In a soft voice that belonged in a much more intimate setting than a bus, Ken said “Even Professors don’t know everything.” His arm curled itself down over my shoulder, tugging me a little toward him. “Take your name, for instance,” he breathed. His free hand rose, and with two, blunt-nailed, long fingers, tapped me at the corner of an eye, and then stroked all the way down my jaw, just under the stinging cut Hayk had made on my cheek.
“My name?”
“Koi Pierce.” My ear tingled with the warm air from the hard consonants, and his touch lingered, distracting and invasive. “Such short, sharp sounds for one such as you.”
“I have another name,” I said, blushing. Dork. I owed him no explanation.
“Yes, even if I were to use the name ‘Koi Pierce’, it would not truly name you. It is not just the words, but the intent, the concept of who you are. Kwaskwi’s thunder friend is Kind; his naming isn’t simple, but it’s better not to risk giving any advantage to Ullikemi. You saw how he called Kwaskwi with only the trickster’s single name.”
Something penetrated the hazy, warm feeling bathing my body. That’s why Ullikemi kept insisting on a name. And I thought giving up Kwaskwi’s name was no big deal. It was exactly what that evil pair needed. Names. All the names. Another puzzle piece slid into place. Hayk’s magic freezing phrase—it was all the versions of that freezing instant all at once, all the names of it in all the languages. And somehow by Hayk speaking it, borrowing Ullikemi’s power, it equaled magic.
Hayk was no fool, and a master researcher. What was the name he’d said to Kwaskwi?
Unktehila.
I was sure I’d heard that name before in connection with the first peoples around Portland. Ken was naïve to think Hayk didn’t have resources. And Hayk knew two of my names. Did that naming magic thing work on humans?
Dream-eater.
I kept forgetting I was no longer entirely Team Human.
Ken’s mouth curved into a half-smile. Sharp glints appeared in the dark depths of his eyes. He wasn’t thinking about Hayk. “What is your other name?”
I shook my head. “How can it be possible to know every language’s version of a word?” I was working hard to dispel this aura of intimacy. But Ken tugged me even closer.
“What is your other name?” His lips brushed my temple.
“If I tell you, does it give you power over me, like Hayk?”
“I would never use you that way, just as you would never use my dreams, Baku.”
I recoiled.
Ken lifted my chin so I couldn’t avoid his gaze. “Why do you fear the Baku part of yourself?”
Out of the frying pan into the fire. He’d given up on my name to go after bigger game. Every instinct in me screamed to throw him off the scent. I couldn’t imagine discussing that surge of strength, that gleeful wallowing in the power inside me I’d felt when…
Say it. Admit it. When you ate Hayk’s evil dream-fragment. And Ullikemi’s. And what’s more, you enjoyed feeling strong until the hangover headache.
I shoved those thoughts way down deep inside me, trying to close off the doorways Ken had teased opened with his husky voice and irresistible eyebrows.
“You know more about Baku than you’re letting on,” I said, trying for a defiant tone.
Ken pulled his arm away with a sigh. He gave me a look that promised this thing between us wasn’t over. “Baku are powerful, so powerful the Council is desperate that your father returns to Japan.”
“Your mission.”
“Yes, I was supposed to bring him back by any means necessary. But then, there’s you.”
“Me.” A flush started down the back of my neck that had nothing to do with Ken’s dark eyes. “Oh. Your Council never guessed the Baku had a little Baku-ette.”
“Herai-san has lived a long, long time. He is one of the last known of his solitary kind. Most Kind don’t…procreate with humans. Children were never considered.”
“Yeah, well. Here I am.”
“Yes, here you are,” repeated Ken, leaning toward me, somehow imbuing the words with intense undertones. Fluttery things started fluttering again.
Tightly shut doorways creaked open, tempting me to confide in this man.
Stupid hormones. This wasn’t the time or place for flutters, or even the right man. Who knew what kind of life Ken had back in Japan? Did Kitsune live in packs? He obviously wasn’t a hermit. He had no idea what crazy thoughts went through my head when he touched me. A kiss, some hormonal groping in the kitchen and on a bus didn’t mean to him what it meant to me.
I needed serious chocolate. A couple pieces of Verdun Pistachio Gianduja and I’d be right as rain, dopamine activators sorting out my mixed up brain chemistry.
Ken’s eyes were all Kitsune-dark, showing his real face. Mouth open, that kinako scent I loved brushing my lips. A pulse, tangible in the air between us, insistent, urging, wanting.
Still, I knew next to nothing about him. For all I knew there might even be a Mrs. Kitsune back in Japan. The first time I met him he had a box of condoms in his hands! Even if the condoms were only some kind of lifehack waterproofing for his phone and not for the more obvious purpose, the man did not kiss like a novice.
It was time to stop acting like a high school freshman on her first date.
But it was my first date. Or close enough. And I wasn’t afraid to dream Ken’s fragments.
I leaned forward, closing that infinitesimal gap between us, and brushed his open mouth with mine.
Ken jerked back as if he’d been burned and, with a muffled Japanese curse, pulled his arm tight against his body.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, not meeting his eyes. Could I be more pathetic? He probably was just being nice, and me with my lack of experience being all naïve and…
Ken gritted his teeth. “No, you’ve got it wrong,” he whispered.
“Yes,” I said, a flush blossoming from neck to hairline. “I figured that out already.”
Muscles ticked in his jaw, holding back fierce emotion. “No, you haven’t,” he growled softly, and grabbed my hand between his palms. The calloused skin was hot to the touch and my focus narrowed down to where little tickles of awareness caressed my hand.
The bus stopped, the sole passenger got up from behind the driver’s seat and stepped off. Nobody got on.
“This, this touching you, wanting you, it’s not a good idea,” he said.
I jerked my hand away.
“Okay, already. I get the picture!”
“I am not saying I don’t want you, Koi Pierce,” he said, dark eyes leveled into a stare, pinioning me in place like a butterfly on stick pins. “We could come together for mutual comfort. Enjoyable, yes, and don’t think I didn’t have that in mind before.”
Oh.
Ken continued. “But there’s more at stake here now than just a physical interlude. Ultimately it would cost more than I am willing to risk.”
“Yeah. Okay. Consider it dropped.”
He was completely vulpine now with slitted, dark eyes, sharp cheekbones and hair forming a widow’s peak over bushy eyebrows. That controlled storm-energy radiated from him in waves, arousing answering trills of tension all along my insides.
Using his real face to try to scare me.
“You know nothing of who I am. What I do for the Council. I have done…great wrong.”
A guffaw broke through the sarcastic words hanging on the tip of my tongue. What is with these people?
“Great Wrong? Seriously?” Apparently the Kind all needed to take a giant chill pill. Talk about drama-mongers.
“I am the Bringer. You heard Kwaskwi name me.”
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask about that.”
Ken took a deep breath. “Kind don’t kill. Not other Kind. Rarely humans. It’s not just a law, it’s who we are.”
“You’re serious.” All levity drained away. Embarrassed heat flushed my face.
“Yes,” he said, switching to Japan
ese, arms at his side, tension thrumming through him so strongly I could almost smell it. “You grew up in the human world, with human blood in your veins. Humans can’t know the inexorable inborn yearning of life for itself. The instinctual recognition of life’s energy coursing through another. The utter horror of extinguishing it.”
Okay, he is serious, but still a drama queen. And now I felt like he was dissing humanity. “So you’re saying you and Kwaskwi could beat each other all the live long day, but not kill?”
“Kwaskwi could not,” said Ken. He took a deep breath. “Ullikemi cannot, so he thinks to use Hayk as his weapon.”
“Because humans are expert killers.”
Ken didn’t acknowledge my words. He was hell-bent on wringing some painful confession from himself.
“I’m the exception. I am the Bringer. My background gives me the ability to overcome the compulsion.”
A world’s worth of hurt underlay the careful tone he used. Background? What did it cost to “overcome” that kind of compulsion?
“I bring Death.”
The driver craned his neck around the protective panel to glance at us. We needed to tone down the dramatics a bit. Luckily the bus was still empty.
I leaned closer to Ken. “You’re what, an assassin?”
His eyes flickered over my face, searching, and then he turned away. “Death-bringer,” he said, bitterness lashing out through his quiet voice.
“This is the great wrong you’re talking about?”
“I plunge myself into that black abyss, and the taint marks me. You grew up human. Innocent. Not knowing the terrible grace of the Kind. Not knowing the anguish that grips us all when I kill.”
I gave a huff of frustration. In English I said, “You don’t go around assassinating willy-nilly, right?”
Ken looked up, meeting my gaze with eyes that were bare slits of darkest black. “I have tasted of death’s dire emptiness to do the Council’s work.”
He clearly expected me to show horror.
“I lived Hayk’s murders a dozen times. My hand on the blade, blood-warmth on my skin, the acrid smell of fear. I ate that dream, whatever the hell that really means, and took that hunger and power into myself. And I liked it! What does that make me?”
“Baku. There is no evil in taking evil from the world.”
He doesn’t get it. Not at all. Frustration made me grind my teeth. We hovered in our seats, both inches and miles away from touching each other, and I wanted to scream or shake him or better, kick him until that haunted look left his eyes and he went back to being alpha-male again.
The bus pulled to a shuddering stop.
“And here we are,” I said, breaking the tension in my best Greg-ever-chipper imitation voice.
Ken gripped the sides of the seat and breathed deeply as the bus driver made his announcement and the doors swiveled open with a whining protest.
Pioneer square. White Doric columns bordering one side of a wide bowl. The brick steps forming the sides of the bowl dull-red in the rain. Only a scattering of hardy tourists wielding umbrellas milled around by the fountain at the north end of the bowl.
Familiar. Real. Navigable.
“The driver didn’t say this was Skidmore,” said Ken.
“Get off anyway. I need a burrito.”
Ken stood and led the way off the bus. As the bus pulled away, he put out an arm to block me.
“Wait a moment,” he said.
Cardamom wasn’t in the scent of the light rain drenching the square. Gag-sweet spoiled food, the dirt-concrete of the city, and an undercurrent of bitter roast emanating from the Starbucks over the tourist office forming the north end wall of the square, but nothing that smelled of Hayk or Ullikemi.
I zeroed in on Shelly’s Garden Burritos and stepped around Ken’s arm.
“Kind are here,” he said.
I sighed. “Hayk?”
“No. Native peoples.”
I gave him a look. “Kwaskwi doesn’t trust us, right? It’s natural he’d have us watched.”
Ken’s nostrils flared, breathing in the rain and Portland smell. “Or he’s here to snatch you so his people would control both Herai Baku.”
“Suspicious much? I thought it was all word-of-the-Kind is gold, and all that.”
“He never promised us anything other than to provide safe haven to your father and return him at Skidmore fountain.”
“So he’s bound to return him to me.”
“Yes,” said Ken in Japanese. “But if he snatched you here, before you ever reached the fountain, he wouldn’t, technically, be breaking faith with us. The contract binds him to return your father at Skidmore fountain. If you’re not there to receive him…”
“He wants nothing to do with me anymore, he’s afraid of Hayk.”
“Speak Japanese,” said Ken.
I threw up my hands, gesturing toward a woman with a yellow flag on a pole surrounded by milling, black-haired tourists with umbrellas.
“Half these people are Japanese tourists!”
He leaned over to capture my gaze, forcing me to look at him, his eyes dark with concern but his mouth set in an angry line.
“Why are you fighting me?”
“Because I want a burrito!”
Ken’s face lost the amiable roundness, going sleek and sharp. He stabbed a finger toward the food cart verandah.
Fine. Bone-headed Kitsune. I’d get my burrito and show him he was being paranoid and domineering. A new word for the dictionary: domanoid.
Kwaskwi wasn’t bird-brained enough to draw Ullikemi’s attention out in public by causing a big scene. Snatching us. Ha.
I ordered and paid, and then stepped back to find Ken twitchy and tense. He scanned the faces of business people carrying their lunches back to the office buildings, the tourists, and even a catholic high school-uniformed group of girls on the steps giggling over selfies.
Creepy and testosteroney. But irritation had deserted me when I needed it most. Ken wasn’t kidding, he really was worried about Kwaskwi. I didn’t want to think too deeply about the reason. Kwaskwi had almost been nice to me. Was I fooling myself to think he would hesitate to harm me based on that supposed niceness?
Marlin would probably tell me in a kind, patient, wise-younger-sister voice that I tended to trust people’s outer faces too much without questioning inner intentions.
“Number 12 up!” said the Shelly’s cashier, flipping a swath of orange-red bangs out of her eyes. She glared in the way that meant it wasn’t the first time she’d called my number.
I jolted forward and picked up my burrito, my hands barely able to circle the stuffed silver foil, hot enough to scald my palms.
“Now,” said Ken, pointedly looking at the burrito, “we have to speak of important things.” He steered me in a half circle back toward the Starbuck’s, switching to a formal, old-fashioned Japanese liberally sprinkled with Herai dialect. “That female in the dress with shiny pieces sewn into the hem and her young companion are Kind of the tribes who settled this place before the European invasion.”
I blinked at him, answering in English. “What, you Kind have something like ‘gay-dar’?”
“Gay-dar?” repeated Ken. He gave me a sharp nudge with his elbow.
“Okay, okay, I’ll speak Japanese,” I said. “Do you really think Kwaskwi wants to snatch me?”
“I am full-minded that he should have done so already if not for my fortunate presence at your side.”
He sounded so formal and so old speaking that way, so at odds with the high cheekbones and model-tousled hair he was sporting. Like if one of the catholic school girls suddenly started spouting Shakespeare.
I held back a smile. Ken was deadly serious, but it was so cute. A twinge of pain at my temple made me remember the burrito. I started unwrapping. Eating dreams apparently made me ravenous for real food. And it was possible his cuteness was entirely illusion. How old was he really?
“We should hie o
urselves directly to the meeting place,” said Ken. “Can you consume your foodstuffs on the bus?”
“Sure, yes,” I said, lapsing into English again. “But he knows where we are going. It’s not like we can lose them.”
“Your words speak truth, but though Kwaskwi has not made promise of safe passage, still he is bound by custom not to breach faith in a meeting place in the presence of your father. In this place there is no such advantage.”
I chewed a mouthful of garlicky bean and fresh tomato salsa bliss. Suddenly, the garlic taste on my tongue morphed into cardamom. I gagged, dropping the burrito on the ground.
“Ullikemi!” I said.
Chapter Eleven
Ken lead me back to the bus stop, leaving my burrito forlorn and abandoned at the feet of the curious onlookers.
“I’m still hungry!” I said.
“Does this bus take us to the meeting place?” he said in English.
“No, but we can hop a MAX to Skidmore Fountain. It’s under an overpass, so the rain can’t touch us there. That’s important, right? Staying out of the rain?”
Right on cue a MAX train rumbled around the corner.
“Stay in front of me,” said Ken.
The Starbuck’s woman with the shiny bits sewed into her gypsy skirt, a blonde-haired coed, and a duo of bald guys in Ducks jerseys were walking rapidly toward us.
Not a random blonde. It was Elise from Kaneko-sensei’s class, and she was unmistakably pointing in my direction and speaking rapidly through a sneer. What? She was Team Kwaskwi? Implications soaked in with the light rain, dragging my shoulders down. How long had Elise been watching me in Kaneko-sensei’s class?
I finally hopped on Ken’s panic train; my heart sped up, and curious fizzy gray appeared at the corner of my vision. The painful ache in my temples relapsed back to a pounding headache, gripping my head in a vise.
A strange, green aura outlined the coming MAX train. I blinked, stumbling backwards against Ken’s solid chest.
“Koi,” he said in his growly voice.
I rubbed my eyes with a fist, and when I peered over Ken’s shoulder the green aura limned every object in my vicinity. All but the shiny-skirt woman who now was only a few feet away.
Dream Eater Page 16