by Wen Spencer
That did nothing for staying calm.
White sands. Palm trees. Hula girls. Surfer boys. Leo in a swimsuit . . .
Oh, yes, much better.
She took a deep breath and let it out. “Atsumori, I need help with this.”
“Eh?” Atsumori gave a surprised and dismayed cry. “You do realize that I’ve never been to one of these places? People generally don’t take portable shrines to love hotels.”
“Just translate the instructions! I’ll figure out the rest!”
After they worked through dialing Leo’s number, the line clicked and hummed but didn’t connect. She hung up, feeling like she’d just reached out and touched evil.
Glass glittered on the sidewalk. Skid marks tracked a car as it fishtailed on the cement, all four tires squealed as the driver fought to keep control of a speeding vehicle. Black paint streaked the front of white vending machines. The tire marks continued back onto the street, vanishing as the car fled the scene.
She was too late.
There was an ambulance disappearing down the street, lights flashing, siren echoing off the skyscrapers around her.
The only thing that marked Leo was a splatter of blood on the sidewalk that a tiny wrinkled Japanese man was spraying with a garden hose.
She gasped as grief uncoiled and bloomed hot; pressing against her ribs, it tried to grow larger than the confines of her body. “What happened? Was he killed?”
The old man went wide-eyed with surprise. “You speak Japanese so well!”
“A man was hit by a car?” She pointed at the wet cement. “Was he killed?”
“Eh? No. He wasn’t killed. He kept trying to get up. They had to hold him down. Give him a shot of medicine to make him sleep.”
The grief contracted enough that she could breath out in relief. “Where did they take him? What hospital?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know.” The man apparently thought the conversation was over as he started to coil up the hose.
“Atsumori?” Nikki cried. “How do I find him?”
“I don’t know. There are several hospitals in Osaka. I don’t know how it is decided which one he will be taken to.”
She closed her eyes and forced herself to be calm even though her hands were fluttering, looking for a pen. This was her story. She should be able to write what she needed to know. If Leo were unconscious, it would be more difficult. Generally her ability would only follow bodies to the end of a death scene—not a comforting thought—or if another character witnessed what was happening to the person. She would need a witness. An emergency medical technician—if they had those in Japan—or perhaps the ambulance driver. Maybe Chevalier or Sato; they might have come upon the accident on their way to meet up with Leo.
She needed a pen. The scene she’d written earlier had ended with Leo’s keys crashing to the ground. She hadn’t been able to extend the scene. Neither Chevalier nor Sato were viewpoint characters, but she might be able to make them one.
And where had the keys ended up? Usually if a detail like that stood out, it was because the item was vital later. People lived or died when such things went missing.
She scanned the sidewalk. Across the street was the bizarre façade of the Platea Dontonbori Hotel Gloria, which was how she had found the accident site. Four gigantic male heads resting on too small naked legs and feet—sans torso—held up four columns. Leo had landed in front of a traditional-style sushi place, closed for the night. On either side of the sliding door to the old man’s restaurant, black stools sat under a slight overhang.
She crouched down and looked under the nearest stool. There was something dark and oddly shaped in the shadows. She cautiously reached out and touched cool, heavy metal. It wasn’t until her fingers curled around the butt of the pistol that she realized what it was—Leo’s gun. She locked down on a yelp of surprise and glanced around to see if anyone was watching her. Luckily the street was currently deserted. She quickly shoved it into her backpack.
How did his gun get there? It hadn’t been part of the scene, so it hadn’t flown off him in the impact. Had he thrown it away before the ambulance came? No, that didn’t feel right. Someone had kicked it away from him, kept him from using it. The car that hit him had kept going, but there had been a second attacker.
Then an awful possibility occurred to her: the second attacker might have been disguised as the paramedic. The old man had said that they had pinned Leo down and drugged him unconscious. Once they had him helpless, they’d taken him. But why? Because hitting Leo with a car had failed to kill him?
She spotted his keys under the other set of stools. She snatched them up and then fled the spot, walking blindly. “Shit, shit, shit.”
What should she do? Who had taken Leo? Why? How was she going to find him?
She had gone from flailing in the shallows to way out in deep water—in one of the really, really deep parts of the ocean—like the Marianas Trench (which, ironically, lay off the eastern shore of Japan). Yakuza with a pack of tanuki. A rampaging goddess. A secret agency of people with super powers. Her control-freak mother wielding the entire American government. And—unless one of them had kidnapped Leo—a new player.
Even with Atsumori, she wasn’t able to take on any one group.
She needed a plan. A damn good one.
Miriam answered with a breathless, “Moshi moshi,” as if she was running.
“It’s me,” Nikki said.
“Oh my God, are you okay? Where are you? Wait, don’t answer that! De Vil has spies out.”
Cruella de Vil had been their code name for Nikki’s mother since they were in high school together at Foxcroft.
“I’m in trouble. Deep, deep shit.”
In the background, “the train is coming” music played, echoing through tile-lined tunnels. Miriam was running through a subway station someplace.
“Where are you?” Nikki’s plan wouldn’t work if Miriam was somewhere far away.
“I’m heading to Namba in a roundabout way—very roundabout. I think your mother had someone following me. A freaky, scary guy showed up claiming that he was FBI. He said you were attacked.”
“Huh? Oh!” Leo and Harada. Miriam was operating on a reality about three versions out of date. “Look, I need to talk to you.” Because everything would be too hard to explain over the phone. “I’ll meet you in Namba.”
“Meet me at Kiss Kiss.”
“What?”
“Kiss Kiss. That host club we went to last month.” The roar of a train pulling into the station drowned her out. “Train is here! I was going to meet Kenichi at his club. We can get a private room. Meet me at Kiss Kiss.”
And the line went dead.
“Shit!” Kenichi’s girl-friend! The American heiress! You didn’t go to Foxcroft unless your parents could comfortably cough up nearly twenty grand a year.
Nikki slammed down the phone and snatched up the katana. She couldn’t let Miriam walk into that mess at the nightclub!
24
Foxcroft
Foxcroft was a sprawling campus of brick and limestone buildings nestled on five hundred acres of lush, extremely private, Virginia countryside. The school dated back to 1914 and dripped with prestige. She’d talked her mother into letting her attend during a period of time when she had a set of sympathetic doctors championing her release. Her mother had enrolled Nikki under her grandmother’s name. Unfortunately, Hortence Phelps had been dead for a decade before Nikki was born, so she couldn’t protest the theft of her identity.
At first it was heaven just to be free of the hospitals and the drugs and the constant interrogation of psychiatrists. It was hard, though, watching the other girls build close friendships. They giggled and squealed and chattered, happy and carefree as kindergarteners. They hadn’t been repeatedly told that they were crazy, drugged routinely, and tied into beds. They hadn’t overheard an orderly raping a neighboring female patient. Slowly, Nikki began to feel like she was a black-and-white cutout moving throu
gh a world of color.
She borrowed stories from her characters to stand in for her real life. She told the other girls that she had loving parents. A secret crush on a popular boy. A best friend and a set of code words that only they understood.
Nikki was afraid to let her guard down. She couldn’t stop writing, and every story turned dark and horrific. The fear of discovery made the need to write stronger. She shared her bedroom with two other girls, so she spent long hours alone in the library. Writing. She sat at a secluded table, books scattered around her, disguising her compulsion as homework. Unfortunately, she tended to tune out the world when she was writing. Weeks into her first term, she was writing the episodic Fielding Deep, about a demon-infested mineshaft. The most recent victim was scrambling through the dark with the rustle of a thousand multi-jointed wings sounding like an evil wind through a forest.
“Oh, that is so cool,” Miriam whispered behind Nikki.
Nikki threw herself forward, covering her notebook. “No! Don’t read that!”
“Why not? It’s cool.” Miriam pulled out the chair beside Nikki and plunked down on it. She had her hair up in Sailor Moon pigtails and was wearing a close approximation of a Japanese school uniform with a white button-down blouse, a string tie, and a plaid pleated skirt. (She explained later that her Jewish parents refused to send her to a Catholic private school that wore uniforms, so she improvised as best she could at Foxcroft.) Miriam was always comfortably balanced on the line of fitting in and still being completely herself.
“It’s a letter to a friend from my old school.” Nikki started to gather up books, using the action as cover to flip shut the notebook and shift it as far away from Miriam as she could. Putting it in her messenger bag would be too obvious.
“Wow, your old school sounds wicked. A thousand multi-jointed wings rustling like an evil wind. Is that bats or the other students?”
Nikki laughed despite the fact that her heart was trying to climb up her throat. “We make up stories. My friend and I. She starts a story. I add to it and send it back. Round-robin.” Someone else is doing this with me; I’m not doing some lone crazy thing.
“What kind of story is it?”
“Horror.” The lies she had ready for emergencies came out smoothly. Her voice didn’t even shake. She picked up her dropped pen and clicked it. “My friend wrote the first part. I need to use her set-up.”
“Can I read it?”
Nikki stared at Miriam, confounded. She hadn’t considered someone that would want to read what she wrote. “It’s—it’s private. Besides, this is the middle of the story. It wouldn’t make sense.”
Miriam laughed and dug through her leather Coach messenger bag. “I read Japanese horror manga.”
“Manga?”
Miriam pulled out a book and slid it toward Nikki. “Japanese comics. Only it’s like a zillion times better than American comics. The characters have depth to them and the plot lines are long and involved and sometimes take decades to play out.”
Nikki cautiously picked up the book. There were no men in spandex, just school kids riding the subway, dealing with bullies, and attending math class with familiar calculus problems on the chalkboard. None of the text, though, was in English. “You can read this? It’s in Japanese.”
“I’ve studied Japanese since fifth grade. I still need a dictionary to look up a lot of the words. I want to live in Japan someday and do something like buying rights to manga for American publishers or having anime dubbed into English. Be the gateway for bringing Japanese culture to the United States.”
Nikki started to say something nice, something complimentary about Miriam knowing what she wanted for her life, but she turned the page and blood splattered the story panels. “Oh!”
“Isn’t it great?”
Nikki flipped more pages. The body count continued to spray blood everywhere as the hero and heroine obviously struggled to understand the chaos around them. “You—you like this?”
“Yeah.” Miriam settled back, looking slightly annoyed. “It’s called Araobi, which means ‘alive’ in Japanese. These souls from deep space are immortal, but they’ve discovered that without death, life has no meaning to them. They’re taking over humans so they can kill themselves. The hero has a horrible life. His parents are dead. He’s bullied. He’s not doing well in school. But because he’s touched death, he clings to life. It’s wonderfully poetic.”
“That is deep. I wish I could understand the words.”
Surprise replaced annoyance on Miriam’s face. “I’m doing the scanlation—that’s scanning the book and then doing the translation.” Miriam swallowed and tentatively offered, “If you want, I can share the translated pages with you.”
For the first time in her life, Nikki felt like she had found someone who might understand. Nikki pulled out her notebook, her heart hammering in her chest. “Promise you’ll never show this to anyone else?”
Miriam made a noise of disgust. “There’s no one else here that’s into horror and dark fantasy. They wouldn’t be interested.”
She handed over the notebook and tried not to tear it back out of Miriam’s hands as she opened it up. She sat clicking her pen and watching Miriam read.
“Wow, you’re really good. Your characters are so vivid. They feel like real people. Are you going to go for an English Literature degree in college? I’m going to Princeton; they’ve got a very good East Asian Studies program.”
Nikki hadn’t considered college or career. Her life had always been narrowed down to surviving days as they came, with turning eighteen the end of her prison term. “I haven’t decided.”
Miriam made a raspberry as she flipped the page. “Happiness comes from knowing your heart and giving it what it wants.”
“I know what I want.” She wanted to be like Miriam. To know herself so well that she had a style of clothes, a favorite book, a plan for the future. She was sick of her mother stealing everything away so that Nikki was so totally helpless that even when she got a small amount of freedom, she didn’t know what to do with it. Here she was—in high school—and she was hiding alone in the library, feeling like a cutout doll pretending to be a living girl.
The pen snapped in her hand as she gripped it tight in fury.
Miriam eyed the broken pen. “Okay, so make a plan and go for it.”
25
Enter the Dragon Girl
Namba Station literally had a hundred different exits once you counted all the department stores and malls that fed into the underground maze. When she and Miriam visited Namba, they normally exited directly from the station, using the stairs up to street level. That still left Nikki with thirty possible options to cover. Assuming, of course, that Miriam didn’t veer from her normal course.
Letting Atsumori guide her through the chaos, Nikki tried to figure out what she was going to say once she caught up with Miriam. She still hadn’t come up with anything reasonable sounding when she caught sight of Miriam’s familiar pink hair moving through the crowd. She was wearing black leather shorts, a black lace blouse, and tights that looked like tribal tattoos.
“Miriam!” Nikki shouted.
Miriam turned and scanned the crowd. She glanced at Nikki’s face, but recognition didn’t touch her eyes.
“Miriam?” Nikki reached out for her hand, and they suddenly went through a complicated dance of nearly touching hands, shifting of weight, and spinning. “Whoa, wait, wait, Miriam!”
Miriam bounced backwards, hands up in karate attack position. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Nikki! What the hell is wrong with you?”
“She is seeing me, not you,” Atsumori murmured.
“Oh hell,” Nikki said. “Atsumori, can you back off for now?”
Miriam moved back several more feet, eyes going wide, but slowly shifting out of attack position. “Nikki?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
Miriam took another step back. “That was very creepy. For a minute, I—I—you looked
like someone else.”
“Come on, there’s something I need to show you.” This was going to be easier to explain if Miriam could actually see Atsumori. There was a tiny bus stop of a shrine just down the street.
“What happened? You disappeared without saying anything to me. I was really worried something—what are you carrying? Is that a katana?”
Nikki opened her mouth and closed it several times. She’d practiced what she would say, but even having lived through the events, she found it hard to believe it was true. Oh, what the hell, this is Miriam. “It turns out that everything I’ve ever written is real. Somewhere in England there is a Fielding Deep. Dupont, Louisana, was wiped off the map—or it’s going to be sometime next year. And every character I’ve written about here in Japan is a real person. George. Yuuka. Harada. They were all real.”
Miriam stared at her for a moment and then breathed, “Oh, cool.”
“They’re dead! They’re all dead!”
“Well, that part sucks, but that’s major coolness.”
She explained as best she could about Gregory murdering Misa and how she ended up with the katana. “Harada came to my place looking for it, and he tried to kill me.”
“You mean Mr. Freaky FBI wasn’t lying about that part?”
“Leo? No, he wasn’t lying, at least not about that.”
“Leo?” Miriam nearly shouted his name with disbelief. “Leo?”
“What?” Nikki stepped through the gates of the shrine.
“You know what I mean. How did you end up on first-name basis with Mr. Freaky? There’s something not right about him. He’s serious scary, and you know it takes a lot to rattle my cage.”
“He is a yokai.” Atsumori appeared beside Nikki.
“He is not!” Nikki glared at the boy god in an attempt to keep him silent.
“His mother was.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Nikki growled. “Just because Shiva thought his mother might be a bakeneko doesn’t mean he is yokai. They could have been wrong.”
