by Megan Crewe
“But—”
“Come on. It shouldn’t be too difficult to ‘convince’ our human prisoners to talk now.”
My pulse stuttered. Human prisoners meant Haru and me. They’d see I’d escaped. Steps were approaching the door in a smooth steady rhythm: the ghost’s feet, still corporeal against the floor.
I didn’t have time to run down the hall. The stairwell was closer—but that would only serve me until they reached the room and saw the scraps of rope I’d left behind.
If I didn’t want them to catch me, I had to use my only advantage: surprise.
I braced myself, my gaze fixed on that satchel beyond the table. I didn’t know if I could do this, but I had to try. As the ghost’s footsteps sounded just behind the door, I threw all my weight against it.
The door slammed into his corporeal form. As he grunted in shock, I was already bolting across the room.
I was less than a stride from the table when a swift kick knocked my legs out from under me.
My elbows jarred against the tabletop as I caught my balance. That minor pain was nothing compared to the sense of failure that pierced through me. But the katana was right there. I wasn’t going down without a fight.
I snatched up the sword and spun around. Keiji’s brother leapt back, just out of reach. Then he pulled a sleek black pistol out of his jacket pocket and aimed it at my face.
I hesitated, my palm sweating against the sword’s grip. He stood between me and the door. There was still the entire table separating me from my satchel. I suspected he could pull the trigger faster than I could lunge—and even if I lunged at him, Haru’s katana couldn’t truly hurt someone who was already dead.
Keiji’s shoes scraped the floor somewhere to my left, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off his brother. “Tomo,” he said, his voice strained. Ignoring him, the ghost dipped his head to me in a mockery of a bow.
“Tomoya Mitsuoka at your service,” he said. “So I finally get to meet Miss Sora in the flesh. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
From Keiji. My jaw tightened. Up close, the family resemblance was noticeable. They had the same wide-set eyes and rounded chin. But Tomoya’s face was narrower, his cheekbones more prominent, giving him a slightly malnourished look. A thin scar sliced across the bridge of his nose just below the jagged sweep of his red-streaked hair.
When I didn’t answer, he made a tiny gesture with the gun. “You’ll probably feel more comfortable if I stop pointing this at you. And I’ll stop pointing it at you if you put down the sword.”
“How about you go first?” I suggested. Tomoya’s smile returned.
“Sora,” Keiji tried, closer now. I could almost see him from the corner of my eye. My hand tensed around the sword grip.
“Back off,” I said. “I can use this on a human even more easily than a ghost.”
“You should be nicer to him,” Tomoya said. “If it weren’t for Keiji, you’d be dead, you know.”
The muscles in my hand were aching from the effort to hold the sword steady. “I should appreciate being tricked into walking into a trap, tied up, and thrown in a storage room while my friends are dead or dying?” I said.
“Well, if you don’t want to be here, we could arrange something else.” His eyes skimmed my body. “Omori would definitely approve of you as a specimen.”
Specimen? “For what?” I asked.
“Oh, you’ll find out. It’s just a few more days until Obon.”
He was smirking at me now, as if there were something funny about the rain ceasing to fall, Mt. Fuji threatening to erupt. I still didn’t understand. He didn’t have to fight us any more than the woman in the sparrow had needed to help me.
“Why are you doing this?” I said. “Why are you helping him? Why hurt the kami at all?”
“Why not?” he said. “What have the kami done for any of us? All those souls they’ve left to the darkness of the afterworld—we’ve got no reason for loyalty. Omori’s already saved more of us than they ever did.”
“Saved you how?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
I didn’t understand, but he didn’t seem interested in explaining. “What about everyone else who’s going to be hurt?” I asked. “You have family, friends, people who are still living. Doesn’t it matter to you what happens to them?”
“That’s exactly why I’m doing this,” Tomoya said, his cocky expression darkening. “For my family.”
“Tomo—” Keiji started again, but I wasn’t interested in what he had to say.
“Doing what?” I interrupted. “What’s going to happen during Obon?”
Tomoya shook his head. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”
“And you trust a demon to keep his word?”
“A demon?” he repeated. His eyebrows rose. “Is that what you’re calling Omori? He’s as human as the rest of us.”
In his amusement, his gun hand dipped, just an inch. A slim chance, but better than none at all.
I ducked and thrust out with the katana. The tip of the blade missed Tomoya’s chest as he jerked back. In desperation, I wrenched it to the side with all the strength I had. The back of the blade slammed into his wrist. His hand twitched, and the pistol fell.
As I lashed out with my foot to shove it away, Tomoya came at me, sliding a knife from a sheath hidden in his sleeve. I dodged and kicked at his knee. He followed me, his blade whipping back and forth, his heel ramming into my ankle. Losing my balance, I smacked against the edge of the table. I needed to be around it. I had to get enough of an opening to go for the satchel.
But unlike the ghosts I’d fought before, Tomoya obviously had both training and practice. I barely flinched out of the way of his descending knife. When I struck out with the sword, he deflected the blow with a chuckle. He started backing me away from the table, into the opposite corner. Farther from my goal.
“If I really wanted to hurt you,” he said. “I could wisp away like the ghost I am, where you can’t touch me. But this is more fun.”
I made to dash around him, back toward the table, but he was too fast. He snatched at my forearm and yanked me backward with a crack. Pain exploded in my wrist and spiraled up my arm. A voice shouted something, but my heart was pounding too hard for me to process the words. I swung around, tears blurring my vision. My blade clattered against Tomoya’s knife.
I jabbed out with the katana again, and he caught it. His fingers glowing with ki, he clutched the blade and heaved it out of my hand. As I groped after it, he smashed his elbow into the back of my ribs, forcing a gasp from my lungs and knocking me to the floor.
“All right,” he said, lowering his knife to my neck. “That’s enough playing. Now you need to answer some questions.”
He’d only just finished speaking when a figure crashed into him, throwing him to the side. I scrambled away, disoriented. A yelp rang out behind me, and a hand grabbed my bad arm with a tug that sent another jolt of pain searing up it. As I swiveled around, Tomoya twisted my broken wrist. A whimper broke from my throat.
But he couldn’t do anything more to me. In a glance, I made out Keiji crouched on the floor beside his brother, his fingers clamped around Tomoya’s knife hand. Blood was seeping down his chin from a nick at the corner of his jaw.
The edges of Tomoya’s body shimmered. He jerked his arm free and shoved Keiji into my way. And I saw the one thing that could save me.
Keiji still had his ofuda. The end of one was poking from his pants pocket. He might not be willing to use it on his brother, but I had no qualms at all.
As Keiji stumbled toward me, I braced myself against the pain in my arm, dodged around him, and snatched the slip of paper. A flash of recognition passed through Tomoya’s fading eyes a moment before I slapped the ofuda against his nearly translucent forehead. He opened his mouth as if to protest, and then his ghostly body vanished. Keiji gave a startled cry.
I bent over, holding the side of the table as the effort of my final offensive caught up with
me. My left arm hung limp by my side, my wrist twinging just from the pressure of brushing against my hip. I hadn’t registered the place where Tomoya had hit my ribs before, but now a stinging pain radiated through my abdomen with every breath. The longing rose up inside me to curl up into a ball and rock until my body felt right again.
But I couldn’t.
Keiji had dropped back onto the floor. He reached out, staring at the spot where his brother had been, as if he might feel Tomoya there. “He’s gone,” he started, his voice raw. “You...” Then he glanced at me, and his face went even grayer.
“Sora.” He pulled himself to his feet. His gaze darted to his brother’s last location once more, and then he shook himself. “I... You’re obviously not okay. What can I do?”
I turned away from him to the table, the anger I’d squashed down while I fought flaring up in a white-hot flame. There was the key I’d done all this for. I stuffed it into my pocket. Then I knelt to pick up Takeo’s short sword and pushed it through the belt loop by my hip. The motion was less agonizing than the idea of looking at Keiji. My satchel felt far too light as I lifted it. Empty after all. I spotted Haru’s katana where it had fallen and collected that too, my fingers curling around the leather bindings on its grip. At least Tomoya hadn’t wrecked my stronger arm. I should count my blessings.
“Stay here,” I said to Keiji. It wasn’t worth the time trying to restrain him somehow. I doubted he could stop me even with my injuries.
I headed for the doorway, testing my legs, and found that other than a pang in my right ankle, they were functioning pretty much normally. Another blessing.
Keiji trailed after me into the hall, dabbing at the dribble of blood along his jaw with the collar of his shirt.
“I’m sorry,” he said as I reached the door to the stairwell. “I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to— Tomoya said he needed me to tell him what we were doing so he could try to help us. I had no idea he was already working for Omori. He’s been into some messed up things, but he never— I never thought he would—”
So much fury blazed through me that suddenly I wasn’t afraid of looking at him anymore. Let him see what I felt.
“You knew,” I bit out. “Even if it’s true that you didn’t know he was with Omori from the start, he said things that upset you, didn’t he? You knew he was asking about our plans, and as soon as you told him, our enemies knew them too. Maybe you didn’t want to think it, but you had to put that together. And you kept telling him everything anyway. You kept—”
You kept pretending you cared about me.
Keiji’s expression was as wretched as if he’d swallowed a mouthful of pine needles and they were stabbing their way into his gut, but he didn’t look away from my glare. And I still, I still wanted to touch his cheek, to make that awful expression leave his beautiful coppery eyes. To believe he hadn’t ruined everything on purpose.
I clamped down on the feeling, burying it under my anger.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I did wonder for a second, when we found Rin’s house, and after... But he’s my brother. You can understand, can’t you, why I didn’t want to believe it could be him? There was always some other explanation. If I’d realized... I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t care,” I said. I pushed open the door and headed into the darkness cloaking the stairs.
On the first floor landing, I placed my back against the wall and edged to the door to peer through its wire-laced window into the hallway.
A dim glow streaked the darkness there—the light of a hundred ghosts or more, drifting around each other in a steady stream. The katana wobbled in my hand.
“Are we still in the keep where they attacked us?” I asked as Keiji crept up alongside me. “Are Chiyo and Takeo here?”
“Yes,” he said. “They’re still shut in that room, as far as I know. This woman ghost, Tomoya called her his lieutenant, he told her to keep the other ghosts guarding the hall.”
“What happened to the kami who were in here with us?”
“I couldn’t see a lot of the fighting,” he said. “And I was... I was trying to keep the ghosts off of you. Some of them were carrying these buckets—they splashed stuff on the floor and the walls, and it seemed like the fighting stopped after that.” He swallowed audibly. “I think they were using blood.”
I grimaced. Like the ropes, like their weapons. They must have splattered the hall with gore so the kami would either sicken or flee.
Blood couldn’t stop me, but a hundred ghosts could. A human girl with a fractured wrist and no protective amulet—even with Keiji’s ofuda, I couldn’t fight them all. Charging out there would be suicide.
So if I was going to save Chiyo and Takeo, I had to make the ghosts leave. I had a feeling asking nicely wasn’t going to work.
At least, not for me.
I glanced back at Keiji where I could sense him in the darkness. “That ‘lieutenant,’ she knows you’re Tomoya’s brother?”
“Tomoya made a pretty big deal about it,” he said, “to make sure they left me alone.”
His voice was still rough, an echo of his repeated apology running through it. Why shouldn’t I use his guilty conscience? However little I trusted him now, he obviously didn’t want to be responsible for my death. He’d fought his brother to keep me alive. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t turn back on that decision and offer me up to the figures out there.
And I didn’t exactly have a multitude of options.
“All right,” I said. “Then I need you to go get rid of them.”
“What?”
“Go find the lieutenant,” I said. “Give her a story—that Tomoya had to run off without consulting with her first, that he asked you to tell all the ghosts here to follow him. Say there was a surprise counterattack on the ghosts at Mt. Fuji. Or that Omori called some urgent meeting. Just convince them to leave.”
There was a rustle of fabric as Keiji shifted his weight. “They’re not going to believe it,” he said. “Tomoya going off and leaving me in charge? They’ll never listen to me.”
The composure I’d been holding on to so desperately started to crack.
“Maybe not,” I said, “but if you’re really so sorry, why don’t you at least try to fix this mess you got us into?”
There was silence beside me, and then an exhaled breath. “Okay,” Keiji said. “Okay.”
I flattened myself against the wall as he stepped past me into the hallway. The ghostlights clustered around him as he walked through them, giving his skin and clothes an eerie sheen. He stopped several paces into their midst.
After a moment, one of the ghosts solidified in front of him. Her sleek, shoulder-length bob obscured her face from where I stood.
Keiji launched into his story with a flurry of impatient gestures and worried expressions. The woman tapped her pointed shoe on the floor. I could only tell when she spoke because those were the few moments Keiji stilled.
All at once, she spun around and marched toward the stairwell. I flinched away from the door and sucked in a hiss of pain as my broken wrist bumped the wall. Ducking low, I darted through the darkness, up the stairs toward the second floor. The door sighed open below just as I scooted out of sight around the bend.
The woman ghost strode into the stairwell. “I told him he should talk to you himself,” Keiji was saying, hurrying after her. “But he wanted to make sure he got to Omori as soon as possible.”
The woman made a dismissive sound. Her faint light faded away as she tapped down the steps. I held myself perfectly still. The ofuda left no sign of the ghost it had banished. There was no way she could know what had happened.
Unless she decided to check the room where I was supposed to be and discovered one of the “human prisoners” was missing.
Finally, the door swung open again. The hard soles of the woman’s shoes clattered back up the stairs. She pushed into the hall. I waited five seconds, ten, and when she didn’t return, crept back down and peered through the win
dow.
The ghostlights had stopped meandering about and were flowing toward the opposite end of the hall. They looked like a cloud of hazy fireflies gusting away in a sudden breeze. As they vanished through the front entrance, I tipped my forehead against the wall and sighed.
Hinges squeaked below me. Tentative footsteps padded up.
“It worked,” I said. “They’re gone.”
“Really? She didn’t seem very impressed.” Keiji came up beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his presence even though we weren’t touching. My skin prickled.
I edged to the side and peered through the window. My hand tightened around the katana.
“Mostly gone,” I amended.
Five ghostlights still floated around a spot I judged to be more than halfway down the hall. By the room where they were holding Chiyo and Takeo, no doubt. Tomoya’s lieutenant had believed Keiji enough to take the majority of her force with her, but not to leave their valuable captives unguarded.
I weighed the sword in my hand. It wasn’t going to do me any good, not against a bunch of ethereal ghosts. I set it on the floor.
“How many ofuda do you have?” I asked.
Paper crinkled as Keiji dug them out of his pockets. “I’m not sure. Twenty-ish?”
“Give me half.”
He held them out, the edges of the scraps of paper tickling my arm. I shoved a few into my own pocket and palmed the rest.
Compared to what I’d already faced in the last few days, five ghosts was hardly anything. But my mouth had gone dry.
“What now?” Keiji said.
I studied the hall. “Go out ahead of me,” I said, “and see if you can get them to turn corporeal to talk to you. It’ll be easier if I can see them properly.”
Without any argument this time, he nudged open the door and headed down the hall alone. The darkness was even thicker now that the main hoard of ghosts had left. After just a few seconds, I couldn’t make out more than the edges of Keiji’s body.
As he approached the ghostly guards, two of them flickered, taking on solid forms. Two was as much as I could hope for. I slipped into the hall.