The miko stopped struggling. From her perspective, it would seem like one of the chairs holding her spontaneously shattered. She was looking at the other chairs now, waiting to see what they would do.
The legs were deeply imbedded, and the attached seats very well constructed. I needed some other way than brute force. I could have whipped out my shadow sword, but using it one-handed in close quarters while dangling from the ceiling seemed too risky. However, there was one thing that occurred to me. I reached across to the broken chair and poured my aura into it, making the chair remnant a ghost. It eased out of the ceiling. I pulled my aura back to myself, letting go. The broken chair dropped as its back had done.
As if in approval, more thunder shook the building. Funny, I hadn’t heard we were getting severe weather moving in.
Focus, I told myself.
I checked to see if Crunch was watching, about to swat me away again for interfering with his prisoner. I didn’t have to worry; he was busy lashing Michiko with the mother of all lightning bolts, holding it by one hand like a whip. The strategy looked good; the flexible energy wrapped her sword and swung around to hit her. Michiko was losing. Her ectoplasm jumped in place, going scratchy, and dropping pixels. The lashes drove her around the room while exploding tables and chairs, sending burning fragments every which way. A little more of that, and the place would burn down.
I redoubled my efforts to get the miko free, flushing another embedded chair with aura, yanking it loose, letting it fall. It occurred to me that I was still doing this the hard way. I shifted across the veil, keeping hold of my perch. Color and gravity returned. The strain of hanging on increased considerably. I wouldn’t be able to hang up here long. Just long enough. I could no longer see Crunch or Michiko, but the miko could definitely see me. Her eyes were wide. They grew wider as I grabbed and flushed her with my aura. In the ghost world, her aura would not have let me do this.
“Trust me,” I said. “I’m going to get you down safely.”
“What are you?” she asked.
I crossed over, hanging onto her as I did. The electric tingle was strong, more resistive, but I got us both into the ghost realm, sharing my energy so that we ghosted through the last two chairs, drifting like leaves toward the floor. Several tables were on fire. An alarm sounded and the sprinklers came on. Sprays of water passed through our bodies. The miko watched her new intangibleness with great interest. She seemed to find it odd her own hand wouldn’t ghost through her torso. It was an experiment I’d tried myself when I was a little kid.
I checked out the battle. Michiko had a working defense in place. The misty cloud that caressed her blade had spun off copies. There were a dozen such clouds between her and Crunch and more of them materializing across the lounge every second. I watched Crunch’s lightning lash fold into one cloud, but come out another, only to be caught by yet another cloud. By this method, the end of his lash was sent flailing right back at him.
He staggered under the impact, an empty pocket of air where his chest and stomach had been. His scream brought a smile to Michiko’s face.
The miko hung onto my arm even after we set down. I think she knew I was her anchor in this place. Her gaze went to the sword of Susanoo. She gasped at the splendid prize right before her. “That sword, I must have it!” Holding onto me with one hand, she reached into her robes and pulled out several stiff sheets of rice paper with black ink scribbles. Charms.
“There’s a line ahead of you for the sword,” I said. “And those paper things didn’t help you last time.” I didn’t want to encourage her in wasting my time—and aura. I’d used a good bit of energy earlier at the night club, and in the Hummer. I should have been all right for a few hours more, but the drain on my aura was twofold now. “Let’s wait for the right moment.”
She gave me an annoyed glare, but her arm relaxed, letting the handful of charms dangle just past her left hip.
It was odd; where were Cassie and the guys? They should have been here by now, but I was still on my own. Something must have come up. Then I thought of all those ghosts brought here, most of which had moved out of the lounge, into the lobby, the upper hotel, and the surrounding area. If even just a few were high level poltergeists … yeah, that might account for the delay.
I studied the battle. Crunch made himself a moving target, dancing, spinning, and catching his own lightning lash between Michiko’s clouds so he could redirect her redirections. He was too used to expending other ghosts’ power; there was no conservation going on. That, combined with the fact the ghosts were leaving the scene, meant he’d soon be running dry. Already, the brightness of the lash was half strength. It had grown narrower. Crunch himself was less bleached out by his internal glow.
If it had been me, I’d have gone to throwing ball lightning. Crunch just hung in there with the same tactic, as if sheer desperation had to bring success.
One crackling segment of energy flicked out of a new cloud, cut through a leg of the piano, and sent it crashing on its side. Aimi’s limp, sleeping body rolled onto the dais, then the floor. A cloud dipping next to her obscured half her arm. Though not amputated, the rest of her arm poked out of a cloud ten feet away, not too far from Crunch. Michiko’s sword was seriously bending time and space here.
And this was my chance!
I stared the miko eye-to-eye, putting my face near hers. “Listen, we’re going to charge Crunch as if attacking him blindly. When I say ‘now’, close your eyes and let me drag you aside. I’ll get you to Aimi. You get her out of here, and leave Crunch to me. Got it?”
Her eyes were full of questions, but she just nodded.
“Let’s go!” I ran holding onto her sleeve. She kept pace.
Michiko saw us coming in, and threw herself to the side even though she wasn’t the target. Crunch turned to keep her in view, gripping both ends of his energy lash, its middle punctuating the air like multiple dashes between silvery clumps of cloud. This put Crunch’s back toward the miko and me. Almost on him, I forged a sword of shadow, materializing it in my free hand, wreathing it with my aura’s orange haze.
I yelled, “Now!”
The miko flung her handful of paper charms, closed her eyes, and let me shove her to the ground, into the cloud Aimi’s arm poked out of. The cloud swallowed the miko. She popped out of the other cloud next to Aimi. The miko opened her eyes on the human world, her body now gray like the rest of the room. She’d fallen out of the ghost realm. The ghosts and I wouldn’t be visible to her. The sword Michiko used would seem to float in the air all by itself.
Crunch had turned at my yell. Seeing me almost on him, he let his lash shorten, like a tape measure rewinding. Free of the clouds, his energy stiffened to form a rod of green light.
A light saber, really? Guys and their phallic symbols…
I leaped to close the distance.
He tried to take a step my way and couldn’t. He looked down and noticed the miko’s paper charms taping his feet to the floor. With a growl of irritation, he glowered at the paper and his ghost fire ignited it, curling the script into ash.
As my feet touched down, we locked up as if real swords were being used. Bits of orange flame dribbled from the contact point, and the underlying shadow of my sword thinned—but didn’t break. His sword flickered raggedly, drained by the damage he inflicted on my weapon. I struggled to push through his defense.
Surely my muscles were stronger than his ectoplasmic ones. He shoved me backward. Apparently not, but the longer he fought, the weaker he’d become. I just had to hang in there.
Listing to the side, I let myself stumble into one cloud, and got spit out another. From the new direction, I charged Crunch.
The change in position let me see that the miko had obeyed her priorities. Instead of going after the sword of Susanoo, she’d scooped Aimi up. Clear of the cloud, her arm looked normal again. The miko, burdened with the unconscious girl, was almost at the exit.
Crunch turned to meet me, hacking at my blade as
if determined to shatter it at all costs. It occurred to me to wonder what Michiko was doing with all the time I’d bought her, but I couldn’t spare the time to look and see. Dancing with Crunch, I found that deflecting his attacks to the side was easier on me. His blows were also losing force. I smiled at him, a silent taunt, and arched an eyebrow. “That’s all you got?”
Instead of answering, he looked around, noticing that all the clouds were melding together and converging on him. Michiko and the storm sword were nowhere to be seen, but this was definitely her work.
Crunch yelled at her, “Show yourself, you little pint-sized bitch. You want a piece of me, right?”
I backed from Crunch, also looking around. The Michiko I knew didn’t run from trouble, she caused it. I felt it in my bones that another shoe was about to drop. That’s when I noticed that one little cloud hadn’t joined the rest in fogging Crunch in. It clung to the carpet, taking position between his feet, licking his boots. Coming from every side, Michiko’s pre-adolescent laughter rang out, and couldn’t be pinned down.
Like the laughter, Torrent and his shadow men came out of nowhere, boxing me in a black cloud of my own. They took on human form, laying hands all over me. I struggled to throw their paws off me. Torrent grabbed my shadow blade with his bare hand. The darkness I’d shaped drained into him. All I had left was my kitsune fire.
My body went rigidly still, hearing Crunch scream in an unearthly high falsetto. I peered past my guards and saw Crunch jittering in place, his ghostly body steaming, boiling away. The cloud at his feet had grown a girl’s arm. Its hand held the storm sword. True lightning shimmered along the blade. The upper third of the blade had pierced Crunch in the crotch, webbing his pelvis with white-yellow jags of celestial fire. There was a flash that washed the whole room away, blinding me. Quick on its heels, thunder boomed, shaking the building.
I felt myself being whisked away by my guards. When I could see again, I was in the lobby—where all hell had broken loose. My guards pulled away, giving me space to appreciate the disaster first hand. Furniture piles made little, haphazard mountains. Broken lamps lay everywhere. Several of the hanging chandeliers were missing. Cracks webbed many windows, those not shattered. The front doors were twisted away. There was no sign of people. Maybe they’d taken shelter in the basement.
Shattered glass glinted everywhere, crunching underfoot as I took a few aimless steps, staring with my mouth open. I closed my mouth and listened to the howl of punishing winds outside where heavy sheets of rain drummed from the sky. The shadow men kept pace with me as I went to a broken window that had lost its drapes. An eddy wind buffeted me, cold and wet, clawing at my russet hair.
I stared out and up. Above the surrounding buildings, a low ceiling of bruise-colored clouds blotted out the night sky. Lightning jags were scoring the higher building, exploding stone, glass, and steel. Debris hailed into the street, rattling off parked cars, setting off car alarms. The early morning air was also being pierced by the wails of ambulances, fire trucks, and police vehicles.
I suddenly understood; while Michiko had tapped into a very small amount of the storm sword’s power, the rest of its energy had slipped its leash and gone romping above the city with a vengeance.
Fear for my friends, especially Cassie, sluiced through me. They wouldn’t be playing it safe, not without knowing I was out of danger.
I spun toward Torrent. “Where’s Cassie and the guys? Why aren’t they here?”
Torrent had a grim cast to his face, a tension that was unnatural for a being whose natural form was shadow. It didn’t look like he was going to tell me, but after a pause, he did. “The miko came out of the lounge carrying … someone.”
I nodded, raising my voice over the moan of the wind, “Aimi.”
Torrent’s dark eyes glittered. The muscles of his jaw knotted. “That’s who we saw. That’s who the ninja saw, from what I could tell.” He didn’t raise his voice but it bulldozed through the sounds of chaos coming in from outside. “Cassie saw the girl being carried out and called her by your name. Your mother, Onyx, and Fenn have been lured away. Apparently, the miko wanted them even more than the sword of Susanoo.”
My heart pounded harder. I swayed, off balance. “And you just let them go, drawn off by some Shinto illusion?”
Torrent bowed his head in apology. “It was your father’s wish. You are the only one indispensable to him.”
“But he doesn’t even know me!”
“You might be surprised. Shadow can take on many forms.”
I shook my head to throw off the distraction of his words, and ran for the main entrance. “Never mind. He and I will have words about this later. What hospital was everyone heading for?”
A tall gangly man with dark curly hair and a high forehead appeared in the doorway. He wore several days of stubble on his face, ragged shorts, a shirt with palm trees, and flip-flops on oversized feet. He held a black mouse in one hand, and waved at me with the other. “C’mon, my car’s right outside. I’ll take you.”
My mind reeled. It was the Mouse Whisperer. I hadn’t seen him for weeks, not since he last showed up to give me a convenient ride in a mouse-infested indigo station wagon with questionable brakes and a god-awful stench from the mouse pellets. Thinking of Cassie and Fenn, I snapped out of my daze and continued, shelving deep dark suspicions about Mouse Whisperer’s true nature for another time.
“Fine,” I said, “let’s go!
TWENTY-ONE
“You take a chance getting up in the morning, crossing the street, or sticking your face in a fan.”
—Frank Drebin
The Naked Gun
As flat shadows on the carpet, my shadow men slithered past me and the Mouse Whisperer, shooting out the double doors of the lobby. Showing no surprise, Mouse Whisperer turned to watch them slide past. He lumbered after them, out toward his vehicle parked in the front drive. I brought up the rear.
The rain was slacking, but not yet a sprinkle. Lightning no longer carved its name into the surrounding buildings. Thunder grumbled only in the farthest reaches of the sky. With Crunch defeated and the sword dormant, it looked like pieces of the city could be picked up and put back together. The emergency sirens sounding from every direction indicated that there were people trying to do just that. Fortunately, it seemed that whatever fires the lightning strikes had started, the heavy downpour was smothering.
That left me with the miko to deal with, unless Cassie had picked up on the deception played on her, and had already cleaned the miko’s clock for her. Better not count on it, I decided. Fate is seldom so kind.
I opened the front passenger door to the Mouse Whisperer’s ink blue station wagon and slid in, trying to breathe shallowly. Next to me, the Mouse Whisperer put his mouse on the dash with several other rodents. He buckled up, and I did too, noticing that the shadow men had flowed up off the drive to cover the car like a new coat of black paint. An interesting way to hitch a ride, I thought.
I faced the driver. “You know where we’re going, right?” I hoped so; I didn’t.
Mouse Whisperer patted the steering wheel. “The Indigo-er always knows. She ain’t let me down yet.”
A beady-eyed mouse looked up at me from the tip of my boot.
“I’m not at all tasty,” I told the mouse. “Don’t you dare take a bite.”
“Oh, they’re friendly,” the Mouse Whisperer assured me, revving up the engine, shifting gears. “They eat lettuce, crackers, granola bars, and sometimes the insulation on the wires under the dash.” He sighed. “I really wish they wouldn’t do that last though. Left and right turn signals are both shot now.”
We pulled away. In response, the mouse on the dash went inside it through a ragged hole. One of them popped a head out the gap where a radio had once been. We reached the street, weaving around the larger obstructions, bouncing on bad shocks over the smaller rubble.
In the back shadows of my mind, Taliesina surfaced, blinking sleepily. Her yellow eyes thinned t
he gloom. I felt her combing through my recent memories, a gossamer brush, light and delicate—until she discovered Cassie lured away by the miko. Taliesina’s stare took on the intensity of a solar flare. I winced, my temples throbbing as her distress bled into me, amping up my own.
I snarled at her. “Jeez, tone it down, will ya?”
Sorry.
“Tone what down?” Mouse Whisperer asked.
“Sorry, not you.”
“Hearing voices?” he asked. “That’s generally not a good thing, but company is company.”
I stared at him, as if his flesh might suddenly peel away like an elfin glamour, revealing a new person I’d yet to see. “Who are you, really?”
He shrugged. “Just a can that gets kicked down the street now and then.”
“Did my father send you, too, to keep an eye on me?”
He smiled gently, warm brown eyes guileless as he patted the dashboard. “Indigo-er decides these things. I just go where she takes me. Want a snicker doodle? I’ve got cookies in the glove box.”
We jounced off some rubble in the street, nearly sideswiped a cherry-colored van, and hastily pulled to the curb to let a fire truck and ambulance scream by.
I opened the glove box, feeling hungry from all the aura I’d expended. The cookies were there, surrounded by five mice of assorted colors ranging from black to gray to white, as well as mottled combinations. The white mice had red, smoldering eyes. The other mice had eyes like dark cinders.
None of them bared their teeth.
“That’s all right, you had them first.” I shut the glove box, telling my stomach to be patient.
Back on the road, we left the highrises, entering a suburban area. Time crept due to my impatience. And Taliesina’s intense hyper-alertness wasn’t helping. The now black station wagon finally pulled to a stop where a flight of stone steps led up to a torii gate, its heavy wooden beams lacquered red. Tukka once told me these were more than decoration; the massive arches were barriers between the human world and that of the spirit—sort of crossing over without crossing over. This was no medical facility, but a Shinto shrine.
Tears and Shadow (kitsune series) Page 16