Eight Million Gods

by Wen Spencer

  “My mother . . .”

  “Your mother was trying to protect you when you killed her! She was trying to make sure that no one would find the body you’d hidden.”

  Her mother had gone ashen and still.

  “You knew what it was like to lie in bed, scared shitless, listening to a man move through the darkness, waiting for him to open the door to your room and hurt you. I was ten! I was ten, and you had me tied up, drugged, helpless, and alone. What would your grandmother have thought? She protected you. She kept you safe up to her dying breath. And what did you do? You killed both of her children, and then you didn’t even take care of your own child.”

  “I did take care of you.”

  “No, you didn’t. You realized the day you killed your mother that she wasn’t crazy. You’ve known all this time that I was like her—that everything I wrote was the truth. You’ve known that this isn’t some insanity that a shrink and the right cocktail of drugs will cure. And yet you kept me locked up in the hospital so you would be safe.”

  “My mother was insane. She wrote on walls with her own feces.”

  “Obsessive Compulsion isn’t insane. It’s a disorder, but its not insanity, and you know it. And every time a doctor had the guts to tell that to your face, you’d fire him and get someone who would agree with you.”

  Atsumori suddenly shifted them sideways, and a black man ghosted out of the shadows. He was a tall, solid man all in black. She had written about him enough times to recognize him. He was the one she really was waiting for.

  “Williams.” Nikki kept to her script, talking fast so her mother couldn’t interrupt. “Sato has taken the Heavenly Bejeweled Spear from Susanoo, and he plans to use it to remake the world.” That said, she could slow down. Her mother might be a bitch, but even she understood the dangers of a rogue operative armed with a powerful magical weapon. “Sato has Shiva’s phone tapped, so he’s been able to stay one step ahead of you. He found Simon the day after he’d gone missing; Simon had been possessed by a kami named Iwanaga Hime. Sato has teamed up with Iwanaga and a large number of yokai looking to take back the world. “

  “And you know this how?” Williams asked.

  “Because I’m an Oracle. With the annoying exception of things like kami, I can ‘see’ what anyone has done or will do, years in the past or in the future. Leo doesn’t want you to know, because he doesn’t trust Shiva. Being that you have him locked in a cage without water, it seems to me that he has good cause.”

  “And you saw this meeting?” William asked.

  “Yes.” Actually dozens of variations of it. This was the most successful storyline. “We want Leo out of the cage. We’ll cooperate to make sure that happens. I know that we can take you.” She put her hand onto the katana hilt. This was partially a bluff—Williams was scary fast and strong—but it was generally a successful bluff. Williams was used to being an attack dog, but he always waited for an order to attack.

  Atsumori took his cue and stepped fully into her. “I am Taira no Atsumori. I will not be taken by force. My shrine maiden was murdered. My shrine was set on fire, and my priest was killed trying to save it. I want Iwanaga Hime and this dog Sato stopped.”

  Her mother’s eyes went wide, and she stepped back behind Williams.

  The black man nodded in understanding. “A very strong Talent if you two can cooperate in that manner.”

  “Let me see Leo. Give him water. Clothes. If you allow that, I’ll give up the katana and tell you where Simon is.” Getting Simon off Yamauchi was going to be their problem.

  She’d run out of time writing out scenarios. It became apparent that if she didn’t meet her mother here, Leo would die in the cage before she could arrange another halfway successful meeting. She only knew that she could save Leo and get the huge machine that was Shiva lurching after Sato.

  After that, she had no idea what would happen.

  38

  Cages

  The stronghold turned out to be just down the road at the rebuilt Izushi castle. When they’d rebuilt it, they’d dug several levels of additional basements to make a secret base where strangers coming and going would be unnoticed.

  In the end, they demanded that she give up the katana before seeing Leo. Apparently scenario number fourteen—where she used Atsumori to cut open the cage—was too obvious.

  They had a small shrine built into one of the underground rooms. Atsumori appeared beside her as she ducked through the low door.

  “It’s tiny.” She hated it. There were no windows, and once the door closed, it would be coffin dark.

  “Relatively speaking, it’s huge.” Atsumori eyed the room. “A nice place to dream, so to speak.”

  Her disbelief must have shown on her face, because he smiled gently at her.

  “You cannot see it with my eyes. The comforts of a kami are different than those of a human.”

  There was a wide shelf in the back of the small room. She laid the katana on the shelf, feeling like she was doing something horribly wrong.

  “This is how it needs to be,” Atsumori whispered. “I learned the hard way that the mind is the greatest weapon. Being clever wins the war—else I would have never died on that beach.”

  Nikki stood with fingers pressed to the polished wood of the sheath, not wanting to break contact with it. The katana had made her feel strong and capable. Without the sword, she’d go back to just Nikki, the girl who kept finding herself locked up and helpless. The girl who can’t even speak the language . . .

  A squeak of dismay slipped out as she realized she wasn’t going to understand any of the conversations going on about what Shiva should do about the goddess.

  “What is it?” Williams asked.

  “I don’t speak Japanese.”

  Williams breathed out something that might have been a laugh, and then amazed her by kindly saying, “We’ll just stick to English then.”

  The other guard shifted impatiently and said something in Japanese. The words tumbled past her with no meaning—Atsumori had left her already.

  Completely alone in her mother’s stronghold, she let them lead her away from Atsumori. She could only pray that they were taking her to Leo and that she was there in time.

  The thing in the cage wasn’t wholly human. It looked like the fever dream of a cat or a mad painter’s attempt at a silver tiger, its fur a wild mottling of white and black. It cringed as she looked at it, backing into the shadows. She glanced around the room and recognized it. This was the room in Leo’s scene. That was the cage in which they were holding Leo captive. It was Leo’s watch on the creature’s wrist.

  The thing in the cage was Leo.

  No wonder he didn’t like the name Scary Cat Dude.

  This was what Miriam had sensed about him in the subway. Why he had frightened Miriam so much in a sea of people.

  “You’re spectacularly not coping,” she whispered to herself and forced herself to see Leo crouching on all fours, panting raggedly with dehydration. It made it easy, then, to hurry to the edge of the cage. “Leo, I brought you some water.”

  He was trying not to look at her.

  Williams gave the bottles of water only a cursory glance before turning his full attention to the clothes she’d brought for Leo. She pushed the bottles through the bars, trying not to show how anxious she felt.

  “I’m sorry, I only brought two. I know that’s probably not enough, but I was afraid they would take them off me if they weren’t in my bag. I brought you some clothes, too, but you didn’t have any spare shoes. We got Simon away from the goddess . . .”

  He had hold of her hands before she even realized he was moving. It was definitely Leo’s human eyes gazing at her from the beast face. It seemed unreal—like he was wearing a very good mask. “You saved my father?”

  “Yes.” She squeezed his hands. “He’s exhausted, though, and we couldn’t get him to wake up or we would have had him call in and explain everything to—to—whoever.”

  “But he’
s safe?”

  “He’s safe. Drink.”

  He let go of her hand to fumble with one of the bottles of water. The two-liter bottle was large and unwieldy, still slick with condensation. His fingers ended with great black claws that clicked on the plastic as he tried to carefully work the cap. She took the other bottle, twisted off the lid and pushed it into his hands.

  “Drink it all. I’m not sure what comes next, but it feels like the shit is going to hit the fan. The creepy music has started. The monsters are coming. You need to be ready.”

  The guards steered her through a maze of hallways. She clung to her backpack, afraid that they would take it from her. She had come prepared for all-out war, but she’d be left nearly defenseless if they took everything from her. The need to write was growing like a wild fire. The fear that they would take away all of her paper and pens only threw fuel onto that blaze. She had minutes before the need became utterly uncontrollable. The scene with her grandmother haunted her. How quickly would she be reduced to that?

  She closed her eyes even as she walked. Seashore. Palm trees. The roar of the ocean. The white foam of the surf on the sand. Leo, out of the cage, wind blowing his dark hair.

  Williams promised that once Simon had been found and Leo’s innocence established, they both would go free. She’d been inside his head. She knew that he would keep any promise he made, one way or another. He was a man who kept his sanity by clinging to a code of honor. His word was his form of pen and paper. If Sato and her mother weren’t in the equation, she’d have nothing to fear.

  The guard pulled her to a stop and said something in Japanese.

  Beyond the solid door was a windowless room that seemed like a closet, minus any shelves. The floor was tatami and big enough for her to lie down on. A single lightbulb housed in a sturdy cage lit the cell. In the very back, there was a miniature sink and toilet, so it was a true proper cell.

  The guard gave her a nudge forward.

  She stepped into the tiny room, glad that she wasn’t claustrophobic on top of all her other instabilities.

  All that vanished as the guard tugged at her backpack.

  “No!” She clung tighter to the bag. “Don’t take it. I need it.”

  He said something that she didn’t understand.

  Her mind blanked on how to say “no” so she just howled it in English. “No! Kudasai!”

  The guard jerked the bag free and slammed the door in her face.

  “Baka!” She shouted one of the few Japanese curse words she knew. She crumbled down to the floor, cursing in English. Keeping the backpack had been a long shot but she had hoped that they wouldn’t take it. “Damn it.”

  She needed to write, and she needed to write now. She fumbled with the front of her jeans and pulled out the folded sheets of paper that she had tucked into her panties. She had dissembled a pen down to the ink cylinder and steel point and had tucked it into her bra so it lay against the wire support. She had purchased the pen and hidden it and the paper just prior to tracking down her mother. An old pen would have leaked but this one still had a plastic glob over the tip.

  She was trembling as she frantically pried the plastic off. So little paper. She had to be careful or she’d use it all up.

  Leo was shaking with anger and disgust. Under the label of the water bottle was Simon’s Shiva key card. She’d given him all he needed to save himself. Leo gripped the card, hating himself.

  All his life he’d wallowed in pity that he’d been captured by Shiva and forced to be an operative. Listening to Williams explain Nikki’s deal that the cold bitch of a mother, Leo realized now how lucky he’d been. Simon had been a good caring father who’d protected him at every step. Since Simon had freed him in Hilo when he was seven, he’d never again been tied up, caged, or restricted in any way. From what he’d gathered in the last few hours, Nikki had spent most of her life imprisoned by her mother. It was her mother that she’d been hiding from, protecting herself with her wall of secrecy.

  Nikki had given up her freedom for him. She had seen his beast form and hadn’t been afraid. And they had locked her up. The one person who had less than he had given up everything for him.

  He wasn’t going to let them keep her locked up. Williams might promise her freedom, but the man didn’t have the authority to keep Nikki’s mother from dragging her back to the United States, drugging her senseless, and locking her up in a mental hospital. Leo needed to free her and find some way to hide and protect her from her mother.

  He forced himself to be human again.

  He dressed, shivering from the change. He drank the second bottle of water that she’d brought him. When he was ready, he swiped the key through the cage’s lock. With a quiet click, it opened.

  He slipped out of the cell and crept barefoot to the door out of the detention area.

  Beyond the access door was a freight elevator to the surface so larger creatures could be muscled easily to the detention cages. It was standard Shiva layout. The prison cells for humans would be up a level.

  There was a great hollow space where the access door to the prisoner cells should stand. Around the edges of the ceiling were strands of silk from a jorgumo yokai. The giant spiderlike monster was deadly by itself, but it couldn’t have taken down the door.

  Sato had been here.

  Leo hurried down the hall, fear churning in his stomach. The spider-whore was a man-eater.

  Around the next corner was a huge splash of blood and flesh like someone had exploded outward with massive force. There wasn’t enough to identify the person but he recognized the scent and the high heels. It had been Nikki’s mother.

  Around every corner were signs of Sato’s passing. He’d gone straight to the temporary cells.

  The cell door had been ripped from its hinges. Sheets of paper with careful tiny handwriting and splattered with blood littered the ground. Leo stared at them in grief and dismay . . .

  Nikki stared in horror at what she had written. Not only had she written it, she’d written it in ink. There was no erasing it. She started to frantically cross out the words when she realized it was useless. She had no power to change what was rushing toward her—she was trapped in the closet, and everything was already happening.

  She flipped the page and wrote what any sane person would at that moment.

  Leo, I love you. I wish I’d kissed you and held you tight and kept you from leaving me at the hotel. I wish I had kept you safe.

  She heard the soft scurry of claws, and a shiver went down her spine. It was coming for her now. The door rattled, and she whimpered in fear. She wanted to be brave. The door rattled again as sharp claws dug at the edges, and then suddenly it jerked open as it was torn from its hinges. She hated that she screamed as the creature reached for her, but she knew it was going to hurt her. There would be blood. Maybe a lot of it.

  39

  Churn the Dark Waters

  Nikki woke in the backseat of a car driving through the night. An echo of a headache and a parched mouth told her that she’d been given Ambien. The streetlights flashed overhead in a steady beat while the wheels whistled and whined on the grooved highway.

  Sitting in the passenger side was a beautiful Japanese woman who looked somehow familiar. As her elaborate hairstyle shifted unnaturally, Nikki realized there were gleaming black spiders hidden within her hair. Nikki recoiled and the woman laughed, clicking her teeth; it was the sound that Nikki remembered first and then her face. The monstrously large spider had worn this face as it loomed over her, eyes staring into hers hungrily.

  Nikki clawed at the handle to the car door and jerked on it. The door didn’t open.

  Sato said something in Japanese.

  “What? I don’t understand. I don’t speak Japanese.”

  Sato breathed out a laugh. “Of course, the giant’s child comes to our land and we are the ones that must speak its language. So it is—the victor stands triumphant at all levels.”

  She frowned, confused, and then r
ealized he was referring to the idea that the United States was the sleeping giant awakened when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. “Why are you doing this? Why are you helping Iwanaga Hime? You know what will happen. This is your homeland. This will be like Hiroshima.”

  “Exactly. The Americans wiped the slate clean and built what they wanted on that scorched earth. I learned that lesson well. The best way to remake the world is to completely level the old one first.”

  “But—but your family died.”

  “Yes. Humans are like cherry blossoms. They bloom, they shower you with their splendor, and then they are gone, only to come again. I have lived for nearly two hundred years. I have lost track of all the flowers that withered at my feet. And that is the fault of Amaterasu’s grandson, Ninigi no Mikoto.”

  It took her a moment to grasp that he was talking about the sun goddess and her grandson who had founded the imperial bloodline. “Huh?”

  “Amaterasu’s grandson, Ninigi, was to marry Iwanaga Hime, the eldest daughter of Ohoyamatsumi. On the way to meet his bride, though, he happened onto her younger sister, Konohana Sakuya Hime, on the seashore and they fell in love. He refused Iwanaga Hime and took Konohana Sakuya Hime as his wife.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Sato laughed bitterly. “Of course not. It’s all just random sounds to you. Iwanaga Hime means the Rock Princess and Konohana Sakuya Hime means Flowering Trees Princess. If Ninigi had married Iwanaga, humans would have been as enduring and long lasting as stones. But he had chosen the goddess of blossoms, so human lives are short and fleeting as cherry blossoms.”