by Wen Spencer
She came to her mother’s room and paused at the door. Just once, she wished she could walk in and find a neatly dressed, sane woman beyond the door. A woman like her grandmother had been, all pressed linen, ever-present pearls, and neatly applied lipstick. Her grandmother had the patience of a saint, dealing with her crazed daughter and fatherless granddaughter, calmly forgiving them both.
Laverne curled her fingers against the painted steel of the door. God, she missed her grandmother so much. If only she could go back to that time, so much blessed quiet and sunshine and the smell of lavender water and fresh-pressed cotton.
The distant screamer wailed, reminding her that her childhood had been lost years ago.
She braced herself for anything and pushed open the door.
Her mother crouched in the far corner, rocking in place as she hunched over a piece of paper. There must have been a change in staff. The walls were covered with mad scribbling. Starting with pens, then pencil, and finally crayons as writing implements were used up and no one had yet thought to clue in the new orderly to keep her mother supplied with paper and pens. The highest bit was all feces-covered fingerprints as madness drove her mother to use anything at hand to continue writing.
At least they had caught her before she resorted to blood.
Laverne sighed. She stepped into the room and let the door close behind her. The room smelled a hundred times stronger than the hallway, but at least the screamer was muffled to barely audible. She focused on breathing through her mouth to lessen the stench.
“Mom?”
No response. Not surprising. She’d spent most of her childhood shut out by her mother’s madness.
“Mom?” She moved reluctantly closer. The smell was worse near her mother. They must not have cleaned well under her fingertips after the writing with feces. She glanced at the wall, amazed at the ineptitude of the staff. Her mother wasn’t a tall woman—she would have had to balance the chair on the bed and then stand on tiptoe to reach so . . .
Laverne’s name seemed to leap off the wall at her, catching her eye. The letters were smeared, but a lifetime of reading her mother is madness made the words clear to her.
Laverne listened to the creak of his footsteps coming up the stairs. She held tight the knife. She wouldn’t take any more. She wasn’t going to let him touch her again.
She stared at horror at the words that trailed off to smears that even she couldn’t read. She had been so careful. She had planned every detail down to the last and then scrubbed away the evidence. He was gone, and no one questioned it. Yet it was there, on the wall, for everyone to see.
“Mom? What did you do?”
They hadn’t given her mother a tablet but a sheaf of paper. They littered the floor like dead leaves, every square inch covered with the careful tiny handwriting that her mother used when she had actual pen and paper. Laverne snatched one up and scanned over the words.
. . . Laverne lay panting over his still body, blood warm and wet between them. Not for the first, but this time it was his blood, not hers, and it was for the last time . . .
. . . she curled in a ball on the shower floor, weeping as the water turned cold. It drizzled over her like the rain at her grandmother’s funeral. He’d stood there, the proper son, but his eyes on her had been hungry . . .
She crumbled the paper into a ball, shaking. This was exactly what she had done. Exactly what she had thought. All laid bare for everyone to see. She snatched up another sheet of paper and scanned it.
. . . so much blood, everywhere. It’d soaked through the bedding and into the mattress. How was she going to hide . . .
She crumbled it and grabbed another.
. . . she going to tell people? Certainly he’d left town before without so much as a note, but would people believe he’d run off, leaving his niece alone? Or would they search the house, looking for clues . . .
She started to snatch up all the pages, crumbling them without even glancing at them. Damn the woman! Bad enough that she had left Laverne alone in that mess, now she was betraying her while she tried to cope with it by herself.
Her mother crouched on all fours, focused utterly on the paper she was currently writing. She muttered softly a litany to the paper. “Yes, yes, that’s smart, girl, keep your head, think it through . . .”
Laverne stared in horror as the pen moved across the paper, revealing her darkest secret.
. . . crypts were for holding dead people.
“No!” She caught her mother by the hair and jerked her back from the paper. “Stop it! Stop it!”
Her mother wailed in dismay and pain but her hand kept moving, spilling damning secrets.
. . . No one else would have the key to her family crypt. Part of her couldn’t bear the thought of disturbing her grandmother’s body . . .
“Stop!” Laverne flung her mother away from the paper. Some tiny part of her was amazed at how bird light her mother was. Did she ever stop writing to eat?
“I have to see!” Her mother scrambled back toward the paper. “I have to be sure! Is it safe for her? She shouldn’t have been left alone with him. He was all twisted and dark inside. It wasn’t the sex, it was the pain for him. He liked to hurt things, it made him feel powerful. It’s why she sent him away.”
“I wouldn’t have been alone if you’d just stopped writing!” Laverne cried as her mother hunched over the paper again.
“Things you bury don’t always stay buried. I have to see.”
. . . of seeing her as anything not neat and clean, of putting him in with her as if stuffing him back into the womb that . . .
She stomped down on her mother’s hand. Heard something snap. Felt it give. Savage joy and self-hatred tore through her. “I said stop!” Laverne grabbed her mother and flung her again across the room.
Desperately Laverne gathered up all the papers, cramming them into her purse. Only when the last dangerously shameful page was hidden away, did she realize that her mother hadn’t moved.
“Mom?” She crept to her mother’s side, still shaking with anger and shame and fear.
There was a gnash on her mother’s forehead. Blood was trickling down her face. Her eyes were open. Unfocused.
“Oh God. Oh God.” Laverne crouched there, panting. What was she going to do? It wasn’t like she could stuff her mother into the family crypt, too. The staff was going to know that she had killed her mother.
Could she make it look like an accident? How could her mother possibly hit her head on the bed? She looked frantically around the room. Her name on the walls shouted her guilt at her. She’d killed her mother. She’d killed her uncle, and now she’d killed her mother.
The words drew her eyes upwards. The only white space left in the room was the ceiling. The staff would probably believe that without paper, her mother would try to write on that, too. She grabbed the chair and put it lying on its side in the center of the bed, tipped toward her mother’s body. Her mother was still clutching a pen; she felt weirdly relieved to see it was the pen that was broken, not her mother’s fingers. Why was it so important to know that she hadn’t hurt her mother before killing her?
Trembling, she considered the crime scene, trying not to think how much easier it was to clean up the second murder. So much calmer.
Should she call the staff? Explain how she found her mother already dead? No. No one saw her come in. She could slip out quietly, and no one would even know she was there.
* * *
“Nikki-chan.”
She whimpered as Atsumori called to her, pulling her out of the writing. Wide-eyed, she clutched the notebook to her chest, hiding the awful scene. It couldn’t be true. Her mother couldn’t have killed her grandmother. Could she?
“Who is this person?” Atsumori asked.
She laughed shakily. “I’m no longer sure.” She forced herself to scan the words again. Everything fit. Her mother was Laverne. She had been raised by Nikki’s great-grandmother because her grandmother had been “ill.” S
he had been left orphaned when she was seventeen, years before she’d met Nikki’s rich and powerful father. Nikki had never heard of an Uncle Billy, alive or dead, nor did she know anything about a family crypt.
If her mother had killed two people, it would make sense why she was so desperate to keep Nikki labeled as insane and too drugged to write. She had secrets that she wanted to keep hidden. Motivation was also easy to map out: Why protect a child that was going to end up as dangerously crazy as her grandmother?
Her mother knew that her ability was real. That’s why she was so insistent on locking Nikki up. Any other person would have seen the proof that she could take care of herself—the fact she was safe with friends every time her mother tracked her down—and washed their hands of the responsibility. She was twenty and not hurting anyone, not even herself. Her mother had carefully never told her about her grandmother’s ability. Carefully made sure that Nikki never knew that her stories were true. Carefully kept her locked up because she was scared that if Nikki knew the truth, she could write out all the secrets her mother had to keep.
She’d betrayed Nikki as a mother to protect herself. Somehow, Nikki was going to make her pay.
37
War Paint
“I don’t know how to drive an automobile,” Atsumori stated somewhere between Kyoto and Kinosaki. One of the joys of having a famous mother was that she was ridiculously easy to track, especially when you had a secret elf talent of being able to write from her point of view. Between that and the car’s GPS system, her mother couldn’t stay hidden from Nikki’s anger.
“You don’t need to know how.” Nikki winced as she did something wrong again with the stick shift. The car never made that noise when Leo or Miriam was driving it. “I can drive.”
“Obviously not well.”
“Well enough.”
“This anger will only destroy you. If you go storming into her stronghold, ranting with righteous fury, she will have the upper hand.”
“Why can’t you shut up?”
“Because you’ve stopped listening to your own common sense. You must find a weapon against her.”
“A sword will work.”
“Once a sword is drawn, it is not easily sheathed. Are you willing to kill your mother?”
“Yes!” she shouted.
“Truly? Strike her head from her shoulders and see it roll upon the ground like pumpkin? Bloody stump for a neck?”
“Shut up!”
“Once done, it cannot be undone.”
“I want—I want her to just leave me alone. I’m tired of running and hiding like I’ve done something wrong. I hate it. And what I hate most is being so utterly helpless because I have to stay hidden to stay safe.”
“Then you must find a weapon against her that is not a sword.”
“I know what she’s afraid of. She’s afraid that people will find out what she’s done.”
“Fear is a dangerous weapon. It is difficult to wield.”
She considered how the scene would go if she were writing it. For a moment, the car vanished out from under her and she was standing in front of her mother.
“You knew! You knew the truth, and all this time you’ve pretended I was insane. You kept me locked up and drugged so I couldn’t get out and tell your dirty little secrets.”
“You’re clearly insane.”
“So if I call up a reporter and send them to our family crypt, he’s not going to find Uncle Billy shoved into the casket with great-grandma?”
“Do you think I couldn’t get that quietly cleaned up before any reporter could get there?”
“And you fixed your birth certificate? Did you make sure that Uncle Billy wasn’t listed as your father?”
“The name on my birth certificate isn’t William Phelps.”
“And your DNA? You’re going to change that, too?”
“Nikki!” Atsumori shouted.
She blinked and yipped in fear as she realized she had drifted to the wrong side of the road out of habit. She jerked the car back into the left-hand lane. “Okay, so fear is bad and writing while driving is really bad.”
By the time she reached Kinosaki, she’d gotten her anger under control. Leo was dying of neglect. Sato had the spear but Shiva didn’t seem to realize it yet. They would know soon enough of what she’d done at Kyoto but nothing she had written indicated that they were aware of why there had been a battle. She had to save Leo and mobilize Shiva against Sato.
Still unaware of the battle in Kyoto, her mother was playing the part of visiting dignitary, touring shrines under some bullshit lie about tourism recovery after the tsunami. Kinosaki lay next door to Izushi. Her mother was looking for her in places where Atsumori would feel safest. There was the mild problem that Kinosaki and Izushi weren’t known for their shrines.
It was Japan, so there were small shrines and temples to be found. Nikki picked out Kyo-o-ji Temple to corner her mother because its garden was backed by a bamboo forest. A tall wall surrounded the grounds, but Atsumori scaled it with godlike ease.
Nikki dodged three bodyguards in dark suits and found her mother alone in the garden.
Her mother’s eyes went wide at the sight of Nikki. She still was in the black kimono and blood red kamishimo. She had the katana sheathed and tucked into her belt.
Her mother reached for her pocket where she kept the radio that linked her to her bodyguards.
“Don’t,” Nikki said. “I need to talk to you about things you’re not going to want other people to hear.”
“Nikki?”
“Yes, it’s just me. Mostly.” Nikki put her hand on the katana’s hilt. “The kami is here, but you’re just talking to me.”
“Nikki, put the sword down and back away from it. It’s dangerous.”
“No, I’m not putting it down. I need you to listen to me, and if I put it down, you won’t.”
“I don’t know what the kami has been telling you . . .”
“It’s telling me not to kill you for the shit you’ve put me through!” Nikki snapped. “Really, what the fuck were you thinking about, you selfish bitch? Your grandmother would be ashamed of you. She took good care of you. She gave you everything you wanted. I’ve seen the pictures. A bedroom painted pink. A princess bed with a canopy. Tea parties in the garden. She did everything to keep you safe and happy. Everything clean and neat and sane. And what did you do for me? I was eight the first time you checked me into a hospital and walked away. I was ten and tied to the bed when the girl across the hall was raped. After everything your grandmother did for you—that’s how you treat me?”
“My mother . . .”
“Your mother was trying to protect you when you killed her! She was trying to make sure that no one would find the body you’d hidden.”
Her mother had gone ashen and still.
“You know what it’s like to lie in bed, scared shitless, listening to a man move through the darkness, waiting for him to open the door to your room and hurt you. I was ten! I was ten, and you had me tied up, drugged, helpless, and alone. What would your grandmother have thought? She protected you. She kept you safe up to her dying breath. And what did you do? You killed both of her children, and then you didn’t even take care of your own child.”
“I did take care of you.”
“No, you didn’t. You realized the day you killed your mother that she wasn’t crazy. You’ve known all this time that I was like her—that everything I wrote was the truth. You’ve known that this isn’t some insanity that a shrink and the right cocktail of drugs will cure. And yet you kept me locked up in the hospital so you would be safe.”
“My mother was insane. She wrote on walls with her own feces.”
“Obsessive Compulsion isn’t insane. It’s a disorder, but its not insanity, and you know it. And every time a doctor had the guts to tell that to your face, you’d fire him and get someone that would agree with you.”
Atsumori suddenly shifted them sideways, and a black man ghosted out of th
e shadows. He was a tall, solid man all in black. She had written about him enough times to recognize him. He was the one she really was waiting for.
“Williams.” Nikki kept to her script, talking fast so her mother couldn’t interrupt. “Sato has taken the Heavenly Bejeweled Spear from Susanoo, and he plans to use it to remake the world.” That said, she could slow down. Her mother might be a bitch, but even she understood the dangers of a rogue operative armed with a powerful magical weapon. “Sato has Shiva’s phone tapped, so he’s been able to stay one step ahead of you. He found Simon the day after he’d gone missing; Simon had been possessed by a kami named Iwanaga Hime. Sato has teamed up with Iwanaga and a large number of yokai looking to take back the world. “
“And you know this how?” Williams asked.
“Because I’m an oracle. With the annoying exception of things like kami, I can ‘see’ what anyone has done or will do, years in the past or in the future. Leo doesn’t want you to know, because he doesn’t trust Shiva. Being that you have him locked in a cage without water, it seems to me that he has good cause.”
“And you saw this meeting?” William asked.
“Yes.” Actually dozens of variations of it. This was the most successful storyline. “We want Leo out of the cage. We’ll cooperate to see that happens. I know that we can take you.” She put her hand onto the katana hilt. This was partially a bluff—Williams was scary fast and strong—but it was generally a successful bluff. Williams was used to being an attack dog, but he always waited for an order to attack.
Atsumori took his cue and stepped fully into her. “I am Taira no Atsumori. I will not be taken by force. My shrine maiden was murdered. My shrine was set on fire, and my priest was killed trying to save it. I want Iwanaga Hime and this dog Sato stopped.”