But before they slept, the Kami who had given themselves to anger and darkness promised to rise once more, when the time of mankind had begun to wane. In those end times, they swore, after the body of Amaterasu had become polluted and unsalvageable under the ministration of men—and they promised that it would!—they vowed to rise, and to take back the earth, or else to destroy it utterly.
12
Mr. Serizawa stopped speaking and only looked long and hard at me. I didn’t like that look. It said he believed this stuff a little more than was healthy. But I had to ask it.
“What does all this have to do with me?”
“After the evil Kami were put to sleep, mankind decided it was much too dangerous for the ofuda to remain on earth, where anyone might use them for evil purposes—and yet, they could not be destroyed, either, lest they be needed once more to control the angry Kami. So they were ritually burned and mixed with a potion that was then drunk by the purest of maidens. The ofuda—and thus, the Kami—became part of each of the maidens’ wombs and was passed down through countless generations in preparation for the end of days, when the evil Kami would awaken again.”
Mr. Serizawa took a deep breath. “The men who had mixed the potion were the high priests, the Watchers who eventually became the tellers of the tale. They—we—wait for the end of days. We know that in the last days the ofuda will each come alive within a child wizard of pure spirit—a Keeper—and that Keeper will have eyes as silver as the seals with the names of the Kami written upon them, and they will see the wind and call the elements to their aid. They will be burdened with the difficult task of summoning and taming the ancient Kami. And this, then, will be the final war. The evil Kami will wish to battle the tame Kami for control of the earth. The rest is left in the hands of the gods—and the children who can summon and control them.”
This I so didn’t need to hear, though I figured I was an idiot to think it would end any other way. After all, Japan is not exactly known for its cheery, fairytale endings.
I had to ask it, of course. “Why…why did your grandfather tell you this story? Why did he make you a Watcher?”
Mr. Serizawa looked at me earnestly. “It was to be my burden to carry for the lives I had taken in the war. And because the end of days is upon us, Kevin Takahashi. The dark Kami wake. And the Keepers wake with them.”
Stupid question. Why do I ask these questions, anyway? Of course it was something crazy and complicated like that.
Mr. Serizawa said, “You have manifested the sword of fire, yes? You have called Raiju with its sigil?”
I considered telling him everything that happened tonight. It might even make me feel better. But I chose not to speak of it. Not now. To speak of it would make it all real. And I wanted to go on pretending this was a nightmare, at least for a little while longer.
“Why now?” I asked instead, standing up. “Why not a few years from now?” I sounded so bitter. “Why now, for Chrissakes? Couldn’t I have at least a few more years of normalcy?” Really, I thought, was that too much to ask?
Mr. Serizawa looked infinitely sad, as if he could read all my emotions in my desperate face. “You don’t understand, Mago. You have encountered another Keeper, and it has awakened the Keeper within you. It has awakened the ofuda which dwells in you. You will be drawn to this person. This person will be where you are. The two Kami will now seek each other out, no matter the cost, no matter what you do, or where you go, and battle to the finish.”
I glared at him. Another Keeper? I took a quick inventory of everyone I knew who had silver eyes. It didn’t take that long. I mean, I had only met one other person in the last few days with pale eyes like mine, and he was currently contemplating kicking my face in. “Snowman?” I nearly shouted. “Snowman controls Qilin? You must be kidding me!”
I couldn’t have a normal bully like Troy, or even Bryce, oh no. Not me. Not Kevin Takahashi. Nope. My bully had to be a super-powered freak of nature in charge of a giant, city-smashing slime-o-rama monster with death breath and an even worse attitude problem. Sort of like his master.
I decided then that my life sucked on so many levels I couldn’t even count them all anymore.
13
I was late to Biology and had gotten turned around in the school corridor somehow. I had no idea where I was going, but I spotted Aimi up ahead, her plats echoing hollowly in the empty corridors. I started hurrying to catch up to her. At least I could ask her where the classroom was.
“Greetings, Master.”
I stopped. Slowly I turned around.
The Asian woman from my dream stood behind me. She was tall, statuesque, and dressed in a bright red ceremonial kimono flocked with gold, hand-painted flames and birds. She was standing behind me, her hands linked together in front of her wide black obi belt. As I watched, the flames on her kimono seemed to move, to absorb the birds fleeing from them. She was smiling at me with ruby red lips and searing blue eyes. Laughing at me, like I amused her. She was Japanese, yet her hair, done up in hundreds of braids and beads, was as red as my mom’s had been, bright fire-engine red.
I opened my mouth to say something, to ask what she wanted of me, but she moved forward with lightning speed and reached for me, the elongated, blood red tips of her fingernails brushing my cheek. I noticed there were kanji and other ancient symbols engraved on her nails, each of which was as long and curving as the blade of a short sword. I wanted to back away, but I hit the wall of the corridor. I wanted to cry out, but before I could, her hair burst into a halo of crackling flames that enveloped the entire school corridor—and me.
I lunged awake in bed, panting and heaving with sweat running down my chest under my T-shirt. I took a deep breath and fell back onto the pillows, shaking, my fists bunched up in the bedclothes.
My jaw clenched compulsively as a spike of childish indignation raced up my spine. I didn’t have to be a Keeper if I didn’t want to be, I thought. It was more like a job than anything else, like being a doctor or lawyer or soldier. It wasn’t like someone was pointing a gun at my head, making me do these things. This was America; despite what Mr. Serizawa had said, I could do anything I wanted.
I didn’t have to summon the sword of fire.
I didn’t have to use the sigil to summon Raiju.
I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do.
In that moment, I made the vow.
Unfortunately, I must have been more upset than I thought, because the pillow my hands were clenched around went up like a bonfire. I was up in seconds, using the pillow to beat at my hands until the fire was snuffed out.
I didn’t feel a thing and my hands didn’t seem to be burned, but my heart was racing like a well-tuned V8 engine in my chest. Jesus, I was turning into that chick in the Stephen King novel on top of everything else, the one who set everyone on fire whenever she freaked out.
The pillow was pretty useless when I finished with it. I stuffed it under the bed, hoping my dad wouldn’t notice the crispy aroma of fried linen wafting in the night air. To make sure, though, I got out of bed and cranked open one of the industrial windows even though it was a chilly night.
I couldn’t sleep. After that, who could?
I locked myself in the bathroom and smoked a cigarette down to a small nub, my hands shaking. I kept expecting to spontaneously combust, but nothing that exciting happened. Finally, I crept out into the hall and visited the kitchen for some potholder mittens. I didn’t know if it would actually do any good, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.
I curled up under the covers, my mittened hands buried under me in an attempt to snuff out any unexpected nocturnal conflagrations.
Then I was able to sleep.
C H A P T E R F O U R
MONSTER MAGNET
1
Kevin’s list of ways to avoid the end of the world:
1. Clean up the environment.
2. Disarm all nuclear weapons, even those we “don’t” have.
3. Avoid all other Keepers at all cos
ts.
4. Start a hug-a-Kami campaign.
I sat at the desk in my room and went over each point with a highlighter. I figured the first two were doable. I just had to become a high-ranking military leader or the President of the United States, whichever came first. Number Three—not so much. According to Mr. Serizawa, Keepers had a weird magnetic attraction to each other, especially now that we were facing the end of days, which pretty much explained why Snowman was like American Express—everywhere I wanted to be. The Kami were actively seeking each other out now, which posed a bit of a problem. I mean, I couldn’t exactly run screaming from every person I met who had blue eyes, right? Right?
That left Number Four, and I just didn’t think the Kami were the cuddly types. And no, I wasn’t being serious with that last one, but I was starting to feel desperate.
“Kevin?” my dad’s voice rose up from below. “Where are you?”
“The same place I was an hour ago,” I shouted back, then realized Michelle could probably hear me. She’d set up her Notebook in her dad’s garage at just the right angle so I could tutor her in tuning up the Interceptor without actually being there.
I glanced at the screen of my laptop and realized she was presently “engaged,” as it were. “Yo mataria tu!” she barked, throwing down a wrench, which bounced off the cement floor. “Why is the cylinder head not moving?” she asked me with pitiful desperation, rubbing a smudge of grease across the bridge of her nose. “You said it would move!”
I looked over her work. “That’s because you’re trying to loosen the exhaust port.”
“Oh.” With a growl and a curse she turned back to the engine, giving the bike a swift kick.
“Kevin?” my dad shouted, “Do you know where the packaging tape is?”
I let my head drop onto my desk as if it had been decapitated. “The same place it was five minutes ago,” I shouted back to be heard over Blue Oyster Cult playing on my stereo. “The kitchen table.”
If you asked me what was worse, facing down a Kami from hell or dealing with my spazzed-out dad, my dad would win every time. There are some monsters even a Keeper can’t handle. In the days since the attack, he’d barely let me step outside the building to walk Groucho, even though I had tons of time on my hands now.
To quote Alice Cooper, school was out forever…or, at least, until the authorities could prove that no new monsters were going to pop up out of the ground unexpectedly—which was proving difficult. According to the news, the military was sweeping the sewer system, looking for any remnants of Qilin. I didn’t think they would find anything; Qilin was toxic slime, basically, and the New York sewers are full of toxic slime.
The no-school thing made everything worse, somehow, because it meant I had absolutely no escape from KTV, or my dad. In the end, I exiled myself to my room, with my stereo turned up on a classic rock station to drown out the incessant babble of KTV and just my laptop for company, while my dad worked frantically on getting our stuff packed up and getting the apartment in Anchorage.
Thank goodness for the web. Were it not for Michelle and Rex, I would have felt like I’d fallen down into a hole somewhere.
“I don’t suppose you could come over and look at the mess I’m making of this bike, could you?” Michelle pleaded with me. She put her hands on her hips. “I think the patient is dying.”
“The patient is not dying,” I told her. “You’re doing fine. And I’ll try to come over tonight, after my dad is done freaking, okay?”
Michelle’s face instantly lit up.
I felt a little bad about lying to Michelle. I had no idea if I’d be able to make our date or not, what with my dad in a whirlwind of preparations. At the rate he was going, he’d have the apartment by week’s end. That meant we’d be gone by next Monday. I didn’t know if I wanted to spend time with Michelle and Rex when I might never see them again.
I didn’t even know how I felt about that, exactly. On one hand, I was used to the whole lone-wolf routine—I’d grown up an only child, after all. And after my mom had died things had gotten really weird, with my dad sometimes spending days in bed under the covers, clutching her robe, while I was left to my own devices. I liked to think of myself as an island, but I’d gotten kind of used to having Michelle and her brother around, bugging me at school or on the Internet, proving there was an actual life beyond these four walls. Not that I was getting sentimental or BFF-ing or anything like that, because that would totally screw up my lone-wolf image.
I looked at the list I had scribbled and realized it was damned useless. Alaska was starting to look better and better, at this point. Better I leave now, I thought, when I could still cut my losses and not look back. Not to mention I was finding it somewhat frightening that I could get sentimental over kids I’d only known for a few weeks—that was definitely something old school Kevin would do, and I was totally removed from that crap now.
Fuck it, I thought. I was a total badass loner, always had been, always would be. I flipped down the screen, leaving Michelle to fight with the bike alone, turned off the stereo, and flopped back onto my bed, covering my eyes with my winged lion toy so the sun wouldn’t blind me. I listened to the faint morning sounds filtering through the closed window. Traffic on the street, distant sirens, a passing car radio broadcasting a Howard Stern show. Normal city things. Yet nothing was normal anymore.
Last Friday changed the city, the world. It had changed my family. Again.
Another move. A new school. New teachers to hate and new kids to avoid. A new room, with a different angle of sun to burn my eyes. I closed them and gritted my teeth until they ached. I wondered what Alaska was like. I imagined a tiny town floating out on an iceberg somewhere. No girls, no Internet or cable, and a lot of polar bears. Cripes, I might as well be dead. My dad would love it, though—peaceful, white, with no monsters.
Wait: not true. A lot of prehistoric monsters in the movies were frozen for millions of years in the ice of the far north before thawing out and going on a rampage, which didn’t bode well. But they would be getting a Keeper, wouldn’t they? Kevin Takahashi, Kaiju Hunter, at your service.
I got up and started dressing just for something to do, stumbling over some textbooks on the floor as I pulled on a fresh pair of jeans and found a T-shirt that didn’t smell. The sight of the books made me feel even more depressed, despite the fact that I hated school, the Cinnamonster, everything. I went to the window and opened it to let in some cold morning air and to clear my head. The sky was overcast, threatening rain, and there was a pre-winter chill that made my breath plume. Cars, cabs and the occasional tour bus moved leisurely up and down the street. Cabbies blared their horns as they competed for early-morning fairs, and a vendor stood out front on the sidewalk, selling bootleg T-shirts and Red Sox baseball caps. Strangely, the world was carrying on as if nothing had happened last Friday. New York was both brilliant and seemingly stupid that way. I wondered what our next place would be like.
“Kevin?” I heard my dad call from the kitchen. “I could use some help with these boxes.”
I rolled my eyes. I really needed to get out of here, at least for a little while. Picking up my leather riding jacket and my shades, I discreetly slipped down the backstairs and out the Fire Exit door.
2
The morning had warmed up by the time I reached the gates of The Evergreens Cemetery. Not much, though, and the spiky October air still cut through my jacket like needles as I rode Jennie down the quiet, tree-lined road that wound around a 150-year’s worth of granite headstones, marble statues and chipped, mossy mausoleums.
I didn’t know why I was here, only that the road had led me to this place.
The day before there had been a huge memorial service for the kids who had died in the club, but I hadn’t been there to see it, though I’d seen captions in all the major newspapers. I just couldn’t bring myself to join the other students in mourning. I don’t know, it just didn’t feel right, me being there, listening to eulogies from o
verwhelmed and probably hysterical parents, when I had so much to do with it all.
Maybe I hadn’t killed those kids, exactly, but the jury was still out on how much of the disaster was my fault. I mean, if Mr. Serizawa was right, then Qilin had been there at the club that night looking for me. Everyone else had been cannon fodder.
I just couldn’t do it, be there. Instead of attending the funeral yesterday, I’d retreated to the rooftop of the Red Panda. There I sat in a lawn chair despite the fifty-degree weather and watched the unchanging skyline as I smoked a whole pack of Newports down, something I’d never done before. It was my way of mourning, I guess. It was a good thing my dad didn’t keep booze or a lot of razor blades around. Who knows what kind of trouble I might have gotten into. After I had chain-smoked the third cigarette, I learned I could light them by just pinching the tips. I’m one talented guy, didn’t you know?
Eventually Mr. Serizawa appeared on the rooftop to tend to the herbal plants he keeps in a miniature greenhouse up there. I ignored him, watching the sun slide down like a pat of butter behind the Empire State Building, though I did hear him say softly in passing, “Mago…how are you?”
“I’m great,” I answered him, staring at my yellow, nicotine-stained fingertips. “I call demons from hell, can light my own cigarettes without a Zippo, and I burst into flames whenever I get excited. I’m officially a unique person. However, I do plan on asking my dad for a Pyromex anti-flame suit for my next birthday.”
I don’t know if he picked up on my sarcasm or not. He didn’t say anything, just moved on with his little watering can like everything was peachy-keen. Have I mentioned that adults are clueless?
I snorted as I rode past old statues and worn-looking angels, their hands raised in supplication, the road curving toward the center of the cemetery. The new monument was easy enough to spot; I just looked for the largest collection of wreathes. I parked at the curb and slid my helmet off, hanging it on the handlebars. I noticed a black-clad girl with a bouquet of lilies standing by the granite memorial wall like a shadowy angel of death, her clothes whipping against her body in the sudden high October gales. The rain hadn’t broken yet, but the wind was knocking the dry yellow leaves off the trees above, and I watched them seesaw lazily down around her.
Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) Page 9
