Seven Deadly Shadows

by Courtney Alameda

  “Anytime, and anything you need,” he says, letting me snuggle under his chin. “Always.”

  He holds me till the sun is gone.

  Twenty-Seven

  Fujikawa Shrine

  Kyoto, Japan

  At dusk, Shiro and I join the others in the courtyard. Shimada stands with his back to us. Roji and Yuza both crouch a few yards away from him, tutting shadows into shapes. Smoke twists off their fingers, crackling like fire and forming twin hashira poles. A lintel forms atop them, completing a nightmarish torii gate. The space between the poles looks black as cats’ pupils—not even the courtyard’s floodlights can break darkness so deep.

  The sight of it makes my heart thump. Shiro squeezes my hand, then tugs me to a stop. Pivoting on his heel, he blocks me from the group with his body. “I should go with you,” he says, looking to the side and swallowing hard. When his gaze wanders back to mine, I can see the ache in him. “I can’t let you walk into the Iron Palace alone, not when Shuten-doji and Tamamo-no-Mae want you dead.”

  “You can’t, you know you can’t.” I cup his cheek with one hand. “Even if Yuza and I manage to find the sword, our hours will be your days.”

  “I know,” he whispers.

  “Someone has to stay and look for shinigami.” I take his fox omamori from my pocket, showing it to him with a half-exhaled laugh. “And at least I’ll have your luck with me, right?”

  Shiro gives me a thin smile, but his lowered ears tell me I can’t comfort him. He leans his forehead on mine. “Promise you’ll be careful?”

  “I’ll be more than careful.” On an impulse, I turn my face up and press my lips to his. It’s a short kiss—a chaste kiss—but it still sets a dark corner of my heart on fire.

  I hop back from him, pressing my fingers against my mouth. I’m a little embarrassed, but not sorry. Once Shiro gets over his initial shock, he grins at me. Every cell in my body yearns to stay here with him, where at least the world around me is a known quantity. Once I step through that gate, a thousand things could go wrong—I’m putting my life in the hands of my would-be assassin. Yuza could betray me and hand me over to my enemies. Or something terrible could happen to her, leaving me stranded and alone in Yomi.

  “Kira!” Roji calls, beckoning to me. “Time to get going.”

  “I’ll be right there!” I call back, trying to ignore the wave of anxiety in my gut. I’m going. Not because I have something to prove to O-bei, or even to myself; I’m going because the Fujikawa Shrine is my responsibility. It wouldn’t be right to ask someone to do something that I’m not willing to do myself.

  “I’ll see you in a few hours,” I say, bobbing in a short bow.

  “I’ll see you in a few days.” Shiro gives me one last, wistful hug. I soak up the moment of security and warmth. While I want to stay nestled here in Shiro’s arms, I have a sword to steal.

  Releasing him, I turn to face the gate. Looking at it, its poles seem to be whispers made flesh. The mere sight of it leaves a sick taste in the back of my throat, as if I’ve just gargled with stomach acid. My whole soul scrambles back as I step forward. I clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.

  “The portal will take you as close to the palace as we can get you.” Roji hands me a tanto knife—a kaiken blade no more than eight inches long, and designed to be hidden in one’s clothing. “Take this. I can’t send you in with a sword, so a knife will have to do,” she says.

  “Let us hope you won’t need it,” Shimada says to me, slipping his hands into his kimono sleeves. “The goal is to remain unseen, unnoticed, and unremarkable. The more attention you attract, the more dangerous your task becomes.”

  Yuza unsheathes her sword, places its tip against her palm, and drives it through her flesh. I gasp, surprised to see the blade disappear into her hand. She removes her sheath and tosses it to Roji. “We won’t be seen. We’ll take the back alleyways to the palace and slip through the corridors as courtesans. Nobody pays attention to silly-looking women.”

  “Not unless they’re hungry,” Roji says, her tone implying that she isn’t talking about food. She looks to me, asking, “You’re sure you want to do this?”

  No, I think. But “Yes” still pops out of my mouth. Roji’s eyebrow twitches upward, but she says nothing.

  “Good,” Yuza says over her shoulder, stepping up to the portal. “Follow my lead.” Darkness ripples around her body like water, then swallows her whole.

  Roji gives me a little shove forward. “Hold your breath while you’re going through, eh? It’ll be more tolerable that way.”

  Clutching Shiro’s fox omamori, I glance back at the others. Shiro lifts his hand in a small wave, giving me a forced smile. Roji grins, as if she’s already picturing what my face will look like once I reach the other side.

  “We will watch over your shrine, priestess,” Shimada says, tipping his hat back from his face. “Go get the sword.”

  “Okay,” I whisper. Taking a deep breath, I step into the portal’s embrace. The darkness hisses in my ears. I lean in, the air fluttering across my cheeks like the edges of butterfly wings.

  The floor drops out from under me. In the darkness, I lose all sense of orientation—up, down, right, or left. Every sensory organ I possess seems to shut down, leaving me panicking in a dark, floating void.

  Then the world rushes back as fast as it left, the air roaring, my heartbeat pounding inside my skull. I’m falling, lights gleaming and tumbling around me, until I slam into a rough surface and skid. Pain spikes through my shoulder and hip.

  I roll onto my back, finding myself in an alleyway. The shadows of ramshackle, Edo-era buildings rise on either side of me, their roof tiles undulating like the waves of the sea. They’re juxtaposed with modern houses, the boxy angles in stark contrast to the more traditional, ancient lines of the others. In some places, lone buildings jut from the ground like broken teeth. Trash litters the ground, a shattered CRT tube television lies broken on its side near my foot, and a strange animal’s corpse hangs by its neck from one of the eaves.

  The stars don’t shine overhead, nor the moon. Diffuse, dim light bounces off low-hanging clouds. Underfoot, the ground trembles. The air smells like strange herbs, a sickly-sweet scent that clings to the back of my throat. Spiderwebs cover the walls, long funnels of dusty web disappearing into cracks and under the eaves of some homes. No lights blaze in the windows. On the wall beside me, a hand-size spider crawls toward the roof. I can hear its body scrape against the plaster.

  “Are you all right?” Yuza asks, crouching beside me. Her voice sounds different, louder and more melodious somehow, as if I’m picking up frequencies here in Yomi that I wouldn’t in the natural world. “I should have warned you—the first crossing is always the worst.”

  I sit up. Grit from the road bites into my palms. “Where are we?” I ask, tucking Shiro’s omamori safely into my jacket pocket.

  “The old quarter of Oeyama,” Yuza says, scanning the area around us. “Come, we must hurry. And keep that bracelet out of sight—the less attention we draw, the better.”

  Frowning, I tuck my bracelet inside my jacket sleeve. I follow Yuza through shifting intersections, losing track of our direction. We pass dumpsters and the drifters curled up beside them, nekomata cat fights, and hollowed-out cars. And the graffiti! I’ve never seen real graffiti in Japan. Trash crunches underfoot, everything from paper scraps and lost phone charms to hypodermic needles. The alleyways seem to draw garbage straight into their veins. Everything reeks.

  We slip from the alleyways, ducking into a vibrant night market. Colorful lanterns bob in the air. Yokai hawk their wares from innumerable stalls, which feature a range of products (and smells) that I don’t recognize. I see fruits and vegetables I have no names for, some that pulsate with strange light; anglerfish-like creatures laid out on ice; and I look away from a display of what appears to be human hearts for sale. I’m dizzy by the time Yuza banks right, taking us out of the market and into the backstreets.

>   She was right about one thing—we draw no attention. If anyone notices our passing, they make no sign of it.

  “Here,” Yuza whispers, halting in front of a nondescript building. She places her hand on the concrete wall. The air shimmers. Bright graffiti explodes under her palm, paint rippling up from the concrete surface. When the mural completes itself, it depicts a red torii gate surrounded by demons. The concrete inside the gate cracks, shudders, and collapses, revealing a hidden passageway. Once we step inside, the wall re-forms behind us.

  Yuza tuts a spell, summoning a hitodana orb for light. The magic tugs at something inside me, almost like . . . a memory. Before I can invite the idea in and dwell on it, Yuza plunges into the rough-hewn tunnel. “This will take us straight into the palace storerooms,” she whispers, moving like a shadow. “From here on, I speak for both of us. Understand?”

  “Got it,” I say, struggling to keep up and yet stay quiet.

  We move fast, silent as the dead. The air smells mildewed and slightly sulfurous. I have to watch where I put my feet, because single steps and inclines appear out of nowhere. Air whistles through cracks in the walls, and more than once, the ground tremors from something unseen. I count enough steps to make up a mile, then two. The walls shift from carved rock to stacked stone. Up ahead, one of the wooden supports used to hold up the ceiling has failed, its spine cracked, edges toothy. I turn sideways to slip through the rubble.

  Yuza stands on the other side, running her hands over the shattered stones. “Help me move these,” she says. Together, we dismantle enough of the rubble to reveal an iron grate set into the palace’s foundation. Yuza takes the grate, moves it aside, and then slips past. I follow her, emerging into a dark, cavernous room.

  Keeping to the shadows, Yuza leads me through the towering shelves full of baskets of rice, passing large-bellied barrels intended for fermenting soybeans or sake. I turn one of my ears back, listening to the scuttling of mice.

  Or at least what I think are mice.

  As we move deeper, whispers crawl from the shelves. Wicker baskets rasp. Bolts of silk snicker. It seems we’ve woken the objects around us, and they’re angry to find strangers in their midst. While it’s no surprise that the objects in Shuten-doji’s palace have become yokai in their own right, it’s unsettling to hear them. Objects in this world—or my own—that exist for a hundred years or more earn their own consciousnesses. We call them tsukomogami, or “tool kami.”

  As we emerge into the storage room’s foyer, Yuza halts. She stops me with her arm, nodding at something up ahead. Ten kimono stand in a circle, blocking our path to the door. Their sleeves hang parallel to the ground, almost as if they’re on display without bodies, mannequins, or wires to support them. Malice ripples in the air, and it tastes like I’ve touched the tip of my tongue to a nine-volt battery. My bracelet burns hot.

  “What are they?” I whisper.

  “Nothing good,” Yuza replies, her voice barely higher than a breath. “Stay here. I will draw them away from the door—”

  But something crashes behind us—the sound slices into my ears, high and bright, almost like pottery shattering. I spin on my heel. A pile of Gigaku theater masks now lies half-hidden behind a shelf. Some of their faces splintered in the fall. Yuza steps away from me, casting her palm down toward the floor and then up across her torso. Her katana appears in a flash of light. We exchange an uneasy glance over the arc of her blade.

  “The stuff on the shelves,” I say, taking a step back. “I think it’s alive. Er, aware.”

  “Breathtaking spiritual insight, priestess,” Yuza deadpans.

  Before I can snap at her—or even cry out—silken kimono sleeves wrap their arms around me. They slide across my stomach, my throat, and my mouth, wrapping me up so tight that I struggle to breathe. Yuza’s katana clatters to the ground. She claws the silk away from her face, but it surges forward again, closing over her mouth and muffling her swearing. When her gaze meets mine, her fury is so sharp I’m surprised it doesn’t slice the silk into ribbons.

  “My, my, what have we caught here?” a woman’s voice asks. I glance up, fighting to keep my balance as the kimono draws itself tight around my knees and ankles. I gasp through the musty silk, because there’s no way I wouldn’t recognize the white-tailed kitsune standing before us.

  “Minami.” I scramble to make sense of her presence, wondering if O-bei has sent Yuza and me into a trap. Why else would O-bei’s favorite pet be here?

  “Imagine how pleased His Eternal Majesty will be when I return Yuza of Osore, Scourge of the Tsujimori.” Minami grins, spreading her nine tails like a peacock’s plumes. She’s guarded by three pomegranate-skinned ogres, each brute larger than the last. “How the Master has missed you, Yuza dear.”

  Layers of silk hold down Yuza’s reply.

  “When I heard this plan, I saw an opportunity to prove my loyalty to the throne,” Minami continues, turning her gaze on me. “O-bei is foolish for trying to deceive her betters, and you have no chance of defeating Shuten-doji in Kyoto. I do not wish to throw my life away on mortal concerns.”

  How could you have so little honor? I understand that Minami could easily betray me—we aren’t friends—but O-bei? How could Minami betray the woman who freed her, fed her, protected her? I want to scream, but the kimono sleeves muffle anything I could say.

  Instead, I work one hand behind my back, reaching for the knife stuck in my belt.

  “Besides,” Minami continues, flicking her tails as she turns away, “the gift of Shuten-doji’s favorite assassin—and the descendant of one of his oldest enemies—will secure me a high place in his court. Seize them and bring them to my chambers. We’ll bring them to the War Room after the council disbands for the evening. You might want to . . . hurt them a little. Otherwise, they may try to escape.”

  “How hurt?” one of the oni asks.

  Minami pauses at the storage room door. “Break a few bones. Not anything in their legs or arms—the Master would be displeased if his best assassin was rendered useless to him.”

  My stomach feels like it has dropped through the floor. The ogres advance. Yuza looks at me, her eyes full of apology. I don’t have time for apologies—two ogres will be in range of her in seconds. I need to move—fast.

  The third moves toward me, slapping the palm of his hand with his mace. The ogre might be ten paces from me. He chuckles when I hop backward, pretending to lose my balance. I tumble to the ground with a grunt, loosening the knife at my back from its sheath. I strain my hand toward its hilt, fighting the cocoon of silk for each inch of space.

  The ogre takes two more steps. He smells of stale beer and overcooked onions. The stench makes my eyes water, even as my fingers brush the knife’s hilt. I’m so close—the tendons in my arm burn as I push the knife free.

  Swinging his club high, the ogre charges with a shout. I watch the weapon’s studded tip, calculating its arc. As the club comes whistling toward my head, I roll. A sharp pain slices into my lower back. I ignore it, using the force of my body to push the knife through the back of the fabric. The ogre’s club slams into the ground with a heavy thud. Taking hold of the knife’s hilt, I jerk it upward, tearing the silk. Its scream is barely more than a whisper; it sighs across my skin as the fabric slides to the floor. Boneless and dead.

  The ogre lifts his club, peering at the cracked floor beneath. He cocks his head, confused. I rise, clench my knife between my teeth, and tut a spell by feel, not by training. I form a triangle with my fingers and thumbs, using my ring and pinkie fingers as bolsters. Envisioning an inferno, I slam my hands together, fingers threading. When my palms connect, they clap like thunder. My hands catch fire. The flames dance like foxtails across my skin, leaving me unharmed.

  I take my knife from my teeth. The foxfire roars down its hilt, setting the blade alight. The ogre growls, narrowing his eyes against the firelight. Gripping the knife by the bottom of the hilt, I fling it at the ogre. Its tip slams into the meaty part of his shou
lder, and the fire leaps into his unruly beard. The ogre drops his club with a howl. Stumbling backward, he tries to yank my blade from his flesh. But the damage is done—the flames eat him alive, racing across his shoulders and licking down his back. He screams, waving his arms and stumbling into the wooden shelves, spreading the fire as he goes.

  He left my burning knife behind. It gleams in the growing firelight. While the other ogres watch him in horror, I snatch my knife from the floor and race to Yuza’s side. It takes a mere second to slice the kimono off her, and one more for her to grab her katana.

  With two smooth strokes, she beheads one ogre and disembowels the other. Their bodies hit the ground, reduced to sacks of meat. With a short squeak, I hop back from their corpses. Pools of blood grow under their twitching bodies, slick as oil and reflecting the flames.

  “That was quite the trick,” Yuza says, wicking the blood from her blade with a short flick of her wrist. “I owe you my life, Kira Fujikawa.”

  “Don’t thank me just yet,” I say, watching the fire pull down one of the large storage units. Little foxes dance in the flames, digging their fiery paws through burning baskets of rice, or racing one another through the lanes between shelves; they stick their noses in piles of silks and tear the spines from books. The heat billows toward us now, scorching my cheeks. “We have to get out of here alive.”

  “No doubt Minami’s already gone to raise an alarm,” Yuza says. “Can you cast that foxfire on command?”

  I slide my knife back into its sheath, repeating the triangular tuts I made. When I clap my palms together, my hands catch fire.

  “Burn this place to the ground,” Yuza says, motioning for me to follow her. “Come, we must hurry.”

  We dash through the palace hallways. Fiery embers fall from my fingertips and spring up as foxes made of flame. They race alongside me, frightening courtesans out of our way and sending the guards scattering. Confused tengu pause and watch us fly past, then flee. There’s no time to process my surroundings—I glimpse a garden courtyard, painted shoji doors, and massive suits of armor. We run so fast, my heart strains. My throat burns as if I’m breathing fire, too. Exhaustion pulls on my muscles and bones.