Elemental Origins: The Complete Series

by A. L. Knorr

  "Certainly." He nodded. "Do you have a pattern you'd like me to use?"

  I shook my head. "Could you work from a drawing? It is not a complicated design."

  "If your drawing is good." He turned and pulled down several bolts of black fabric. Laying them across the counter he said, "These are all silk." He produced a box from beneath the countertop and opened it, displaying several spools of thread.

  I fingered the fabrics, choosing the thinnest and lightest one.

  "That is beautiful silk from China," he said. "It is very delicate, but also strong."

  "The lighter the better." I peered into the box of threads. "The thread needs to be one hundred percent silk, too. Which ones of these are silk?"

  "Oh." He paused and tapped his chin thoughtfully with a finger. "One minute."

  He disappeared behind the curtain and I heard more murmured voices. He reappeared carrying a smaller wooden box. Putting the other one away, he opened the older looking trunk. He took a pair of spectacles from his pocket and searched the jumble of half-empty spools of thread. He retrieved one and perched the glasses on the end of his nose to read the tiny words on the bottom of the spool. "Yes. One hundred percent silk," he said, and handed it to me.

  I held it in the light. "Perfect."

  He nodded and put the remaining fabrics and spools of thread aside. He rolled open the bolt I had chosen and pulled a notebook out and lay it on top. "For the design," he said, handing me a pencil. He patted his chest pocket. "Where did I put my tape measure—"

  I began to draw the simple robe, including the pocket and the little slippers. The man disappeared again and reappeared with a soft, flexible tape. He peered at my drawing and nodded, satisfied. "Very simple. I have made something similar before," he said, "only longer. I've not done these before." He pointed to the slippers. "You need these done in silk as well?"

  "Yes, one hundred percent."

  He frowned. "They will not last."

  "That's okay," I said. “They don’t need to—”

  I was interrupted when a second man appeared from behind the curtain to watch us talk. My mind skipped a cog when I saw the edges of a tattoo peeking out from under his collar. He was broader and younger than the tailor. He didn't say anything, just watched me through uninterested eyes.

  "Um," I scrambled for my train of thought, "the slippers don't need to be sturdy, either. They are mostly for ceremonial purposes." I cleared my throat nervously.

  "All right," the tailor said, "if that's what you want." He gestured to a low stool against the wall behind the front entrance. "Step up here, please, and I'll take your measurements. It is for you, I presume?"

  I nodded. I stepped up and held my arms out patiently while he measured me, jotting everything down in his notebook. I tried hard not to let the other man's eyes unnerve me, but after the events of the night before, it wasn't easy. Who was this fellow, and why was he just watching the tailor work? Was he yakuza, or was the ink barely visible at the edge of his collar just a regular tattoo?

  "How much time do you need?" I asked as the tailor finished my measurements.

  "A week should do it," he said.

  My heart sank as I stepped down from the stool. "There is no way it could be done faster?" If Daichi happened to arrive tomorrow or the next day, I didn't want to have to be in Tottori any longer than was necessary.

  He frowned. "It is an emergency?"

  "I would pay a little extra to have it in a few days," I said.

  The younger man crossed his arms over his chest, his fingers were adorned with many rings. It wasn't the rings that made my heart stop. He was missing the ends of both of his pinkie fingers. He was yakuza. I comforted myself by thinking that if he knew Raiden, he wouldn't be here, he would be at the fortress with the rest of his brothers. He must be from a different group.

  "Very well," the tailor said. "I have access to a few seamstresses. But any sooner than four days is impossible."

  I nodded. "Thank you."

  He took my cell number and the address of my hotel in case he had questions, and I gave him a down payment of half.

  The younger man watched the entire transaction, never taking his eyes off me. I had sweated through my shirt by the time we concluded our business. I left the shop in a hurry.

  Chapter 19

  I took the train to Furano and stepped off onto the streets of a town I no longer recognized, the town of my youth. Even the shape of the earth under the town had changed. What hadn't changed was the smell of the sea air and the humidity that softened my skin and made my hair feel cool and damp.

  I walked the sidewalk of the main street, taking in buildings and homes that had been erected after I'd left. People bustled past me, talking on cell phones, carrying bags and backpacks, all of them walking somewhere with purpose.

  My childhood home had been beyond the end of a street that had backed onto a forest, and beyond that, the sea. Multiple trails had led from our yard into the woods. Aimi and I had been able to take our pick. Up to the cliffs, down to the ocean, into the woods, toward the gorge. But now?

  I walked slowly, my eyes scanning for some sign of my previous home. There was no indication that my family had ever lived here. Narrow bungalows and apartment buildings, one after the other with a mere few feet between them, spread out before me as far as I could see.

  I wandered off the sidewalk and toward a park. It was the first green space I had seen and it bordered a soccer field. Kids kicked a ball around on the field in a chaotic match. More children watched from the stands or played on the swings and playground equipment. I wandered to the stands and took a seat on the warm wooden bench.

  I was still watching the kids play when an enormous shadow passed overhead. It was so large I looked up, expecting a low-flying zeppelin. It was too dark and its edges too abrupt to be a cloud. It was also fast-moving. But there was nothing in the sky. My gaze snapped back to the soccer field where the dark shape was still visible. My eyes narrowed and I stood up in the stands. I got up and climbed to the highest seat. None of the kids I passed seemed to have noticed anything strange. I squinted at the shadow as it moved over the field.

  My breath caught in my throat. It was the shape of a bird. I looked up again but there was no bird to be seen. All of the hair on my forearms and scalp stood at attention. The shape swept across the green, the span of its wings now visible to me. My jaw went slack. The wingspan covered the entire soccer field, the tips falling across houses and treetops that lined the borders on either side of the park. It glided on until it was out of sight.

  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 sm
all 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.

  Chapter 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 c
hewing 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."