Seven Deadly Shadows

by Courtney Alameda

  “Let’s talk to him,” I say, walking toward the bridge without a plan.

  “Wait, Kira!” Shiro says, grabbing for my wrist. He misses. I step onto the bridge, and its wooden planks shiver beneath my feet. The shinigami lifts his hands. The boy wobbles, stumbling closer to the water’s edge. He’s so small, no more than three or four years old.

  “Excuse me?” I ask the shinigami. “Sir?”

  The shinigami’s gaze snaps to me.

  He drops his hands.

  I release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.

  The boy’s mother calls his name, and he toddles away from the river’s flank. My relief slips out of me on a sigh. The shinigami’s lip curls.

  “How are you able to see me, girl?” He spits the word girl as if it’s made of poison.

  I bow deeply. “My name is Kira Fujikawa. This is the kitsune guardian of the Fujikawa Shrine, Shiro Okamoto,” I say, gesturing at Shiro, who has managed to catch up to me. “We’re on an errand from Lady Katayama—”

  “Ha, as if I’d help Lady Katayama in her foolish quest to become queen of Yomi,” he says, turning away. His butterflies swirl around him in a tornado of silver. “Get out of my sight.”

  O-bei wants to be queen of Yomi? I pause for a second, exchanging a glance with Shiro. This wasn’t information O-bei had offered to me herself; and it makes me wonder how much of a pawn I’ve become in this game of yokai.

  Either way, someone still needs to stop Shuten-doji. I can’t do it alone.

  “Please, sir,” I say, starting after him. “My family’s shrine was attacked two nights ago. If we can’t find help from a few shinigami, we will not be able to defeat Shuten-doji, and the world will—”

  He whirls on me, murder in his slate-gray eyes. “Do you think I would stoop to help a human?” He spits on the ground. “Betray my own people to serve a mortal’s interests? Leave, before I decide you’d look better as a butterfly.”

  Both Shiro and I bow again. When I rise, I watch him walk away, his patent-leather shoes striking the bridge’s planks like gunshots. Oni-chan jumps up onto the bridge bannister, twitching his tails and shooting a judgmental glare at the shinigami’s back.

  “Did you know your mother wants to be queen of Yomi?” I ask Shiro without looking at him.

  Shiro sighs.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” I say, watching the little boy skip across the grass with his mother. Oni-chan begins washing his face, apparently unconcerned with our failure. “Will O-bei be a better queen than Shuten-doji is king?”

  “I suppose she might be.” Shiro’s ears slant at forty-five-degree angles.

  I’m not comfortable with the question mark in his tone, but addressing it now will only distract us from our goal—recruiting shinigami. I don’t know enough about the politics of Yomi to know whether helping O-bei is a mistake; for now, I file the information away to ask Shiro about later.

  “Fine,” I say to him, knowing our situation is anything but fine.

  We make our way to the Meiji Shrine slowly, searching the entirety of Yoyogi Park. By the time the sun touches the horizon, we’ve been rejected by three more shinigami: an old woman carrying butterflies on her parasol, a fashionable girl who wears her souls strung in a necklace, their wings struggling for purchase against her silken blouse; and a round-bellied, red-faced man whose brown moths tremble as he shouts at us. For every thousand human souls I see, at least one shinigami hovers on the edge of our spaces, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. But none of the shinigami want anything to do with humans, outside killing them. And nobody wants to work with O-bei Katayama.

  Nobody.

  The shadows stick to our shoes as we stroll into the park’s dense forests, headed for the shrine. Darkness falls over the forest floor. The treetops make black blots against the sky. Every few yards, I spot another massive spiderweb hanging between the trees, each spun by a jorō spider the size of my thumb. The last of the light limns the delicate fibers of their webs, making them glitter like gold. I’m not certain whether the phenomenon is natural or supernatural.

  “We need to hurry,” Shiro says, looking at the spiderwebs. The tone of his voice tells me he’s trying to sound casual and failing. “Something’s not quite right about this place—”

  A song curls under the park’s ambient noise, one I hear with my soul, not with my ears.

  “Kagome, Kagome . . .”

  The small hairs at the back of my neck rile. Shiro lifts his head and scents the air, cursing under his breath. I scan the area, looking to see if any yokai lurk in the shadows of the park’s massive trees. I see nothing. No one. Even the pedestrians on the path have disappeared. My bracelet remains cold against my wrist, the one consolation.

  “Shuten-doji’s spies must have followed us,” I whisper.

  Shiro puts a hand on my lower back. “Word gets around fast in Tokyo.”

  “Where’s Oni-chan?” I whisper, looking around. The little demon cat appears to have faded into the shadows, for he’s no longer at my feet. “Oni-chan?” I whisper. “Oni-chan!”

  Shiro growls. “Of course he wanders off the minute we need him—”

  The song lifts again, closer now. “Circle you, circle you . . .” The tune crushes salt into the wounds in my heart, and I shudder at the fiery sensation that sears through my chest.

  “Do you know where the Meiji Shrine is from here?” I whisper to Shiro.

  “No, but I think I can sense where it lies,” he says, pushing his bangs out of his face. “C’mon!”

  We run. The asphalt path stretches and ducks through the shadowy forest, with no end in sight. We run till my heart burns and my lungs feel like they’re going to pop like balloons. We run till the shadows fill in the spaces between the trees. Till my legs feel like they can’t take another step. Till the soles of my feet ache.

  A torii gate comes into view, standing like a sentinel against the growing darkness. It towers over the path, and the golden medallions on its lintel glow like cats’ eyes.

  Shadows congregate beneath the gate, swirling around a young woman in a crimson furisode. Her footsteps make no sound, and while everything about her appears human, there’s a certain sort of wrongness about her that sets my teeth on edge. Maybe it’s the infant wail carried on the wind, or maybe it’s the strange way the lower half of her kimono moves, almost as if something beats the fabric’s insides with tiny fists. Her face seems to be almost . . . fluted.

  No, not fluted. The creases running up and down her flat, ovular face aren’t slits at all, but eyes. Eight of them, all shaped like pea pods and glowing like tiny stoplights in the dark.

  She’s a jorōgumo. And she’s blocking the only path to the Meiji Shrine.

  Shiro and I halt.

  “What do you want?” I shout at her.

  The woman smiles as she advances, revealing several rows of jagged teeth. “The Master has heard there are flies who wish to challenge his authority,” she says. Her voice is more hiss than hum. “We have come to end your insurrection before it can begin.”

  Other yokai women emerge from the shadows around us, their alabaster faces glimmering with hellish light. I turn, watching them multiply: two becomes four, then four becomes six. They wear furisode in a rainbow of pain, reds and blues, purples and blacks. One wears silk in the off-white color of broken bones; another, the seeping yellow of pus. I’m drawn to and repulsed by them in equal measures.

  “You serve Shuten-doji?” Shiro asks.

  “Yessss.” The affirmation comes in stereo, echoing from the many mouths around us. The sound worms under my skin and chews its way into the seat of my spine.

  “Then you are the ones guilty of insurrection,” Shiro says. “And your master should fear the retribution of Amaterasu-omikami for his insolence.”

  The jorōgumo snicker, their voices winding around Shiro and me like a dense web. Words like stupid little kitsune and light-dwellers and fools reach into my ears. Their derision sticks to my sk
in, heavy and wet. They step forward, circling us tighter.

  “My Lord and Master has come to liberate my people from the tyranny of the light.” The red jorōgumo throws off her furisode, gaining height as her glamour falls away. She’s naked beneath and human only to the waist—she dances nimbly on eight spindly, sleek spider legs. Her white flesh quivers in the low light. Muscular. Strong. These yokai are different from the ones that attacked the shrine, more evolved, more poised.

  More powerful.

  Fear laces every muscle in my body, making them tighten and clench. My brain’s shouting move! at me, but flight isn’t an option. The trees around us wink with endless glittering, ruby eyes. It’s impossible to tell how many jorōgumo lurk in the woods; but we’d never be able to outrun them all.

  Either we fight, or we die trying.

  “Your day, light-dweller,” the red jorōgumo says, lifting her clawed hands as she stalks toward us, “is over.”

  But just as she lunges toward us, a high-pitched scream echoes from somewhere beyond the tree line. Shiro throws a protective arm in front of me. As the sound gurgles and throttles, the jorōgumo halts and turns her slender head.

  “Yui?” the red jorōgumo asks, frowning. A susurrus answers from the forest, the sound of many voices whispering,

  Yui?

  Sister?

  Yui, where are you?

  She is no more.

  Can you feel it?

  Yui is no more.

  I turn my head, keeping track of the other yokai on the path—but they are not paying attention to me. They shudder on their spidery stilts, easing sideways, looking nervous. Shiro and I inch closer to each other. I wish the claws extending off Shiro’s fingertips were a comfort, but they look so small against an army of so many.

  “Yui! . . . Was that you?” the purple jorōgumo asks.

  A small object comes hurtling out of the trees. It slams into the red jorōgumo’s chest, leaving a fresh crimson smear of blood across her skin. She scuttles backward with a shriek, her gaze fastened to the basketball-shaped object on the ground.

  Wait . . .

  Is that hair?

  I stumble back before my mind makes full sense of the horror on the ground before me, this head without a body, ripped so savagely from her shoulders. The hellish glow has gone out of the jorōgumo’s eyes, and yet they still seem to stare up at me. Her mouth still rings around an unfinished scream. The white of her throat ends just a few inches under her chin, bits of shredded meat gleaming in the fading light.

  “No,” the first jorōgumo says, and the depth of the sadness in her voice surprises me. The jorōgumo lowers herself to retrieve her sister’s head, scooping it off the ground in both hands, tears flowing from the corners of all eight of her eyes. “What has happened to you?”

  As she stoops down, I spot eyes glowering in the bushes behind her. Each eye is as big as my fist. No, bigger. The left eye appears cloudy, as if injured once upon a time. One eye gleams yellow, the other blue.

  “Kira,” Shiro whispers, barely louder than an exhale, “when I say run, you run to the Meiji Shrine, do you understand?”

  I nod, but barely. He twists a single index finger around mine and squeezes as if to say, I’ll be right behind you.

  A growl guts the air. Before the jorōgumo can react, a massive cat leaps from the woods, slamming into the red jorōgumo. The two figures tumble forward, a flash of white fangs, singed, brindle-black fur, and spider legs. The creature’s claws run crimson red as they tear into the jorōgumo’s flesh. Her screams punch into my eardrums like sharpened pencils.

  Shiro shoves me toward the torii gate. “Go!”

  I can’t leave him. “But I—”

  The blue jorōgumo charges at me from my left, throwing off her kimono with a shriek. My fear has grown through my feet and rooted me to the ground.

  “Dammit, Kira!” Shiro says, pushing past me. He snaps his fingers, summoning a ball of fire that burns like a miniature sun. When he pushes his hands out in front of his torso, the ball follows his fingertips, floating overtop them. He moves his fingers in intricate patterns, and it looks like he’s tutting a spell. A spout of white-hot foxfire erupts off his fingertips, leaping toward the jorōgumo and catching fire on her skin. Each flame looks like a tiny foxtail.

  The jorōgumo burns as quick as tinder, the fire licking up her arms and back and catching in her hair. Her screams echo and snap as she tries to beat the flames down with her hands.

  Behind us, a roar cracks the asphalt underfoot. I clap my hands over my ears, but before I can turn around to see what’s behind me, Shiro grabs me by the upper arm.

  “Go. Now,” he says, his skin starting to glow with ethereal light.

  “Shiro—”

  “You can’t fight them, Kira! Just go!”

  Without another word, I turn and run through the first torii gate. Full dark has settled along the path. The heels of my boots strike the ground, loud as horses’ hooves. Behind me, screams and shrieks snap at each other’s throats like dogs. Up ahead, small lights twinkle like fireflies through the trees.

  You can’t fight, Kira.

  My eyes blur. I wipe my lower lids with the sleeve of my coat as I run.

  You. Can’t. Fight.

  A second, more formal torii gate sits at the end of the road, marking the entrance to the shrine grounds. And safety.

  Fifty feet from the torii gate.

  Then twenty.

  I don’t even hear her sneak up behind me.

  A loop of spider’s silk catches me around my torso. The leash snaps taut, yanking me off my feet. I slam into the ground. The breath gets skinned straight out of me. I try to wiggle free, but manage only to get more of the silky stuff stuck to my jacket.

  As I struggle, someone chuckles at me. I roll onto my side, only to see the jorōgumo in the yellow furisode walking toward me. Thousands of jorō spiders crawl out of the forest foliage, until the very ground seems to undulate on their black-and-yellow backs.

  Everything inside me collapses. Not like this, I tell myself, watching the small spiders form a sea of glittering eyes and twitching legs around me. My bracelet burns with fire as they draw closer.

  The yellow jorōgumo limps toward me. Splatters of blood cover her face and torso, and there are long gashes in her left side. She pauses a few yards away, giving her lasso a rough, cruel tug. The spider silk tightens around my body till I can barely breathe.

  “My sisters are dying because of you, girl,” she says with a hiss. The jorō spiders advance. One crawls up my shoe and onto the flesh of my calf. I kick it off, but two take its place, crawling over my boots, up my thighs, over my abdomen, and inside my jacket. I shriek as the first set of fangs tears past my tights and into the flesh of my leg.

  The yellow jorōgumo gives the lasso another yank. “For that, my children will devour you slowly, bit by agonizing bit.”

  Another jorō spider sinks its fangs into my ankle. I bite my tongue, not willing to give this demon the pleasure of hearing me whimper. It is harder to ignore the spider that nips my abdomen, and I squeeze my eyes shut to handle the pain.

  Just a little closer . . . , I think, shaking my head to dislodge the spiders crawling over my cheek.

  “My, my,” the jorōgumo says, easing another step forward, letting her guard down, “you are a proud one, aren’t you—”

  Before she can strike, a shadow drops from the trees with a great whoosh. A glint races through the spider-woman, slicing through her from the crown of her head to the bottom of her thorax. Slowly, the bisected parts of the demon shift and open like two gory petals. The monster’s viscera hit the ground with a wet slap. The little spiders scatter, disappearing into the shadows as fast as they came.

  A man in white lands a few feet away, dark blood dripping off the edge of his sword. His hat tumbles down after him, revealing two white fox ears sticking out of his long, silvery hair. Nine bushy white foxtails cascade from his backside.

  He turns.


  It’s Goro.

  Eleven

  Yoyogi Park, Meiji Shrine

  Tokyo, Japan

  “What are you doing here, Kira?” Goro asks as he cuts my spider-silk bonds off me. He helps me to my feet. “Your mother said you’d come to Tokyo, but you should be at home, behind the protective wards I wove into your parents’ house!”

  “Protective wards can’t help me now,” I say, my voice trembling. “Didn’t you hear . . . about . . . ?”

  Grandfather.

  Just thinking the word triggers a sob in my gut. It hits my lungs, rising through my chest like a tsunami. I throw myself into Goro’s arms, overwhelmed by the swell of emotion. He hugs me back, his embrace so fierce it’s almost as if Grandfather himself is here. Almost, but not quite.

  Goro puts a hand on the crown of my head. “I know. The Grandmaster phoned this morning.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say through my tears. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t save him.”

  “Don’t be,” Goro chides me gently, releasing me to arm’s length and taking my shoulders in both hands. “I knew Hiiro better than anyone, and he would have been happy to trade his life for yours. And if there is a blood moon on the rise, not even I could have stopped Shuten-doji’s beasts. Do you understand?”

  “I know, but—”

  “No buts,” Goro says. “There is nothing you could have done, not as you are. If you want to survive the blood moon, you will need to become better, hmm? Stronger than me, stronger than your grandfather. You must prepare for a future that honors Hiiro’s sacrifice.”

  I sniffle, then manage a short bow.

  “Kira!” Shiro jogs down the path, drawing our attention. A regular-size Oni-chan runs beside him. Shiro spots the oozing jorōgumo corpse on the ground and halts, his attention snapping to Goro and me.

  “Thank you, Goro-sama,” Shiro says with a bow. “I regret that my failure to protect Kira forced you to intervene on her behalf.”

  “Nonsense, young kit,” Goro says with a smile. “That’s the most action these old bones have seen in decades. Come. I will have my acolytes deal with the mess we’ve left. The three of us have much to discuss. But”—Goro points to Oni-chan—“you will have to wait outside, nekomata. I’m sure you understand.”