A Mortal Song

by Megan Crewe

  Before I could ask how she’d gotten here or where she’d been, Keiji made a startled noise. I followed his gaze back toward the courtyard.

  The ghostlights had settled, several corporeal figures standing in their midst, all of them watching us. One near the back of the crowd was walking toward the bridge. He strode right to the edge of the gate, the red streaks in his hair clearly visible even in the fading daylight.

  Tomoya.

  So it was true. Omori had taught the ghosts how to come back.

  “A nice trick,” he said. “I applaud your ingenuity. I don’t think the allies you set us on are enjoying themselves quite so much.”

  “Tomo,” Keiji said, his voice a rasp. He swallowed audibly. “You have to stop this!”

  “You don’t understand yet, little brother,” Tomoya said. “You will. Once we’ve taken care of these insurgents.” His gaze rested on Chiyo. He smiled his sharp little smile as if he weren’t worried at all, and a fresh chill washed over me.

  “If you make it through the shrine, we’ll be waiting for you,” he said. “You won’t trick us a second time.”

  He drew back into the crowd, his physical form fading. “Tomoya!” Keiji called, but his brother had already vanished. To our sight, at least.

  “He has even more of the demon’s power in him than the others,” Takeo said. “I think he is acting like a river, carrying the main flow of energy across the distance before it streams from him to his associates.”

  That sounded like Omori’s sort of efficiency. Maybe carrying all that energy had corrupted Tomoya’s mind even faster.

  “We should go for the mirror as quickly as possible,” I said. “Before they come up with a plan for our return.”

  “Hold on a second,” Chiyo said, peering down at Rin. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “This is the sage Rin,” Takeo said hurriedly. “The one who foresaw you saving Mt. Fuji.”

  “Oh!” Chiyo said, her eyes widening. “We thought the ogres got you,” she told Rin. “They made a real mess of your house in the tree.”

  “Hmmm,” Rin said. “What is merely broken can be fixed. The ogres could hold me but not destroy. They all moved here on the demon’s orders, and within the shrine, I had the strength to avoid further holding.” She gave Chiyo a measured look. “You have learned some, but not all I would have liked. But the days for training are past.”

  “I can handle this, no problem,” Chiyo said, hefting her sword. “We’ve taken down ogres before.”

  “Our enemies multiply,” Rin muttered in her obscure way, but I could guess what she meant. My skin crawled as we marched over the bridge to the shrine grounds.

  A second after our feet crunched onto the gravel path, I got my confirmation: a hulking figure with a mane of maroon hair and horns jutting from its cheeks burst from between the trees beside us. Chiyo leapt forward, her sword blazing as it plunged into the ogre’s chest. Three black dog-like creatures sprang over the hedge on the other side of the path, their eyes shining red and their fangs gleaming. They were followed by an immense cat with two snaking tails. A shriek split the air above us, and a pack of body-less heads, streaming dark hair and gnashing their teeth, descended on us.

  “Nukekubi,” Keiji muttered, edging closer to me. Now that he was actually faced with the monsters from his books, he looked as though he’d preferred keeping them in his imagination. I swiveled on my feet, trying to track all of our enemies at once.

  The oak and monkey kami sprang to our defense. They caught one of the demon dogs between them, the oak man stabbing it awkwardly. Takeo leapt to meet the monstrous cat. I held out my blade and shoved Keiji behind me as the second dog snapped at my arm. Its breath smelled like burnt meat. As I thrust the beast away, Keiji slapped an ofuda against the nose of one of the nukekubi that had dived at us. The wan face cringed and circled away, but it didn’t disappear.

  “Damn,” Keiji said, his voice shaking. “I figured it was worth a try. The salt might repel them.”

  “Even if it doesn’t, throw it in their eyes,” I suggested. I stuffed my remaining ofuda into my satchel and palmed a handful of my salt.

  Chiyo sliced her sword through the air, cutting two of the flying heads in half. The pieces fell to the ground with a sickening patter. Takeo shoved aside the dead body of the two-tailed cat.

  “Push on,” he said.

  We ran down the path, Rin taking the lead with a speed I wouldn’t have expected from her aged body. She might not have trained in the martial arts as intensely as Takeo, but she still had skill. When another ogre lurched out in front of us, she dashed up its gangly body in a blur of motion, kicked out at its collarbone, and twisted its neck at the same time. It collapsed, its spine cracking.

  The sage stumbled as she hit the ground. She pressed her palm to the path before pushing herself upright, and I remembered her comment about her power being connected to her valley. And who knew what the ogres had done to her to keep her imprisoned until now? How much longer could she keep fighting?

  Two demon dogs charged at Chiyo with a snarl. She spun around, ki arching from her sword and shattering through their bodies. But even as they crumpled, four more ogres stormed out of the forest on either side of us.

  “Don’t let them halt us,” Rin said. “Clear the way and make for the shrine!”

  Easier said than done. Takeo and Chiyo slammed through the two ogres in front of us with their blades, but the ones behind us charged at us three humans. Haru whacked one in the face with his sword. The oak kami managed to ram that ogre in the chest before the second tackled him to the ground. He groaned as he waved at us to leave him behind. My gut twisted, but I spun around and gestured to the others to race after Chiyo.

  We burst into a yard ringed with shrine buildings that were shuttered for the night. More screeching heads dove at us. Keiji and I threw salt at the ones near us, and their features contorted. They dipped, sputtering and blinking furiously, low enough that Haru and I could stab them with our swords. Chiyo chopped through another one as the last sank its teeth into her hair. She yelped, and Takeo slammed it to the side, his fist lit with ki. The horrific face sizzled and plummeted to the ground.

  More monsters were flooding onto the path both behind and ahead of us. There was nothing to do but run on. Sweat streaked down my back and into my eyes. My shoulder throbbed where the bullet had caught it this morning. I gritted my teeth against the pain.

  The gravel skittered under my feet as I smacked away a demon dog with the flat of my blade. Keiji whipped another handful of salt into a swarm of nukekubi and nearly tripped. I caught him by his elbow, tugging him onward.

  The monsters had gathered for a final stand on a series of wide stone steps at a bend in the path. At least half a dozen ogres waited for us, demon dogs and two-tailed cats stalking between them, a cluster of nukekubi circling against the darkening sky. At the top of the steps loomed a wooden gate and a roof marked with two boards forming an X at its peak.

  “The sanctuary!” I said.

  Chiyo darted up the steps, smashing through four ogres without a pause for breath. Before the other monsters could try to stop her, the rest of us hurtled in to cover her. The sanctuary gate’s hinges creaked as Chiyo pushed into the compound.

  Two flying heads screamed down at me, and I flung salt at them as I held up my sword to block them. They hissed and veered away. Rin leapt into the air and mashed their skulls together. One demon dog clamped its jaws around Takeo’s sword arm, but he flung his blade to his other hand and plunged the weapon into the creature’s side.

  A tall, spindly ogre with claws as long as its fingers threw itself up the stairs after me. I scrambled higher. My sword clinked against the ogre’s claws, which sounded hard as metal. I ducked and jabbed at its belly, and felt one of those claws graze the top of my head.

  I jerked back, swallowing a cry, just as Keiji slammed into the ogre’s side. They both toppled. The ogre slashed out at Keiji the second before they hit the ground. I ch
opped at its arm, an instant too late. Keiji rolled away, gasping and clutching his stomach.

  My heart stopped. Another demon dog chomped at Keiji’s leg, and I kicked it in the muzzle as I grabbed his shoulders. “Come on!” I said. He stumbled with me over the last few steps and through the gate Chiyo had left hanging open. The sanctuary compound’s additional protections appeared to be too strong for any of the monsters to follow us inside.

  “Chiyo!” I yelled, but she didn’t answer. Within the high fence, there was not just one sanctuary building but a row of them, spread out across a yard of white stones. Any one of those buildings could have held the mirror. She might be searching too far away to hear me.

  Keiji was straightening up. “Lie down!” I said, gripping his arm. I knelt beside him. His shirt was mottled with dirt and blood, but I couldn’t tell how much of the latter was fresh or even his. Bracing myself, I tugged up the hem.

  His pale skin was smudged scarlet. The blood had seeped from a thin line that curved across his abdomen just above his belly button. The cut was so shallow the bleeding had already slowed. My shoulders sagged in relief. Not fatal. Not even all that concerning.

  “Should I start coming up with my brilliant last words?” Keiji asked, staring up at the sky.

  “It’s just a scratch,” I said. “I think you’ll live.”

  “Oh,” he said, and sat up despite my wordless protest. “It didn’t feel that bad, but then you hauled me in here, so I figured the pain just hadn’t sunk in yet.”

  I flushed, remembering my panic. I hadn’t even stopped to see what was happening to anyone else. They were still fighting. I should get back to the battle.

  “It was very valorous of me, though, wasn’t it—leaping in like that?” Keiji went on. “I’m practicing the bravery thing.”

  “I already told you,” I said. “You’re brave enough.”

  “But that was bonus points level brave,” he said as I shifted my weight to stand. “Can I at least get a kiss of gratitude out of it?”

  He said it in that joking way of his, but his eyes were serious. They flickered nervously when I met them. Something twinged in my chest, and all at once I felt like crying. So much time I’d spent being angry and uncertain when my heart had never wavered in what it wanted.

  “You idiot,” I said, “you don’t have to try to get yourself killed for that.”

  His face tilted up to catch my lips as I quickly dipped my head. His fingers slipped into my hair, and a happy shiver ran down my spine. I kissed him hard, reveling in just how warm and there and real he was for that brief moment before I had to pull away.

  I didn’t want to. Right now, for this one moment, we were safe—who knew what might happen after? But the others needed me too.

  “Sora,” Keiji said, “I’m sor—”

  “Don’t,” I said before he could finish the apology. I pushed myself to my feet and offered my hand to help him up. “You don’t have to say it again. It’s not as if I haven’t made mistakes too. Now let’s make those monsters see what a mistake it was to challenge us.”

  A grin flashed across his face. He sprang up. We were just turning to the gate when a low, wrenching cry carried through it.

  We hurried forward. “Haru!” Chiyo yelled, charging across the yard behind us. She held an eight-sided mirror of brilliant silver under one arm. Together, we burst through the gate onto the top of the stairs.

  There, we all jerked to a halt, staring at the scene before us. Takeo and Rin had been forced to the sides of the stairs, Takeo eyeing the two ogres who loomed over him. A monstrous cat and a demon dog circled Rin on the ground, a nukekubi above. And at the base of the stairs, the largest ogre I’d ever seen had its sinewy arm squeezed tight across Haru’s chest and one of its claws pressed against his throat, deep enough that blood was already dribbling onto his shirt collar.

  The ogre’s gaze fixed on Chiyo. It bared jagged teeth. “Our red-haired friend requested I take this human if you escaped us,” it said in its rough voice. “I bring him back to the ghosts now. Tomoya says if you want to fight for his life, you will leave your special toys behind before you reach the bridge. Otherwise, he dies.”

  It turned and loped away, Haru still clutched in its grasp.

  “No!” Chiyo cried. She raced down the steps, blasting through the creatures that sprang at her. As she passed the katana Haru had dropped, she snatched it up. “I’ll kick you all into the afterworld, just you wait!”

  “Chiyo!” I called after her, my heart in my throat. We couldn’t let her go alone.

  But as I moved to the steps, even more monsters swarmed from the woods. Our stand here had given those spread across the shrine grounds time to reach us. I swung my sword so swiftly I barely saw where it struck, trusting my body to follow the rhythm of the fight, tossing salt in every direction. Around me, grunts and thumps told me the others fought on just as hard.

  It wasn’t enough. With every moment, Chiyo was farther away.

  Then, with a gruff mutter, ki blazed across the steps. The light was so harsh it blinded me. I stumbled, gasping.

  When my vision cleared, the smoking bodies of our enemies littered the stone stairs, filling the air with a caustic oily stench. Amid them, Rin slumped on her side. Her breath rattled over her lips, and her skin was gray.

  “Go!” she rasped. “Stop her before all is lost!”

  Takeo dashed down the path on ki-sped feet. I ran after him as quickly as I could, hearing Keiji’s erratic breath behind me. We passed the limping monkey and the oak-man, sprawled and weak but alive, not stopping until we reached the bridge. I pounded across the boards. Takeo had already halted beneath the first torii at the edge of safety.

  Ghostlights clogged the courtyard. They surged toward the bridge, and I could imagine all those hostile eyes studying us, anticipating our next move. But I couldn’t spot a single solid body among them—not the ogre, not Haru, not Tomoya. Not Chiyo.

  She was gone.

  22

  “WHERE’S YOUR LEADER?” Takeo demanded of the ghostlights. “The one with the red in his hair.”

  At an answer I couldn’t hear, his jaw set. “Enough. I can bring the sacred sword to deal with you if that’s all you’re willing to offer.”

  Whatever the ghosts said next, it wasn’t good news. Takeo’s broad shoulders sagged so slightly no one but me might have noticed. “Is there—” he started, and then leapt back as a figure turned corporeal in front of us.

  The burly man who’d shifted his state grinned and waggled a net matted with crimson stains. “Next time we’ll get you,” he said. The rest of the ghostlights surged even closer behind him.

  All three of us withdrew farther up the bridge. “What did they say?” I asked.

  Takeo was frowning. “After some mockery, they seemed happy to inform me that we have no hope of finding Tomoya. He told none of them where he intended to take Chiyo, so that there would be no one we could force to help us. And he specifically told them to tell us that.”

  He lowered his head, rubbing the side of his face. I’d never seen him look so wretched.

  “Tomoya can’t have killed her,” I said, the most reassurance I could offer. “Not so quickly. She’s too strong for that.” So he’d have brought her to a place where he could... take his time. Another room smeared with gore? A continuous string of torture, the way Omori had been whittling down Mother and Father’s lives? Nausea trickled through me.

  Dragging steps rasped over the wooden boards with the tap of a stick-turned-cane as Rin limped toward us.

  “Chiyo took Haru’s sword,” Keiji said. “Even without the other one, couldn’t she still manage to defeat a bunch of ghosts? Maybe they just took the fight farther off.”

  “The spirits fear the sacred sword far more than the girl,” Rin said, reaching us. “It can do what charms cannot.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Charms banish. The spirit remains, elsewhere. The sacred blade is like running water.
It purifies. The ki returns to its source.”

  I remembered Tomoya in the keep, complaining that the sword had taken too many of the ghosts “for good.”

  “So when she cuts them with the sword, they’re completely destroyed?” I said. “Their ki is absorbed back into the world—they can’t return?”

  Rin inclined her head.

  If the sacred sword didn’t just send the ghosts back to the afterworld but dissipated their ki in a way more final than death itself, it was no wonder Tomoya had wanted Chiyo to leave it behind. Haru’s katana wouldn’t even banish the spirits.

  “Perhaps she just needs more time,” Takeo said, but even he didn’t sound as if he believed that. I swallowed thickly. Obon began tomorrow night.

  I turned back toward the courtyard. “We have to go after her,” I said, but the sea of ghostlights before us made my gut knot. Next time we’ll get you, the ghost had said. They had no intention of letting us pass easily. And without Chiyo or the sacred sword—

  “Where is the sword?” I said as the thought stuck me. “And the other treasures? If she left them behind as Tomoya asked...”

  “That with the power of water was returned to water,” Rin murmured in what I’d come to recognize as her prophesying voice. I glared at her, wishing she could find it in herself to speak plainly, and then realized I knew exactly what she meant.

  I hurried back across the bridge and up the gravel path to the huge stone basin of the purifying fountain. Blurred shapes glinted beneath the flowing water. I leaned over, my hands braced on the slick rock.

  The sacred sword lay at the bottom of the fountain, the necklace and the mirror beside it.

  Chiyo might have been desperate to save Haru, but she’d still known we couldn’t afford to lose the treasures. She’d left them behind in the purest place she could think of, where no malicious thing could touch them.

  As the others came up beside me, my hands clenched. We couldn’t afford to lose her either. How could she have taken such a risk—

  But even before I’d finished that thought, I knew. I remembered all too clearly how the idea of Keiji being hurt had burned every other thought from my mind. Beneath her cheer and confidence, Chiyo must have felt even worse seeing that claw digging into Haru’s throat.