Frail Human Heart

by Zoe Marriott

  This couldn’t go on. Shinobu had given his life believing that I had the power to end this terrible conflict. I had to be worthy of that. Before the whole city fell apart.

  Dad parked illegally at the curb right outside the Avalon bookshop. There was a metal shutter rolled down over the large shop window today and a closed sign on the door, but unlike the cafe on the corner, where a similar metal shutter seemed to have been pried up by some immense force until it belled out over the pavement, there were no signs of damage.

  I battered on the door, ignoring my dad’s anxious looks as the noise reverberated down the road. If there was anyone in the flats above to hear us, I was pretty sure that after the events of the past couple of days they wouldn’t be likely to turn all Neighbourhood Watch. Not even if they heard screams and gunfire down here.

  “Mr Leech!” I bent to push open the post flap in the door. “It’s Mio. Mio Yamato. We need to talk. Let me in.”

  “Even if he’s home, he might not be able to hear us,” Rachel said, tipping her head back to look up at the curtained windows of the apartment over the shop. “He might still be in bed.”

  “He can hear us. I know you can hear me, Mr Leech! Come on, open up.”

  “Why don’t we…?” my dad began, only to swallow the rest of his sentence when I threw up a hand for silence.

  Crouching down, I pushed the post flap open again and strained my ears. There it was again. A faint muffled noise.

  Hikaru stepped closer, his eyes narrowing as his sharp Kitsune ears picked it up too. “Someone’s shouting for help. We have to get inside, now.”

  He shouldered past me to the door. I got out of his way, catching my dad’s arm to pull him a few cautious steps to the side.

  “What’s he doing?” my dad demanded.

  “I’m guessing he’s breaking and entering, Kitsune style,” I said.

  Jack caught on and ushered Rachel aside, too. “Trust me. I was there the last time he broke into a place. You don’t want to be too close.”

  Hikaru’s tail, which had been tucked inconspicuously under the back of his hoodie, whipped free and began making complex swirling motions in the air behind him. He laid his hands on the painted wood, feeling out the seal between door and frame with the delicacy and respect of a bomb-disposal expert examining a bunch of multicoloured wires sticking out of a large ticking object.

  “It’s warded. Mega warded,” he said. “This is going to take a bit of subtlety. Don’t interrupt.”

  Dad and Rachel both opened their mouths to make – I could see from their expressions – sarcastic remarks. I shushed them with a finger on my lips and a stern look.

  Hikaru began to make a low, eerie crooning noise in the back of his throat. The strange, beautiful tune sent a prickle of excitement raking through the fine hairs on the back of my neck. Sparks of lightning flickered and danced up and down the luxuriant copper brush of his tail, coalescing on the silvery white fur at the tip. Identical sparks began to form around the hinges and handle of the door. Long filaments of electricity flowed around the doorframe.

  Nothing happened.

  Hikaru’s crooning song took on a lower, rougher pitch, almost like a growl. His tail flicked hard. White light flared around his hands on the door. Something inside the wood clunked loudly.

  The door still didn’t open.

  Hikaru’s growl began to sound less like a song and more like a series of muttered swearwords. He shook his head. “Oh, stuff it.”

  He brought both hands down on the wood with a sharp smack.

  Lightning crackled over the whole surface of the door. Thunder boomed, shaking the front of the building until the windows rattled. My ears popped.

  Hikaru spun sideways and plastered himself to the wall. “Make a corridor, people!”

  The door blew out of its frame in a trail of glowing sparks and smoke. It rattled across the pavement and crashed down, narrowly missing the boot of Dad’s car at the curb. The shop bell pinged off and landed with a discordant jangle by my foot.

  “I give it a six out of ten,” Jack said, poking a smouldering piece of wood with her toe. “Excellent opening. Lacked finesse in the finish.”

  Hikaru’s cheeks darkened and he folded his arms. “Did you want to get in there or not?”

  I was already climbing over the door and rushing into the shop, pulling the sheathed katana from my back as I entered. The others followed more cautiously, goggling at the vast space, the mesmerizing sea patterns painted on the ceiling and the huge glass aquariums filled with dozens of different types of jellyfish.

  “Jellyfish?” my father said, as though it ought to mean something.

  Hikaru nodded thoughtfully.

  “Mr Leech?” I called out. “Are you hurt? Can you tell me where you are?”

  We all heard the feeble voice echoing down from somewhere above us.

  “He must be in his flat. Come on,” I said.

  I led the way to the back of the store, and we trooped up the rickety, rusty old staircase together, making it shudder under our tromping feet. The door at the top was unlocked.

  Beyond, Mr Leech’s tiny flat was shrouded in darkness.

  Tiny, brittle things crunched and snapped under my feet as I stepped inside. My hand patted at the wall in search of a light switch. “Mr Leech?”

  “Over here…” His rich, fruity voice sounded alarmingly ragged. Where on earth was he? How could it possibly be this dark in here? He only had lace curtains at the windows.

  I stubbed my toe on something. The impact set off a mini-avalanche. There was a sliding noise and then a crash. Mr Leech let out a little grunt. Screw this. We needed light. Tightening my grip on the sword’s hilt, I pulled him free of the saya and shoved the sheath into the harness on my back. Then I lifted the blade above my head. Burn. Burn. Burn.

  The bright silver crescent of the blade’s cutting edge flared with sudden brilliance, the flame-shaped ripples in the metal seeming to shift as they caught fire, sending out rainbow-edged curls of living white light.

  “Whoa,” Jack breathed behind me.

  The flickering light of the blade revealed nothing but wreckage. The tiny flat had been filled with what Jack would have called “Old Lady Bling” – overly large, dark furniture, doilies, occasional tables and shelves crammed with knick-knacks, plates, bowls, figurines. Now everything was smashed. I mean, everything. The furniture had been thrown around and torn into chunks. The knick-knacks and figurines had been crushed to dust. The walls were pocked with holes deep enough to expose brick, and the flowery carpet had been ripped up from the floorboards in long, ragged strips.

  And the windows were gone. Vanished. It was as if they’d never been there. That was why it was so dark. For some reason that realization made nausea churn in my stomach. Mr Leech had been left alone here in total darkness.

  “Mr Leech? Can you keep talking to me, please? I’m trying to find you.” There was no response this time. The nausea wriggled slimy tentacles in my gut. “Mr Leech?”

  “What happened here?” Hikaru whispered from the doorway as I advanced cautiously into the ruins, trying not to set off another avalanche.

  “It looks like an earthquake hit the place,” Rachel said.

  I caught sight of a battered brown-leather shoe poking out from under the debris. “He’s buried under all this. Help me!”

  My dad muscled through the mess, sending off mini-landslides in the wreckage. The overhead light finally snapped on. Rachel had found the switch. I slid the katana quickly back into his saya and bent to grab the smashed-up remains of a giant Welsh dresser that was lying on top of Mr Leech.

  “Don’t let anything else fall on him,” I said, getting my fingers under the splintery edge of the dresser and preparing to lift. My dad crouched down, ready. I took a deep breath, then heaved up the massive chunk of wood. Things crashed and smashed all around, but my dad slid into the gap, sheltering Mr Leech’s body with his own. I got the dresser upright, then pushed it back away fro
m both of them. Dad painstakingly brushed off pottery shards, flecks of wood and shreds of carpet to reveal Mr Leech’s crumpled body.

  He was curled into the foetal position. His golden skin, delicately crinkled with age, had a disturbing grey cast, and his mouth was set in a thin, straight line that told me his teeth were clenched together.

  Looking at him brought back a sickening rush of memories of my grandfather’s collapse. I had found him after school, lying unconscious at the bottom of the stairs. Ojiichan had been a complex man with a lot of hidden motivations, and I’d accepted that I had never truly known him while he was alive. But he had been the lodestone of my childhood, and I would always love his memory. I would never get over the fact that he had died all alone in a hospital bed, and I hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye.

  “No ambulances,” the old man said suddenly. “Trust me. I will be quite all right. Can anyone see my cane, at all?”

  I let out a ragged sigh of relief.

  “Where does it hurt? Do you think you could bear to let us move you?” My dad’s voice was gentle. He looked at the towering heaps of debris all around us. “I don’t think it’s safe down here on the floor.”

  “Can anyone see my cane?” Mr Leech repeated, perfectly calmly, as if Dad hadn’t spoken.

  “Concussion,” Rachel whispered, peering over my shoulder.

  “What if he has a spinal injury? He should probably lie still,” Jack said.

  “We can’t leave him lying there like that!” Hikaru protested.

  “I haven’t regressed back to childhood, thank you,” the old man said crisply. He opened his eyes and gave me a look that held a trace of the forceful personality I had met the day before. “I just want my cane. Will someone please find the blasted thing? Quickly, if you don’t mind.”

  Maybe it wasn’t concussion after all. I looked over my shoulder at Jack, Hikaru and Rachel. “The cane is dark wood, with a silver cap, I think.”

  “Is that it?” Hikaru asked. He waded through a pile of smashed china and heaved a nondescript walking stick out of a mess of what looked like broken table legs. “This is it, right?”

  In answer, Mr Leech feebly lifted one arm, his twisted fingers making a painful beckoning motion. Hikaru passed the stick across the wreckage to Jack, who handed it to Rachel, who handed it to me. It felt like ordinary wood, a little heavy at the top because of the silver cap. I put it carefully in Mr Leech’s hand.

  The instant the old man closed his fingers around the cane, it began to glow. Shimmering, blue-green light − the kind you’d see if you lay on the bottom of a clear ocean and stared up through the waves towards the sun − undulated along the dark length of wood. Suddenly it was hard to look at it, or at Mr Leech. I turned my face half away, squinting. Was the cane a long silver-white icicle? A twisted piece of translucent turquoise sea glass? Was Mr Leech holding a cane at all, or a handful of pulsating mercury-like liquid that spilled between his fingers and soaked into his skin? For a second I even thought the walking stick looked like a long, slender wooden fishing rod.

  Then the light faded, and the cane in Mr Leech’s hand was just a piece of plain, dark wood again.

  He let out a long, deep exhalation of breath. His skin had regained its healthy golden tinge, and his eyes were sharp and twinkling once more. “Oh, that’s so much better. Thank you.”

  “That bastard Izanagi did this to you, didn’t he?” I growled.

  “I’m afraid so,” Mr Leech confirmed breathlessly as my dad and I each took one of his arms and eased him to his feet.

  Rachel and Jack had already unearthed an old leather armchair and were setting it on its feet. It was battered and missing a few strips of its upholstery, but otherwise seemed solid. Hikaru hastily dusted about an inch of dirt and debris off the seat and back, and then we helped Mr Leech down into it.

  “Why did you stay here?” I asked. “You must have known what he’d do to you.”

  Mr Leech sighed heavily, planting his cane down firmly on the bare board by his foot. “I really had no choice, my dear. I cannot … ahem. Let us say that I am…” he hesitated, his mouth working as if the next word was difficult to say. “Stuck.”

  “You can’t leave. You’re bound to the nexus!” my father said in tones of dawning discovery.

  Mr Leech didn’t answer.

  Dad seemed to take the silence as confirmation. “Did Izanagi bind you?” He folded his arms, staring down at the old man. “Tell me, Mr Leech, why did he go to such trouble? Why didn’t he just kill you?”

  “Dad!”

  Mr Leech shook his head. “No, it is a good question. I assure you, Mr Yamato, he would have, if it were within his power.” He paused, eyes expectant.

  “I knew it,” Hikaru said, his tail whisking excitedly. “You’re a Kami.”

  Mr Leech beamed at Hikaru. “Care to hazard a guess as to which one?”

  “I don’t need to guess,” my father said dryly. “The name would have given the game away, even if you hadn’t filled your shop with jellyfish. You’re Ebisu, aren’t you? Patron of good fortune for humans in general and fishermen specifically, and of the health of children. Izanagi’s oldest son, the one he called—”

  “Leech-child,” Mr Leech finished softly. A flash of something dark and wild passed behind his eyes and then faded into his usual calm twinkle. “But you, please, will call me Ebisu. It feels good to hear my own name again.”

  “He bound you to this place. And … this form?” Hikaru’s voice was grave and respectful.

  The old man, the bound god, nodded. “A punishment.”

  “For what?” Jack asked, appalled.

  Mr Leech made a tiny shrugging movement, lips pressing together, but his eyes fixed on mine, as if he was waiting for something.

  “I don’t know much about Izanagi,” I said, “but I do know that he’s a coward. If he bound you like this, it’s because you threatened him somehow. He wanted you out of the way. But he couldn’t kill you?”

  “No more than the wind or the moon or the sky can be killed,” Ebisu said. “In a sense that is all any of us are, we who call ourselves gods. Just little pieces of nature’s capricious will that woke up one day and became self-aware.”

  I paused, sidetracked. “What about Izanami? Your … your mother,” I said hesitantly. “I’ve seen her and she definitely looks – um, I’m sorry – dead.”

  “Does she?” he asked sadly. “When was the last time you saw a dead person get up and walk, and wail, and mourn?”

  “Then why is she trapped in the realm of the dead? Why is she…?” I let my voice trail off. I didn’t want to describe his mother’s rotting form to him.

  “She does not live. But she is not dead in the sense that mortals understand death,” Mr Leech said. “That is the great tragedy. My mother loved her family. Too much. She gave up all her strength, all her powers, in her desperation to save her youngest child. It destroyed her. Left her in a state of undeath, ruined and rotting. She cannot ever truly die, yet she is barred forever from life.”

  “Wait,” Jack chimed in again. “Mio told me the story. After Izanami… Well, after she went to Yomi, didn’t Izanagi kill the baby? The baby that Izanami gave everything to save?”

  “He tried. In his rage, he chopped the child into small pieces and scattered them. But though it was only a newborn, even he, father of the gods, could not destroy it. Each mutilated piece – even the drops of blood that fell from the blade of his sword – eventually grew into a new god. That is why he did not bother to try to kill us, you know, my defective sister and me. He did not want our ugliness to multiply. He intended us to sink to the bottom of the sea, where we would choke and flounder for an eternity, helpless and trapped in the dark. That way he would have been rid of us and the shadow of imperfection that our existence cast upon him, and we would have been justly punished. That was to be our fate. If our mother had not intervened.”

  There was a long moment of quiet as we all absorbed that.

 
Finally Jack grunted, her gaze catching mine as one corner of her lips tugged up into a twisted little grin. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: that guy is a class-A dick.”

  A tiny giggle popped out of my lips, and just as suddenly I felt myself choke up. I covered my eyes for a second, then wiped my hand shakily over my face.

  Jack nudged me with her elbow, her smile transforming into an expression of concern. “OK there, Mimi?”

  Clearing my throat, I took a deep breath and nodded. “Yes. Yeah.”

  I was just so grateful that Jack had caught me before I managed to sneak out of the house and leave her and the others behind. What had I been thinking? I had been an idiot to believe I could walk out on them and do all this alone. I needed my friends. I needed my dad.

  And I was so glad they were with me right now.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE TIES THAT BIND

  S tiffening my spine, I turned back to the old man and looked him in the eye. “Mr – um – Ebisu,” I began. “When I came here before, you offered me something. A sword. A wakizashi. You wouldn’t – couldn’t − tell me what it was for, or why it was hurting … him. So I refused it, and you made it disappear.”

  I could feel the others staring at me in shock. Yeah, I might have left that bit out when I was telling them about my visit here. Oops.

  Mr Leech waited, his eyes huge and dark in his small, wrinkled face.

  “That sword was really important, wasn’t it? Do we need it now? To end the war between the gods?”

  Mr Leech’s face went tense with effort – I could see the muscles around his jaw standing out. He managed a minuscule, painful inclination of his head.