Eight Million Gods-eARC

by Wen Spencer

  A black luxury car slid up to the curb. The dark-suited yokai opened the back car doors and stood waiting for the women.

  “Where do you think they’re going?” Miriam whispered.

  Nikki shook her head. The mind boggled about where a goddess might go after midnight.

  “We should follow her.” Miriam tugged at her hands.

  “No.” Nikki shook her head again. “We need to save Simon.”

  There was a faint trail of dust from the elevator to 1049 and 1050. Both doors had signs hung on the doorknobs, forbidding housekeeping from entering.

  “She’s sealed the door against me,” Atsumori murmured.

  “Just one?” Nikki glanced at the two identical doors. “Not both of them?”

  “Just this one.” He flickered into sight beside 1049 and traced the door’s outline. “I cannot cross into this room. There is another door and a window into this room, but they are barred, too.”

  “I think we hit the jackpot.” Nikki took out her lock picks.

  “Maybe,” Miriam said. “Or she has a very nasty surprise locked in there.”

  “Is there anything in 1050?” Nikki knelt in front of the door to 1049 and started to work the metal carefully into the lock.

  “It is empty.” Atsumori vanished.

  Nikki could feel him pressing close to her as she felt her way through the lock’s tumblers. It made her uneasy, because it seemed dangerously addictive to know she could become nearly invincible at will. As with any addiction, though, it was a matter of stepping out your skin and letting something else take control. She had always thought she would fall to Valium or Xanax. Somehow she never suspected that she’d get hooked on a teenage Japanese god.

  Another mistaken assumption was that she would need to know how to pick locks to break out of a room, not to break in. Preparing for a totally different set of disasters, she’d practiced on handcuffs, filing cabinets, supply cabinets, and hospital doors using everything from paper clips to ballpoint pen parts. It only took her a minute to work quickly through the tumblers of the mechanical override lock on 1049. When the lock clicked open, Atsumori stepped into her and together they swung open the door.

  The room was exactly as she had expected.

  Only the gleam of the city from the window lit the room. The rectangle of light from the hallway door revealed a chocolate-brown carpet coated with white powder and pieces of ceramic statuary. Dust hazed the air. She breathed in the talc dryness.

  Statues of calico cats, paws upraised in the lucky beckoning gesture, sat on a dresser, on the nightstand, on the table next to the window, on the floor clustered tight around the bed and lining the walls.

  “Seriously creepy,” Miriam whispered behind her.

  Tacked across the doorway was a folded paper shide.

  “I cannot enter with that there,” Atsumori said quietly.

  Miriam reached up and pulled it down. “What about now?”

  “Yes, I can enter. Thank you.”

  Nikki stalked forward, katana ready, the grit from the statues crunching underfoot. Miriam followed, pulling the luggage cart into the room, shutting the door, and turning on the lights.

  Simon lay bound on the bed, wearing only boxer shorts. The heavy jute rope elegantly crisscrossed his body, tying him with rough beauty. He was gagged with a ball on a leather strap. His skin was so pale it seemed translucent; his veins running vivid blue, creating a roadmap of his fragile condition. Harsh rope burns marked the days of his captivity.

  This could be me. This could be me.

  She fought to control the fear that the sight of him triggered. She tightened her hold on the katana. Atsumori was with her. She wasn’t helpless.

  “How do we know it’s just him?” Miriam whispered. “Maybe there’s something other than the goddess in him.”

  Simon jerked. His eyes opened, dark brown that faded to stunning blue just before they closed again.

  “He’s alone in his skin,” Atsumori said.

  “Did you just . . .?” Nikki cried, pointing down at Simon. “Possess him?”

  “It is the only way I could be sure,” Atsumori said. “I did what I could to strengthen him. He is very fragile.”

  “Maybe we should just call the police,” Miriam whispered.

  If the police became involved, Shiva would be close on their heels. Was this a good thing or a bad? Shiva would do nothing to save Leo from whoever had taken him. Simon would be in no condition to force them, and Nikki wouldn’t be able to talk to Simon.

  “Will he survive being moved?” Nikki asked.

  “Yes,” Atsumori said. “But he could not take another day of Iwanaga Hime using him.”

  “We take him then.” Nikki swallowed down on her fear and forced herself closer to the bed.

  If it were me on that bed, I wouldn’t want the one person that could help me be too afraid to move. Go!

  Reluctantly she laid the katana beside Simon on the bed and then with shaking hands struggled to undo the leather strap of the ball gag. She couldn’t understand how the knots were tied. Unable to untie Simon, she finally slipped the katana under the ropes and sawed upward.

  “Don’t break my shintai,” Atsumori said. “Or we’ll in the same mess that Iwanaga Hime is in.”

  “Don’t you dare ever try this with me. I won’t bear it. I’ll kill myself first.”

  “I swear to you, I would never try to hold you against your will. If you were not willing, I would rather perish.”

  “I don’t know how Iwanaga could do this to someone after being tied herself. I could never do this to another person.”

  “She has never been human,” Atsumori said. “Her father is one of the heavenly kami, older brother to Amaterasu, goddess of the sun, and Susanoo, god of the storms. While she is an earthly kami, she is no more human than the flowering tree or a great rock.”

  “And Simon is nothing more than a sword or at cat statue to her?”

  “Nothing more.”

  The ropes finally gave. She pulled them off Simon and flung them aside as if they were snakes.

  Simon was a tall man—nearly a foot taller than Nikki or Miriam—and even though he was slender in build, he was going to be difficult for them to muscle around. She glanced to the luggage cart and realized that Miriam wasn’t even in the room.

  “Miriam!”

  A muffled curse drew Nikki to the connecting room, katana tightly in hand.

  Miriam was ransacking the dresser drawers of 1050.

  “What are you doing?” Nikki cried.

  “We’re in her lair!” Miriam shook a newspaper at Nikki. “We should try and find out everything we can!”

  Nikki stammered a moment in surprise and dismay before managing, “No!”

  “You don’t do a big production out of leaving if you’re coming back in a few minutes. We should find out what Iwanaga is planning.”

  “No! I don’t know if the two of us can even move him. We don’t have time to dick around looking for something that might not even exist. There’s not going to be a map with a big x on it and the words ‘ultimate secret weapon’ written on it. Hell, even if it did, it’s going to be in Japanese—I’m not going to be able to read it!”

  “I could translate . . .” Atsumori started to offer.

  “We don’t have time!” Nikki caught herself before she shouted the words so they came out as a hoarse whisper.

  “She is an oracle,” Atsumori pointed out.

  “If there’s something here,” Nikki said. “We could pick it up, read it and not even know what we have in our hands.”

  Miriam frowned, still shaking the newspaper. “Right. Right. Okay. This is your book. What is in this room that is important to the heroine?”

  The question surprised her at first, but then, once she considered it, yes, she might be able to use her ability that way. Nikki glanced around the room. Unlike the other bedroom, this one had the earmarks of being lived in. There were piles of newspapers, books, bottles of sak
e, every type of nail polish and makeup imaginable, shoes by the door, the closet hanging open showing off a dozen hand-painted kimonos. Obviously while 1049 was a shrine to house the goddess, her tanuki goons and the shrine maidens interacted with her in 1050. If she were tweaking Simon’s earlier scene, what would be important for her to add? What would save the heroine or doom her if she missed it?

  She turned in a circle, paused, and pointed to a school bag lying on the bed. “That. That’s important.”

  Miriam pounced on the bag and snatched it up. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Nikki wavered. There was something more. She turned again, looking. Not in here. She walked back to 1049 and quickly checked the drawers of the dresser. At first glance, they were all empty, but then she found a men’s leather wallet and a red diplomatic passport from the United Kingdom. A quick check confirmed that they belonged to Simon. “Okay, now we go.”

  28

  Into the Mountains

  It wasn’t until they were wheeling Simon through the garage that they realized one small flaw to their plan. They stood in silence, eyeing the sports car.

  “It doesn’t feel right to put him in the trunk.” Nikki broke the silence.

  “I have to drive.” Miriam said. “Him or you.”

  “Right. Trunk.”

  Still it felt very, very wrong to close the trunk on Simon after they had muscled him into the small space. They were bad American gaijins and left the luggage cart sitting in the garage like no Japanese native would and fled the underground parking lot.

  “Where are we taking him?” Miriam asked when they stopped at the first red light. Maru was on Miriam’s lap, paws on the steering wheel, watching the light with her.

  Nikki stared wide-eyed at Miriam. She hadn’t planned that part out. “Umm.”

  “De Vil has my place staked out. I don’t want to explain to the FBI why we’ve got a Brit stuffed in the trunk. And if we start talking about Japanese gods and raccoon dogs, we’re both going straight to the loony bin.”

  “Both Shiva and Iwanaga know where I live,” Nikki said.

  “She will know that I was there,” Atsumori added. “She will assume I will go back to my shrine. It is where I’m strongest.”

  Amazingly the cup holder had collected a half-dozen pens at some point. Nikki snatched one up and clicked it, thinking. Where the hell did they run to? Any hotel they checked into would log their passports and instantly put them on the radar for her mother.

  She hated to show up on anyone’s doorstep with so much trouble, but their options were limited. “Do you think Pixii would be okay with us showing up—like this?”

  Miriam laughed. “She’d probably be pissed if we left her out.”

  Much to Miriam’s joy, a good part of the drive to Pixii’s place was on highways where she could play—cautiously—with the power of Leo’s car. The last thing they needed was to be pulled over for speeding.

  Nikki examined the bag that they’d stolen out of 1050. It was a school bag of the kind that every Japanese high school student carried. A student would buy a sturdy leather bag in seventh grade and use it until they graduated. Nikki thought of the shrine maidens and shivered. She hadn’t realized that the girls were so young.

  Inside was a collection of books, not surprisingly all in Japanese. At the very bottom of the bag was a student photo ID card in a plastic holder. It showed a teenage girl with the bowl-cut of a shrine maiden.

  “Her name is Umeko Kuroki.” Atsumori read the kanji that had mystified Nikki. “She’s a second-year student at Kagoshima Prefectural Kirishima High School.”

  Tucked behind the card was a Shinkansen train ticket from June. She couldn’t read the station they departed from, but she recognized the kanji for Osaka. “What does this say?”

  “Kagoshima,” Atsumori said. “It is a city in Kyushu.”

  The girl didn’t look familiar. She wasn’t one of Nikki’s characters. “Did you see her with the goddess?”

  “I did not,” Atsumori said. “None of the shrine maidens seemed to be the correct age to be this girl.”

  “The ticket suggests she came from Kagoshima to Osaka,” Nikki sighed. “Where is she now?”

  “Maybe she’s one of the girls that died. Kenichi said that two died already.”

  It would explain why she hadn’t been with the goddess. What had the tanuki done with her body? Certainly she and Miriam had just proved how easy it would be to get a dead body down to the garage and into the trunk of a car. Nikki tucked the ID back into the bag and studied the books.

  One of the books was clearly an atlas for a young child. Bright smiling children in traditional clothing stood next to maps of countries, waving flags. Oddly, Hawaii was treated separately from the United States, with kids in hula outfits and waving the state flag as well as the American Stars and Stripes. The boy reminded her of Leo, with black hair and dark eyes.

  The second book was a history textbook. The third seemed to be child’s science, explaining things such as electricity, gasoline engines, and airplanes.

  “This is one weird collection of books.” Nikki frowned at the last book, which was a thick Frommer’s guidebook on Japan. The statue of a god frowned back at her from the cover.

  “Iwanaga Hime knows nothing of the world as it stands now,” Atsumori said. “My shrine is at the edge of Kyoto, but from it I have been able to watch the world change. I saw them lay the tracks for the first train. I was mystified when they strung the first electric lines. I was awestruck when the first planes flew overhead. I have had not only my priests and my shrine maidens devoting their lives to me, but an endless parade of people visit my shrine. From the neighbors who have owned the local bakery for a dozen generations to the Americans who come with their short pants and bug-bitten legs. How do your people get so bitten up?”

  “I don’t know.” Nikki flipped through the books, trying to figure out what was important about them. “We taste good?”

  “On that mountain, Iwanaga would have seen nothing but trees and river and farm, and the one family that served her were farmers, not priests. They would have come, prayed, and left her alone.”

  Had Iwanaga been lonely or was that just a human trait? She certainly had been angry when she finally managed to get free.

  While the first three books seemed fairly new, the tour book was dog-eared and heavily annotated. It was in Japanese, but Nikki could guess the locations being discussed from her own research and accompanying pictures and maps. Sections of text had been underlined, circled, and crossed off. “She’s looking for something. All the notes are around shrines, not hotels or restaurants and such. She thinks what she’s looking for will be at a shrine, but she’s not sure which one.”

  “A shintai to hold her?” Miriam guessed.

  Nikki curled up against the thought. Of all the things she hated most about mental hospitals, number one was being tied helpless to a bed while the chance of rape loomed huge. The hospitals tried to prevent it, but it only took one orderly who slipped through their background checks, one patient with kinks, one visitor who saw an opportunity and took it. Her fingers twitched, wanting to write. It reminded her, though, that she didn’t write little personal tragedies.

  “She has to be looking for something more. She’s angry, but she has to be scared that the other kami will find out she’s free and imprison her again. She’s vulnerable now, so, yeah, she wants Simon and you and the katana, but she’s probably looking for something—something like a weapon. She’ll fight before she lets herself be bound again, and the body count will be high.”

  “Bigger than Dupont?” Miriam asked.

  Nikki nodded, clicking her pen. “Dupont had only twenty characters, and most of them knew each other. This time, I’ve got dozens of people scattered all over Japan, and none of them are connected. She’s going to do something big—something—something that will affect them all.”

  Pixii lived on a mountain somewhere in Nara Prefecture. Nikki had the directions to he
r place memorized, but they were from the Nara train station. From there, she was supposed to take a bus to a remote bus stop and then walk the rest of the way. While Pixii had provided Nikki with detailed instructions on how to find the correct bus and method of paying the fare, they were devoid of road names, distance, and landmarks until the section on foot. Nikki fought with the GPS system, trying to target Pixii’s location, but failed. In the end, they used the system to get to Nara while Nikki tried calling her on Miriam’s phone.

  “She’s not picking up,” Nikki said.

  “She tweeted that they were firing the kiln. She needs to stoke the fire like every fifteen to twenty minutes, so she’s probably in and out of the house a lot.”

  In the end, they stopped in Nara at the bus station and found a map that described the bus routes and took a picture of it. After that, they drove carefully through dark, winding mountain roads, trying to find the correct bus stop.

  For the first time in her life, Nikki desperately wanted to write without her hypergraphia pushing her. Where was Leo? Was he okay? She gripped her pen tightly, wanting to put it to paper, but Miriam needed her co-piloting. It was taking all Miriam’s concentration to drive the dark, twisting roads. According to Pixii, the bus stop was merely a collection of small markers alongside the road, showing that five different buses stopped at that location. With headlights raking through the darkness, she kept her eyes focused for the signs.

  Luckily, it was near dawn when they reached the correct section of road, otherwise she would have never seen them. Each sign was only the size of her palm.

  They stopped and stared at the signs.

  “There’s the bakery with the red roof.” Nikki pointed to the building just ahead. A wall of trees climbed the steep hillside behind it, mist rising off the trees as the sun paled the sky. “Take that right.”

  The road rose and narrowed as it wound its way up the flank of a mountain. Farms nestled in the small valley between the hills, a dozen rice paddies reflecting the pale sky like pieces of a broken mirror.