A Mortal Song (28 page)

Takeo stepped on last, moving to the center of the raft with the sacred sword ready in his hands. The water rippled as the fish began to swim. They carried us to the middle of the river and then swiftly down it. A breeze ruffled my hair. As the trees on the bank flew by, the ghostlights shivered through them, chasing after us.

“They don’t look happy,” Takeo said.

A gunshot rang out, but Takeo deflected the bullet with a burst of ki. One of the nearby figures solidified—a scowling young man running along the bank. Just as we reached a bend in the river, he sprang at us, knife raised. Takeo shifted into a fighting stance, but the ghost had underestimated the distance. He plummeted downward a foot from the edge of the fishy raft.

The second he hit the water, his body shattered into a sparkling mist. It faded into the breeze, and then he was gone, his ki returning to the world from which it had come.

“Wow,” Keiji said, peering into the water as if the man might have reformed there.

We swept under another bridge and out into the midst of Ise city. The scenery on the banks changed from forest to grassy soil to concrete and back again. Soon we’d left the ghosts and the shrine grounds far behind us.

Takeo must have sent a request to the fish, because they drew up to the bank. “Thank you,” he said when we’d hopped off, and I gave a quick bow beside him. Then he turned to Keiji. “You said south of Tokyo? We should see if any kami northeast of the shrine saw your brother leaving in that direction.”

The oak-man and the monkey spread out to search. Keiji and I stayed with Takeo, as did Rin, who hadn’t loosened her grip on her stick-cane. We rambled across the countryside, stopping when the two of them sensed a fellow kami was near. None reported having seen anything that sounded related to Tomoya.

Finally, the monkey came scampering back to us. Takeo bent to confer with it. When he straightened up, a glint of hope shone in his eyes.

“A swallow saw a transport truck drive away from Ise City around the right time,” he said. “The driver looked like a normal human being, but he had short hair with red streaks.”

There weren’t many people with Tomoya’s sense of style. “The other ghosts with him must have been hiding in the truck,” I said. “He knew we’d be looking for them.”

“We’ll just have to hope other kami took note,” Takeo said.

We rushed onward, but after another hour, we hadn’t found any more witnesses. We stopped near a train track that cut through the fields around us. A train whipped by, rattling the metal slats.

“Tomoya might be nearly to Tokyo by now,” I said. “We’ll have more time to search that area if we take a train before they stop running for the night.” And more energy. Takeo and Rin were already looking even more weary than before. At least riding the train would allow them to recover some of their spent ki.

“If we go to Tokyo, I could get Tomoya’s car,” Keiji said, apparently thinking along the same lines. “That’ll drive faster than you can run, right? Then we can cover more ground. Assuming he did go to one of the same districts as before.”

Takeo stared along the line of the tracks. “We must take the best chance we have,” he said. “If the kami can’t tell us where the ghosts have gone, we’ll rely on your knowledge.”

We found a station a short dash along the tracks. As we waited for the next train, Takeo disappeared briefly with the other kami to recruit whatever creatures they could find nearby. When the train finally arrived, I sank into my seat. I
was exhausted now, but my pulse was still thrumming with urgency.

“You will need your strength for the times ahead,” Rin said with a surprising gentleness, and touched both me and Keiji on the forehead. A moment later, I was asleep.

I woke up just as the lights of the great city began to streak through the train windows. Keiji was still sleeping, his head resting against mine. When I eased away to look around, his cheek dropped to my shoulder. His glasses dangled by the tip of his nose. I pushed them up and he shifted closer, a faint smile curving his mouth. A strange ache filled me, fierce and tender and breathtaking all at once, as if, while I was looking at him, nothing in the world could be wrong.

Then the earth shook beneath the tracks, the train stopped abruptly, and all the things that were wrong came rushing back to me. The faces of the other passengers tensed, their hands gripping their seat arms. A little boy started to cry, so frantically no word from his mother calmed him.
It’ll be over soon
, I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t actually promise that.

When we reached the station and disembarked, the kami sped us along to the spot where Keiji had parked his car. He drove us through the city, nervously checking the traffic around us, until we passed the southwestern suburbs of Tokyo. Then he turned us down the winding back roads that scattered the peninsula where he thought Tomoya had conducted most of his business while alive.

Takeo sat in the front seat, staring through the windshield. We passed farmland and fringes of towns and rolling forested hills. Whenever he or Rin felt the presence of a shrine of any size or another kami habitation, we stopped so they could consult them. No one reported on Tomoya’s passing with any certainty—many trucks followed these roads, some said. But several of them agreed to help us with our search, heading out in the directions we hadn’t yet tried.

As dawn colored the sky, Mt. Fuji came into view through my side window, then slowly slipped away behind us. In the thin light, I could see stalks bowing and leaves withering in the fields. Heat was already rising from the earth, strangely distant with the car’s air conditioning system sending its steady stream of cool air over us.

“I can’t sense her at all,” Takeo said, his brow furrowed. “I’m extending my senses as far as I can.”

“We haven’t covered the whole area yet, not even close,” Keiji said, but his arms quivered as he adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. None of us had gotten more than an hour’s sleep on that train ride.

“We’ll find her,” I said. “We have to.”

The words had barely left my mouth when the ground bucked beneath us. The car lurched. My shoulder smacked the door hard enough to send a lancing pain down my arm. Keiji jammed on the brake.

The tires screeched, but we stopped—in the middle of the road, with the engine rattling in time with the shaking of the earth. Beside me, Rin turned to peer back the way we’d come. “The fury arrives,” she said.

I craned my neck to follow her gaze and choked up. Mt. Fuji loomed over the trees beyond the rear window. Smoke was billowing above its upper reaches, rolling out across the sky around it.

“It’s erupting?” I managed to force out. “Now?”

“Very soon,” Rin said.

I spun on her. “
How
soon?”

She looked at me as the ground finally stilled, with a flat expression that suggested I should know better than to ask. “As soon as the fire climbs from the depths to the peak. As soon as the last strands of control break.
Soon
.”

I wondered if she wanted me to say I’d changed my mind. That I’d take up the sacred treasures after all, race to the mountainside right now. But even faced with that horrible image through the window, the idea felt utterly wrong. I’d let myself second-guess my feelings too many times in the last week. Almost all of my mistakes had come down to that. I had to believe I could see what was right—and what wasn’t.

“Then we’ll have to move faster,” I said. And if we didn’t find Chiyo in the hours we had left... I wasn’t going to let myself think that.

“
S
o we keep going
?” Keiji asked from the front of the car. Takeo stayed silent.

I was about to tell him to drive on when a furry red body amid the trees by the road caught my eye. A fox. It was staring toward the mountain, as if it understood what the scene before us meant as well as we did.

“Wait,” I said, and leaned toward Takeo. “There are foxes here. They like to involve themselves with human lives, don’t they? And they’re clever. If any creature would have noticed odd activity in the region, it’s them.”

“Can we trust them?” Keiji asked. “If they’re like the stories say, aren’t they always playing tricks?”

“They do often enjoy misleading more than guiding,” Takeo said. “I’ve preferred to avoid their kind.”

It was true that most of the tales I’d heard of foxes involved them leading humans astray. But from what I remembered that had usually been out of mischief rather than true malice. And why should we assume that was all there was to them? Even Omori held more concerns and cares than I’d first assumed.

“I think we should give them a chance,” I said. “They live on this land too—they could lose their homes. Do you really believe they’d prefer to play tricks on us now if they could help us?”

Takeo grimaced. I grasped the door handle. “
I’ll
go ask them.”

I hopped out of the car. As we’d talked, the fox I’d seen had vanished into the forest. I marched the way I hoped it had gone. “Foxes!” I called, as loud as I could. “If any of you can hear me, I beg you to come. I wish to speak to you on behalf of the kami of Mt. Fuji.”

After a few moments, I strode deeper into the woodland. Takeo’s steady footsteps crackled over the dry leaves that scattered the ground behind me. I shouted out my summons again as he drew up beside me. My back tensed.

“You are right,” he said quietly. “I should not let old prejudices prevent me from seeing solutions to our problems.”

But the minutes stretched, and no answer came to my call. My heart sank. I was just turning back toward the car when a sleek, red-furred body rustled out of the underbrush. The fox halted in front of us and straightened up into the form of a lovely woman in a red kimono.

“Kami,” she said with a bob of her head to Takeo, and then to me, “and you who speak for them. What is it you seek from us?”

When Takeo didn’t immediately respond, I pushed onward, hoping I was choosing my words carefully enough to avoid mischief. “You can see Mt. Fuji is threatening to erupt. You may have heard that a demon has taken control of the mountain. We are searching for the one kami who can stop him and prevent the disaster. We believe those who took her, a group of ghosts led by a young man with red-streaked hair, have brought her somewhere in this area to imprison her. They would have arrived in a truck. They would have picked a location away from living humans. They would likely be using blood, lots of it, to help weaken her. The effects of the demon’s rule are hurting everyone, including you. We hope that the foxes will consider lending their efforts to our cause. Any clue you or your kind can find that might lead us to the one we seek, we would be immensely grateful for.”

The woman’s nose twitched. She offered a sly smile. “Blood we could scent out. I have not seen those you speak of, but there are many I can ask. Kami, do you extend this request too?”

Her bright eyes settled on Takeo. He bowed lower than she had to him. “I do,” he said, with only the slightest hint of an edge in his tone. “Indeed, if you are able to help us, I believe I can speak for my rulers when I say that they would welcome you to the palace to thank you personally.”

I blinked at him, startled that he would speak that boldly on behalf of Mother and Father, though I had no doubt he was correct. The fox-woman appeared equally affected. “Well,” she said, with a brush of her slender fingers over her flowing hair, “I will do as I can. We will find you in your smoke-creating vehicle if we have news.”

“Please hurry!” I added, but she’d already dropped into her fox shape to dart off through the trees.

We hurried back to the car and continued our own desperate search. Every time I glanced back, more smoke-tinged clouds clotted the sky and shadowed the mountain. The sour taste of fear filled my mouth.
Hold on
, I thought at the mountain.
Please, just a little longer, hold on
.

Had Omori even noticed how close his invasion had pushed Mt. Fuji to eruption? Even if he couldn’t bring himself to care about the people who’d be hurt, didn’t he at least realize there’d be no tourists to use in his plan now that the volcano’s fire was so obviously building? Or was he so caught up in the thought of regaining the power of life that he’d lost all sense?

We passed another town, Takeo shaking his head. “Nowhere near here,” he said.

“Can’t you ‘see’ anything?” I demanded of Rin.

She turned her sunken gaze toward the road ahead of us. “This far from my valley, my vision is dim. I see... Water may put out a fire. That is all.”

As I bit down on a noise of frustration, the earth trembled again. Keiji slowed the car. The ground had just settled when a fox sprang through the tall grass ahead of us onto the road. It transformed into a woman, a little older than the one we’d spoken to before but just as elegant. As Keiji stopped the car completely, she sauntered over to us. Takeo fumbled unsuccessfully with the window controls and then simply opened the door.

“My cousins told me of your search,” the woman said, halting. Her black eyes and pale teeth gleamed in the rising sun. “There is an abandoned factory near Mishima that smells of blood where none was before. The chill of the dead is upon it too. I can show you.”

Without waiting for our response, she slipped back into her fox form and loped ahead. My heart thumped as Keiji drove on.

The fox trotted down roads that grew narrower and more pot-holed, and finally onto a gravel track that angled through a vast field of scrub. In the distance, a cluster of broad dun buildings stood around a concrete yard.

Takeo jerked forward.

“She’s there,” he said, and his mouth twisted. “They’re hurting her.”

As we crept down the road toward the factory compound, a scattering of the kami Takeo had talked to earlier caught up with us, along with a few beings I wasn’t as familiar with: wolves that moved across the terrain like gauzy phantoms, the child-sized tree fairies with their slingshots and tiny crossbows, and a strange creature with a bear’s furry body, an elephant’s trunk, and the striped legs of a tiger. When it crossed the road in front of us, Keiji gaped for a moment before murmuring, “Dreameater.”

At least we weren’t going into this completely alone.

About a half a mile from the factory, Takeo motioned for Keiji to pull the car into the field. We stepped out onto dry soil and yellowed grass. The twenty-some allies who’d joined us trailed behind as we circled around the back of the compound. I eyed the buildings, watching for glints of ghostlight or shivers of movement in the dark, dusty windows.

“She’s in that one,” Takeo said, motioning to the most easterly building. We crept closer, my hand tight around my ofuda. After a minute we stumbled onto a streambed, little more than pocked, muddy earth. A trickle of water little wider than my hand ran down its center. We hopped over and hurried onward.

We were some fifteen paces from the building when several dozen ghostlights streamed out of its walls and those of the neighboring structures. They charged straight at us, so swiftly I didn’t have time to suck in a breath before I had to throw out my hands, trying to banish every one that raced near me. A few turned corporeal and tossed one of their gore-stained nets over the kami beside me, but one of the spirit wolves smacked it aside with its massive paws. The ghosts shuddered and turned ethereal again as the tree fairies pelted them with needles and stones imbued with their own sort of magic. And in the midst of us all, Takeo swung the sacred sword, breaking a dozen ghostlights into showers of shimmers with a single sweep.

For a moment, I thought we were going to win. I thought it might even be
easy
. Then a ghost near the back of the group turned corporeal with a pistol in his hand and a sharp blast of sound.

The bullet hit Takeo’s wrist. His arm flew wide, and his fingers slipped from the sword’s hilt. Before he could spring after it, the ghost who’d shot him fired again, catching him in the chest. He staggered backward as his ki worked to dislodge the bullet from his flesh, and the horde of ghosts surged toward us. The kami monkey broke from his ethereal state with a wheeze, a knife stained with dried blood plunged deep into his stomach. The tree fairies scattered as another ghost took aim at them. I tried to hold my ground, but there were too many ghosts around me for me to fend off their blades as I tried to banish them. One sliced across my forearm; another nicked my cheek. I gasped, stumbling backward. They were pressing us farther and farther from the sword that was our salvation.

We’d never reclaim it like this. “To the stream!” I shouted, hoping the others would understand. The running water, thin as it was, should provide us enough protection that the ghosts wouldn’t follow. Perhaps we could even draw them to it and dispatch some of them that way.

But the ghosts clearly knew better than to fall for that ploy. As we dashed the last several steps to the streambed and leapt over it, they stopped, hazy lights churning around the few still corporeal forms. The sacred sword lay in the grass in a clear circle in their midst. I stared at it longingly.

Takeo was hunched over, clutching at his chest. Though his breath was ragged, his bleeding appeared to have stopped. He was too tired to heal completely. Before I could speak to him, a tall form emerged from the crowd of ghosts and ambled up to the stream. He raked a hand through his crimson-streaked hair and smirked at us.

“Look at this brave rescue force, cringing behind their piddly stream,” Tomoya said.

“Hardly as cowardly as using hundreds of ghosts to attack one teenaged girl,” Takeo retorted.

“One very powerful kami girl,” Tomoya said. “Who intended to disrupt our plans. You know that even with these new friends of yours, you can’t hope to overpower us now that you’ve lost that pretty sword, don’t you? Why don’t you take it easy for a few days, and then we’ll be done with your mountain, and we can all go on with our lives?”

“You’ve already had your life,” I said. “You have no right to steal another. And can’t you see the mountain might not even hold until Obon? It’s about to erupt!”

“Then Omori will bring us and your broken kami friends down to the cities, and we’ll find the bodies we need there,” Tomoya said, as if no other consequences mattered to him. “What isn’t
right
is the fact that I died at all.”

Before I even noticed him moving, Keiji had jumped back across the stream to the ghosts’ side. “And whose fault is that?” he said, his posture rigid. “Who are you blaming?”

“Kei,” Tomoya said evenly. “What did they do to you to make them lead you here?”

“They didn’t do anything,” Keiji said. “I
wanted
to help them. This is wrong. Everything you’ve been doing— You know why you got killed in the first place? Because you listened to the wrong people, you believed what they told you, even though they were turning you into a criminal.”

“I was making money,” Tomoya said. “Good money, so we could get out of that crappy house. So you could be happier. Where’s the gratitude, little brother?”

“There are other ways of making money,” Keiji said. “Ways that wouldn’t have gotten you killed, so you would’ve still been there when Auntie was telling me how useless I was, when Uncle locked me in my room for two days. You’re making the same mistake all over again. Omori’s just as bad as the people you were hanging out with before. He’s worse! Do you really want to be a party to
mass murder
, Tomo? Because that’s what this means, really, what you’re planning to do to all those ‘bodies.’ Even I can see that.”

His voice was so raw my heart ached, hearing it. Tomoya took a step toward him, and I shifted forward automatically, my hands rising. But Keiji glanced back at me, his gaze worried yet firm, sending a message I could read.
Let me do this myself
. I forced my body to still.

“I have to follow Omori,” Tomoya said. “I need my life back. I left responsibilities unfinished. There are things I have to
do
.”

“For who?” Keiji demanded. “Not for me—I won’t want anything to do with you ever again if you go through with this.”

Tomoya blinked. A sort of daze softened his cocky expression. For the first time, I thought to wonder what
he’d
been focused on the moment he died.

“But it’s all for you,” he said to Keiji. “I knew I couldn’t leave you alone. You need me. No matter what I do, Kei, it’s always to look after you. I know you know that.”

“You really can’t believe that I might know it and still think you’re totally wrong, can you?” Keiji said quietly. “You can’t see anything except what you’ve already decided.”

“I see you,” Tomoya said. “I’m your brother. I’ve always known exactly who you are, Kei.”

“Are you sure?” Keiji asked.

Tomoya took another step toward him as if to touch his shoulder, and Keiji jerked back. His feet tangled. He stumbled to the side, toward the stream. A memory flashed behind my eyes: the rabbit startling us, Keiji tripping, my attempt to catch him. But in the glimpse I caught of his face as he fell now, I saw no fear, only resolve.

Tomoya lunged after him, catching his wrist. But Keiji was falling too fast, too hard, for even his taller, stronger brother to stop him. Because he’d meant to fall, and he’d put everything he had into the act. He curled his fingers around his brother’s hand and crashed into the shallow water, pulling Tomoya with him.

A few of the watching ghosts solidified, and a voice hollered, “No!” One sprang forward, but there was no time to stop the fall.

Tomoya toppled over Keiji, his red hair streaming like a flame, and his elbow hit the stream. His body burst with a crackle of ki so bright it left dark spots in my vision. A fine mist dispersed around us, but some of the ki shot off through the air in the direction of the mountain. I remembered suddenly what Takeo had said about Tomoya carrying a greater portion of Omori’s energy.