Seven Deadly Shadows

by Courtney Alameda

  Yuza coughs, then gazes up at the shinigami. “Fools . . . my master . . . will find me . . .”

  “You’re quite welcome,” Heihachi says, cupping his struggling moth in both hands. He rises, wavers, and allows Shimada to brace him for a moment. Roji places a hand on his lower back, brows knotted. Heihachi looks like he might collapse without their support.

  “What did you do to her?” Shimada asks.

  “I drew out as much of her pain as I could bear,” Heihachi says, opening his palms. His little moth, Sana, flutters up and tucks herself inside his collar. “Not all power comes from a sword, Shimada-san.”

  “Neither does all death,” Shimada replies.

  Heihachi says nothing to this, but bobs his head in a short, tired bow.

  Shiro and I move aside, giving Shimada and Roji the space they need to escort Heihachi from the cellar. Exhausted, Heihachi drags his feet, kicking up dust and exposing a small, white object near the bottom of the steps.

  I cross the cellar, wondering what lies in the dust.

  “I want Yuza guarded constantly,” O-bei says behind me. “If not by one of you two, then by Minami.”

  “That’s a lot of work,” Shiro says, rubbing the back of his neck with his palm. “Especially when Kira and I still have shinigami to recruit.”

  “Surely you can dedicate a mere eight hours a day, brother,” Ronin says. “After all, what else is a tailless kitsune good for?”

  As the brothers bicker, I kneel by the stairs and pluck a bit of folded paper from the ground. I dust it off, and my heart sinks. It’s the shikigami fox. Its bloodstains have dried to brown, its edges now blunted. I rise. Any malevolence it once had is gone now, but I’m going to burn it all the same. No magic, either. Just me and a match, simple physics, and some ash.

  I turn to leave, but Ronin calls me back: “Kira, wait—can we talk?”

  My hand tightens around the shikigami, crushing it in my palm. I pause and turn, feeling the weight of the room’s attention on me. O-bei, Ronin, and Shiro make a strange family, two death gods and a kitsune. Yuza now leans against the wall, her face hidden by her hair, and sleeps.

  Ronin steps forward. Shiro moves to intercept him, placing a hand on his chest. The brothers glare at each other, but Ronin eases back.

  “May I apologize?” Ronin asks, breaking his brother’s gaze first. I’m not certain if he’s asking for permission from me, or Shiro.

  Ronin is further gone than he was at the train station—he moves with a shinigami’s grace, as if his muscles and bones are no longer subject to gravity. He looks older, too, though maybe that’s just the effect of his tailored suit and tie. He would look like a salaryman, were it not for the death in his eyes.

  Maybe he thinks words can absolve him; but no matter if you’re living or dead, a true apology needs to be made with your whole soul. And Ronin no longer possesses one.

  “While I’m grateful to Lady Katayama for the work being done on the shrine,” I say, “sorry doesn’t bring my grandfather back.”

  “Kira . . .” Ronin says.

  “Does this mean you’re staying?” I ask O-bei.

  She nods.

  “Fine.” I walk out of the cellar, alone.

  Twenty-One

  Fujikawa Shrine

  Kyoto, Japan

  The next morning, Shiro and I sit at the kitchen table before school, practicing my onmyōdō mudras. Goro busies himself about the kitchen, cleaning up from breakfast and drinking tea. Oni-chan sits on the stove, noisily destroying the rest of our leftovers. The morning news blares from the front room, and outside, the sounds of shrine reconstruction bang on.

  “Zai!” Shiro says. I fan my fingers out, palms down, with only my thumbs and index fingers touching. When I glance over, Shiro’s hands already form a perfect Zai mudra.

  I almost completed the Zai mudra before him. Almost.

  “You nearly beat him that time, Kira-chan,” Goro says with a chuckle. “You’re getting quicker.”

  “Not quick enough,” I say, grinning at Shiro.

  “Shiro, you should teach Kira to properly empower her mudras for use in battle,” Goro says, and then drains his teacup. “I won’t be here at the Fujikawa Shrine much longer, and I’d prefer she not blow up any more train cars in my absence.”

  “Really?” I say, sitting up straighter. Learning onmyōdō—real onmyōdō—has been a dream of mine since I was old enough to know that humans could wield magic against the yokai.

  Goro nods. “We empower the kuji-kiri by filling it with our intentions. In battle, we may use mudras to strike down our enemies or shield our allies. It will take practice, but you seem like a quick study.”

  My heart glows. It’s not often I receive praise from an elder. In celebration, I begin tutting the mudras in order: Rin, Pyoh, Toh . . .

  “Maybe a little too quick, for a human,” Shiro adds, looking me up and down. “Are we sure she’s human? Roji says she’s been picking up her sword training with unnatural speed as well.”

  “She’s human,” Goro says, pouring himself another cup of tea. He sets the kettle back down on the stove. “Do you see any trace of yokai in her, boy?”

  “Hmm,” Shiro says, looking me over, tucking one side of my hair behind my ear. “She does lack proper ears, it seems. Even half-breeds have some point to them.” He flicks the top edge of my ear.

  “Hey!” I say, playfully batting his hand away. “There’s nothing wrong with my ears!”

  Shiro responds by flicking his fox-shaped ears back and forth.

  “Show-off,” I say, pretending to grumble about it.

  “Sorry,” he says with a sheepish grin.

  “You can make it up to me by teaching me how to empower my mudras,” I say with a smile.

  “Oh, right! To empower a mudra, it’s not enough to think of its name,” Shiro says, folding his fingers into the Rin position. “You need to think about what that mudra means to you. If Rin is fire, what does fire mean? Is it a cozy fire on a chilly winter’s evening, or is it an all-consuming inferno? Your intent determines the force of your cast.

  “For example, if my intention is to summon a small flame—say, no larger than a bit of candlelight—I get this.” Shiro pushes his hands out, setting one of his index fingers alight. A tiny fox forms from the flames. It crawls onto the tip of his finger, wrapping its fiery tail around his knuckle. “Try it.”

  “Not in the house,” Goro says, setting his teacup down. “Learning such control is the work of years. Decades. Take it outside.”

  “I barely have weeks,” I say.

  “We’ll practice,” Shiro says, gripping my hands as I go to perform a Rin mudra.

  “One question, before you go,” Goro says, not fooling anyone with his faux-casual tone. “I saw Ronin emerge from the motomiya this morning. I didn’t realize you’d invited him back to the Fujikawa Shrine, Kira.”

  “I didn’t,” I say, snapping my fingers in annoyance. “Lady O-bei thinks she has the authority to do whatever she wants here.”

  “I warned you about her,” Goro says. “That woman looks out only for herself.”

  “That isn’t true,” Shiro says.

  “You keep trying to convince me your ‘mother’ isn’t a monster,” I say, making air quotes around the word mother. “But she keeps living up to my low expectations for her.”

  “I have proof,” Shiro says.

  “Is that so?”

  “C’mon,” Shiro says, pushing back from the table. “There’s something I want you to see.”

  Shiro and I leave Grandfather’s house and head for the priests’ dormitory. In the distance, I hear O-bei barking orders at someone over shrine fortifications and spells.

  I glance sideways at Shiro. He clears his throat but says nothing.

  The priests’ dormitory isn’t large—most of Fujikawa Shrine’s priests lived off-site, with their families or roommates. No more than ten or twelve priests could live on shrine property, and our dorms were never more
than half full. Grandfather occasionally loaned the rooms to homeless men who needed a warm room on a cold night, or to traveling priests who needed a safe place to stay. I’ve offered the rooms to the shinigami, but they don’t seem to have much use for sleep. Or, for that matter, a defined personal space.

  We remove our shoes in the dormitory’s genkan, then step past the noren curtain that shields the interior from view. I step up into the main hall, the wood floor worn smooth from years of use. Shiro leads me past a communal room—currently empty—and the bathroom and shower facilities. His dorm is the last on the right, the one with a ding in the wood beside the knob.

  Shiro’s bedroom isn’t just neat—it’s precise. His bookshelf is sorted first by topic, then by author; his bedding makes a perfect cube against one wall; and there isn’t a speck of dust in sight. While the room is no larger than the one I have at my parents’ house, it has a lovely view of one of the smaller gardens and half of a pond. My jealousy blossoms. What I would give for a little room like this, here at the shrine. That dream lies within my grasp, technically; but my parents could snatch it away at any instant, or on a whim.

  “I like this place,” I say softly, crossing to the window. A small porcelain lucky cat chime hangs from the frame—I tap it, making it ring. “There’s good energy in this place.”

  “I’ve been happy at the Fujikawa Shrine,” Shiro says, opening his closet and removing a dusty, battered box from the topmost shelf. I turn from the window, curious. He looks over at me. “I hope I can stay for a long time, Kira.”

  It’s a simple statement, and yet it makes the air pressurize around me, like I’ve stepped outside just before a storm breaks over the city. Since the attack on the shrine—maybe before, for him—we’ve danced around naming whatever exists in the space between us. I tell myself that it’s not proper, that a shrine maiden shouldn’t fall for her shrine’s protector; and I tell myself that I don’t care. I’m constantly torn between the rules I should abide by and what I want.

  He beckons me over, removing the lid from the box. Inside are photographs—hundreds of them—mostly of kitsune that I don’t recognize.

  “What’s this?” I ask him.

  “My family,” he says, sitting on the floor. “My actual family.”

  I kneel beside him as he spreads the photos in an arc around us. I don’t know any of these people, but a few of them bear a passing resemblance to Shiro, or to Ronin.

  “When I was little, I begged Mother to tell me stories about my parents,” Shiro says, placing his hands on his knees. “I think the asking may have hurt whatever heart she had left, because she’d always insist she was my parent. But she didn’t have these magnificent ears.” Shiro bounces his index fingers up along the outer ridge of his fox ears. I laugh.

  “Most of all, I wanted to know about my mother,” Shiro says, reaching for a more recent picture of a woman with seven tails, her hair and fur as red at Shiro’s. He rubs its edge with his thumb, smiling. “I was really little when she died—maybe three or four? She used to make charms for O-bei, and I would nap on her tails while she worked.”

  “That sounds cozy,” I say. “And if she had seven tails, she must have been very powerful, and very wise.”

  “It seems Ronin takes after her in that regard,” Shiro says. I can taste the bitterness in his words. It must ache, knowing that Ronin had not one but two kitsune tails at Shiro’s age, only to throw his birth family’s legacy away for his adoptive mother’s power.

  “Tell me something?” I ask.

  “Anything.”

  “If you had been the elder brother, and O-bei had asked you to become shinigami instead of Ronin,” I say, leaning into his side, “would you have done it?”

  “No,” he says, and the word is hoarse, and painful. “I would never do anything that would hurt you or your grandfather. O-bei may have raised me, but Fujikawa-san gave me a home.”

  “Who’s the wiser brother, then?” I ask.

  He swallows hard and doesn’t answer me.

  Twenty-Two

  Kōgakkan High School

  Kyoto, Japan

  At school the next day, all anyone talks about is the fire in the teachers’ office.

  As Shiro and I walk into homeroom, my guts churn. If my parents find out that I was involved with the fire in any way, the freedoms I enjoy at the shrine will end. Shiro’s invisibility spell must have saved us in more ways than one, because I don’t hear anyone whispering our names in the halls.

  Araki-sensei—the teacher who saw Yuza in the teachers’ office—speaks of a woman in a white kimono but is unable to identify her. Nobody can. And nobody will, because she’s chained up in my shrine’s motomiya. As far as the authorities are concerned, Yuza of Osore doesn’t even exist.

  Just before Shiro and I leave for the day, I run to the restroom to fix my shirt, which became untucked while we were cleaning the windows. It looks lumpy under my sweater, and I don’t want to be caught on the street looking so rumpled. It wouldn’t be respectful to my school.

  As I straighten my skirt in a stall, a giggle steals past my door, followed by a sharp shush!

  I pause. “Who’s there?” I call, but nobody answers. It isn’t possible to see past the stall door, which has no gaps at the top, sides, or bottom. I’m completely sealed in, with no way of knowing who’s waiting on the other side, or why. I left my phone in my messenger bag in our homeroom, which means I can’t just text Shiro, either.

  “Hello?” I say.

  No answer. No surprise, either.

  “Look,” I say, summoning up as much of Roji’s swagger and O-bei’s authority as I can muster. “I don’t have time for stupid drama today. You have five seconds to walk out that door. Stay, and I’ll make sure you leave this place bleeding.”

  I’m half bluffing, but I’m counting on Ayako and her girl goon squad to lose their collective nerve. Fights are won and lost in hearts and minds. All I need to do is make the girls doubt themselves, and I win.

  “Five,” I say.

  The rubber sole of a shoe squeaks against the floor tiles.

  “Four,” I say.

  A whisper creeps into my stall, a small, scared thing.

  “Three,” I say, injecting boredom into my voice.

  The outer bathroom door slams once, and hard.

  “Two.” I click the lock on my stall door.

  “One.”

  Someone giggles on the other side of the door. “Like we’re afraid of you, Kira.”

  I narrow my eyes, shifting into that sense of preternatural calm I’ve developed via sparring with Roji. “Time’s up,” I say softly.

  I kick the door so hard, it flies open and smacks one girl in the face. She shrieks. I don’t see who I’ve managed to hit. As the door rebounds, I grab its side and step out of the stall. Nanao Miyamoto slouches against the bathroom sinks on the other side, clutching her gushing nose.

  Nanao is one of Ayako’s favorite little monsters. The girl sees me and shrieks, dropping to the floor and crawling under the sinks. Bloodstains erupt across her white blouse like gory fireworks.

  “I warned you,” I say, turning to face three other girls, including Ayako. Three of them now bear yokai parasites, which no doubt drove them to try to harm me today. The blood moon grows closer, emboldens the malicious yokai. “But no, you’re too foolish to listen when someone tells you to back off.”

  I turn on the other girls, who back toward the main bathroom door, clutching one another. The girl on Ayako’s left—I think her name is Haruhi—trembles and trips. The other girls shriek in collective alarm. In mere seconds, I’ve shifted the balance of power in this room. These girls thought they were going to come in and gorge themselves on my misery, fear, and pain. I almost pity that their souls are so empty of meaning that they need to turn their anger on another person to feel whole.

  Almost, but not quite.

  “W-we saw you,” Ayako says. “The day of the fire! We saw you and your weird boyfriend disappear
from the courtyard.”

  “Did you?” I ask. “That sounds an awful lot like a made-up story, Ayako. The kind that just might put a dark mark on our sterling reputation here at Kōgakkon.” I say those words with absolute venom, hoping she remembers the ones she spoke to me that day.

  “That’s Ayako-senpai to you,” Haruhi snaps.

  “Not anymore,” I say, cocking my head at an angle like I’ve seen O-bei do when she’s openly mocking someone. “The honorific -senpai confers respect. And I don’t see anyone worthy of my regard in this room. The four of you have done nothing but torment me since I arrived at Kōgakkan, but that ends today.”

  “You can’t speak to me this way,” Ayako says, hate swirling in her gaze. “You know who my father is, and what he’ll do to you if—”

  “Have you ever stopped to consider the shame you’d bring down on your family, Ayako?” I ask, narrowing my eyes. “Attacking the granddaughter of the recently deceased head priest of a local shrine, tsk. What would your father say, were he to be informed of your behavior?”

  Tears hover in the corners of Ayako’s eyes, betraying her embarrassment. And her fear. I try not to feed on those emotions, or to pull any enjoyment from Nanao’s sobs. This isn’t about vengeance—this is just a petty schoolyard feud, one that’s wasting my time and energy.

  “You would never tell,” Ayako says.

  You’re right, I won’t, but only because tattling is for children. “Go, Nanao,” I say to the girl beneath the sinks. “Tell the school nurse you tripped and fell. It would be shameful to admit the four of you lost to the school outcast, now, wouldn’t it?”

  Nanao crawls out from under the bathroom sinks, blotting blood off her lips with her sleeve. She stumbles toward her friends, shooting a frightened look at me. Haruhi takes the girl under her arm.

  “Nobody will believe she tripped,” Ayako says with a sniff.

  “They absolutely will,” I say, holding up my palms, showing Ayako the pink-skinned scars left over from our last violent encounter. “They’ve been believing that lie for ten whole months.”