A Mortal Song

by Megan Crewe

  Chiyo swayed this way and that, her arms around Haru, then dragging Takeo over. The doe and the boar and the others pranced in a circle around the wavering fire. The even tapping of their steps formed a solid rhythm under the melody.

  Even without words, I understood the song. Darkness was upon us, it said, but we fought, and we survived, and we will be victorious again. The feeling of it tingled through me, drawing me to my feet. Then I halted.

  My muscles throbbed from the fight and lack of sleep, which my body needed far more than those fueled by the earth’s ki. Part of me longed to leap into the midst of the dance, but my legs had locked, refusing to move. The kami danced on, not one of them noticing me standing there—not even Takeo.

  Why should they? Even if I’d held on to my flute, even if I matched their steps, I’d never belong with them again.

  My stomach twisted. I turned and slipped away through the shadows.

  In the small clearing behind the shrine building, the mingling of moon and starlight glinted on the grass. I could still hear the music faintly. Here, there were no watching eyes to wonder why a human danced the kami way or to notice if I faltered. I held up my hands to the sky and let the melody sweep through me.

  My bare feet pattered over the grass. The breeze became my fickle partner, whispering around me and then flitting away. The smell of cedar and summer flowers filled my lungs. I closed my eyes.

  I’m back in the palace’s great hall, I told myself. It’s still my birthday. Everything since then was only a dream. It’s time to dance, to celebrate another year, to honor the time I’ve been on this Earth. I could picture the lanterns gleaming on the walls, Mother and Father whirling around each other with eyes for no one else. All the other kami in their colorful robes or shining pelts, spinning like autumn leaves on a stream.

  The soreness of my body retreated into the distance. The music would flow on without end, one song blurring into the next, and I needed nothing to sustain me but the soaring of my heart and the rhythm rippling through my bones...

  A shoe scraped over stone, and my eyelids popped open, the illusion falling away. My hands dropped to my sides.

  Keiji was sitting down on the edge of the platform. I could hardly see his face from where I stood, only a sliver of moonlight reflecting off his glasses.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was trying my best not to distract you. You don’t have to stop.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. Now that I was aware again of my limbs, my breath, an even deeper exhaustion was settling over me. I stepped toward him.

  “It’s gotten a little crazy over there, hasn’t it?” he said with a half smile, gesturing toward the front courtyard.

  “It’s not crazy,” I said. “I just don’t fit in there anymore.”

  “You fit in a lot better than I do,” Keiji said. “I bet half the time they forget whether you’re kami or not.”

  I looked at the ground. “I don’t.”

  “Is it really that bad being human? I kind of like it. I guess being able to instantly heal and, okay, turn invisible and all that is pretty neat, but—”

  “It’s not about that,” I broke in. “You couldn’t understand—you have no idea what it’s like, to know who you are and what you can do and then none of it is true, none if it’s really yours, it’s just...” I didn’t know how to finish.

  In the silence that followed, I heard Keiji swallow. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to make you upset.”

  It was strange the way he could be irreverent one moment and serious the next. Because I was used to talking with kami, whose natures were clear and unwavering. Because he was human, and that was what being human meant, wasn’t it? Changing, all the time.

  Like me, right now, wanting to run from his words and to hear more of them, both at the same time.

  He moved to get up, and I grasped his wrist. His pulse drummed against my fingers. He met my eyes with a question in his.

  “Don’t go,” I said. “I—I’m not angry.”

  He sat back down, watching as I released his arm.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t really understand how it’s been for you. But I do know a little about what it’s like to feel you don’t fit in. My brother and I, we weren’t what my aunt and uncle wanted at all. Our marks were never high enough, our chores never done fast enough. But he— He managed to figure out what he wanted to do, who he wanted to be, at least. I’m still working on that. I’m not one of the athletic guys, or the charmers, or the geniuses. I know I can’t pull off any of those. So I make people laugh. I collect a lot of facts about a lot of weird things. And I can pretend pretty well not to care about anything else. That’s what I’ve got so far.”

  “You care,” I protested. “You—” The memories welled up too fast for me to put them into words: the whisper of loss I’d felt through his palm, his joy when exploring Rin’s valley, his determination as he’d followed me into battle last night. The awe on his face just before he’d kissed me.

  He glanced up at me then, with a full smile this time. “I don’t seem to be so good at pretending with you. I think I’m okay with that.”

  The hurt he’d tried to keep out of his voice when he’d talked about his family lingered in his eyes. Was it worse to feel you had a place and then to lose it, or to never have felt you belonged? Maybe I was lucky I’d had what I was missing as long as I had.

  “I shouldn’t have snapped at you,” I said. “It’s just—it’s taking a while to get used to the idea that I’m so much less than I grew up thinking I was.”

  Keiji shook his head with a short laugh. He slid off his glasses, rubbed the lenses with the hem of his shirt, considered them, and set them on the platform beside him. Without them, his face looked even more open.

  “Just because you aren’t kami doesn’t mean you’re less than them,” he said. “You’re definitely the most amazing girl I’ve ever met, Chiyo included. And, okay, I haven’t met that many girls, but I can judge at least a little.”

  He raised his head, and the look he gave me knocked the breath out of me.

  “But—” I couldn’t help saying. “Chiyo, she glows.”

  He arched his eyebrows. “What are you talking about? You do too.”

  “What? Can you even see without those on?” I motioned vaguely at his glasses.

  “If I’m close enough, sure.” He shifted off the platform onto his feet, so we stood just a few inches apart. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure there’s more than one way to glow.”

  I held perfectly still, my heart pounding, unable to tear my eyes from his. Keiji’s gaze dipped down to my mouth and up again, but he didn’t move. “If I—” he said. “Could I—”

  I reached for his arm, my fingertips skittering up to the soft skin above his elbow. My touch seemed to give him the answer he’d been seeking. He leaned across those last few inches and kissed me.

  His lips brushed mine cautiously, but his other arm slid around me, steady against my back. For an instant, my mind leapt to Takeo—what he would think if he saw this? But why had I told him no if I wasn’t going to take the feeling I wanted when I had it? I shoved all thought of him away and kissed Keiji back.

  With a rough sound in his throat, he pulled me closer. My arms slipped behind his neck of their own accord. The wineberries had left his mouth sweet, and his skin smelled like smoke from the fire. The warmth of him radiated through me. Every nerve in my body started to hum, and I could have believed right then that I really was glowing. I kissed him again, more deeply, wanting to lose myself in this one thing that I had chosen.

  Then the ground shuddered beneath us, tipping my feet and bringing me back to Earth.

  We broke apart, Keiji stumbling backward. I caught my balance against the platform. The ground heaved and trembled for a few seconds longer before it quieted. I stared down at it, struggling for breath.

  None of the earlier quakes had lasted that long. The mountain’s fury was growing.

  A
wave of nausea swept through me. While I was letting myself get carried away by my careless human emotions, the fire inside Mt. Fuji was swelling, ready to rain down on the Nagamotos, their friends and neighbors, and thousands more. For a few minutes, I’d actually forgotten that. Forgotten even my kami friends, the ones I’d considered family, who were still being tormented and maybe even dying at Omori’s hands.

  Good or bad, none of my feelings mattered right now. If I was really going to help and not become a burden, I had to put them aside until this war was over. Shut off every part of me—the fears, the delight—except those that supported our efforts. Strength. Focus. I had to be as kami as a human could be.

  “I should make some more ofuda before I sleep,” I said. “There’s not much time left before we’ll be leaving.”

  Keiji paused and offered me a shy grin.

  “Need a hand?” he asked.

  “Thank you,” I said, but I couldn’t quite return the smile. There’d been a moment in the midst of the music when I’d felt so sure we’d come out of this horror safely. But the truth was, even Rin hadn’t been certain what the future would hold. I’d never forgive myself if one of those kami in the courtyard, or Haru, or Keiji, died because I’d gotten distracted from doing all I could to make ready for the battle ahead.

  15

  WE REACHED Tokyo in the middle of the morning. Keiji stashed his books in a train station locker, and we detoured to a grocery store where we bought up all their bags of salt with his and Haru’s pocket money. The rest of us with arms purchased cheap satchels to carry our defensive materials.

  Everywhere we went, I heard murmurs about the weather, the tremors; saw worried glances at the ground and sky. Browning grass mottled the park we gathered in to portion out our supplies. Scattered on it were dead crickets and beetles for whom the heat and lack of water had been too much. The sight of their fragile carcasses brought a lump to my throat. They reminded me far too sharply of Midori.

  If we didn’t succeed in retrieving Amaterasu’s sacred jewel from the Imperial Palace’s shrine today, the crisis would only get worse.

  I’m not sure any of us felt completely ready as we headed across the palace’s parking lot. Of the kami we’d met around Nagoya, only Sumire the violet, the oak, the monkey, and the boar had followed us here. The others Takeo had felt were more likely to be hurt or killed than able to help. He held my hand, Chiyo Haru’s, and Sumire Keiji’s, using their ki to make us invisible as we approached the two broad gates leading into the palace grounds. My pulse started skittering. We skirted the visitors dawdling on the paved bridge that crossed the still, murky water of the moat. A guard stood by the high stone wall, oblivious to our presence.

  Chiyo clenched the sacred sword at her side. I sucked in a breath as we stepped past the old wooden doors onto the grounds.

  No ghosts rushed to meet us. Nothing met us at all but the heat rising off the baked asphalt. A squat, modern building stood ahead of us by a branch in the road, near a lawn spotted with trees and rounded bushes. Tourists strolled by as the breeze stirred the leaves.

  “Maybe the ghosts are waiting for us farther in?” I said. Surely Omori hadn’t completely failed to defend this treasure?

  Takeo inclined his head. “The grounds cover acres, and only the small area around the shrine is fully protected. We can’t know where our enemies will make their stand.”

  “So we’re going to just wander around until we stumble onto them?” Keiji said, his mouth slanting nervously.

  I didn’t like that idea either. “Maybe there’s a kami on the grounds who can tell us what they’ve seen,” I said.

  “Just got to find them,” Chiyo said. “Too bad kami don’t use cell phones!”

  A small streak of cloud streaming across the sky caught my eye. There were other ways of sending a message across a distance.

  “Use a kite,” I said to Takeo. “You can make it with a message on it.”

  “Perfect!” Chiyo said. “Like people used to do way back during wars and stuff. I guess this is a war, isn’t it? Here, I can do it.”

  Before she’d even finished speaking, she was stretching a cylinder of ki between her hands. Rough characters sparkled across its side: Imperial Palace kami, we need your help. She tossed the ki-drawn kite up over her head. It caught as if on a gust of wind, swaying higher and higher. Chiyo’s eyes narrowed, watching it.

  “Don’t drain yourself,” Takeo warned. She nodded and then let the kite dissipate.

  We continued down the road tentatively, taking the wider branch. We’d just reached the building when a brief burst of ki sparked in the sky.

  Here.

  “It worked!” Chiyo said.

  “Definitely kami,” Takeo said as he absorbed the sense of the ki. We hurried forward in the direction the message had indicated. The road led us around an inner wall of mossy stone and through another gate. We passed wide hedges and old-style wooden guardhouses with gently curved tiled roofs. If it hadn’t been for the boxy shapes of high rises hovering in the distance over the treetops, I could have believed we’d slipped back into an earlier time.

  Not a whisper of a ghost rose to challenge us. My fingers curled into the palm of my free hand. Even if the dead were keeping themselves dim and hidden, kami eyes would spot them. So where were they?

  The road curved through a grove of cherry trees. There, a tall kami with bristling hair and arms roped with muscle stepped out to greet us. A pine, I thought, or maybe a fir. He looked young, even younger than Takeo, and his eyes widened as he took in our group.

  “I am glad to help you,” he said haltingly, and paused as if struggling with his words. He must not have been around humans or speaking kami often enough to have fully picked up the language. “There is... You look for the jewel?”

  “We do,” Chiyo said. “Do you know where it is?”

  He bobbed his head in a jerky motion and gestured for us to follow. “It is not far. It is... moved, for safety.”

  “Away from the ghosts?” I said, and he nodded.

  Chiyo bounded forward to walk beside our guide. The kami walked on without hesitation, but there was something out of rhythm about his gait. Uneasiness crept over my skin. I scanned the gardens, dragged air into my lungs, and strained my ears. None of my senses caught anything worrisome, even with Takeo’s ki enhancing them. He looked perfectly confident as he strode along beside me. All the other kami appeared alert but untroubled.

  It was just the overactive emotions that had come with this human body, then—my fears trying to make me jump at shadows. I squared my shoulders.

  The young kami turned off the main road onto a narrow path. The flowering shrubs that lined it gave off a delicate perfume. The path wound toward a three-story keep on the edge of an inner moat. The roof bowed over the keep’s white-washed walls. Solid panels sealed off most of the windows.

  “The jewel,” the kami said, and cleared his throat. “Inside.” I supposed the palace shrine kami must have secreted it here when they’d seen the ghosts converging on them.

  The keep’s door opened at Chiyo’s nudge. As we eased inside, the oak kami sent up a ball of energy to cast a dim glow over our surroundings. We’d come into a long, high-ceilinged hallway that led to what looked like a stairwell at the other end of the building. Several inner doors broke the blank white stretch of the walls. The floors were clean, but the place felt abandoned. An ideal hiding spot.

  Now that we were away from other eyes, Takeo released my hand to set his fingers on the grip of his sword. He and the other kami turned corporeal. My body settled back into the physical world with a wash of heat and the smell of dust.

  Our kami guide stopped before the third inner door and bowed. His eyes stayed fixed on Chiyo.

  “Here,” he said. “This is where.”

  As Chiyo reached for the doorknob, a cry leapt into my mouth. No! I gritted my teeth and scanned the hall again. An army of ghosts couldn’t conceal themselves in this darkness. And if there was
something wrong, Chiyo was hardly defenseless. I had to get over my nerves. It was my decision to be here in the midst of the danger.

  Then Chiyo turned the knob, Takeo at the ready beside her, and I happened to glance at the young kami. My body went rigid.

  The way he was watching her, as if he were afraid to look away. The strain in his jaw. I recognized the feeling in that expression, because I’d felt it more than once in the last few days.

  It was desperation.

  “Chiyo!” I said, but she’d already pushed open the door. Her nose wrinkled.

  “What—” she started.

  She never had the chance to finish her question.

  In a blaze of light so intense I thought the ceiling had caught fire and fallen on our heads, hundreds of ghostlights rained down on us. The thickest whirl of them smacked straight into Chiyo and Takeo, slamming them through the doorway and yanking the door shut. One solidified, jamming a key into the lock. The swarm of ghostlights blurred around me. Waiting for Chiyo and Takeo to burst back out, I fumbled with my sheaf of ofuda. A solid door couldn’t stop kami, locked or not.

  But they didn’t emerge.

  All around me, ki glinted where the other kami must have been striking out at the ghosts. I thrust out my trembling hand, smacking charms against the spirits closest to me. A liquid sound came from behind me, something sloshing on the floor, but I didn’t have time to look. Haru was leaping forward, snatching at the door Chiyo had vanished behind, and a ring of ghosts solidified around him.

  A sound of protest escaped my lips. I threw myself toward him, but my legs couldn’t move fast enough. He banished three of his attackers with quick snaps of ofuda, reaching to his satchel for his salt. Before he could pull it out, his fourth charm missed. The woman he’d aimed it at ducked beneath his arm and plunged the thick blade of her knife into his side.

  His amulet gave him no protection against steel. He sagged against the wall as if deflating. Gasping, I slapped an ofuda against the side of the woman’s head before she could turn around and spun as another ghost turned corporeal behind me.