A Mortal Song (20 page)

I didn’t need to tell her which door Haru was behind. She hustled down the hall on teetering legs as if he were a beacon only she could see. When we reached the room I’d escaped from, she charged right in. Then she dropped down beside his slumped body with a cry.

“No,” she said, finally releasing the sword. She pressed her hands to his face and shook her head. “No no no no. You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying here with me.”

“Chiyo,” I said around a catch in my throat, “I don’t know if he’s even—”

“He’s alive,” she said. “I can feel it. Right...” Her fingers skittered down to his chest. “But it’s slipping away. I have to catch it.”

She inhaled with a gasp, and the room exploded with light. Haru’s body twitched. A breath rattled over his lips. He groaned and rolled over, and Chiyo collapsed beside him.

I
crouched
at Chiyo’s side for several long minutes, feeling her back tremble under my anxious hand and wondering how long it would take for Tomoya’s lieutenant to discover our lie and come charging back here with the rest of Omori’s ghostly army. Rescuing Haru from the brink of death had left Chiyo completely drained, and Haru, though alive, was so weak he crumpled over the first two times he tried to sit up. There was no way I could carry both of them, and no way Chiyo would allow me to separate them. Finally, Keiji came for us with the oak kami.

Takeo met us outside in the early afternoon heat, his tan skin still off-color. “We should leave here immediately,” he said. His gaze fell to the wrist I was holding limply by my side. Before he could remark on it, a gangly figure appeared on the path behind him: the pine kami who’d tricked us into entering the keep.

Chiyo managed to spring onto her wobbly feet, raising her sword, and my hand dropped to the hilt of mine. The young kami bowed as low as his waist allowed, stretching his arms toward us. Cupped in his hands was a necklace composed of sparkling curls of green jadeite.

“The Imperial jewel,” I murmured.

“I most greatly, greatly am sorry,” the kami stuttered. “They—my tree—they started to cut, to chop—they said if I did not say what they asked—”

“If you’d told us that,” Takeo said, “we would have stopped them.”

Chiyo wavered forward, and Takeo accepted the necklace to fasten it around her neck. “Thank you for bringing this to us,” she said to the pine kami in a reedy voice. “I’m not angry. I know you must have been very scared.”

She beamed at him despite her weariness, and he bowed his head again, blushing. Then she turned her grin on Takeo.

“A little more trouble than we were hoping, but we got what we came for in the end.”

“Let’s make sure we don’t lose it,” he replied. “Omori’s forces could return at any moment.”

He and the few other kami who’d come with us to the palace gathered around Chiyo and the three of us humans. As their ki swept through me, my thoughts started to fragment. I hadn’t realized how weary
I
was, but between my injuries and the fight and so many nights of sleep cut short, it suddenly took all my energy just to stay upright.

We whisked through the city streets to a wide forested park surrounding one of the largest shrines I’d ever seen. In the separate sanctuary building off limits to the average visitor, Takeo bent over me and slid his fingers across my broken wrist. That was the last thing I remembered before sleep dragged me under.

When I woke up, my head felt clearer. Sunlight was filtering through the paper panels of the door near my feet. The sounds of a ringing bell and clapping hands carried with it. That would be the human visitors at the worship hall nearby. We hadn’t taken shelter at an active shrine before. Takeo must have arranged with the resident kami some way of preventing the priests from noticing our presence.

Beside me lay my satchel and a bundle of clean clothes: a green tunic of a similar shade to the now-filthy shirt I’d borrowed from Chiyo and a pair of pale jeans. Brought by one of the kami as well? Had I only slept a few hours, or had we lost another day?

I dressed quickly and slid open the door. Before I could step out, a tremor rippled through the floor. The door rattled in its frame. I waited, gripping the wall and counting off the seconds. I reached ten before the ground stilled.

Oh, Fuji
, I thought.
What are they doing to you?
I pictured the walls of the palace I’d grown up in splattered with gore, and shuddered.

I hurried to an entranceway that led to a grassy yard behind the building. From the angle of the sun, it was late afternoon—the same day, then, not the next morning. Still three days left until the first night of Obon.

Haru was sitting on the steps leading down to the yard, watching Chiyo and Takeo, who were standing by a small pond. They both looked well enough. The pond’s water was low, the soil dry and cracked along its edge. Keiji squatted on the bank, tossing bits of bread to the koi.

I stiffened when my eyes fell on him. I hadn’t told the others yet. They didn’t know the part he’d played in leading us into that trap.

Keiji had to realize I would tell them, but he was still here. I didn’t know what that meant.

“It was too great a risk,” Takeo was saying. “However important he is to you.”

“It wasn’t a risk at all,” Chiyo replied, smiling. “I knew I could do it. We still have time, and there’s only the mirror we still have to get, right?”

“Your ki was already exhausted and you pushed yourself even further,” Takeo said. “Omori will be sending every ally he can spare to Ise to stop us from reaching the mirror. You’ll never be able to fight through an army if you have nothing left.”

Chiyo rolled her eyes. “I haven’t
lost
it. Look.” She raised her hands, and a ball of glinting energy formed between them. But after a few seconds, its surface quivered. Chiyo’s fingers tensed as the ball fizzled away into the air.

As I pushed myself on toward them, Chiyo frowned at her hands and then shrugged. “I just need a little more rest, and I’ll be good as new.”

“We have little enough time as it is,” Takeo said. “We can’t be sure the mountain will even hold until Obon.”

Chiyo turned at the sound of my steps. “Sora!” she said. “I never really thanked you before. So thank you, thank you, thank you.” She threw her arms around me. “When you got us out of that horrible room, the only thing I could think of was saving Haru.”

“I know,” I said, awkward in her embrace until she stepped back. “How are we going to tackle Ise?”

“We were about to discuss that,” Takeo said, his voice softening. “But first, how are you?”

With his familiar gaze on me, my scrapes and bruises prickled. I could have asked him to heal all of them as he had my wrist, to make every ache and pang disappear—at least, the physical ones. But then I’d be suggesting I couldn’t carry on without help. I needed to get used to the limitations of my human body.

“I’m all right,” I said. “And you?”

He grimaced. “Recovering. I should have realized the ghosts might resort to trickery.”

My hands balled.
I
should have realized. I’d known something was wrong.

Except I hadn’t known, not really. I’d only had a feeling that something was off. I’d had lots of other feelings in the recent past: the fear that froze up my mind, the... whatever it was that had blinded me to Keiji’s lies. Even if some of my instincts were right, how was I supposed to tell which inclinations to listen to and which to ignore?

“How did you manage to get rid of all those ghosts anyway?” Chiyo asked. “Can we do the same thing at Ise?”

My eyes darted to Keiji, who had gotten up to join us. He met my gaze uncertainly.

“It wasn’t really me,” I said. “Keiji convinced most of them to go. I only had to fight a few. But I don’t think that trick will work a second time.”

Chiyo’s eyebrows leapt up. “‘Convinced’ them to go? Have you got some super power of persuasion you forgot to mention to me, Mitsuoka?”

A flush crept up Keiji’s neck. He lowered his head, his hair falling over the top of his glasses. For a second, I thought he was going to make me say the rest. Then he forced himself to look up again.

“They listened to me because the ghost who planned the surprise attack was my brother,” he said, his voice strained but steady. “It’s my fault. That they—that they knew where we’d be and when, the whole time. That they knew about Chiyo and the treasures.” His mouth twisted. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt, I promise you. He’d never said anything about Mt. Fuji or Omori—it never occurred to me, at the beginning, that he could be involved in that. I was only telling him things and answering his questions in case he knew things about ghosts that I could use to help, and I was hoping if I helped enough, then afterward maybe the kami could help him somehow. He wanted his life back. That’s all
I
wanted.”

Takeo’s hand had leapt to his sword. “Omori knows everything because of you? This morning... Nagoya... Sora almost
died
. Any of us could have died. Fuji could be lost completely now because of you!”

Keiji cringed. “I know. I should have figured it out sooner. I just didn’t want to think he could be part of something that awful.”

“Wait,” Chiyo said, sounding amused even as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Your brother’s a ghost? You figured
that
out right away, didn’t you?”

“Of course I knew he was a ghost,” Keiji said. “He... died two years ago. He’d gotten in with a bunch of guys running a lending company, and he was going to make enough money so he could get his own place. A place for him and me, to get away from our aunt and uncle. But—I don’t know exactly what happened—the group he was with was connected to one of the syndicates, and someone there must have pissed off someone in a different syndicate. There was a big fight and...”

He made a jerking motion with his hand, as if it were a figure toppling over. Dead.

“A little while after that, he appeared in my room—he told me he’d wanted to keep an eye on me still, and he thought since I already believed in spirits and all that, maybe I could handle talking to him. I freaked out a bit, but, well, it was so good to have him back.”

“The syndicates,” Haru said in his abrupt way. I hadn’t heard him walking over. “You mean yakuza.”

Keiji nodded. “When you mentioned some of the ghosts were yakuza, that was the first clue I had,” he said to me, a plea in his eyes. “I know I should have said something, even if I wasn’t sure. I wish I had.”

But he hadn’t. Those regrets didn’t mean much when the damage was already done.

“Wow,” Chiyo said. “It sounds like Omori’s set himself up as the big boss, then, recruiting all the dead yakuza members he can find.”

Recruiting. The word brought back Tomoya’s odd comments. “We already know he’s helping them by lending them his power,” I said to Keiji, “but how is he finding so many of them at all? Your brother talked about Omori
saving
them. What does that mean?”

“Yes,” Takeo said, still gripping his sword. “We need to hear everything he told you about Omori’s intentions.”

“Tomoya didn’t tell me much this morning,” Keiji said. “He said he’d explain more later, when everything was in place. I just know he’s proved himself to Omori and been put in charge of a bunch of the other ghosts...” He paused. “He did mention something before all this started, though. Months ago. He said he’d made friends, and that one of them was so powerful he could guide spirits right out of the afterworld. Maybe he was talking about Omori.”

My mouth fell open. “Then Omori isn’t turning just to spirits who’ve lingered here—he’s dragging back those who passed away properly but haven’t been dead long enough to fade away. No wonder he was able to raise such a large army.”

No wonder that army felt so indebted to him. He
had
saved them, if only temporarily, from the cold, dark emptiness I’d glimpsed as my life drained away.

Keiji nodded. “You’re right. It must be. But Tomoya didn’t give me any details back then either. I just know he was trying to find a way to come back for real. He was always talking about how there might be forces in the world that could make that happen.”

“Hmmm,” Chiyo said. “So where is your brother now?”

“I banished him,” I said before Keiji had to answer. Maybe it was more weakness, but I didn’t want to see the expression he’d make saying it. “But... if Omori knows how to bring spirits over from the afterworld...”

“He could come back,” Keiji filled in, his eyes widening. Then his jaw set. “If he does, no matter what he says, I swear I’m not going to tell him another thing. I never would have in the first place if I’d known the whole story. I’m on your side. I want to keep helping, better this time... if you’ll let me. I’ll do whatever I can.”

He was watching me as he said those last words. I looked away. Being near him was making my chest increasingly tight. But maybe his brother had let something slip that we didn’t realize was useful yet. That was more important than my wounded heart.

We stood there in silence for a moment, Takeo looking as if he were still considering driving Keiji out of the shrine at sword point.

“How were you even telling your brother things?” Chiyo said abruptly. “Secret meetings in the woods?”

“My phone,” Keiji said. “He did something to it, with ki I guess, so it always works for him no matter where I am.”

“All right.” Chiyo held out her hand. “Give it here.” As Keiji passed over his phone without argument, she added, “I don’t think we should be talking secret plans with you around until we’re sure you’re really sticking with us. So…”

She made a dismissive gesture. Keiji blinked and then ducked his head as he ambled toward the shrine building.

“Do we want to head for Ise right away?” Chiyo said to Takeo and me.

“I don’t want you that close to Omori’s army until you’ve recovered more of your power,” Takeo said. “As much as I hate to delay, I think we should hold off on our travels. I suppose... if we leave first thing tomorrow morning, that should be sufficient time.” He didn’t sound entirely sure.

“We can do everything possible to prepare in the meantime,” I said. “Make more ofuda, collect salt and lotus flowers and whatever else can repel the ghosts...”

Takeo rubbed his chin. “I could speak with whatever kami live here in the city. Perhaps there are a few powerful enough to be of service in a fight, and willing.”

Would that be enough? Tomorrow, with just two days left, we’d have only one real chance at retrieving the mirror and making it to Mt. Fuji before Obon. And it wasn’t just the huge force that would be waiting for us at Ise that we needed to worry about. We’d assumed before that Omori and his ghosts would be predictable in their attacks, that they’d try to overwhelm us with brute force alone, but they’d surprised us today. Out-thought us.

He’s as human as the rest of us
, Tomoya had said about Omori. In the moment, I’d dismissed that remark as delusion, but there was some truth to it. The demon and his ghosts, none of them were straightforward—they were all at least partly human too. I should know better than anyone else here how annoyingly complex a human mind could be.