Seven Deadly Shadows

by Courtney Alameda

  “This is your fault, Ayako,” Nanao says in a wheezing, nasally voice. Her lower lip has started to swell, too, and blood-tinged saliva oozes off its puffy edge. “I-if I end up with a disciplinary action on my record, I’ll never get into Tokyo University—”

  “Oh, shut up,” Ayako says, holding the bathroom door open for Nanao. She turns to me. “This isn’t over, Kira.”

  “Now you’re hurling lazy threats?” I ask, putting my hands on my hips. “It’s absolutely over. If you come after me again, you’ll be bleeding next.”

  Ayako’s face flames red. She slams the main bathroom door so hard the walls shake.

  When they’re gone, I brace myself against the sink and dry heave. Not because I’m afraid of anything Ayako can do to me—I know what real monsters are capable of now—but more so because that showdown dumped more anxiety into the pit of my belly. But try as I might, I can’t vomit up an emotion. I’m empty.

  I wash my hands, then my face. Lifting my gaze to the mirror, I watch rivulets of water run down my cheeks and drip off the end of my chin. Sometimes it soothes me to watch the physics of my world—sometimes, they’re the only parts of it that still make sense.

  After drying my face, I use some toilet paper to clean Nanao’s blood off the floor. I regret hitting her so hard; judging by the amount of blood on the floor, she probably walked out the door with a broken nose.

  Then again, if she’d heeded my warning, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt in the first place.

  As I exit the bathroom, I find Shiro waiting for me outside, a grim smile on his face. He has my bag slung over one shoulder.

  “I was going to interfere, but it sounded like you had the situation under control,” he says, handing me my bag.

  “It would’ve been weird for you to be in the girls’ bathroom anyway,” I say in a deadpan tone, making it clear that I’m fine but fed up with this place. “Let’s get out of here, we have shinigami to find.”

  Twenty-Three

  Fujikawa Shrine

  Kyoto, Japan

  That evening my parents come to the shrine.

  It’s the night of the new moon, and lately, Roji has been dragging me into the assembly hall for practice. After all these weeks, I’ve begun to enjoy the feeling of the wooden bokuto sword in my hands. The blisters at the roots of my fingers have hardened into calluses, and the once-soft muscles in my arms, back, and abdomen have grown accustomed to the sword’s weight.

  “Oi!” Roji says, keeping a brisk pace. “Move your arms like you mean it!”

  We stand with our feet spread hips’ distance apart, raising our wooden swords over our heads in a practiced, methodical way. Up, down. Up, down. We begin our warm-up with thirty of these exercises, which seem simple in theory. After weeks and weeks of training, they still make my muscles blaze with the effort.

  “I’m not the sloppy one,” I say, not a little breathlessly. “You’re not even paying attention to your footwork!”

  A knock interrupts us. We turn. Three dark figures crowd the assembly hall’s door. I pick Goro out first, mostly from the silhouette of his ears. It takes me a half second longer to recognize my mother.

  I swear under my breath. Mother steps into the hall in her stocking feet, looking tidy in a wool peacoat and black slacks. Father follows her inside, still dressed in a dark suit and tie. No doubt he’s just finished work for the day.

  As for me? Well, I look like a mess—baggy clothing, my hair askew, and my skin flushed and sweaty. Mother lifts a brow as she scans my outfit. If disapproval could take a human shape, it would probably look like my mother. Pursed lips, prim peacoats, and a middle-aged perfume I can smell from ten feet away.

  “Mother. Father,” I say, performing a polite bow. I don’t need to ask why they’re here—it’s apparent from the quiet fury in Mother’s eyes.

  “May I have a moment with my daughter, Miss . . . ?” Mother says to Roji, and I watch my mother squirm as she realizes she doesn’t know the names of the people I “work” with.

  “I’m no miss,” Roji says, but she nods. “You want to keep that?” she asks, gesturing at my bokuto as she walks backward toward the door. I toss it to her with a small grin, my attitude belying the anxiety gnawing on my guts. I promised my parents that I wouldn’t shame them any further, and yet here I am. Busting girls’ noses in the bathroom and setting the teachers’ office on fire.

  . . . I really hope they didn’t hear about that last bit. I tuck loose strands of my hair behind my ears, trying to make myself more presentable. I’m failing, no doubt.

  When Roji and Goro are gone, Mother wastes no time with small talk. “You hit Nanao Miyamoto in the ladies’ restroom today.”

  “Proper girls don’t start fights at school,” Father says.

  “I didn’t start that fight,” I say, resting my hands on my hips. “But I wasn’t going to be the one bleeding at the end of it, either.”

  “You broke Nanao’s nose,” Mother says. “Do you have any idea how embarrassing this is for our family? Her father is a business associate of ours, Kira! Did you consider how this would impact our relationship with him?”

  “No,” I say with a shake of my head. Of course my parents show up to the shrine once their business relationships are threatened, and not before. “I was thinking about survival. Do you know what happened the last time Ayako and her friends cornered me? They beat me.”

  Mother turns her face away, sucking in a sharp breath.

  I continue, “They pushed me to the ground, kicked me in the chest, and pulled my hair. What was I supposed to do today? Let them hurt me?”

  “No,” Mother says, sweeping both hands down as if to push the idea away. “But it was still wrong to lower yourself to their level and shame the family as a result. You’re likely to be expelled from Kōgakkan for this, Kira.”

  “Fine,” I say, knowing it’s anything but fine. Mother gasps. “Why should I attend an institution whose students have so little honor?”

  “Because Kōgakkon is one of the best high schools in Kyoto”—Father’s voice rises—“and it is a privilege to attend the institution.”

  I hold up my hands, showing my parents the pink scars that hug the bottoms of my palms. “Is it a privilege to be pushed to the ground, Father? To have my dignity stolen from me, day after day, as my entire class shuns me?”

  Mother presses the back of her hand to her lips and looks away. My father remains expressionless, but I can see the muscles in his jaw flexing. He’s frustrated. My parents came here to collect a rebellious daughter and march her back home in shame. Now that I’ve shattered their assumptions, they scramble to deal with an unexpected complication: I have broken my promise to them, but not because I’m wild or rebellious. I acted in self-defense.

  “I know you’re here to bring me home, but I can’t leave the shrine. Not now,” I say. Not with a waxing moon hanging over my head like an executioner’s blade.

  “You don’t get to make that decision, Kira,” Mother says softly.

  Before I can argue further, a faraway scream reaches my ears. I turn away from my parents, cocking my head toward the sound, and listen hard.

  “What was that?” Mother asks. I hold up a hand, asking for silence. It can’t be Yuza—she stopped screaming in pain after her first night here.

  Footsteps pound the veranda outside. The door wrenches open, and Roji sticks her head inside the room. “Kira, we’ve got company.”

  “What kind of company?” I ask.

  A second cry pierces the walls, closer now.

  “Let’s just say they’re not here for tea,” Roji replies with a smirk.

  “What’s going on?” Mother demands, but I’m already running across the room. “Kira!”

  “Stay here!” I shout at my parents. Roji pushes the door open as I rush outside, then slams it in my wake. “Is there really an emergency, or are you just getting me out of a lecture?” I ask.

  “Oh no, the yokai are here,” Roji says, tutting a quick
spell over the assembly hall’s doors to keep them locked tight. My parents bang their fists on the glass, calling my name. Roji grins, jerking her head in their direction. “Lovely people, your parents.”

  “Don’t start,” I say.

  She tosses me a blade. I pull an inch of it out of the sheath and catch a glimpse of my reflection in the glittering metal. Live steel.

  “Don’t kill yourself with it,” Roji says, jerking her head toward the back of the shrine. “Better yet, don’t kill me with it.”

  “You’re already dead,” I say.

  “And I don’t want to be more dead!”

  “What’s going on?” I ask as we jog around the assembly hall.

  “Shuten-doji decided he wanted Yuza back,” Roji says. “He sent a few of his little friends to get her.”

  “How many?” We jump off the veranda and into the small courtyard.

  “Enough to matter,” Roji replies.

  I follow Roji, my heart pounding in my chest. My grip on my katana feels slick with sweat. Fear closes clawed fingers around my heart; I remember a night like this, not long ago, when Shuten-doji’s creatures came and took everything from me. The shrieks and screams I heard that night come shooting back like bullets that tear into my courage.

  I’m not the girl who hid from her grandfather’s killers.

  Not anymore.

  As we pass Grandfather’s house, several dark, spidery shapes race past, headed toward Yuza’s cellar prison in the motomiya.

  “I’ll get the jorōgumo,” Roji says, and then points to something on the wall above us. “You take her!”

  I glance up. A shadowy yokai hunches on the stone wall, her icy eyes burning with hate. Her once-beautiful face has a melted quality to it, as if her flesh had liquefied and then refrozen. A yuki-onna, or at least she was before she was burned.

  The yokai makes a pained, gurgling sort of sound. She leaps from the wall, clawing at my face.

  I take a step back, out of her range. Just like I would while training with Roji. The yuki-onna tumbles to the ground, glaring up at me through the mess of her half-burned hair. Something within me spurs me onward—this hot rush of adrenaline, maybe, or my brain screaming kill or be killed! with the decibel level cranked up. Gripping my sword, I step forward and thrust my blade into the demon’s chest. Bone and flesh and muscle resist my katana. I shove it in harder, feeling the way the blade’s sharp edge grinds against her rib bones.

  The yuki-onna’s death rattle echoes up the sword, through the hilt, and tremors into my arms. She collapses around my blade, boneless, bloodless. Her body blows away, snowflake by snowflake, into the wind.

  I release a deep, shuddering breath. Horror seeps into my bones like the slow creep of cold up one’s spine.

  I took a life.

  Or at least, I took an existence. It doesn’t matter that I killed her in self-defense, or in defense of the shrine; the realization still hits me full-bodied and hard. Somehow, taking her life has only made mine emptier.

  I yank my sword from her body. Roji circles back to me, her white shirt stained cherry red. Unlike me, she wears the blood of our enemies comfortably, almost as if she doesn’t even notice it’s there at all. I heave, nausea rising in my gut like a wave.

  “There’s nothing good about killing,” I say to her, breathless.

  “No, there’s not,” Roji says. “That’s why being a shinigami is a curse. But we can talk about regret later. Let’s move.”

  I follow her to the shrine’s motomiya, throwing an uneasy glance over my shoulder. Nothing stalks us, save for the swirling snow. The shrine grounds lie oddly silent. No screams rend the air. The clash of steel doesn’t echo through the night. But smoke curls like dragons’ tongues over the tops of the buildings. It scratches my throat like sandpaper and burns in my tear ducts. I rub one eye with a knuckle, but it serves only to spread the pain.

  We sneak around the back side of Grandfather’s house, keeping to the shadows by the garden’s outer wall. Roji moves like a cat, sinuous and silent; the snow doesn’t even crunch under her bare feet. The breeze tugs at the loose, short strands of her hair—this is the first time I’ve seen her without her signature braids.

  She halts at the garden’s edge, motioning for me to halt.

  At first, I’m not sure why we’ve stopped; but then I hear a soft shuffling, the clack of bone, and a soft, sad exhale. I turn my head, looking left. The sounds seem to be coming from the motomiya, which is hidden beyond a hedge. Roji glances back at me, mouthing, Be ready.

  I nod at her, even though I feel anything but ready. I slide my hands into position on the katana’s hilt—my right hand tucked against the sword’s guard, my left gripping it by the base. Roji taught me to grip the sword primarily with my index and pinkie fingers, keeping the middle fingers more relaxed. But I can’t help but grip the sword like a lifeline, as if letting go would mean a fall to my death.

  Roji pushes herself off the wall, heading for the motomiya. I follow her close. The small shrine emerges from the shadows, its boxy sides and sloped roof darker than anything else around it. Yokai corpses litter the ground, their blood draining into the cracks between the cobblestones. With every drop of blood spilled here, I swear I feel the shrine’s bones ache. I count ten—no, twelve—dead. Limbs twitch, but nothing struggles to get back up.

  I step into the shrine, peering down into the cellar. Even now, I sense the malevolence leaking out of the very boards of this place, as if the memory of what happened here couldn’t be burned away. What’s more, I can’t be sure whether it’s my own discomfort speaking, or something true. Something real. Something evil.

  In this light, the bloodstains on the floorboards look black.

  Roji follows me inside.

  Something stirs behind her, shifting into view.

  Roji must see the look on my face.

  She whirls.

  I scream.

  With a roar, a giant oni charges at us. He has a crimson face and a wild mane of matted black hair. He swings his bone-studded club off his shoulder, shattering one of the small shrine’s pillars. I turn my face away as the wooden shrapnel zings past my face.

  Roji responds faster: “Retsu!” she shouts, making a one-handed mudra and shoving it outward. The air around her seems to heave, slamming into the ogre and staggering him. Roji takes advantage of this opening, rushing forward and slamming her shoulder into his meaty chest, pushing him out of the small shrine.

  “A little help here, Kira?” she shouts at me.

  “Oh, right!” I say.

  Roji rolls her eyes.

  I dart out of the small shrine as the ogre lurches back to his feet. The ogre stands larger than most men—even taller than Shimada—and has thick, heavy muscle cording his arms, legs, and back. In a one-on-one match, I doubt I could take him; luckily, I’m not alone.

  He grins at me, chuckling under his breath. “How happy my lord will be when I bring back not only his prized assassin, but his favorite enemy.”

  “You should never assume a girl wants to go home with you,” I say.

  The ogre says, “Ha!” and rushes toward me. I sidestep to the right, his club whistling past my head.

  Roji charges in, ducking his backswing and striking at his side. She misses, dancing a step or two out of range; the ogre slams his fist into the space she was occupying a breath ago. I step forward, driving my sword through the ogre’s left calf. He howls in pain and grabs for me. I drop down, while Roji takes her sword and drives it through his gut.

  A trickle of blood slides from the ogre’s mouth as he collapses to his knees. Roji draws her sword from his body as he gurgles, his eyes rolling up into his head. He hits the ground.

  Roji extends her hand to me. “Not bad, kid. You learn quick.”

  I grin, clapping my hand into hers. She pulls me to my feet, and together we back away from the ogre’s corpse.

  “Whoa, are you okay?” Shiro says, popping up through the open trapdoor in the motomiya’s fl
oor. “I thought we’d already cleared the grounds, I’m sorry!”

  “We’re fine,” I say. “Is Yuza still down there?”

  “Yeah, we have her secured,” Shiro replies, stepping onto the motomiya’s veranda. He frowns at the broken pillar, picking a toothy sliver out and dropping it on the ground. “Shimada and Goro went to check the shrine’s perimeter, and my mother’s gone to help the kitsune—”

  A gasp interrupts him. Shiro’s features go rigid, guarded, as his gaze zeroes in on someone behind me. Oh no, I think as I turn, my spirits in free fall.

  Mother steps from the shadows of the veranda. Before her lies the unmistakable corpse of a slaughtered oni, a twitching garden of dead jorōgumo legs, and a wayward daughter bearing a bloodied blade. The demon blood spattered over my clothing isn’t doing me any favors, either.

  I start toward her. “Mother, I—”

  “This was not the life I wanted for you, Kira,” she says, stepping down from the veranda. I halt. “This was the life I tried to protect you from.”

  “You knew?” I ask, anger hitting me like a hot poker. “You knew it wasn’t all a lie? You knew about the yokai, and Grandfather . . . Can you see past Shiro’s glamour?”

  Mother says nothing—she merely holds my gaze with her dark one.

  “Why?” I say, my voice edging close to a sob. “If you know, why have you left me to bear this burden alone?”

  “This world was never my world,” Mother says. “Not the way it was your grandfather’s, and not in the way it’s now yours. I thought I could shelter you from it, tell you it was a lie, that your eyes deceived you . . . but I was wrong.”

  She doesn’t apologize, but the sorrow in her voice doesn’t sound manufactured, either. I press her harder: “Mother, the shrine is in danger. We are in danger. There is a blood moon rising, and—”

  “I can’t help you, Kira. I never had your talents,” she says with a shake of her head. “Though I will allow you to remain at the shrine until the new year. Make your grandfather proud—he was always so very fond of you.”

  Mother turns away, heading for the shrine gates.