by Jasmine Walt
“A wise decision,” Ryujin said. I let out a tiny sigh of relief at the amused tone of his voice—at least he wasn’t mad, or trying to take advantage of my slip-up. I knew from the old stories that other gods weren’t quite as forgiving.
The dragon king opened his mouth to speak again, but before he could, the doors flew open.
“Father!” a female voice cried, and we turned to see a smaller sea dragon with pearly white scales swim into the room. She had golden eyes like Ryujin, and looked extremely agitated.
“What is it, Tama?” Ryujin asked, his expression shifting to alarm. “Is it your mother?”
The sea dragon nodded. “She is growing weaker, Father. I am not sure she will be with us much longer.”
Ryujin’s expression darkened. He turned his turmoil-filled gaze back to us and extended one of his huge arms. His claws unfurled to reveal two giant gemstones, one that looked like pure moonlight, and another that blazed like a dying sun.
“These are the jewels of the rising and ebbing tides,” Ryujin told us. “You can use these to lower the tide that blocks the cavern entrance and seek passage through it to Kai’s tomb. I will lend you these, if you go to Sarushima and procure a monkey liver for me.”
“Monkey Island!” Shota exclaimed. “You’re going to send us there? I’ve always thought it was just a legend!”
“You will not be going,” the dragon king said sternly. Shota deflated visibly, and for a moment I felt bad for him. “I require one of you to remain behind as a guest and keep my daughter company.”
Amabie, who had been watching quietly from her father’s side, drifted over to Shota. “I wouldn’t mind showing him around the castle,” she said, looping his arm into hers. I forced myself to ignore her as she snuggled against Shota—I was not going to let my jealousy distract me from the real problem at hand.
A pained look crossed Shota’s face. “I’m not sure the two of you should go by yourselves,” he said, taking a step toward me. “I’ve heard stories about those monkeys, and—”
“There is no choice in the matter,” Ryujin said firmly. “One of you must remain behind, and I must have that liver. My wife is dying,” he said quietly, his great head drooping a little. “She has been ill for some time now, but in the past few weeks it has gotten worse. Only the monkey liver can cure what ails her, and none of my subjects have been able to procure one for me.”
“Then we will get you one,” I said, feeling sympathetic for the dragon king. Raiden shot me a look, but I ignored him. I knew all too well what it was like to stand aside and watch as someone slowly wasted away from an incurable disease. If there was a way to save his wife, and get what we needed in the process, then I was glad to help.
Something in Ryujin’s gaze shifted, and he studied me for a long moment, silent. “You have a noble heart,” he said gravely. “Both of you do. I believe you will keep your word.” His expression changed, turning businesslike. “Any monkey liver will do, in theory, but I desire the strongest one, for the best chance of my wife’s survival. Should you bring back the liver of the monkey king himself, I will give you a special weapon you can use to defeat Kai.”
“A special weapon, you say?” Raiden said, sounding very interested. “What kind of weapon?”
“I will reveal that to you once you come back with the liver,” Ryujin said imperiously. “Now do we have a deal, or not?”
12
“Thanks for coming with me,” I said as Raiden and I swam out of the palace without Shota. Since we’d agreed to Ryujin’s terms, we’d been forced to leave Shota in Amabie’s care, a fact that rankled me a lot. “I know you think this is a dumb idea.”
“I would never make you face something like this on your own,” Raiden said as we floated past the gates. He sounded a little miffed. “You’re an untrained shaman about to go up against an entire island of monkey yokai. What kind of guy do you think I am, that I’d make you do that by yourself?”
I flinched at the hurt look in his eyes. “I just figured you were angry at me, since I’m not doing what you want.”
Raiden sighed. “I’m angry because I think you’re playing right into Kai’s hands,” he said, scooping a hand through his hair. It floated around his face in the water, a black cloud of fine strands, and I was struck by the urge to smooth it back from his face just to see what it would feel like underwater. “But it is our duty as shamans to stop him, and if Ryujin really does have a weapon we can use to bring him down, we need to do whatever we have to in order to get our hands on it.”
He turned his body to face mine, and my heart stuttered when he lifted a hand to my cheek. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you,” he said softly, rubbing his thumb against my skin. “You’re already carrying such a big burden with your mother as it is, and I know it’s unfair that all this is coming down on your shoulders. But this thing with Kai…it’s bigger than any of us. We can’t let him win, Aika. Do you understand?”
“Of course I do.” The stakes were pretty obvious now that I’d heard the story from Ryujin. But Raiden was staring so intently at me, it made me wonder if there was something hidden between the lines of his warning. “Why wouldn’t I understand?”
“It’s just…things are more complicated than you think.” He hesitated, as if he wanted to say more, but he just shook his head. “You should call the Umigame now.”
“Sure.” My stomach sank with disappointment as his hand fell away, but I did my best not to show it. I lifted my wrist and touched the turtle charm I’d added to my bracelet, summoning the Umigame back to us. He appeared in less than five minutes, speeding around the side of a huge coral reef in the distance.
“You’re pretty fast for a turtle,” I teased as we floated onto his shell.
“Turtles are only slow on land,” he huffed back. “Where do you want to go?”
“Monkey Island. Do you know where it is?”
“I know where everything is.”
“Is it close by?” I asked, patting the turtle lightly on the shell.
“Closer than the last journey. Relax now. We will be there soon.”
Nodding, I settled down on the Umigame’s back. After a moment of hesitation, Raiden joined me.
As the turtle sped off into the ocean’s great wide beyond, Raiden and I lay down on our backs. We stared up at the distant ocean surface, like we were sunning ourselves on a beach instead of riding on a giant turtle shell. Even with the water swirling around us, I could feel Raiden’s body heat caressing my skin. He was close enough to touch, our hands barely an inch apart, and as he turned his face toward mine, my heart skipped a beat. There was such intense longing and regret in his eyes…a longing mirrored in my own heart, if I was honest with myself. I wanted to reach out and touch him, to run my hands down his chest and explore the tanned skin and muscles hidden beneath his shirt, just out of reach.
The look in Raiden’s eyes deepened as if he could sense my intention. He shifted a little closer, reaching for my hand…
“Umm.” Heart hammering, I quickly propped my head up beneath my hand, turning my body sideways to create distance. How could I feel this way, when just a little while ago I was turning green with envy over Shota?
“What do you know about Sarushima?” I asked, desperate to put my attention on something, anything, else. “Do the monkeys have superpowers, or are they just normal monkeys?”
Raiden stared at me for two very long, tension-filled seconds, his hand still outstretched. That tug in my chest intensified, but I resisted, refusing to give in to the urge to wrap myself up in him. I needed to sort out my feelings for these two before I made any moves. I refused to be the asshole who strung two different guys around because I couldn’t make up my mind about which one I wanted.
“I don’t know a lot about Monkey Island,” Raiden finally said, dropping his hand. “I think they’re normal-sized monkeys, but they can talk like humans, and they’ve built some kind of society on the island. Beyond that, I’m not sure.”
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“Right. That’s why there’s a king, I guess.” I chewed on my lower lip as I thought about that. “Do you think my furi might come in handy? Since it’s kind of like a monkey?”
Raiden shrugged. “Not sure. It’s worth summoning him, though, especially if it turns out that the monkeys can’t talk. We’ll need a translator.” His lips twitched a little. “You end up saying the damnedest things sometimes when you become a shaman.”
I laughed. “Yeah, I never thought I’d find myself needing to communicate with a tribe of monkeys.”
“Trust me, this isn’t even going to come close to the weirdest thing you’ll ever encounter,” Raiden said. “My parents and grandparents have told me all kinds of crazy stories about their encounters with yurei and yokai in Japan.”
“Oh really?” Yesterday, I would have blown this off as nonsense, but my eyes were open now. After all, knowledge was power, and I needed to know everything I could if I wanted to defeat Kai and save my mother. “Like what?”
“Well, there was this one time my mom went to a hotel in Japan to help out with a group of makuragaeshi that kept flipping pillows.” Raiden smirked.
“What do you mean flipping pillows?” I asked, pursing my lips as I tried to remember something about the creatures. Unfortunately, they’d never featured in the stories my mother had told me.
“Makuragaeshi are these childlike spirits that sort of look like samurais.” He waved off the comment. “They like to haunt rooms and play pranks on the guests. So they’ll take a sleeping person’s pillow and put it under their feet or step into ash and track footprints on the ceiling. That sort of thing.”
“So your mom went to Japan to deal with a bunch of supernatural pranksters?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Supernatural pranksters that looked like children dressed up for Halloween, yes.” Raiden shook his head. “It was kind of ridiculous when you think about it, because they’re harmless, but the client paid a lot of money because they were losing money…”
“Oh, do you guys do a lot of jobs like that?” I asked, gesturing at him. “You know, remove harmless spirits for money?”
“Not as many as you think, but we rely on enough of them that it bugs me.” He shrugged. “It pays the bills, though, and besides, no one wants to deal with horrible monsters all the time. Jobs like that do help shamans learn the ropes.” He smiled at me. “Normally, that’d be the type of job I’d take someone like you on for training.”
“Oh, are there lots of easier spirits and such?” I asked, surprised the jobs were so common.
“Tons of them,” Raiden said, nodding, before he launched into a story about another hotel that had trouble with a mokumokuren. He spent the rest of the journey telling me more stories from his family’s history. As he talked, he grew more animated, his eyes sparkling with laughter as he painted me the most outlandish pictures using only his words and hands.
Watching him talk about his family business made me wish we’d met under better circumstances. In a world where my mom hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer, and my father had survived, I would have been brought up with the safety and security of a real family. A shaman family, going by what the furi had told me, where I would have been taught to use my powers from a young age. My father probably had his own set of crazy family stories, stories that would have been both entertaining and educating. He had likely been the only man alive who knew the truth about what had happened to the yokai shamans after Yamatai had crumbled away into nothingness.
“Do you think there might still be yokai shamans around?” I asked suddenly, interrupting Raiden. “If my father was one, he had to have come from a family of them. Could I have relatives out there somewhere?”
“I hope so,” Raiden said, but the hint of doubt in his voice wasn’t reassuring. “I just figured that if you did, wouldn’t your mother have known about them? It’s very uncommon to marry someone and have no idea about their familial connections.”
I bit my lip. “Mom says that my grandparents are back in Japan, and that she had a falling out with them. They didn’t want her to marry my father, so the two of them eloped, and ended up moving to America while she was pregnant with me. I don’t have any idea who they are—Mom didn’t even have pictures of them in the house. Do you think that her parents knew my father was a shaman? What if that’s the reason they didn’t want her to marry him?” My stomach plummeted at the thought. Did that mean my mother’s parents would reject me too, if I ever met them face to face?
“It’s all too possible,” Raiden said sadly. “Shamans used to be revered, but ever since that Inoue Enryo guy came onto the scene, our reputations have gone down the drain.”
“Enryo?” The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “Who’s that?”
Raiden let out a disgusted sigh. “He was a doctor of philosophy who made it his personal mission to debunk yokai and yurei myths,” he said. “He basically managed to convince all of Japan that most of the superstitions they’ve believed in for thousands of years are lies, and to throw away their traditions and turn to science instead.” His eyes flashed with anger. “It isn’t that I don’t believe in science, or that some of Dr. Inoue’s work wasn’t unfounded. A lot of the myths and superstitions Japan has clung to are false. But the old gods have faded away as we move further and further into the age of technology. We’re losing touch with our ancestors, with our spirituality.”
A pang of sadness hit my heart, and I found myself reaching for the hand I’d spurned earlier. “That has to be really hard,” I said softly, “being continuously rejected by society.”
I felt guilty now for dismissing Raiden so thoroughly when he’d first told me I was a shaman, despite the evidence staring me in the face. As a pre-med student, I was one of the science-worshipers, even though I was also a spiritual person. While I still believed that modern medicine was one of the greatest achievements of mankind, I was a reiki practitioner, too. It was all too obvious that there was still a lot we didn’t know.
And ignoring the very real existence of spirits and monsters was only going to push us further away from answers, not closer.
“I’m used to it.” Raiden shrugged as if it were no big deal. But his hand tightened around mine, and that familiar pain glimmered in his eyes again. “That’s why my family started our investigation company. So we could continue to make use of our abilities, and worship the old gods, without being ridiculed or turned destitute. That could be what happened to your father’s family, Aika. They might have been poor, and your mother’s family didn’t want her to marry him because of their lack of social status or wealth.”
I flinched. “That sounds so cold,” I said. But it also wasn’t uncommon amongst Japanese families. “I need to ask my mother about all this,” I added, urgency filling my words. “She’s the only one who can give me answers about my heritage.”
Raiden’s expression hardened, and he nodded. “We’ll have to get her out of there then.”
The turtle shell tilted backward, and I sat up, realizing we were headed toward the surface. I squeezed Raiden’s hand tighter as nervous energy pumped through my veins. It was one thing to say you were going to an island of monkeys—another thing entirely to actually set foot on one. And on top of it, we were going to have to kill the monkey king and take his liver. A shudder rippled through me at the thought of reaching into a dead primate’s abdomen and pulling out his organs.
You’re studying to become a doctor, Aika, I reminded myself. Now’s as good a time as any to get used to sticking your hands into someone else’s guts. Even if you’re doing it without sterilized gloves.
The Umigame gave one last push with his enormous fins, and we broke the surface with a huge splash. Sea water slapped me in the face, and I sputtered, trying to maintain my balance on the turtle shell. The sun hung high in the air above us, blazing with the ferocity of a summer afternoon even though it had been early fall back in San Francisco.
“Guess we’re clos
e to the equator,” I said as a warm breeze drifted around us. I picked at my sodden shirt, realizing the hot air was going to bake the sea salt into my skin and clothing. “You wouldn’t happen to have an ofuda that dries clothes, would you?”
Raiden grimaced, pulling out a sodden wad of paper from his pocket. “These are all ruined,” he groaned. “I should have thought to ask Shota for his waterproof pack. Maybe your kyuubi can dry us off?” He glanced dubiously at my charm bracelet.
I snorted. “Maybe, but she’d probably singe all the hairs off your body just for fun.” Wiping my hair out of my eyes, I turned and got my first look at Sarushima. The beach seemed to stretch out across the coast, with dense green vegetation just beyond it. Even from here I could see that the place would be ideal for fishing and having a beach day. Better still were the huge persimmon trees dotting the landscape complete with bright orange fruit that glittered like gemstones in the bright sunlight.
“Well, no time like the present,” Raiden said, getting to his feet. “Thanks for the ride, Umigame,” he called. He executed a perfect swan dive into the water, barely making a splash.
Show-off.
“I have another matter that requires my attention,” the Umigame said, “so I cannot stay. But I will come when you call.”
“Thank you.” I patted the turtle on the shell, then carefully slid down the side of it. Raiden popped up just as I reached the water, and a jolt of surprise hit me as he caught me in his strong arms.
“Thanks,” I said as he cradled me against his chest. I looked up at him and was surprised to see he was smiling down at me. “You didn’t have to do that, you know.”
“No, but I wanted to.” He brushed my sopping wet hair out of my eyes, his smile fading a little. My pulse jumped as he dipped his head a little closer to mine, our breath mingling in the salty sea air. “I know you don’t like it, but I can’t help that I want to protect you, Aika. It’s just who I am.”