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We took our seats and placed an order for an
appetizer and settled in for that most boring of exercises,
waiting. We didn’t talk much, just a little comment here and there
about the people that milled around the area to try and keep up the
appearance of normalcy so that if it did show up, it didn’t think
that anything was “off”. I popped my chin in my hand and sighed as
I looked once again at the scurrying masses, and then I saw someone
who looked vaguely familiar. I did a double take and knocked my
fork off the table and onto the floor. I used the time it took to
reach down and snag it to wrap calm I didn’t really feel around me
like a frail suit of armor. The person that had caught my attention
was the same Asian man who had creeped me out so badly the day Mr.
Baker’s door bell had remained eerily silent when he had entered
the store.

I glanced at him again as I raised my hand to
catch our waitress’s attention so I could get a clean fork. He had
stopped on the other side of the street and leaned up against a
tree, arms folded over his chest in a casual stance but his eyes
were locked on our table. A shiver skated down my spine as the
single potato skin I had eaten turned into cement in my
stomach.

“I think it’s here,” I whispered, and Maria
stiffened across from me.

“Where?” she asked, and I jerked my chin
slightly back in the direction where it stood. She laughed and
turned her head to the side as if she were responding to a joke I
had told her and glanced across the street. “Why do you think he’s
it?”

“Because I recognize that person as someone
who came into Mr. Baker’s and was kind of creepy,” I said, and told
her about the cowbell not ringing and the horrible “off” feeling I
had gotten when he had been behind me.

“You’ve had creepy customers before, and they
never turned out to be anything more than sketchy people,” she
said.

“It’s hard to explain,” I said and glanced at
the man out of the corner of my eye. He was still standing there
and staring straight at us. “There’s a sick feeling in the pit of
my stomach now, like something is whispering to me that what I’m
looking at isn’t the genuine thing. And I can’t think of any other
reason for someone to be staring at us like that unless they were
plotting something.”

“Maybe he’s staring because he thinks we’re
both hot,” Maria said.

“I don’t think so,” I began, but broke off
when I saw the man across the street straighten and head in our
direction. I tried to get a good look at his eyes to see if they
were still wrong, but I didn’t get a chance because Maria drew in a
sharp breath when she caught sight of his face, and I could see the
muscles in her cheeks twitching as she fought to keep her smile in
place.

“You’re right, that’s it,” she hissed. “I
just got a few hunger pains, but it’s not trying to take over.
Feels more curious than the usual aggression.”

I worried at the skin of my fingers as I
waited until the
Gaki
was within earshot before I put my
half formed plan in motion. It walked over to the menu that
restaurants tend to leave out for people to peruse as they walk by
and began to look at it. I could barely see it out of my peripheral
vision, and it took every ounce of will power I owned to not spin
around and confront the threat or bolt off in the opposite
direction screaming at the top of my lungs.

“So what do you think of the farmhouse idea?”
I blurted, and Maria stared at me, her face clearly asking
Are
you mental?
I hadn’t had time to explain my plan to get the
Gaki
interested in following us, but I knew she was pretty
quick on the uptake when the chips were down and I kept right
on.

“I really do think it would be a great
location for the Spring Prom. We could have both outside and inside
dancing, maybe set up a tent with luminaries all over the
place.”

“I don’t know,” Marisa said thoughtfully, and
I smiled. She had picked up on my cues. “Didn’t you say you haven’t
actually been inside the farmhouse itself? For all we know the roof
could be caving in and there might not be room to set up an actual
dance floor. That would be a horrible ending, don’t you think? I
can see the headlines now, ‘Prom Queen Killed in Farming
Accident!’”

“True, but I still think it would be worth
checking out. Even if it needs some repairs, I bet we could get the
Workshop classes to chip in and help fix things for extra credit or
something so that it’ll be safe to go inside.”

“Maybe,” Maria said, sounding doubtful, “but
we’d need to get permission from the owners first, wouldn’t we? Do
we even know who the owners are?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “I’m sure there’s a
way we could find out. It wouldn’t hurt to ask around.”

“I still think we should take a quick look
inside before we make the suggestion,” Maria said, and I
nodded.

“Well, we have about an hour before the sun
goes down,” I said after a quick glance at my watch.

“What, you mean go out there now?!”

“Why not? There’s still enough light left to
find our way there. We’ll just take a quick look inside to make
sure that there’s enough room for everyone and no major damage,
then I can propose it as our location when they put up the
suggestion box next week. That way there will be plenty of time to
get permission from the owners and get the place in some sort of
decent condition. All this speculation is pointless if the house
has already fallen down.”

Maria sighed as if she were being put out,
but nodded in agreement. I asked our waitress for our check when
she came to see if we needed anything else, and before too long we
were getting to our feet and walking to my car. The
Gaki
had
vanished, but I knew he was still watching us by the uneasy prickle
that raised the hair on the back of my neck. Once we were safely in
my car and I was heading down the road, I glanced over at Maria to
check on her as I dialed Akira’s cell phone number. It rang once
and I hung up, the signal we had agreed upon to let him and Dellar
know we were on our way so that they could get into position. The
area around the farmhouse was a “dead zone” and they had needed to
wait somewhere with cell phone reception so they could receive my
alert.

“I’m all right,” she said. “I can feel it
probing at me, but nothing that indicates it’s wanting anything
more than information. Dellar taught me how to block it a little,
so all it’s getting is what I’m seeing right now. I think it’s
doing it so that it can tell where we’re going. I-I don’t have a
good feeling about this at all.”

“I know,” I agreed. I kept my eyes mostly
glued to the road, but every now and then I glanced into my rear
view mirror to see if I could tell if anyone was following us. It
didn’t do me much good because traffic was pretty steady with
people heading home or out to eat after work. Still, it was back
there, somewhere, and my stomach started to cramp.

We remained silent after that, as neither one
of us wanted to talk too much in case the
Gaki
was able to
get past her block and listen in. We just weren’t willing to take
any chances. After a few minutes I carefully turned my car off the
main road and onto the rutted gravel drive and winced as I heard
the undercarriage scrape against the ground again.

A few more twists and turns and the trees
suddenly gave way to reveal the old farmhouse in all its
dilapidated beauty. I swallowed and got out of the car and Maria
followed suite though she had to pause to lean against the hood for
a moment. I gave her a worried look but she waved my concern away
and straightened up. I fidgeted, glanced around and wondered if
Akira and Dellar were nearby, but I knew that I wouldn’t see them.
We walked around the exterior a little and made idle comments about
the state of the buildings and the grounds, I griped about how the
length of the grass equaled tick bites, discussed the changes that
would need to be made, and where certain things like a tent could
be put up. I almost convinced myself that we really were going to
suggest this place for the Spring Prom instead of putting our souls
(and lives) on the line.

The whole time we wandered I strained my ears
and listened, but there were no sounds to indicate another car was
approaching. The woods were eerily silent, something that made my
skin twitch because that usually signaled that a large predator was
nearby. I knew it was most likely the presence of both Akira and
Dellar, but that didn’t prevent the hair on my arms from rising up
in response to my rising tension.

“I guess we’d better go inside,” Maria said,
her words drawing out of her mouth at the speed of frozen molasses,
and I shared her unvoiced sentiments. Akira had stated that we were
to only venture into the house if we absolutely had to, since there
was no telling if and when the second floor would collapse under
its own weight. I turned to face the drunken doorway and thought,
not for the first time, that it looked like some kind of gateway to
places better left unexplored. I had taken a step forward when
Maria stiffened, groaned, and then lunged at me.

My back slammed into the packed dirt with
enough force that the wind was knocked out of my lungs with a harsh
wheeze, and I stared up into Maria’s milky, glassy white eyes as I
struggled to draw in a decent breath. I had been taken completely
off balance and I cursed the fact that I had let my guard down even
though I knew the chances of the
Gaki
taking control of
Maria were high despite her best efforts.

“Maria!” I wheezed, but there was no reply as
she bore all her weight down onto my chest. I tried to draw in air
as I struggled against her hold, but I could only shift slightly
and was unable to muster enough strength to lift my hands as I
gasped. There was an iron band wrapped around my ribs, the back of
my head throbbed, and darkness began to encroach on my vision.
Where were Dellar and Akira?!

My ribs suddenly relaxed without warning, and
I drew in a deep, welcome breath, placed my arm against Maria’s
chest and shoved with everything I had. We struggled against each
other for a moment before I became aware that the dull roaring that
I thought had been my blood rushing in my head while I had tried to
frantically suck in air was really the sound of something happening
in the woods.

I gave another shove and Maria fell off of me
and onto her side. I climbed to my hands and knees, but before I
could regain my feet she had thrown herself on me again and my face
smashed into the dirt. Bone crunched and my sinuses immediately
swelled up as breathing became difficult. Dirt filled my mouth as I
continued to struggle through my groan of pain. A cracking gunshot
sound in the woods turned into a scream that was abruptly silenced.
All was quiet, and then . . . footsteps.

Maria had twisted my hands behind my back and
my shoulders cramped from the strain. I shifted and managed to pick
up my head enough to look in the direction of the trees. The air
had taken on the faint purple light of dusk, slowly deepening into
the darker purples and navy of twilight, and for a moment I saw
nothing. Then movement as something shifted in the shadows that
were cast by the waning light. My eyes widened as the man that had
watched us at the restaurant walked out into what was left of the
evening sunlight. I whimpered and strained my arms in an effort to
break Maria’s hold, but her strength was triple what it usually was
as a result of that thing’s control over her.

The
Gaki’s
steps were slow and
measured as it dragged something heavy and large behind it. The
ground dipped slightly in front of it, and when it stepped down the
small incline it’s burden shifted. The shock of white, stringy hair
and even paler scalp that appeared from behind it’s arm made my
heart kick into overtime and I wondered just how fast a heart could
beat before it actually burst. Mine was certainly on its way as
fine tremors began to develop in my arms and legs. There was
something so wrong about seeing Dellar being dragged along like a
pure dead weight that I just couldn’t fully comprehend what it was
I was seeing.

When the Gaki was a few yards away it came to
a stop and let go of the hold it had on Dellar’s shirt. His body
flopped onto its back with a sickening thud and I gaped stupidly at
the end of the branch that jutted from his chest. There was very
little blood, and the detached part of my brain told me that that
was because the branch was acting like a plug and keeping his blood
from gushing out.

I dragged my eyes away from Dellar’s body
(
he’s not dead, he can’t be dead, oh crap I’m dead
) and
stared up at the impossible being that now stood before me with a
deeply contemplative expression on its face. Where was Akira? I
strained my ears until I thought they would burst, but I couldn’t
hear anything that sounded remotely like other footsteps or even
the flap of wings.

“Well,” the
Gaki
said, and I jerked
against my bonds in another futile attempt to break free. “Isn’t
this a pretty picture. Two friends, sister’s in all but blood, at
my mercy.”

I pulled my lips away from my teeth in a
silent snarl, my brain sluggish as it tried to thaw out from frozen
shock.

“Wondering where your
Tengu
lover is?”
it asked conversationally, and I shook my head in denial of the
‘lover’ comment, but the
Gaki
took it to mean I was
answering its question. “He won’t be showing up. You really think
that he could stand up against his brother?”

“You’re not his real brother,” I hissed.
“You’re just some soul munching monster that’s taken over his
brother’s body.”

“Only partially true, my dear,” it said with
a slow shake of its head. “It’s true that I obtain my nourishment
through consuming human souls, but I am, in almost every way, his
brother simply because when I choose a body to inhabit, I allow
that soul to merge with me instead of being absorbed. Akira
realized this the first year after I chose this body, and he’s been
doing what he could to protect me ever since. That protection will
extend greatly once I’ve taken over your body and merged your soul
within me.”