by A. L. Knorr
The birds had stopped singing and nothing but the sound of the wind and waves reached my ears. A light scattering of pebbles made me turn.
A blue-black fox the size of a large cat padded across the rock toward me. Aimi came closer, her head down, her mouth closed. She sat on her haunches a few feet away.
"You found me," I said. My soft words belied the excitement I felt to see my Kitsune sister on this clifftop again.
She made a show of getting up and sniffing the moss around me. She crossed behind me and sat down on my other side.
"He just left," I said.
She blew a breath out of her nose and looked out at the ocean.
"I miss you," I whispered.
Her mouth opened and her tongue appeared as she panted under the sun's heat. Those green eyes found mine and she got up and came closer. She nosed my elbow and I lifted my arm to let her in close to my side. I let my arm come to rest on her shoulders and all was right with the world again.
* * *
"You talk about us as being creatures of the Æther. What is the Æther, anyway?" I asked Aimi as we gathered flowers in the woods to fill our home with the fragrance of summer. "Mother thinks it is the place where faith lives—is that what you think, too?"
Aimi popped a violet blossom in her mouth and chewed. "I might describe it better as spirit." We moved through a thick carpet of violets, our footfalls silenced by the soft stems and flowers. "It will be different for you than for me, I think."
That drew me up and I stopped walking. "Why would it be different?"
"You are Akuna Hanta, I'm only Kistune. I'm a creature with power, but I am as flawed as any human. My motives can be selfish, or altruistic. As a Hanta, you are capable only of good."
I thought back along the timeline of my childhood: the time I cut Aimi's hair while she was sleeping, took a spoonful of honey in the middle of the night because I was hungry, and dressed up in my mother's most expensive kimono when she wasn't home, got the hem dirty and then blamed it on Aimi. "That's not true."
"Not in your human form," Aimi said with a laugh. "But when you become a Hanta, you are an agent of the gods, capable of destroying the most powerful and wicked demons. Even Oni."
I shuddered as the image of the red-skinned devil with horns and fangs and carrying a nasty looking spiked club rose to my mind. These ugly fearsome creatures were sometimes painted on room-dividers and robes as a warning. Legends told that they meted justice out to the wicked and loved to feed on human flesh. Bile rose in my throat. I had always thought the legends were contradictory. How could something that was supposed to mete out justice on the wicked be so wicked itself? It made no sense. "How am I supposed to destroy an Oni?"
"You ask so many questions, thinking I might have the answers," Aimi said patiently.
"Who else should I ask? You are the one who did this to me."
"But I didn't know you'd come out as a Hanta." Aimi turned around and looked back at me, holding her palms out. "I thought you'd just be a girl blessed with sharp intuition and good luck. It's your own heart that took my gift and made you what you are."
"A bird," I replied, crossing my arms. I dropped my chin and gave Aimi a look that said I wasn't impressed. I had always thought that Aimi had been given a superior ability to mine.
"No." Aimi raised her eyebrows in surprise and strode up to me. She put a hand on my forearm. "I mean, yes, you can become a bird, but because you're a creature of the air, you can get closer to the Æther than anyone or anything else. You can touch the sky. You can visit where all the good spirits live and where they are made. The Æther feeds power into both of us, but you're from a higher realm." At my expression of confusion, she sighed. "Have you ever tried to take the form of a vulture?"
"What?" I dropped my arms. "No, why would I?"
Aimi stepped back. "Try it. Right now. Just humor me, please."
I dropped my arms, pictured a vulture, and waited for the feeling of a thousand little stars dancing over my body as I took a winged shape.
Nothing happened.
Aimi cocked an eyebrow. "Well?"
I looked down and then back up at her, bewildered. "I can't. Why can't I?" I tried again, and failed again. Nothing changed.
"Vultures are carrion eating birds. Creatures that live on death. A fox is a predator, but it’s also a scavenger and a trickster. As a Hanta, the Æther gives you the form of creatures who live in the highest realm, and who do not live on death."
"But I can take on the shape of a falcon, an owl, and a hawk. They all kill to survive."
"Yes, but the difference is that they are hunters. They take something that is alive and make it dead. Vultures feed on things that are already dead and rotting. The shapes that you can take are symbolic of your purpose. Birds hunt from the skies, you hunt from the highest realms of the spirit, combing the realms below you. Those birds hunt mice and rodents from the sky. You hunt demons. Now do you see?"
My mind spun as all this sank in. Aimi turned away and kept walking.
"So how am I supposed to hunt these demons? What do I do with them?" I stumbled after her, catching up.
"I don't know the answer to that, but I have faith that you will. When you're ready."
"When will that be?"
"When you get the Hanta vision, I guess." Aimi stooped to cut a cluster of flowers and add them to her basket. "And not a second before," she chuckled. "The Æther works that way. The answers come, but always at the last minute. It's like it is always testing how strong our faith is."
My mind went back to what Aimi had said about Toshi's heart being as beautiful as a pearl. I watched her thoughtfully. Always more graceful than me, always slightly ahead of me. She had so much faith in the Æther providing us with the knowledge we needed when we needed it. I added more blossoms to my basket and we harvested side by side in silence. Me digesting all this new information, and Aimi thinking her Kitsune thoughts. Whatever they were.
"Do you remember anything from the days before you were a Kitsune?" I asked.
"You mean from when I was just a fox?" Aimi had a basket filled with daisies draped over her arm. My basket was full of lilies. Together we would make numerous bouquets and deliver a few among our neighbors. It was something Aimi and I had done every year since I was small. "Some," she replied, bending to cut more stems. "I remember coming to a battlefield and hearing the sounds of dying men. It was their cries that attracted me in the first place."
"Do you know who had been fighting?"
"I have no idea. I had no interest, either. All I wanted was to follow my nose toward the scent of blood. I remember being very fearful of the smell of men, but also that these men were wounded and would pose less of a threat." She laughed. "Makes it sound like I was able to rationalize, but it wasn't like that. My thoughts weren't really thoughts, they were just instinct."
"What happened then?" I tucked the stem of a blossom into my hair.
She shrugged. "It's hazy, but I remember skirting the bodies until the smell of one of them drew me in. He was still alive, but he was dying, and the smell of his blood was so thick and strong.”
I shuddered. "That was when you drank some?"
"Yes. But I got scared away by the sound of horses approaching. I didn't drink very much." She shrugged. "I guess the quantity doesn't matter so much."
"And you had no idea what it was going to do to you? That it was going to make you into a Kitsune?"
"Of course not," she said. "I was just a fox like any other. There was nothing special about me."
"Did you feel any different?"
"Not that I can recall," she said. "Not until I was dying."
"How much later was that?"
"Oh, years, Akiko. I lived out all of the days a fox could hope for. I was old and infirm when I died."
"The blood stayed in you all that time?"
"I don't know. I guess whatever you eat becomes a part of you in some way, and I had eaten something that gave me a tamashī. Or maybe it
was the spirit of the samurai that left his body and went into mine." Aimi sat on a rock and took out our water bag. She took the kerchief from around her neck, wiped her face, and held the bag out for me.
"What is a tamashī, exactly?" I took the bag and put it to my lips for long refreshing swallows.
Aimi laughed as I sat down beside her and handed her back the bag. "You have one. Can't you feel it?"
"I don't think so." I frowned.
"Maybe because you started life as a human, so you've always had it. I started life as an animal, so when I got my tamashī, I could feel the difference." Aimi took a sip and put the bag down. "Watch."
She turned toward me, and keeping her gaze on me, she flicked her left hand out and opened her palm. A light appeared in the region of her heart, glowing under the fabric of her robe.
I gasped and leapt to my feet, staring at her chest.
The glow moved down her left arm and I followed it with my eyes as it moved along underneath her sleeve. It rolled out of her sleeve and came to rest in the palm of her hand. Its brightness almost made me squint.
"What is it?" I breathed. The small bright ball looked like a star, and it twinkled with a warm yellow light.
"It's my tamashī," she said. "My connection to the Æther and the source of my power." She closed her fist around the light, reopened it and the light was gone. "Maybe some would call it my soul."
"How did you do that? Can I do that?"
"Of course," she said. "Just try it."
I opened my left palm the same way she had. Nothing happened. I looked at Aimi.
She looked thoughtful. "Try it with your right hand."
I made the same motion with my right hand, and a light appeared in the region of my heart. I gasped and then laughed. I felt it there, warm and humming. I sent the ball of light down my right arm and into my hand. My tamashī was brighter, whiter, and larger than Aimi's. We both had to squint to look at it.
"More evidence of the difference between you and me," she murmured.
"What?" I asked, blinking at her over the light.
"The fact that it came to your right hand, not to your left." Something in her face looked sad at this. But before I could ask her to expand on this thought she said, "Just be very careful with this, little sister." She held a hand out to shield her eyes from the glare.
"Why?"
"Because it is the seat of your power, and it can be snatched—" Quick as a striking cobra she grabbed my tamashī and dashed away. "—like that!" she cried, laughing.
"Hey!" I took off after her, laughing too. "Come back, thief!"
She giggled as she darted through the trees, the soles of her shoes teasing me as she kept just out of reach. We pounded through the trails we both knew so well until Aimi darted off the path and onto rougher ground. She skimmed nimbly over the rubble and boulders between thick shrubs and thorny bushes. They grabbed at my clothing and I heard a tearing sound. I didn't care, and doubled my efforts in pursuit of her. It was the first time Aimi and I had played since my engagement to Toshi. My heart was flying with happiness.
Aimi's form disappeared up and over the edge of a boulder. When I heard her scream, my heart vaulted into my mouth and I sped up to crest the rocky rise where she had vanished from view. I pulled up in shock.
An elderly stranger stood in the small clearing, he turned toward us as we came over the rocks, Aimi first. He was holding a twisted walking staff in a gnarled hand. A bright yellow kerchief had been tied around his throat, and a matching hat sat on his head.
Aimi gave another shocked cry of surprise and lost her footing as the stones moved under her feet. She fell forward and sprawled across the rocks, crying out in pain. My tamashī spilled out of her grasp and rolled across the stones toward the man.
His wizened face blossomed with shock and his eyes widened in surprise, the light from my tamashī reflected in his pupils. He moved faster than a man of his years had right to. He grabbed the hat from his head, bent, and caught the light into it. A sigh of amazement issued from his throat as he cradled my tamashī in his hat.
In front of me, Aimi's form shimmered and she transformed into a fox. She disappeared inside her dress as her clothing collapsed into a heap. She leapt from the gaping neck, snarling and snapping at the man. He took a step back and raised his cane to strike her.
"No!" I cried.
Aimi lunged. The man brought his walking stick down hard, but Aimi bolted between the man's legs and the cane snapped in two on the rocks as she disappeared into the undergrowth. It was the violence of his blow that penetrated my heart with fear. He’d had intent to injure her.
"Aimi!" I yelled. The instinct to follow her was strong, but I couldn't leave my tamashī.
"What are you?" the man said, his voice raw and dry. Something in his face told me that he had some ideas about what we were. He'd just seen Aimi transform in front of his eyes.
I stared at him, my eyes wide as saucers. Sweat trickled down the hollow of my spine.
"That's mine." I held out my hand. "I need it back, now, please."
He took a step forward. "Are you Kitsune?" I couldn't see the light from my tamashī, closed in the cap the way it was.
I shook my head and reached for the hat. Was I going to have to tackle this man to get my tamashī back? My mouth had gone as dry as a desert and my hands trembled with adrenalin. Should I become a raptor and batter him with my wings? Snatch the hat in my talons? Just the thought was enough to transform my body. My robes fell and the shape of a peregrine falcon shot upward from the neck of my dress. In a flurry of feathers and clutching talons I climbed and gathered momentum to dive at him.
His face tilted up to watch me, his expression transforming from surprise to amazement. "Akuna Hanta," he whispered with understanding. He took a staggering step backward as I circled over his head. He gasped and opened the hat. The glow from my tamashī lit his face and the forest around both of us.
I dove, screaming a falcon's cry as I went.
He lifted my tamashī to his lips and I pulled up as I realized what he was about to do, turning my talons toward his face. I was too late. A piercing shriek tore from my throat as my light disappeared into his mouth. He ducked as my talons snapped closed where his face used to be. I swooped and shot upward again, preparing for another attack.
"Down." The command cracked through the air like thunder.
Some undeniable force pulled me down like a typhoon shoving me toward earth rather than lifting me to the heavens. I screamed in confusion and sprawled into the dirt at his feet, my wings open, my chest and beak in the soil. My whole body trembled, and I screamed again in terror. What was happening? Where was Aimi? Why was she not here to help me?
The man's shadow fell over me, and with it, a desperate cold.
"You will give me years," he said, taking off his outer robe. "Destiny has finally answered my call."
The last thing I saw before he threw his jacket over me were the green eyes of a blue-black fox watching from the underbrush. A horrible thought rose in my mind as the darkness suffocated me—that Aimi had known he was there and had lured me toward my doom. For with me out of the way, there would be nothing to stop her from marrying Toshi.
11
From the hotel, I had to take the train southwest of Kyoto to a poorer suburb. The wealth of Kyoto began to dissolve as the minutes passed until I found myself looking at what could nearly be identified as slums. My heart slipped down into my shoes and I began to doubt my intuition about the janitor who had compelled me to do what I was doing. What if he was just crazy? I shook my head. He knew what I was. How many humans could tell an Akuna Hanta just from looking at them? None, in my experience, except for Daichi, but he’d seen my tamashī.
I stepped off the train at the right stop and used my GPS to make my way to the address. It was a tiny house, squashed in a row of tiny houses with not so much as an inch between them and no space between the sidewalk and the front door. The windows were blocked with
white paper and a dim glow lit them from within. I stepped up and knocked.
The door opened and Inaba stood beside it, smiling, his eyes crinkling. He was dressed in a traditional Japanese robe, black with gray stripes. He wore his robe crossed high at his neck, and it struck me as odd-looking, like he’d purposefully done it up high to hide something, a necklace or a charm, perhaps. "Come in, come in, please," he said, stepping back from the door and leaving room for me to enter through the narrow doorway.
The smell of incense hit my nose and my gaze was caught on two candles burning on a shelf on the wall. Between the two candles were the photographs of two people: one was a teenage boy; he was smiling into the camera and shared the shape of Inaba's brow. The other was of a woman, unsmiling but serene, with her dark hair parted in the middle and tied back.
"I am Inaba." My host bowed to me. "I'm sorry we didn't have time for proper introductions at the museum. The supervisor is quite strict about the cleaning staff interacting with patrons."
"Akiko," I said. I followed him into the small space towards a low table.
"Please, come in Akiko. It is an honor to have you in my home, and to learn your name." Inaba sat down cross-legged at a low table and gestured for me to take the place across from him. A bowl sat at each place with another bowl placed upside down on top of it to serve as a lid. "You must have so many questions," he said. "I am not the greatest cook in the world. My wife was superb, but I'm afraid her talents did not rub off on me." He lifted the lid from his bowl. The smell of miso and onion mingled with the scent of incense. "Please, enjoy. I don't stand on ceremony anymore."
I lifted the lid from my soup and inhaled the delicious salty smell. My stomach growled and I realized I hadn't eaten since that morning when I'd had a bowl of cereal at the hotel. "Thank you for feeding me. It's very kind of you. But, please tell me before I die from curiosity." I looked him in the eye. "How do you know what I am?"
