tanuki if the fight at the castle was uncovered. How could she explain all the hacked-up raccoon dogs in business suits? Click. Click. Click.
If she said that she knew kendo—the Japanese style of fencing with a
katana—she could explain using the sword to kill the tanuki both at the castle and at her apartment. She had taken a semester of martial arts with Miriam at Foxcroft. She was fairly sure that school records would be vague enough after nearly five years to give her wiggle room there. How had she gotten the katana? She could say she had lied to the police and that she knew Gregory . . .
“Shit!” she cried.
Leo whipped out his pistol so fast it seemed to materialize in his hand. He searched the room for something to shoot. “What is it?”
“The police know about my writing.” She took a deep breath, trying to stay calm. Don’t lose it in front of the man with a gun. “An officer overheard me talking about Gregory’s murder with Miriam. That’s why I was arrested.”
He cocked his head, frowning. “That wasn’t in the police reports.”
“I blogged the scene. Not all of it, but enough. It was on my website until the police had me take it down.”
He frowned deeper, eyes tracking as if reading over the reports in his mind. “Someone sanitized the report before I saw it.”
“Shiva?”
He shook his head, holstering his pistol. “I don’t think so. I was lead agent on Winston’s murder. Normally, I would have been the first person from Shiva to see all police reports. I would have been the one to issue a request for the report to be sanitized.”
It left an obvious candidate: her mother. Walcott must have filed a report with the State Department; naturally her mother would send her own cleaners to remove evidence of Nikki’s “craziness.”
Okay, she was going to completely freak out. She needed Leo gone so she could do it in private.
“I’m going to take a bath.” She hoped he’d take the hint and make himself scarce. “I haven’t washed for days, and I’m feeling really gross.”
Leo moved toward the door, pulling out his pistol to check its clip. “I’m going to make sure this hotel is still safe. If I don’t come back, take the train and keep the katana close to you. The god will protect you.”
He was gone before she could form a good answer.
An entire page of dots did nothing to make her feel comfortable with her level of sanity, but it did relieve the stress-related need to write. Since evidence was mounting that she wasn’t insane, whatever had blocked her from writing about Simon was back in place. Her hypergraphia, though, had been fed enough that she could consider the implications that her mother knew she was in Japan.
Unlike Shiva and the yakuza, her mother had studied her habits and had already found her weaknesses and knew how to exploit them. How had Miriam contacted the American Embassy? If she had used her cell phone, then all calls out of her cell were being tracked. Since Miriam had mistakenly posted to Nikki’s public forum instead of the Team Banzai forum, it was possible that Miriam hadn’t thought of using a public phone to make the call to Walcott.
In a panic, Nikki found her cell phone and checked it. She had remembered to turn it off in Osaka. Time to ditch it completely; this was why she always carried the cheapest prepaid phone she could find. She took out the battery, making it untraceable. She considered pitching it into the toilet’s reservoir tank, but there was a slim chance she might still need it. She checked for her favorite hiding space: the inside lintel of the closet door. There was a narrow ledge. She chewed a stick of gum and used it to tack the phone onto the ledge. She experimented with sliding the door open and closed. Hopefully, the phone would stay hidden for years before being discovered.
By law, the onsen staff should have asked for her passport. Residents of Japan, however, were circumvented; Leo must have checked in with ID that claimed he was a citizen of Japan. Since he had told them Nikki was his wife, they probably assumed she was a resident. It made her feel guilty—he’d made her untraceable, and she’d snapped at him.
Of course, she could be worrying unnecessarily. Her mother didn’t trust outsiders to corner her; she always supervised the capture. According to the news on Sunday morning, her mother was in D.C., defending the separation of church and state. (Her mother was weirdly agnostic. She maintained that there was a god but viewed him with a suspicion that Nikki had inherited.)
Regardless, Nikki needed to lay low for a while. It meant limited posting to even her secret forums, keeping to public phones, and being careful when she used her bank card. Both Shiva and her mother were probably monitoring her bank accounts, so withdrawing money would put her instantly on everyone’s radar.
With that in mind, she counted her cash. She had fifty-two thousand yen, or in the neighborhood of six hundred dollars. She could get to Tokyo, but the combined train tickets would probably eat half her money. She should hit an ATM just before she left Osaka. Every yen she could pull out meant a longer time she could go without setting off signal flares.
She wasn’t sure what to do about the katana. If she gave the sword to Leo, Shiva would stop looking for her. The yakuza wouldn’t, unless Shiva killed them all.
Of course there would still be her mother to worry about. It was sad that of all the scary people chasing her, her mother frightened her the most.
When Leo searched her apartment, he had suggested that kami couldn’t be filmed. The security system at her apartment building hadn’t shown her while Atsumori was merged with her. It seemed to indicate that if she kept the katana, she could move invisibly through Japan. Shiva would still be chasing her, but it might be safer not to give up the sword.
Until they found Simon, though, it was a moot point. As far as anyone could tell, she’d vanished off the face of the Earth.
She was running out of time before Leo returned, and a bath actually seemed like a good idea. Hoping for some privacy, she stuck the katana in the closet, behind a set of rolled-up futons. Not that it actually meant that Atsumori couldn’t spy on her, but it made her feel better.
There wasn’t a Western-style shower. The “private” bathing area was an open-air hot tub for five. Like all Japanese baths, there was an area where one sat on a stool and washed using a hand-held shower and bucket. Only after you were clean did you step into the tub. It felt dangerous to be sitting naked among rocks out in the garden, washing her hair. Logically she knew that the garden was constructed so no one could spy on her, but she felt like someone might walk up the garden path at any minute.
Had all the unaccounted-for bruises faded since they left Osaka? She peered at them, unsure. Under the bandage, the thumb-wide scar was still angry red but looked weeks old. It cut a groove along her rib cage just beneath her breast. The bullet had come frighteningly close to hitting her heart, but luckily it hit bone and deflected instead.
The water in the grotto was deliciously hot. She had to slowly ease into it, but once immersed, she felt like she was melting in the heat. Despite doing nothing but sitting in a car all day, she was exhausted. It was tempting to jus nod off in the heated water.
“If you stay in too long, you will faint,” Atsumori murmured in her ear.
She yelped and scrambled out of the grotto, cursing, to pull on the hotel’s yukata. “Don’t do that!”
“You looked as if you were going to fall asleep.”
“I would have gotten out before I did.” She pulled the thin cotton yukata tight around her. Apparently, tucking his katana into the closet wasn’t enough to give her privacy from the god.
There didn’t seem to be a point to hiding in the bathroom to get dressed. She pulled on clean clothes as quickly as she could. Once she felt decent, she considered her dirty underclothes. Blood stained the left side of her bra and the band of her panties. She considered just throwing them out, but they were her favorite matched set. She realized that her biggest reason for not simply washing them was because Leo would see them drying.
“Oh, grow up,” she muttered as she ran cold water into the sink. “So a boy will see your undies. Big deal. I’m sure he’s seen lots of girls’ undies.”
She added shampoo to the cold water and scrubbed at the bloodstains. Considering sh
e had woken up in the yukata from the Inari Shrine and not in the shirt and jeans she’d been wearing at the castle, Leo had already seen her undies.
She caught a glimpse of Atsumori out of the corner of her eye as she hung up her panties. He was smirking at her underwear.
“What?” she snapped, embarrassed.
“Why do you have her on your underthings?”
“Her” was Hello Kitty. The bra and panty were a matched set with the iconic cat on them.
“Because I can.” She eyed the underwire for blood. “I never got to pick out my own clothes when I was growing up. I know my mother has excellent taste in clothes, but she only seemed to buy me ugly things. They made me feel worse about myself. It wasn’t until I saw this television show about models that I began to realize why I felt so ugly all the time. These girls would be sitting around in pajamas with their hair up and no make up and they were as ugly as me. The only difference was that they got to put on pretty things and makeup and be beautiful.”
“But why her? Why not beautiful underthings?”
She was slightly surprised by the question until she remembered that Misa had a slight fetish for lacy underwear. The shrine maiden probably unknowingly gave the boy god an education on such things. “Hello Kitty is beautiful by always being herself.” She hung up the bra beside the matching panties. “She is not skinny and does not dye her hair, or wear fancy clothes. All she needs is to be clean with clothes that fit her well, a cute hair bow, and she’s set.”
She suddenly realized that it wasn’t Atsumori she was seeing out the corner of her eye, but Leo. She flinched in surprise and then cursed. “Will you two stop doing that?”
Leo gazed down at his feet in silence for a minute before saying, “The hotel appears safe.” He retreated into the bedroom to pace with grace. He’d brought the kitten in, and it chased him as he strode back and forth. “One of the girls is a minor Sensitive; I’m the only guest that has scared her in the last few weeks. I didn’t find any signs of tanuki or other yokai.”
