Eight Million Gods

by Wen Spencer

  Nikki clicked her pen nervously, her mind racing through what they would need. In theory, she knew how to pick locks, but most hotels had gone to a magnetic key system. Some had mechanical override, but still it took her minutes to get through a single lock. There were hundreds of rooms, which meant hundreds of locks. If they went around, blindly opening doors, someone was bound to call the police.

  How could they safely find Simon at the hotel? Had there been anything in Simon’s scene that would indicate which room he was in?

  “The goddess was using beckoning cat luck statues as backup shintai,” Nikki said.

  “Yeah.” Miriam was focused on finding a parking space. “So?”

  “In an earlier scene I wrote of Simon, he knew he was about to be taken over because the statue exploded and dust was settling on him. It was a pattern; it happened enough times that he knew what was coming. The statues are too weak to contain Iwanaga, and when they explode, she has to move to a new container. Kenichi said that Iwanaga leaves a trail of dust wherever she goes.”

  “Dust, eh?”

  “Yeah, I think we might be able to follow them like breadcrumbs.”

  The hotel lived up to the name “Imperial.” The lobby was an expanse of cream-colored walls, a soft butter-colored ceiling, and a geometric carpet of blacks and reds, looking properly regal. They scouted for a luggage cart while acting out “we’re debating our plans” complete with one of Nikki’s notebooks standing in as a tourist book, pointing at things that didn’t exist on the page and making random remarks like “I want to see Osaka Castle at night” and “I want to go to Dontonbori.”

  They’d just found the nook where the carts were stored when Atsumori suddenly flooded into Nikki, caught hold of Miriam, and pulled her into the darkness of the storage alcove.

  “What are you—?” Miriam started to ask.

  “Hush,” Atsumori murmured.

  For a minute, Nikki wasn’t sure what Atsumori was reacting to. Then she realized that far across the lobby, the left-most elevator had opened up and men in dark suits were spilling out. There was something very strange and feral about the way they moved. They tipped their heads up as if sniffing something floating on the air.

  They were yokai. Nikki pressed her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry of dismay. Was the goddess taking Simon away? Surely he was too weak for her to use again.

  The men conferred quietly and then split into two groups. Some continued to walk toward the doors while the others waited, watching the display over the right-most elevator. The car was stopped on the tenth floor. After a minute, it started to descend, counting down the floors.

  She gripped Miriam tightly. “If Simon is on the next elevator, we’re going to have to follow him.”

  “Will you be able to recognize him? I don’t want to mess with them if we don’t have to.”

  Would she know Simon? She had recognized Leo instantly. Chevalier and Sato had looked familiar. “I think I will.”

  The quiet chime of a bell announced the arrival of the center elevator. The door slid open. A woman in a beautiful crimson and gold kimono stepped off. Behind her were three shrine maidens in their traditional loose red trousers and white half-length kimono jackets.

  “Holy . . .” Miriam whispered. “It’s her.”

  Nikki swallowed hard as her stomach turned cartwheels. If this female got ahold of her, there would be no escaping. The goddess, at least, didn’t glance in their direction. She moved toward the hotel’s front entrance so smoothly it seemed like she was gliding on ice. Was she even moving her feet?

  A black luxury car slid up to the curb. The dark-suited yokai opened the back car doors and stood waiting for the women.

  “Where do you think they’re going?” Miriam whispered.

  Nikki shook her head. The mind boggled about where a goddess might go after midnight.

  “We should follow her.” Miriam tugged at her hands.

  “No.” Nikki shook her head again. “We need to save Simon.”

  There was a faint trail of dust from the elevator to rooms 1049 and 1050. Both doors had signs hung on the doorknobs, forbidding housekeeping from entering.

  “She’s sealed the door against me,” Atsumori murmured.

  “Just one?” Nikki glanced at the two identical doors. “Not both of them?”

  “Just this one.” He flickered into sight beside room 1049 and traced the door’s outline. “I cannot cross into this room. There is another door and a window into the room, but they are barred, too.”

  “I think we hit the jackpot.” Nikki took out her lock picks.

  “Maybe,” Miriam said. “Or she has a very nasty surprise locked in there.”

  “Is there anything in 1050?” Nikki knelt in front of the door to 1049 and started to work the metal carefully into the lock.

  “It is empty.” Atsumori vanished.

  Nikki could feel him pressing close to her as she felt her way through the lock’s tumblers. It made her uneasy, because it seemed dangerously addictive to know she could become nearly invincible at will. As with any addiction, though, it was a matter of stepping out of your skin and letting something else take control. She had always thought she would fall to Valium or Xanax. Somehow she never suspected that she’d get hooked on a teenage Japanese god.

  Another mistaken assumption was that she would need to know how to pick locks to break out of a room, not to break in. Preparing for a totally different set of disasters, she’d practiced on handcuffs, filing cabinets, supply cabinets, and hospital doors using everything from paper clips to ballpoint pen parts. It only took her a minute to work quickly through the tumblers of the mechanical override lock on 1049. When the lock clicked open, Atsumori stepped into her and together they swung open the door.

  The room was exactly as she had expected.

  Only the gleam of city lights from the window lit the room. The rectangle of light from the hallway door revealed a chocolate-brown carpet coated with white powder and pieces of ceramic statuary. Dust hazed the air. She breathed in the talc dryness.

  Statues of calico cats, paws upraised in the lucky beckoning gesture, sat on a dresser, on the nightstand, on the table next to the window, on the floor clustered tight around the bed and lining the walls.

  “Seriously creepy,” Miriam whispered behind her.

  Tacked across the doorway was a folded paper shide.

  “I cannot enter with that there,” Atsumori said quietly.

  Miriam reached up and pulled it down. “What about now?”

  “Yes, I can enter. Thank you.”

  Nikki stalked forward, katana ready, the grit from the statues crunching underfoot. Miriam followed, pulling the luggage cart into the room, shutting the door, and turning on the lights.

  Simon lay bound on the bed, wearing only boxer shorts. The heavy jute rope elegantly crisscrossed his body, tying him with rough beauty. He was gagged with a ball on a leather strap. His skin was so pale it seemed translucent; his veins running vivid blue, creating a roadmap of his fragile condition. Harsh rope burns marked the days of his captivity.

  This could be me. This could be me. Nikki realized suddenly.

  She fought to control the fear that the sight of him triggered. She tightened her hold on the katana. Atsumori was with her. She wasn’t helpless.

  “How do we know it’s just him?” Miriam whispered. “Maybe there’s something other than the goddess in him.”

  Simon jerked. His eyes opened, dark brown that faded to stunning blue just before they closed again.

  “He’s alone in his skin,” Atsumori said.

  “Did you just . . . ?” Nikki cried, pointing down at Simon. “Possess him?”

  “It is the only way I could be sure,” Atsumori said. “I did what I could to strengthen him. He is very fragile.”

  “Maybe we should just call the police,” Miriam whispered.

  If the police became involved, Shiva would be close on their heels. Was this a good thing or a bad? Shiva would
do nothing to save Leo from whomever had taken him. Simon would be in no condition to force them, and Nikki wouldn’t be able to talk to Simon.

  “Will he survive being moved?” Nikki asked.

  “Yes,” Atsumori said. “He cannot take another day of Iwanaga Hime using him.”

  “We take him then.” Nikki swallowed her fear and forced herself closer to the bed.

  If it were me on that bed, I wouldn’t want the one person who could help me to be too afraid to move. Go!

  Reluctantly, she laid the katana on the bed beside Simon and, with shaking hands, struggled to undo the leather strap of the ball gag. She couldn’t understand how the knots were tied. Unable to untie Simon, she finally slipped the katana under the ropes and sawed upward.

  “Don’t break my shintai,” Atsumori said. “Or we’ll be in the same mess as Iwanaga Hime.”

  “Don’t you dare ever try this with me. I won’t bear it. I’ll kill myself first.”

  “I swear to you, I would never try to hold you against your will. If you were not willing, I would rather perish.”

  “I don’t know how Iwanaga could do this to someone after being tied herself. I could never do this to another person.”

  “She has never been human,” Atsumori said. “Her father is one of the heavenly kami, older brother to Amaterasu, goddess of the sun, and Susanoo, god of the storms. While she is an earthly kami, she is no more human than the flowering tree or a great rock.”

  “And Simon is nothing more than a sword or a cat statue to her?”

  “Nothing more.”

  The ropes finally gave. She pulled them off Simon and flung them aside as if they were snakes.

  Simon was a tall man—nearly a foot taller than Nikki or Miriam—and even though he was slender in build, he was going to be difficult for them to muscle around. She glanced to the luggage cart and realized that Miriam wasn’t even in the room.

  “Miriam!”

  A muffled curse drew Nikki to the connecting room, katana tightly in hand.

  Miriam was ransacking the dresser drawers of room 1050.

  “What are you doing?” Nikki cried.

  “We’re in her lair!” Miriam shook a newspaper at Nikki. “We should try and find out everything we can!”

  Nikki stammered a moment in surprise and dismay before managing, “No!”

  “You don’t make a big production out of leaving if you’re coming back in a few minutes. We should find out what Iwanaga is planning.”

  “No! I don’t know if the two of us can even move him. We don’t have time to dick around looking for something that might not even exist. There’s not going to be a map with a big ‘x’ on it and the words ‘ultimate secret weapon’ written on it. Hell, even if there was, it would be in Japanese—I’m not going to be able to read it!”

  “I could translate . . .” Atsumori started to offer.

  “We don’t have time!” Nikki caught herself before she shouted so the words came out as a hoarse whisper.

  “She is an Oracle,” Atsumori pointed out.

  “If there’s something here,” Nikki said, “we could pick it up, read it and not even know what we have in our hands.”

  Miriam frowned, still shaking the newspaper. “Right. Right. Okay. This is your book. What is in this room that is important to the heroine?”

  The question surprised her at first but, then she considered it. Yes, she might be able to use her ability that way. Nikki glanced around the room. Unlike the other bedroom, this one had the earmarks of being lived in. There were piles of newspapers and books, bottles of sake, every type of nail polish and makeup imaginable, shoes by the door, the closet hanging open showing off a dozen hand-painted kimonos. Obviously while 1049 was a shrine to house the goddess, her tanuki goons and the shrine maidens interacted with her in 1050. If she were tweaking Simon’s earlier scene, what would be important for her to add? What would save the heroine or doom her if she missed it?

  She turned in a circle, paused, and pointed to a school bag lying on the bed. “That. That’s important.”

  Miriam pounced on the bag and snatched it up. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Nikki wavered. There was something more. She turned again, looking. Not in here. She walked back to 1049 and quickly checked the drawers of the dresser. At first glance, they were all empty, but then she found a man’s leather wallet and a red diplomatic passport from the United Kingdom. A quick check confirmed that they belonged to Simon. “Okay, now we go.”

  28

  Into the Mountains

  It wasn’t until they were wheeling Simon through the garage that they realized one small flaw to their plan. They stood in silence, eyeing the sports car.

  “It doesn’t feel right to put him in the trunk.” Nikki broke the silence.

  “I have to drive.” Miriam said. “Him or you.”

  “Right. Trunk.”

  Still it felt very, very wrong to close the trunk on Simon after they had muscled him into the small space. They were bad American gaijins and left the luggage cart sitting in the garage like no Japanese native would and fled the underground parking lot.

  “Where are we taking him?” Miriam asked when they stopped at the first red light. Maru was on Miriam’s lap, paws on the steering wheel, watching the light with her.

  Nikki stared wide-eyed at Miriam. She hadn’t planned that part out. “Umm.”

  “De Vil has my place staked out. I don’t want to explain to the FBI why we’ve got a Brit stuffed in the trunk. And if we start talking about Japanese gods and raccoon dogs, we’re both going straight to the loony bin.”

  “Both Shiva and Iwanaga know where I live,” Nikki said.

  “She will know that I was there,” Atsumori added. “She will assume I will go back to my shrine. It is where I’m strongest.”

  Amazingly the cup holder had collected a half-dozen pens at some point. Nikki snatched one up and clicked it, thinking. Where the hell did they run to? Any hotel they checked into would log their passports and instantly put them on the radar for her mother.

  She hated to show up on anyone’s doorstep with so much trouble, but their options were limited. “Do you think Pixii would be okay with us showing up—like this?”

  Miriam laughed. “She’d probably be pissed if we left her out.”

  Much to Miriam’s joy, a good part of the drive to Pixii’s place was on highways where she could play—cautiously—with the power of Leo’s car. The last thing they needed was to be pulled over for speeding.

  Nikki examined the bag that they’d stolen out of room1050. It was a school bag of the kind that every Japanese high school student carried. A student would buy a sturdy leather bag in seventh grade and use it until they graduated. Nikki thought of the shrine maidens and shivered. She hadn’t realized that the girls were so young.

  Inside was a collection of books, not surprisingly all in Japanese. At the very bottom of the bag was a student photo ID card in a plastic holder. It showed a teenage girl with the bowl-cut of a shrine maiden.

  “Her name is Umeko Kuroki.” Atsumori read the kanji that had mystified Nikki. “She’s a second-year student at Kagoshima Prefectural Kirishima High School.”

  Tucked behind the card was a Shinkansen train ticket from June. She couldn’t read the station they departed from, but she recognized the kanji for Osaka. “What does this say?”

  “Kagoshima,” Atsumori said. “It is a city in Kyushu.”

  The girl didn’t look familiar. She wasn’t one of Nikki’s characters. “Did you see her with the goddess?”

  “I did not,” Atsumori said. “None of the shrine maidens seemed to be the correct age to be this girl.”

  “The ticket suggests she came from Kagoshima to Osaka,” Nikki sighed. “Where is she now?”

  “Maybe she’s one of the girls who died. Kenichi said that two died already,” Miriam said

  It would explain why she hadn’t been with the goddess. What had the tanuki done with her body? Certainly she
and Miriam had just proved how easy it would be to get a dead body down to the garage and into the trunk of a car. Nikki tucked the ID back into the bag and studied the books.

  One of the books was clearly an atlas for a young child. Bright smiling children in traditional clothing stood next to maps of countries, waving flags. Oddly, Hawaii was treated separately from the United States, with kids in hula outfits and waving the state flag as well as the American Stars and Stripes. The boy reminded her of Leo, with black hair and dark eyes.

  The second book was a history textbook. The third seemed to be child’s science, explaining things such as electricity, gasoline engines, and airplanes.

  “This is one weird collection of books.” Nikki frowned at the last book, which was a thick Frommer’s guidebook on Japan. The statue of a god frowned back at her from the cover.

  “Iwanaga Hime knows nothing of the world as it stands now,” Atsumori said. “My shrine is at the edge of Kyoto, but from it I have been able to watch the world change. I saw them lay the tracks for the first train. I was mystified when they strung the first electric lines. I was awestruck when the first planes flew overhead. I have had not only my priests and my shrine maidens devoting their lives to me, but an endless parade of people visit my shrine. From the neighbors who have owned the local bakery for a dozen generations to the Americans who come with their short pants and bug-bitten legs. How do your people get so bitten up?”

  “I don’t know.” Nikki flipped through the books, trying to figure out what was important about them. “We taste good?”

  “On that mountain, Iwanaga would have seen nothing but trees and river and farm, and the one family that served her were farmers, not priests. They would have come, prayed, and left her alone.”

  Had Iwanaga been lonely or was that just a human trait? She certainly had been angry when she finally managed to get free.

  While the first three books seemed fairly new, the tour book was dog-eared and heavily annotated. It was in Japanese, but Nikki could guess the locations being discussed from her own research and accompanying pictures and maps. Sections of text had been underlined, circled, and crossed off. “She’s looking for something. All the notes are around shrines, not hotels or restaurants and such. She thinks what she’s looking for will be at a shrine, but she’s not sure which one.”