by Wen Spencer
Normally he would have already made the call himself. Kami couldn’t be photographed, though, not even when they were housed within a human. If the god enshrined in the katana was possessing the girl, then not a single security camera in the city would pick her up.
Sato placed his hand on the folding door. The cut fabric melded together, returning to whole. The patina of wear vanished from the door, and the smell of newness flooded the apartment. “It will take me hours to erase all this.”
That was his cue to leave. Sato would remove all evidence that a fight had taken place: the broken door, the pool of blood, and the dead body. He would leave the bric-a-brac of Nikki Delany’s life for the police to puzzle over, trying to understand why the American girl had suddenly gone missing.
Annoyingly, Chevalier chose to follow, carrying his stolen Coke. “What’s in the bag?”
The top layer were flyers, so he took one out and handed it to the man. “They’re tour books and flyers from places she’s been. She’s either going to head for friends or go someplace she’s been to before.”
It was a flyer for the Gion Matsuri, the month-long festival in Kyoto. Pictures dominated the glossy advertisement but the information was all in Japanese. How fluent was she? It could be a factor in where she might hide. Her elegant cursive handwriting flowed around a picture of the float procession.
Chevalier read the English words aloud. “‘In 869, the entire country was struck by a plague. Emperor Seiwa sent an envoy to the Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto to pray to the god Susanoo to end the country’s suffering. He ordered the creation of sixty-six halberds, one for each province, to be erected at the palace’s garden and then had the portable shrines carried by strong young men from the temple to the palace garden. For more than a thousand years, Kyoto has celebrated Gion Matsuri. It is one of the three largest festivals in all of Japan. It infuriates Kenichi’s princess.’ Why?”
Chevalier raised an eyebrow in question. “Who is Kenichi?”
“I don’t know,” he said truthfully enough.
Down on the street, with Chevalier’s smoke dulling his senses, there was no trace of Nikki’s scent. He wanted away from the man so he could examine in peace the flash drive he had found. He unlocked his car with his remote and slid in behind the wheel.
Chevalier climbed in the passenger side without asking permission.
He gripped the steering wheel tight, trying to hold in his anger. “Aren’t you supposed to be watching Sato?”
“He doesn’t like me crowding him while he works. He’s a good little monster; he’ll stay put.”
The steering wheel was starting to bend, so he eased back on his grip. “You do know that he can make you vanish with a touch of his hand?”
Chevalier laughed. “No, no, he can’t hurt me. That is why I’m his babysitter. I’m impenetrable to such things that go bump in the night. The monsters, they cannot touch me.”
“I can touch you.”
Chevalier laughed. “Ah, yes, Monsieur Minou, I am not bulletproof, and you are heavily armed. But you also know that if you go rogue, all the monster hunters will come crashing down on your head. Then who would be left to find Simon, mon ami?”
He hated that the answer was no one.
“I am worried—What the hell? Do you have something living in your—” Chevalier suddenly yelped as Misa’s kitten latched all four sets of claws into his ankle. Swearing, Chevalier stomped down hard, and there was a cry of pain.
His gun was out and at Chevalier’s head before the man could stomp a second time. “Hurt it again, and I’ll kill you.”
“Are you fucking insane?”
“Get out.”
After the Frenchman scrambled out of the car, he pulled away quickly. He wanted to put distance between him and the desire to put a bullet into Chevalier’s brain. At the first light, he reached down and fished the kitten out of the passenger leg well.
It gave a piteous cry as he ran fingertips over it, searching out where it was hurt. Luckily, Chevalier’s aim was off as always. He’d only gotten the kitten’s tail.
“Let this be a lesson. Don’t jump something that is bigger than you.”
His phone rang. That would be Ananth whipping him back into line.
He answered his phone with, “He left Sato unguarded, pushed into my space, and kicked my cat. I didn’t shoot him. I could have shot him, dumped his body, and let everyone think Sato had slipped his leash.”
“I’m giving you a chance. Stop pulling guns on people or I’ll have you put down.”
He clenched down on a growl. The kitten climbed up to his shoulder to rumble counterpoint in his other ear.
“You find anything at the girl’s apartment which could tell us where she’s taking the katana?” Ananth asked.
“No.” He had the feeling that it was the other way around. The katana was taking Nikki Delany someplace. If the kami possessed her too long, though, it would kill her. If all the abandoned pieces of her life told a true story, her death would be sad. “I’ll call you if I find her.”
Nikki sat back in the seat, biting down on a groan. If she was writing the truth, then Scary Cat Dude had her wallet and passport. If.
She still needed to go to her apartment. She needed to see for herself what the truth really was.
12
Erased
She got through Umeda in record time as Atsumori guided her. “How do you know your way around better than me?”
“I am a god and you are not.” Atsumori used her mouth to speak. It was a weirdly uncomfortable feeling, and she decided not to ask any more questions.
She dithered on the corner across from her building, pretending to study the selection of drinks in the vending machine. It was a Coke machine with all the familiar soda logos sporting kanji lettering. Her focus, though, was on her balcony. The light was off in her apartment—the last she could clearly remember, it had been on. She didn’t have her keys. If whoever turned off the light also locked the door—Atsumori, the Scary Cat Dude, the police—then she had no way to get in without talking to the landlord. If the landlord unlocked the door herself, there was way the woman would miss the dead body on the floor.
If it was still on the floor.
Maybe the light bulb had burned out.
She wasn’t accomplishing anything out on the corner. This was the first real concrete proof that what she wrote wasn’t a forgotten news report wrapped in insanity. She had to go and see the truth for herself. The bloody insanity or the clean impossibility. She steeled herself to walk across the street and into her building.
The lobby was empty. A security camera on the elevator fed video to a monitor opposite the elevator’s door. Nikki glanced at the screen as she pushed the call button. The elevator car was up on the ninth floor. Its doors were closing, whoever had gotten off was already out of sight.
There was a long pause as the electronics considered possible directions, and then slowly the car started down to the lobby.
“Come on, come on.” Nikki whispered to it, trying to watch both the monitor and the lobby door at the same time.
She was aware of a tension shimmering through her body; Atsumori was readying for a fight. The ritual at Inari’s shrine had apparently eliminated all barriers between them. She felt him merging with her and she no longer blacked out. It was weirdly uncomfortable—like she suddenly had been made a glove—but she preferred it to losing consciousness.
She wanted to tell him to stay out of her, but she was afraid that she might need him.
The elevator doors opened. A mirror hung on the back wall of the car, probably in an attempt to make the tiny space seem bigger. Her reflection had Atsumori’s fierce brown eyes. She stepped into the elevator and turned around so she wasn’t facing the mirror. For some odd reason, the security camera hadn’t caught her entering. According to the video monitor, the elevator was empty.
Keeping an eye on the monitor, she stepped closer to the camera and then raised her hand up to cover
its lens. The monitor still showed an empty car with the doors standing open.
She smacked the camera lens. “I’m here! Show me!”
The monitor continued to deny her existence as it showed the doors closing.
Had someone looped the video feed? She hit the “Open” button, and the screen showed the doors reopening. No. According to the monitor—or maybe just her perception of the monitor she just wasn’t there. Which had gone crazy: her or the universe?
The frightening truth was that it made more sense for it to be her.
She punched the “6” button and rode up to her floor. The dead body of a man she had killed shouldn’t be comforting, but part of her really hoped that was what she would find in her apartment. It would be there, real and undeniable. If it was gone she would be faced with two possibilities: that there had never been a dead man, or that she had written a true account of some secret organization quietly covering up a murder. The first was so much more logical and reasonable than the second.
She felt like she was racing around and around the question of whether she was crazy. It had always been comforting to run through the symptoms of schizophrenia and not find any of them in herself. The last few days had rattled her confidence. Delusions of being possessed, hearing voices, and believing in secret conspiracies were classic symptoms. She knew that schizophrenic patients could weave a tight fabric of delusions that even a sane person couldn’t unravel because of the interdependent logic. “Invisible aliens controlled people via messages hidden in cellphone signals” was impossible to disprove, since the aliens were invisible and the messages concealed. “Japanese spirits living in swords” wasn’t that far removed from invisible aliens.
Was her very attempt to cling to the claim of sanity proof that she was insane?
The elevator dinged as it stopped on the sixth floor. After a pause, the door rolled open. She stepped out, her footsteps loud in the bare concrete hallway.
At her door, she hesitated. Which did she really want? Dead body or clean room? Proof that she’d been attacked or complete lack of evidence?
Taking a deep breath, she opened the door.
The room held the new tatami smell of freshly cut hay. The bathroom door was closed; there was no hole cut through the fabric. The room was cleaner even than when she moved in and certainly the neatest it had ever been while she was living there. Everything was carefully put into place. Her Post-It Notes were all missing, and the wall looked newly painted.
“Damn you,” she whispered.
Fighting to control her anger, she stepped into her apartment and closed the door.
“What is wrong?” Atsumori asked.
“I almost died here. I killed a man. And they erased it all until only the absence of dirt stands as evidence.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know.”
Her keys sat on her table, in full view of the door, beside her purse. Anyone else would have thought she had just stepped out for some harmless errand—like taking out the trash—and just never came back. Whispering curses, she snatched up her purse and rooted through it. The useful clutter of her life—her iPod, packs of tissues, and city maps—was all there. Her passport, driver’s license, and credit cards were all gone.
The Scary Cat Dude had taken them. Somehow, she had to get them back.
13
The Castle
Still shaking with anger, Nikki stripped off her borrowed yukata, pulled on underwear, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, quickly packed her suitcase with the rest of her clothes, and then fled. She had planned to go straight to the train station and go to Nara, where Pixii lived. She couldn’t leave, though, until she managed to get back her passport and wallet.
Osaka Castle sat in the heart of the city, a pocket left over from the past, surrounded by a nearly half-square-mile park. Around it was a deep moat filled with jade-green water. Wide stone ramps led up to great iron-clad wood gates looking big enough for elephants to pass through. A cobblestone road wound uphill, between walls of massive stones fitted together like the building blocks belonging to a giant child. Beyond a second gate were a dojo and a Shinto shrine and yet a third gate leading to a courtyard at the foot of the towering castle. Dusk was racing toward night. She’d been to the castle enough times to know that the little gift shops and food stands in the stone courtyard were still open but the entire park area would be practically deserted. She hit the stand selling fried octopus dumplings, takoyaki, and then retreated to the shrine to think.
Who were these bastards? What right did they have to come into her apartment and erase all evidence that she had fought for her life against a supernatural monster? Okay, maybe it was a good thing that they’d taken away the body. A dead raccoon dog in a business suit would have been hard to explain to the landlord.
Why did the tanuki attack her?
In her novel, Harada worked for a yakuza crime boss. Harada had heard about the shrine fire, gone to Gregory Winston’s apartment to collect the katana, and lost his temper when Gregory told him that he didn’t have the sword. How did Harada end up at her apartment? Had he followed her from the train station? No, he’d come disguised as Tanaka, so he must have known the detective had questioned her. It suggested that the yakuza had access the police records but not necessarily police cooperation, or Tanaka would have come himself.
When had Harada taken over Tanaka’s identity?
It was possible that the person who arrested her had been Harada all along. Once she considered the possibility, though, it seemed more likely that she had been questioned originally by the real Tanaka. Harada would never have taken her to the police station in the first place.
“What’s wrong?” Atsumori interrupted her thoughts.
She blinked, and realized she was sitting with a takoyaki halfway to her mouth. “Huh?”
“You—you made a noise.”
“Oh, um, I thought of something.”
She had chosen to hide at the Hokoku Shrine inside the castle’s compound so she could see Atsumori when he spoke to her. She didn’t need her sanity rattled any more than it already was. They were in the back of the shrine in a secluded rock garden, well out of sight of the gate. The boy god had been pacing restlessly around the small grassy islands that the rocks sat on. It felt like they had slipped into a twilight world, the setting sun spilling gold light over the rock garden and the thick castle walls secluding them from the distant traffic. The only sounds she could hear were his footsteps crunching on the gravel and the caws of the crows.
“What did you think of?” he asked.
She gave a bitter laugh and lowered her chopsticks, resting the octopus dumpling back with its brethren. “Oh, it just occurred to me that if I had done the sane thing, I wouldn’t have had you with me when Harada came to my apartment. I would have been sitting there, sorting through all the bric-a-brac of my life, thinking that the only person I needed to stay one step ahead of was my mother.”
He frowned slightly. “You are running from your mother?”
“She thinks I’m crazy.” She laughed bitterly again. “If I tried to explain any of the last twenty hours to her, she would know I’m crazy.”
“You are not insane.”
“Says the god,” Nikki murmured and picked the takoyaki back up with her chopsticks. “Are you hungry? Do you eat?”
“I feed upon the spirit of the offering.”
She winced. Put that way, it made him sound like a vampire. She understood what he really meant. Maybe. She believed that he was nourished not by the food but the goodwill behind it. “Here. You can have the rest of these.” The takoyaki were good but rich and slathered with sauce and mayonnaise. They were only sold in eight packs as a traditional pun on the fact that octopi had eight tentacles. “I’m stuffed.”
He came to sit beside her, the takoyaki on his lap as if he was about to open them up and eat them. She lay back on the stone patio and watched the sunlight fade out of the sky.
Good new
s: she didn’t have a homicidal stalker hacking her data files, and the slightly unhinged shape-changing assassin was dead. There were, however, two organizations moving through the shadows, both possibly criminal in nature, looking for the katana. The yakuza had proven that they were willing to kill to get it. The other one had a weird “James Bond” feel to it—as if the British Secret Service were employing Frenchmen and monsters.
Scary Cat Dude was right in thinking that, with cash, she could make her way to any point in Japan without leaving a paper trail. She could most likely bolt to Tokyo without fear of trouble following.
While she had a thousand dollars worth of yen in hand, she would need access to her bank accounts sooner or later. Without proof of identification, she couldn’t replace her bank card. And there was the small technicality that she was only legally in the country for another thirty days.
She needed to get her passport back. In the United States, she could have breezed through life without it. In Japan, though, everyone who looked at her knew that she didn’t belong. Everything from the shape of her eyes to the color of her hair marked her as a foreigner.
So how did she go about contacting Scary Cat Dude?
He had a cell phone. If she could find out his number, she could call him. She didn’t know his real name, but he was one of her characters. She might be able to write a scene where he tells someone his phone number.
She sat up, dug out her notebook and pen and, in the gathering darkness, started to write.
It took him the rest of the day to find out anything new about Nikki Delany. She hid everything about herself behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. Both her phone and her flash drive were protected with passwords. In the case of the flash drive, it was ten characters of upper-and lower-case letters mixed heavily with numbers. He needed to call in a favor to have both passwords cracked. The flash drive contained word-processing documents; the handwritten information in the notebooks typed in and embellished. There was nothing of her: no address book or e-mails or calendar.