by A. L. Knorr
I stood on the top step of the stands, my heart rattling and jumping like I'd just run for my life. My eyes strained for another glimpse of the shape, but it was gone. There was only one explanation for a shadow that big, and the fact that no other human around me seemed to notice its presence.
There was another Akuna Hanta here, and they wanted me to know it.
* * *
I found their graves by accident.
I made my way back toward the train station in a daze, watching the ground for another enormous shadow that never appeared. When I realized I'd been walking for a long time without paying attention to where I was going, I stopped walking and looked around. I didn’t recognize the street anymore. I had not traveled this street on my way from the train station into Furano.
I was about to rifle in my bag for my phone when my eye caught on a narrow walkway between a chain link fence and the back of a row of apartments. A small hand-made sign pointed down the walkway and said Old Furano Cemetery. I crossed the street and took the path. I passed backyards and humming transformers, a few small gardens, and a broken old fountain with cracked paving stones around it.
The cemetery was overgrown with vines and shrubs, the grass hadn't been cut in weeks, and yellow dandelion heads spotted every space between the stones. Square headstones shoved upward from the heaving ground and stood tilted crookedly and covered in moss.
I passed the chain link fence to the entrance. A small sign over the open gate said 1868—1975. This rundown graveyard, barely recognizable and hidden in a back alley, was the burying place of my parents’ generation and my own. Surely, I had seen it before when I was a girl, but it was so different looking from the Furano cemetery of my youth. Would my parents be here?
I began a methodical walk to read every headstone and marker I could find, many of them buried in grass. The first name I recognized was Kito's. I stood frozen as my eyes took in the final resting place of Toshi's father. He'd passed in 1947. Vivid memories of the tall imposing man, virile and full of vigor, filled my mind. When I was young, it had seemed impossible that he could ever die.
Dread rolled over me when I passed Toshi's mother's headstone. She had been a quiet, demure woman. Shy, and preferring to stay at home. I never got to know her. She'd passed a year after her husband.
I braced myself as I reached the next stone, but it was not Toshi's. It was a name I didn't recognize. I wandered on, steeling myself against the rush of emotions I would feel if I saw my love's name engraved in a moss-splotched marker. Instead I wandered by several names I didn't recognize, and some I did. I remembered the baker, the man who was always smoking and laughing out in front of his shop. The man who had no teeth whose face had collapsed in on itself, giving the kids of the village reason to laugh and make fun. The old woman who watched the street from her window but never ventured beyond her own yard, always sending her daughter to do her bidding.
It was my mother's headstone that brought me to my knees. I had held it all together until the moment I saw Batya Susumu engraved in the stone. She'd died a mere three years after I had disappeared. Grief washed over me and my head collapsed on my chin. Hot tears welled up in my eyes and spilled down my cheeks. I reached out a hand and put it flat on her name. Why had she died so young? The thick fabric of certainty settled over my shoulders and I knew, as sure as I knew that the sun rises in the East, that my mother had died of a broken heart. Her daughter had vanished without a trace. Had Aimi told her anything? Had she even tried to come after me, to rescue me? Or had she simply let me go and gone on to marry Toshi and be the kind of wife for him that I never could?
"Oh, Mother," I whispered. "I am so sorry. I never wanted to leave you." Tears fell unbidden as birds chirped around me and butterflies and bees darted among the overgrown flowering weeds. A world oblivious to my pain.
I turned my head and my blurry vision made out my father's name on the next marker. He'd passed in 1949, which explained why his stone was a little less rough looking. I wept for him, too, the kind man who had only done his best to give me and Aimi a good life.
I knew I would not find a marker for Aimi. If nothing had happened to kill her, then she'd still be alive. I wondered where she was. I might guess that she was not even in Japan anymore. Modern times made it so easy to travel, and as a Kitsune, she was insatiably curious and opportunistic.
Sobs shook my shoulders as I knelt there at the resting places of my parents. I had never felt so alone in my life.
"It's better to forget those things which are behind," came a deep voice from behind me. "And press on to those things which are ahead."
I gasped and spun around, whipping up to my feet and rubbing the tears from my eyes to clear my vision. The words had been spoken in a dialect not so different from the Japanese I spoke when I was young.
"Don't you think?" The tallest man I had ever seen in my life stood leaning against the metal gatepost. He wore black jeans and a white t-shirt with an unbuttoned, faded black vest. Long, glossy black hair had been pulled half-back from his face and tied up. A high forehead and cheekbones caught the sunlight and threw shadows into the hollows of his cheeks. Tanned skin and a week-old shadow on his jaw suggested a life lived mostly outdoors. The black slashes of his eyebrows gave him a fierce look, but the warm hazel eyes beneath them were soft with compassion. One impossibly long leg was crossed over the other, but it was the pair of white Converse sneakers that made the corner of my mouth lift. I liked him instantly. This man had to be the owner of that enormous shadow that had passed over me at the soccer stadium, and the Hanta who had freed Inaba from his demon. How many Japanese reached this kind of size, or even close to it?
"I thought I was alone," I said, wiping my face and swallowing my tears. A single hiccup escaped.
"Never," he said with a crooked smile. "You're a creature of the Æther. You are never alone." He uncrossed his leg and walked toward me, striding through the long grass. He came to tower over me and gaze at the headstones in front of me. "Who are you crying over, little Hanta?"
"My parents," I said. "I never got to say goodbye to them."
"I'm sorry," he said. "We all have some kind of tragedy in our lives, don't we." He stopped in front of the stones. "Okaasan and Batya Susumu," he read softly.
"How did you find me?" I asked.
His gaze was surprised. "I wasn't looking for you. I happen to be in the area for a target, and I saw you from the sky. I also saw that your tamashī is missing. I have never met a Hanta who lost their tamashī before." He gave a graceful shrug. "I was curious about you."
Curious? I blinked at this. As soon as I had seen him I thought for certain he had come to help me. Now it appeared that this meeting had happened by accident.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"Akiko. And yours?"
"Yuudai. My family name was Yamigu. Not that that matters anymore. Only worldly authorities care about that, and my contact with them is minimal these days." He rolled his eyes. "Thank God for small mercies. What a mess this realm is in."
"You are the Hanta who helped Inaba," I said.
Yuudai's casual behavior was so unexpected that I felt like the world had just tilted off its axis. He was exactly as Inaba had described him physically, but I had expected a much more imposing personality. Instead, he oozed 'boy-next-door.'
"Inaba?" He looked pensive.
"In Kyoto. A yakuza boss with Oni tattoos," I prompted. I was surprised that he couldn't remember the man who had cut all of the ink out of his skin.
Yuudai gave a hearty laugh, showing straight white teeth. "Do you know how many people I have saved that that describes?" He shook his head. "I don't take names. There is no point." He gestured towards the open gate. "If you are finished here, would you like to get some dinner?"
"Um." I blinked at the unexpected invitation. "Yes, I would. But, you said you were here for a target. You have time to go out for a meal?"
"It’s not ripe yet," he said, surprising me further.
"Ripe…?" I trailed off, confused.
"And I'm always hungry." He grinned down at me. "Aren't you?"
"I suppose," I murmured, bemused. Truthfully, I was emotionally raw from the discovery of my parents’ graves. The last thing on my mind was food but I wasn’t going to let the opportunity of spending time with this Hanta slip through my grasp. I followed Yuudai out of the graveyard and down the small alley.
20
Yuudai ordered enough food to feed six of me. Fried fish and rice dishes, miso soup, rolls of maki, nigiri, and temaki. He also ordered a liter of hot sake and insisted on pouring it for me every time my cup was nearing empty.
"You know I can't pour my own sake, right?" he said around a bite of rice, peering into his empty cup.
"Yes, sorry," I said, picking up the hot bottle by the napkin wrapped around it. "You just drink it faster than anyone else I know."
I filled his cup with the yeasty smelling liquid. I set it down, watched him down it in one gulp, and then take bite after bite of sushi. I wondered if he'd ever get full.
"So, you really didn't find me to help me?" I asked, scooping some rice into my mouth with my chopsticks.
His eyes found mine as he swallowed his mouthful. "I can't help you," he replied matter-of-factly. " I would if I could." He shoved in another mouthful of octopus tentacles and rice.
"Why can't you?" I poured him another cup of sake.
He stopped chewing momentarily. "You really don't know this?"
I shook my head.
He swallowed and shot back the sake. "What happened to you? How did you lose your tamashī?"
I told him about my family, how Aimi and I had been playing in the woods when we'd happened upon Daichi and he'd stolen my tamashī. How I had been his slave ever since. It flowed out easily, with no restriction. Apparently Daichi’s command of secrecy didn’t hold when it was a Hanta I was addressing. It felt so good to tell my story that I had to fight to keep my emotions from spilling everywhere.
Yuudai didn't take a single bite of food as I described my circumstance. He listened intently and his eyes roamed my face. His brow creased when I told him that Daichi had swallowed my tamashī. "I wonder why he did that?" Yuudai murmured. "I don't think he needed to swallow it to keep you in his power. Strange choice."
"I guess he was worried about me being able to take it back."
"Yeah, but one command from him and you'd be unable to, anyway. Huh," he scratched his chin. "Go on."
I told him how once I was in Daichi's power, I had been kept in a cage for years on end. It was only in the last decade that he'd allowed me to remain as a human and had me learn English so I could be of use to him.
Yuudai shook his head in horror and wonder. "I wonder why he wanted to stay alive for so long if it was just to rot in some small town in a foreign country," he mused. "And you say now that all you have to do is give Daichi this sword and he will give you your tamashī back?"
I nodded. "He has issued a command that I cannot use any Hanta abilities for anything other than pursuing this one goal."
"And when he gives you a command, you are compelled to follow it."
I nodded again. "It is irresistible. He owns me."
"So you have never actually hunted or unseated a demon before?" Yuudai began to eat again, filling his mouth with rice.
"Never. I have no idea how it’s done." I leaned forward. "You can see why I thought you might have come to help me."
Just then our waitress came by to check on us. Most of the food had been consumed by Yuudai, but our rice bowls were still half-full. Yuudai asked for more temaki and another bottle of sake. She bowed and disappeared.
He took a breath. "I would like to help you, and I think, seeing that you know so little of the Hanta life, I can probably tell you some things that you don't yet know. But I can't tell you how to be a Hanta. It would be contradictory to our very nature to explain it to you."
My heart plummeted. "Why is that?"
"Because we operate by faith. Faith is to believe without seeing. If I show you how a Hanta's work is done, then you'll fail at it. You literally won't be able to do it. I will have permanently crippled you. You'll be a faithless Hanta." His brow puckered and his mouth turned down at the corners. It was the most negative expression I had seen him make so far. "And it would be better to be dead than to be faithless."
Frustration bubbled in my blood and the desire to press for details was nearly overwhelming. "Inaba told me that you said you can't kill a demon." I was fishing for information. If he wouldn't tell me how a Hanta did their job, then maybe he'd explain more about our enemies.
He took another bite from his bowl and shook his head. "No, they can't be killed. Not by a Hanta anyway."
"By who?"
He half-shrugged. By now I was getting used to that lift of one shoulder. "That's the business of the Æther, not us. We weren't made to kill them."
"Just to unseat them," I prompted. My rice bowl sat abandoned, getting cold. The sake had warmed my blood.
The waitress returned with a fresh bottle of sake. We thanked her and she took away the empty plates from in front of Yuudai. I noticed her eyes linger on his face and form, on his long limbs. Yuudai didn't notice. He was probably used to the stares. Either that or he was oblivious to them.
I picked up the sake and poured him a fresh cup. "You said that your target wasn't 'ripe,'" I said, setting down the ceramic jug. "What did you mean by that?"
He took a deep breath as though he was starting to get full. His eyes roamed the dishes left in front of us. He snagged the last temaki cone and took a huge bite. I stifled a laugh. The way he ate reminded me of the jocks at the high school, desperate to fill every empty space.
"You’re like the world’s largest hummingbird. Five minutes from starvation at any given moment," I laughed.
He shot a stuffed-cheeks smile at me and swallowed his temaki. "That's not far from the truth," he said. "You try fueling a body like mine and see how far you get on no food."
"Good point." I had never really noticed that I was any more hungry than my girlfriends. Georjayna ate the most of any of us, but she was nearly six feet tall, so that made sense. Yuudai would tower over Georjie, probably by a good six inches, so it made sense too that he needed thousands of calories to get through a day.
"I'm guessing you've lost your Hanta vision?" Yuudai asked as he lifted a bowl of soup to his lips and took long swallows. He smacked his lips and set it down before eyeing up the waitress as she set down a plate of tuna sashimi laid out in a flower shape.
"I never had it," I said. Aimi had talked about the vision, assuring me that it would come as I matured.
"That sucks," he said. "You were very young when your tamashī was stolen." Five pieces of sashimi disappeared down his throat, he barely chewed. "You can't hunt without it."
"But you didn't answer my question—"
He was already nodding around another mouthful. "Ripe, yes. This is something that you will understand when you get your vision back." He swallowed. His eyes grabbed mine and his face went serious. "What you haven't learned yet, is that demons have a purpose. Yes, they are evil, wicked, horrible creatures that feed on blood and fear and chaos—"
I felt the blood drain from my face at this description.
"But, even wickedness has a reason for being. You can't have light without dark, and the people who get themselves tangled up with demons have become vulnerable to possession by putting themselves in a demon's path. Some deeply deceived people even seek them out because demons can present themselves as a kind of savior."
My head jerked back in surprise. "Why would they do that?"
He cocked a dark eyebrow and raised a finger, "Don't make the mistake of underestimating the power of these entities. They can influence the events that happen in the earthly realm, always through deception. It's all around us. There is a war going on. Humans think the war is with each other, but it’s not. Their enemies are not flesh and blo
od, but demonic entities in high places. The Akuna Hanta were very important at one time, and we are becoming very important yet again. Possessions are increasing, especially with humans who have a lot of political power. Demons have caught on that it’s through the elite families of the world that they can have the most influence, and the elite are more than happy to make pacts with them."
"Because the demons make them more powerful?"
"Exactly," he said. "And those humans who have made these pacts are beyond our reach. The Hanta has a responsibility to help humans who have a wish to be freed. But for those who are being used voluntarily in exchange for something like fame or fortune, we can't help them." He shook his head and took another bite.
"So, the ones who are ripe?"
Around a mouthful of rice and vegetables he said, "The host has been through hell with this entity inside them, and only when they are in the worst of it, when they've been brought to their knees, can they be freed." He swallowed, the thick column of his throat moving. "Doing it this way triggers real change in a human heart. It isn't likely that anyone would ever want to make the same mistake again. They were deceived into hosting it, and they have come full circle and now know that demons might lead to a temporary power, but will end only in destruction and death." He raised a finger again. "Until that point, when they are full of regret and desperation to be free," he made two fists and thudded them against his chest. "When their spirit is absolutely wailing, and you can hear it from miles away," his face scrunched up to illustrate the agony the people in this state were experiencing, "spiritually screaming in abject misery." His eyes popped open and he opened both fists at the same time, splaying his fingers outward. His face became a mask of wonder and ecstasy. "Only then can you help them."
I stared at him, mesmerized.
His voice lowered nearly to a whisper. "In that moment, they are ripe. There is nothing that feels better than unseating that evil." His eyes grew wistful, the same way any professional who loves his work might look.
