Seven Deadly Shadows

by Courtney Alameda

Before Shiro can answer, the connective tissue between the train cars splits open. Light stabs through the wounds. A torrent of white silk moths spills inside, their wings beating against the train car’s glass doors. My mouth falls open.

  “Go!” Shiro shouts at the other passengers. “Just go!”

  The others flee as the glass doors shatter inward. The moths flurry through the car like snow, rushing toward us. Soft, fuzzy bodies slam into me, chalking up the air and making it harder to breathe. I hold my hands up to block my face. Someone shoves me backward, toward the window, and I nearly trip over an armrest. The other passengers shriek, fleeing out the other side of the car to safety.

  Goro speaks a single word in a language I don’t recognize. A shock wave slams into the train car, shoving the moths away from us. They scatter like autumn leaves, driven forth by strong winds.

  Metal whistles through the air, its screech halted by a sharp clap. I look up, barely able to see Goro standing several feet down the aisle from me, the blade of a katana stoppered between his palms.

  A woman in a white kimono wields the sword.

  No, she’s not a woman, she’s a shinigami. One with more butterflies than any death god I saw in Tokyo. Her hair’s done up in a simple chignon. Her beauty is like the edge of a sharp sword—best appreciated from a distance.

  Shiro pushes me behind him, putting his body between me and the shinigami’s blade. Oni-chan growls at my feet. He sinks his claws into the crate walls, making it buck and rattle. Ronin steps into the aisle behind this new intruder, one hand on his sheathed sword.

  “Stand aside,” she says. “My orders are to kill the girl.” Her gaze hits me like a blade between the ribs. I try to gasp, but I can’t suck the air in. My lungs feel like they’ve popped in my chest.

  “Who are you?” Goro asks. “I know most of the shinigami in Yomi, but I’ve never seen your face before.”

  The Shinigami in White narrows her eyes. “It doesn’t matter who I am.”

  “I disagree,” Goro says. “For I’ve heard stories of a shinigami who serves Shuten-doji as an assassin, one who dresses in white so that the blood of her victims may stain her garb. It is said she keeps every kimono.”

  One corner of the Shinigami in White’s lips twitches upward. “Do they also say that she displays the patterns from her favorite kills in her home?”

  “No,” Goro says, returning her wicked smile with a grimace. “But I’d believe it.”

  “You are surrounded, lady.” Ronin draws his sword. “The only blood that will be staining your kimono today is your own.”

  “Is that so?” the Shinigami in White says with a short laugh. She lifts a hand, beckoning to the moths that cover almost every nearby surface in the train car. They beat their wings and rise. “Let’s see you try to land an attack on me, child.”

  Her moths envelop her in a cyclone, and then explode outward in a swift-moving cloud. Blades clang. Goro swears, then grunts in pain. Shiro scrambles into the aisle, shouting, “No!”

  I drop between the seats. As the moths thunder overhead, I reach down and open Oni-chan’s crate door. The cat darts out with a yowl. To my right, the sounds of a struggle reach through the drumming wings. Another shout rocks the train car, clearing the moths from the air; but this time, the voice belongs to the Shinigami in White. I rise, white moth dust speckling my shoulders and everything else in the car. My allies are cocooned in pill-shaped, silken white sacs. One sac writhes on the floor in front of the Shinigami in White. Hands press against the springy wall, from the inside, and I swear I hear Shiro shouting, “Run, Kira!”

  And go where? I ask him in my head, easing back as the Shinigami in White turns toward me. There isn’t anywhere to run on a train!

  I scramble to remember the spells Shiro taught me, but all I can think about is the shinigami’s katana plunging into my gut, or feeling my heart stop beating around that blade. Fear scatters everything I’ve learned to the dark corners of my brain.

  The Shinigami in White now wears three deep scratches on one cheek. They ooze droplets of black-red blood, each making a little rosette on the shoulder of her white kimono. “You little beasts have caused more trouble than you’re worth,” she says, narrowing her eyes. She brings her blade level to my chest. “Stand still, now, if you want to die without pain. Even my precision has its limits . . . as does my patience.”

  She tenses for an attack, but just before she springs, her eyes grow wide. The reflection of a massive cat ripples across the train’s tinted windows.

  Even I flinch when Oni-chan roars, the sound exploding through the car as if it were a drum struck by one of the gods. The Shinigami in White takes a step back.

  It’s just the distraction I need.

  Memory surges through me. Dropping down to one knee, I tut the symbol for Rin. All my pent-up fear roils, bubbling over into my heart and making my fingertips tingle. I shove my hands forward. Fire explodes off my palms, tearing through the air in the form of crimson flames. Heat billows against my face. The moths burn, and if I weren’t so shocked, I’d marvel at them twirling through the air on cinder-edged wings. The flames chew through the cocoons that hold Shiro, Goro, and Ronin.

  Gray ash and black smoke linger in the flames’ wake.

  “Whoa,” I say, turning my palm over, marveling at my unblemished, unbroken flesh. My hand pulses with heat, several degrees hotter than the rest of my body, as if my blood’s turned to napalm. That was . . . that was so . . . whoa.

  The Shinigami in White straightens. Smoke stains her kimono. “They said you are a clever girl,” she says, lifting her blade. “But not clever enough—”

  Shiro grips the Shinigami in White’s throat with clawed fingertips. Rubies of blood appear at each pressure point. “Drop it,” he growls. “Or we’ll see how much blood I can get on your kimono.”

  The Shinigami in White sneers. “As if you could ever best me, boy.”

  She hisses a spell and bursts into a cloud of moths, disappearing through the train’s broken window.

  “Dammit!” Shiro says, turning to slash a nearby headrest with his claws. Stuffing leaks out of the tears in the fabric. His chest heaves with each wave of his fury.

  “Well, everyone’s alive,” Goro says with a sigh, picking moth silk off his clothing. Oni-chan, now back to his regular size, leaps up onto the back of one of the seats. He begins washing his face with a paw. “I suppose we’ll call that a victory for now.”

  “But what about the train?” I ask, gathering Oni-chan into my arms. He turns into putty, but still twitches his tail as if annoyed. Everything is charred, blackened, burned; my allies, at least, look only a little singed.

  “We’ll blame the damage to the train on a gas leak,” Ronin says. “Or some equally dull mortal fear.”

  I shake my head, incredulous. “But there aren’t any gas lines aboard this train—”

  “It won’t matter,” Ronin says, sliding his katana back into its sheath. “Mortals will believe anything I wish them to believe.”

  Oni-chan hisses at me as I ease him back into his crate. After everything I’ve done for you? he seems to say.

  It’s going to be a long ride to Kyoto.

  Fourteen

  Kyoto Train Station

  Kyoto, Japan

  I step off the shinkansen train in Kyoto, anxiety rising. I have faced demons, death gods, and more danger than I ever could have dreamed of surviving—but none of it terrifies me as much as the prospect of my parents’ wrath.

  “On a scale of one to ten,” Shiro says, hopping onto the platform after me, “how pissed are your parents going to be today?”

  I doubt numbers could describe my parents’ ire. Their fury won’t be like a firework, but more like an asteroid plummeting to Earth, one that slams into the surface and chokes the atmosphere with dust. Their anger will linger long after the brightest parts of it have burned out, as will their shame. It couldn’t have been comfortable for them to explain my disappearance to the authorities,
my teachers, their friends, or the rest of our family. And while Goro’s intervention may have bought me some time, it did not buy me their forgiveness.

  “My parents are very traditional, and very conservative,” I say, setting Oni-chan’s crate down on the ground as we wait for Goro and Ronin to disembark. “From their perspective, it looks like their daughter ran off to Tokyo with a boy.”

  “I’m not a boy. I’m a kitsune shrine guardian,” Shiro says with a sniff.

  “They don’t know that,” I say.

  Ronin steps off the train with a short laugh. “And can you really call yourself a kitsune, brother, when you’ve yet to earn your first tail?”

  “I’d rather be tailless than dead,” Shiro fires back, snatching Oni-chan’s crate off the ground.

  As Goro joins us on the platform, he sighs. “You are both fools, hmm? What is done is done, and arguing about it won’t help matters.”

  Ronin turns away from us. “I’ve made reservations at the Nishiyama Ryokan. Have my things delivered there, won’t you?”

  With that, he disappears into the crowds on the platform.

  “By the gods, I hate him sometimes,” Shiro says. Oni-chan growls in his crate. I’m not sure if the little demon agrees with Shiro or if he’s just hungry. I’m betting on the latter. It’s always the latter with him.

  As we exit the terminal, my nerves balloon. A thousand different conversations cascade through my head, each one of them ending in embarrassment and humiliation for me. And the look on my mother’s face does nothing to help my confidence.

  “That’s them right there,” Shiro says, recognizing my parents from across the station. He waves, then falters. “Your mom looks, er . . . happy to see you.”

  My parents wait in the station’s entryway, backlit by the chilly sunlight outside. Mother’s lips move, but the space between us swallows up the sound. Now Father turns his head and spots me. He looks even less pleased. Both are dressed for a government function—Father in a conservative black suit and Mother in a gray kimono with a pale pink obi. Mother’s formal manner of dress tells me exactly what kind of government function it was—important. Which means I’m interrupting something. Perhaps there were memorials held in Grandfather’s honor today, many of which I will have missed.

  Great.

  My parents take me straight home, where I endure their interrogations first, then the police’s. I doubt I helped the case much: like Ami, I told the police that Grandfather hid my sister and me in the small shrine’s cellar. We saw nothing and heard only screaming. Like Ami, I lied.

  But what am I supposed to say? That my family’s shrine was desecrated by demons hell-bent on obtaining the last shard of a legendary sword? That my grandfather was murdered by a demon lieutenant of Shuten-doji? That I’m currently recruiting death gods to try to save my family’s shrine? No. Even after everything I’ve endured, those answers sound improbable even to me.

  Once the police are gone, Mother’s mood teeter-totters. She’s usually so reserved with me—she only hugs Ami and keeps her kind words for Ichigo—but twice now, she’s reached for my hand, seemed to remember herself then and withdrawn it. Nothing hurts worse than the promise of love, retracted. My mother has never loved me the way she loves her other children.

  We don’t argue until I ask to stay at the shrine until the new year.

  Father turns to look at me, expressionless. He makes a dark silhouette while standing near the garden windows, keeping his hands clasped behind his back. Mother and I kneel on cushions around the chabudai—a short-legged table used for dining, working, or studying. She shifts her weight, and the lines in her brow deepen. She looks at my father before she says: “I don’t think that’s wise.”

  It’s a polite way of saying absolutely not.

  “There should always be a Fujikawa at the family shrine,” I say, wishing I could tell them my real reasons for wanting to stay there. The yokai have attacked me three times now—if I live at home, I worry my family could become targets, no matter how many magical wards protect the house. Instead of saying these things, I insist, “It’s tradition.”

  “I’m not sure you can handle the responsibility, Kira,” Mother says, lifting her chin. “When you went to Tokyo on ‘shrine business,’ you left me with the odious task of explaining your disappearance to the authorities and your school. I know you wanted to grieve, but running to Goro-san was not the answer.”

  “You embarrassed your mother and me,” Father says, his attention trained on the gardens outside. An unspoken warning again lingers in his tone.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, performing a polite bow to my mother. Shame hooks into my back and tugs downward, making my shoulder blades ache. “I didn’t intend to make you worry, or to embarrass you or Father. I only wanted to do what was right, and to honor Grandfather’s memory.”

  “And yet you were not here for his wake.” Father scoffs, shaking his head. “This is why I did not want her spending so much time with your father, Midori. The man has filled her head with folklore, rather than facts and figures.”

  “Grandfather taught me Shinto, not folklore,” I say, balling my hands in my lap. It’s hard to keep my tone even, especially in the face of Father’s dispassion for the family shrine. He will never understand what the shrine means to me, even if he is family; Father doesn’t want to understand.

  Mother purses her lips, casting her gaze to the floor. The tension tightens between us, so taut I could almost reach out and pluck the air like a shamisen string. Mother used to be a priestess at the Fujikawa Shrine. Grandfather required my father to take her family name when they married. Mother was an only child, and Grandfather insisted that the shrine remain in the Fujikawa family. From my grandparents’ stories, I know Mother left the shrine days after I was born. Nobody will tell me why. Nobody wants to discuss the events that turned me into my parents’ cursed child, an outcast in my own home.

  The only place I have ever felt comfortable is the Fujikawa Shrine. I intend to return there, and to stay there.

  I rise from the chabudai table, step back, and kneel in seiza position. I place my hands on the floor, making a triangle with my thumbs and forefingers, and bow forward. Custom requires I hold the bow for the space of two blinks, then straighten gracefully.

  When I sit up, I meet my mother’s gaze. “Mother, allow me to honor our family’s past by preserving our shrine for the future.”

  This time, Mother doesn’t look to Father—this choice belongs to her. I suspect she knows I’m lying about the attack on the shrine, my trip to Tokyo, Goro, all of it; there’s a glimmer of regret in the deep, black mirrors of her eyes. I’ve lived with this woman for the sixteen years of my life, and yet my mother has always been a mystery to me.

  Seconds pass. Mother inclines her head in a nod. “Very well. You may stay at the Fujikawa Shrine through the end of the year, so long as you maintain your grades and do not shame your father and me any further. You are to listen to Goro and respect him as you would me. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, Mother,” I say, bowing again. My hair slides forward, hiding my smile.

  “Good,” she says, rising from her seat.

  Both my parents leave the room without another word.

  I don’t arrive at the Fujikawa Shrine until late in the afternoon.

  The torii gate at the bottom of the shrine steps leans to one side, its hashira poles propped up with wooden bolsters. Shadows curl against the stairs. I shiver as the temperature plunges. While the trees that line the shrine’s steps are evergreen, I can see the tops of the shrine’s maples, their bare, skeletal fingers reaching toward the sky.

  Part of me doesn’t want to climb these stone steps. I’m not ready to see the rest of the destruction, not yet. So many memories linger in this place: brilliant festival days, when people from all over the city would come to watch me dance; serene moon-viewing parties and sunsets spent with Grandfather; the gentle smiles of the other miko; quiet afternoons spent sweeping the cobblestone
s; and the gentle laughter of children, feeding the koi in our ponds with their parents.

  I can’t let one nightmare ruin a lifetime of good memories. But today, I’m already weary straight down to the depths of my soul. I spent the better part of the afternoon getting scolded, then ignored by my parents. While I don’t blame them for being angry with me—I shamed and terrified them by running away—I wish we could have spent one moment together, honoring Grandfather at the family kamidana. Grandfather deserved at least that much from us.

  I pluck a piece of blue-and-white police tape out of the bushes near the torii gate. With a growl, Oni-chan leaps out, startling me. He jumps up to try to catch the tape in his claws. I dangle it for him, laughing as he wiggles his rear end and springs. He snatches the tape away.

  “How are you able to walk on shrine grounds, little demon?” I ask him. He cocks his head at me, and then I remember that this ground is no longer sacred. Under my current plan, the shrine won’t be rededicated until the last day of December, in a special oharae ceremony that will purify this place.

  That is, of course, assuming any of us survive that long.

  Still carrying the tape in his mouth, Oni-chan bounds up a few of the shrine steps and stops, looking back at me as if to say, Aren’t you coming?

  With a small smile, I start up the stone steps. My suitcase wheels bang on each ledge, useless. Oni-chan trots ahead of me, flicking his dual tails.

  As the shrine comes into view, my spirit dims. Silvery webs still cover half the buildings, making it seem like the gods have stretched a funerary shroud over the main hall. The verandas are curtained off by sheets of leaves caught in cascading webs. Spongy green scum covers the pond, and a thick layer of leaves rests atop the cobblestones. Shadows gather in the courtyards, and I wonder what might be watching me in the growing darkness.

  I expected the destruction, even braced myself for it—but nothing could truly prepare me to face the wounds my enemies left on my home.

  I am surprised, however, to see buildings framed in neat steel scaffolds. A massive dumpster sits in one of the courtyards, full to the brim with the shrine’s broken bones. Someone has started reconstruction, and from the looks of it, they’ve been at it for several days now. Perhaps O-bei Katayama intends to keep her promises and will make restitution for her crimes.