by Wen Spencer
“I have forty main characters,” she scrambled to explain. “Well, thirty-five. Five have died so far. Gregory Winston. Misa. Three others were killed by Harada. Oh, wait, make that thirty-four. I forgot about Harada.”
“Who?”
“Harada was the tanuki at my apartment. At least, that’s what I called him. Not sure what name he really used—I haven’t got anyone’s real name yet.” Thirty-two if they didn’t count her and Leo, but she didn’t want to tell him that he was one of her characters.
Leo’s confusion was clear in his voice. “And?”
“So far this is fairly typical story. People are living their ordinary lives when something ugly brushes up against them and kills them.” She winced as she realized what it meant for Simon. “I’m sorry.”
He gave her a worried glance, and she realized that he was counting her as a possible victim, too.
“Teach me to write myself into a story.”
She focused on the notebook and the finished scene. “Kenichi is the only Osaka viewpoint character—other than me. The rest are scattered all over Japan. I don’t know how they all play into this. When the goddess was talking to Kenichi, though, she mentioned something.” Nikki scrolled down through her files on her laptop, found Kenichi’s section, and read the line. “‘I want to drink deep, eat my fill, and then destroy my enemies.’ If this turns into one of my usual novels, every one of my characters is a likely target for her revenge.” A connection was made in her mind. “Oh!”
“Hmm?”
“Oh, it just fully clicked that Harada was employed by the goddess. I wish now we didn’t kill him.”
“If you had not killed him, he would have killed you.”
There was that small problem. She shivered, remembering the warm trickle of his blood running down her face. “Once a character is dead, I can’t write any more about them.”
“We’ll find my father without Harada.”
“Yes, we will, but I’m worried about the big picture. The thing is, normally, by the end of the book, all the characters are usually dead. Even if they do get out alive, every character has interacted with the main storyline. Half my characters have had only their set-up scenes—the goddess hasn’t interacted with them yet.”
“We’re going to stop her before she can hurt them.”
She hoped he was right, but it had been her experience that nothing she ever did stopped people from dying.
22
Love Hotel
It was nearly ten at night when they hit Osaka. Leo grew quiet and tense as they roared along the highways that bisected the city.
“I’m taking you to Umeda,” he said. “There are hotels there where you won’t need to hand over your passport. I’ll get you into a room under my credit card, and then I’ll go after my father. If something happens and I don’t come back, then . . . it might be safer if you leave the country.”
Hopscotch the world, one step in front of her mother. “I don’t really have the money to run.”
He gripped the wheel tight and took them down off the highway onto the busy streets of Umeda. “Write down this number. 19.43.47 north by 155.5.24 west.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a house in Hawaii. On the big island. Out in the middle of nowhere. You’ll need a GPS and four-wheel drive to find it. It’s off the grid, with solar power and catchment water. It’s yours for as long as you want it.”
Tears filled her eyes, burning like acid. This thing called love was stupid. He found a parking space and tucked the sports car neatly into the space.
Around the corner, the street was lined with neon bright hotels. The first was Hotel American and was fairly nondescript. The second was Casa Swan, with silver swans in midflight gleaming on a brilliant red corner sign. Beyond it, she could see Cupids flying down the center of Hotel Francisca’s facade.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding! A love hotel?”
“They’re mostly automated. No one will see you check in, so no one will ask for your passport.”
“I thought they were only hourly.”
“You can rent them for the night if you come in late enough.”
The first three places were full. The fourth, a hotel, called Love Now, had rooms open. The automated booking panel had four photographs still lit up, showing the unoccupied rooms. The rest of the room photos were dark, indicating that they were taken.
Nikki stayed tucked against Leo’s side, screened from anyone walking past. She could hear his heart beating through the thin soft fabric of his shirt.
“Not that one,” she said of the room he was about to select. The bed was inside a large birdcage and there was a steel chair beside it looking like the love child of a gynecological examination table and a science lab.
“Which one?” Leo asked.
There was no wonder that these were the last rooms rented; they were obviously tailored for very specific tastes. Of the three, one was styled on a boxing ring, complete with boxing gloves hanging from hooks over the bed. Another was a schoolroom with chalkboard and steel desks. It, too, had shackles visible by the bed. She knew Leo didn’t plan to stay, but she never wanted to sleep on a bed with restraints again. The last seemed harmless. It was decorated in opulent golds and creams and blue velvet drapes.
“This one.”
“Belle’s Boudoir.” Leo read the kanji over the photo. He hesitated a moment and then pressed the button beside it and swiped his credit card. “Stay here a minute, I’ll get the key.”
He was back a moment later to walk her to the elevator. “I booked the room all night,” he murmured as he kept her hidden from anyone who might be scanning the lobby via remote camera. “If I don’t come back by dawn, I won’t be coming back at all. Just leave.”
He opened his wallet and took out all his cash. “Take this.” He pushed the yen into her hands. “Use it to disappear.”
Her hands were shaking as she stuffed the money away. Tell him that you love him. Don’t let him walk away without knowing. Don’t let him walk away!
“I—I—” The words caught in her throat. She couldn’t stop him from leaving; the host club was their only lead to where the goddess had Simon. She had no good reason to go with him: she didn’t read kanji, she didn’t speak Japanese, she didn’t know exactly where the host club was or what any of the people looked like, nor could she fight or shoot a gun. “I’ll wait for you.”
“Only till dawn.” The door opened to the elevator, and he pulled her into the small space and leaned over her, hiding her completely from the world’s eyes.
She shouldn’t feel so safe with him pressed so close, but she did. She reached out and put her hand on his chest, felt his heartbeat. She wanted to slide her hand up, to touch his face, to kiss him. If she did, she wouldn’t want to let him go.
Tears started to burn in eyes again, and she looked down so he wouldn’t see.
The elevator stopped, and they stepped off into a narrow hallway. Their room was at the end. Muffled music and giggling came from behind the doors they passed.
She unlocked the door, opened it, and gasped slightly in surprise. Belle’s Boudoir was for Disney’s Belle of Beauty and the Beast. The gold and cream of the photograph in the lobby were from the Beast’s ballroom. What hadn’t shown up was a painting of Belle and the Beast waltzing. They looked so happy. Nikki gazed at it, filled with envy.
If only my problems were as simple as dealing with a handful of townspeople with pitchforks.
Leo had stopped in the doorway, holding the door open. He eyed the picture with open dismay and then hid the look away. “The door will lock automatically. You’ll need to call the front door to get it open.”
She turned from the picture of the happy couple to gaze up into his eyes. She wanted to kiss him good-bye, but she wasn’t sure if she would be able to let him go afterwards. “Be safe.”
He nodded as if she had said something deep and profound and left her there, alone.
23
&n
bsp; Belle’s Boudoir
There was a packet of condoms on the pillow of the turned-down bed instead of a chocolate.
She saw the bright red square as she dropped her backpack onto the king-sized bed. She picked it up, not knowing what it was. The red wrapper had the words Kit Sack inside a big white circle. For a moment she thought it was “Kit Kat” wafers, as the package styling was nearly identical to the chocolate bar. Then she noticed the much smaller word “condom” at the top of the label and dropped it.
“Oh geez!” She snatched the condom back up to prove she had only dropped it out of surprise. The silly thing even had the words “2 pieces” in English on the side. “Who thinks of these things?”
Having established her superiority to absolutely no one, she dropped it back on the pillow. Then, thinking of the heat of Leo’s body under the thin fabric of his shirt as he leaned over her in the elevator, she picked it back up and shoved it into her backpack.
Of course, the condom would only be useful if Leo came back.
She eyed her backpack. If she tried, she probably could write what was going to happen at the club. But what if it all went horribly wrong? She had bawled uncontrollably over people she thought were totally figments of her imagination. Writing Leo’s death would destroy her.
Just the thought of something happening to him started the need to write. She paced the room restlessly. Her hand crept up to her mouth and she was chewing on her fingernails before she realized it. She growled in frustration and jerked her fingertip out of her mouth.
If she did write something horrible, could she save Leo? She never could stop characters from dying, but they were always over there, somewhere, in a place she thought existed only in her mind. Her characters ignored the barricades she made up, brushing them aside as if they didn’t exist. The truth was that her obstacles weren’t actually there. The people were real, but her barriers weren’t—because she couldn’t change reality.
Not at a distance. This time she could be a very real barricade from disaster; she could go and do—something. The question was: could she actually change a story? It was just words on paper. Could she keep someone from going off to find out what the weird noise was in the woods, or to check out the local graveyard in the middle of the night, or a hundred and one other really bad ideas?
Of course, she would be the one doing the really stupid thing. What the hell would she do in a gunfight? Last time she had nearly chopped off Leo’s head and gotten shot. And she had been very, very careful not to think too much about what she had done to the men who attacked them at the castle. They had been bad men who were trying to kill her, but she’d been inside the heads of “bad” people enough to know that they usually had people who loved them nonetheless. There could be parents, wives, girlfriends, and even children grieving for those men who she had hacked into pieces. She could only hope and pray that they hadn’t really been human.
She didn’t want to pick up the katana and let Atsumori carve his way through a crowded nightclub where there would be dozens of innocent bystanders for every tanuki.
Besides, there was the whole causality problem. If you went back in time to stop the man you loved from being killed, time would be rewritten so he never died. If your lover never died, though, you wouldn’t need to travel back in time to save him in the first place. The paradox would snap time back into place like a stretched rubber band.
How fixed was her story? Would she be helpless to change things after she’d written them? If she stopped certain events from happening, would she have written them in the first place? Would there be some weird looping logic where the events she wrote were actually the result of her trying to stop something? If she wrote a shootout at the nightclub and rushed there to stop it, would she actually be the reason it started in the first place? Would she only succeed at putting herself in harm’s way? Maybe something would stop her from reaching the nightclub so she couldn’t change the story—maybe she would get got hopelessly lost at the train station or caught by her mother?
She fought the need to write as it grew stronger. She didn’t want to see the future in full gory detail if she couldn’t change it. Truly harrowing death experiences flashed through her mind—unbidden and unwanted. Gregory’s disemboweling with the blender. Misa’s rape and murder.
Fingers wanted either a pen or to be chewed on. She tucked her hands under her arms.
“Oh, you’re being a big chicken.” She flapped her arms and clucked. She strutted around the room, making chicken noises.
Fine, she’d see if Leo would come out of this safely and if he didn’t, she’d do whatever it took to make sure he did.
Shiva knew about Nikki.
Leo had driven away from Izushi feeling like he’d made the worst mistake of his life. At the restaurant he had debated trying to kill Chevalier and Sato before they could report to Shiva. To do so would be to betray everything his father had taught him. Chevalier would have been easy to take. Sato’s ability, though, made him nearly impervious to most weapons. If he failed, it would leave Nikki alone with so many against her and possibly considered guilty of the attack just by association with him.
In the end, he decided to distract Shiva with a pack of tanuki working with yakuza and a goddess on the rampage. He’d flooded Chevalier with the details, hoping he’d forget to report Nikki’s ability. The polar opposite of Nikki, it was possible that the Frenchman wouldn’t realize the implication of her being able to cooperate with Atsumori.
Sato was the wild card. He’d sensed Nikki’s possession. He’d instantly put distance between him and the possible danger that Atsumori posed. It was questionable, though, that the kami could actually harm Sato; the man was godlike.
Sato had the experience to realize that Nikki had an invaluable ability without even knowing about her writing. Would Sato explain it to Chevalier? Remind the Frenchman to report her? It was impossible to say. The man was Shiva’s most dangerous Talent. He had no reason to betray her—and no reason to protect her.
To wait and see how things landed had been the reasonable, logical decision. Yet it felt like he’d made a horrible mistake leaving the two Shiva agents alive in Izushi. When Nikki leaned so trustingly against him in the tight confines of the Love Now’s elevator, the knowledge that he’d failed her felt like a white-hot iron bar shoved through his chest. She had to know that he’d failed her, and yet she continued to trust him. He had to find some way to keep her safe from Shiva.
Simon would know how to fix this. More than ever, he needed his father.
He found parking near the host club and started walking to meet Chevalier and Sato. They were going to storm into Kiss Kiss and pin that little whore Kenichi to a wall and make him tell them where . . .
He had only a second of warning—headlights sweeping over him—and then a dark car mounted the sidewalk’s curb and struck him at full speed.
Nikki huddled in the giant empty bathtub for two, which was the farthest away from the open notebook lying on the bed that she could get.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
She really, really hoped she could change the story, since there was an epic fail in store for Leo in the near future.
“Are you sure this will happen?” Atsumori asked.
She screamed and was halfway up the wall, defying gravity, until she remembered that she wasn’t truly alone in the hotel room. “Shit! Atsumori!”
“Can you stop it?” Atsumori’s voice was tense with his emotion.
“I don’t know.” She caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. Just her. No one else. Oh, she never thought it might be comforting to fall back to thinking she was just crazy.
“When was this?”
“I don’t know.” She shuddered. She could still feel the solid impact of carhood meeting flesh. The confusing tumble of Leo’s body. He’d been conscious while he was flung through the air by the impact, but then he landed hard enough to knock him out. The story camera pulled back to follow his ca
r keys flying from his pocket and jangling across the sidewalk. She’d already dropped the pen in horror and fled the notebook. She’d written more graphic accidents, but this was the first time she knew that a real living body was involved. “I was trying to write what was going to happen at the nightclub with Leo.”
She felt better having someone to talk to—ignoring the fact that she couldn’t actually see Atsumori. It was chasing out the echoes of the words in her head. She climbed out of the tub and turned on the water in the sink. Her hands shook as she splashed cold water onto her face, rinsed the hot burn of unshed tears out of her eyes. “He was heading to the host club . . . Oh God, how much time do I have?”
She needed to warn Leo. Ditching her phone in Izushi had seemed like a smart idea. Her mother had used her phone to track her twice before she caught on to the trick. Without it, though, she felt trapped in a bubble. She hurried to the room’s phone and took the “OMG culture shock baseball bat” right between the eyes. The phone looked like it should be in the NASA mission control room being used to launch a moon shot. The headset was surrounded with dozens of buttons, all labeled in kanji.
“Why does everything have to be so complicated?” She snatched up the headset and punched the first button. The noise of a subway station blared from the speaker next to the button. She jumped and swore. It was the infamous “excuse” phone with sound effects to make lies convincing. Cheating spouses could use it to make it seem like they were somewhere else. “Only the Japanese!”
She reached over, snatched up her pen, and clicked it rapidly. “Calm down or you’re going to be stuck writing again. Calm. Calm.”
She closed her eyes, breathed deep, and focused on palm trees and waves against white sand. It made her think of Leo’s place in Hawaii. She could almost see it: a rustic home with both Japanese and Hawaiian influences and a dazzling view of the ocean. She just needed to get through this mess, and then she could live in paradise with Leo. Okay, so there was a Japanese goddess, an international antisupernatural something-or-other agency, and her mother to deal with . . .
