Eight Million Gods-eARC (16 page)

“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 sound she could hear was his footsteps crunching on the gravel and the caws of 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 peerson 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’s going to 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 news: 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 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. He was, however, one of her characters. She might be able to write a scene where he told 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 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 had 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.

The prepaid cell phone had been decorated with cherry-blossom stickers and a half-dozen overly cute charms dangling from straps. It looked like a phone that any Japanese teenage girl would be carrying. It was utterly devoid, though, of personal data. There were no numbers in the contact list. Despite Nikki obviously bolting from her apartment, the incoming and outgoing call logs were all scrubbed clean. If he hadn’t taken it from her purse, he wouldn’t have been able to guess it belonged to her.

Who was this girl? Why was she so careful?

The phone did have dozens of photos, but only of manhole covers, vending machines, and bicycle chains. He thumbed through a collection of links, sprockets, and chain guards from various city bikes, wondering at her fascination. What did they have to do with a
kami
enshrined in a stolen
katana
and a dead
tanuki?

He was about to abandon the phone when it rang. He read the caller ID as he waited for the call to drop to voice mail. It was a local number; Nikki Delany knew at least one person in Osaka.

Luckily Miriam Frydman wasn’t as secretive as Nikki Delany. By the start of evening rush hour, he knew her life history. Miriam was the middle child of four siblings, and yet the only one that attended a boarding school. That hint of her being a problem child was smoothed over by the fact that she had no criminal record, had graduated from high school with honors, and had been accepted to Princeton University’s East Asian Studies Department. She was in Japan on a work visa, employed as a translator by the gaming company Capcom and living in Osaka. By his standards, she was squeaky clean.

Miriam called Nikki’s phone a dozen more times; she obviously didn’t know that Nikki had abandoned her ID and cell phone at her apartment. If that was the case, she also didn’t know that Nikki had bolted. Most likely, Miriam’s next step would be to visit Nikki’s apartment. Sooner or later, the people who sent the
tanuki
after Nikki would be looking for their “man.” It would be best if squeaky clean didn’t cross paths with monsters; human or otherwise.

He caught up to Miriam as she stepped onto the subway train. She sensed him before she even saw him moving toward her and shied away, scanning the other passengers with wide frightened eyes until she spotted him. And then her eyes went even wider, as if she knew what he was.

He should have guessed that Miriam Frydman would be a Sensitive. Talents like Nikki Delany were like metaphysical bonfires to spiritual moths.

“Ms. Miriam Frydman, I’m with the FBI.” He flashed a badge to prove it, but she didn’t believe him. Even a normal person would have trouble lying to a Sensitive.

She edged toward the door, trying to flee. “I didn’t think FBI had jurisdiction overseas.”

“The FBI investigates any murder of an American citizen abroad,” he stuck as close to the truth as he could. “I’m looking into the murder of Gregory Winston on Saturday night.”

She hit the closed door, and her eyes widened even more. “I don’t know anything about it. Really. My friend is writing a horror novel, and some psycho fan copied one of the murders from the book.”

“Yes, I know.” He knew that Nikki Delany had written Gregory’s murder hours before it happened. It was the most recent file saved on her flash drive. The wall of Post-it Notes was an accurate portrayal of the current condition of Nikki’s work. The novel wasn’t one solid manuscript but hundreds of scenes labeled by the “character’s” initials and a seemingly random numbering scheme. For some reason, though, she had changed everyone’s names. So far he hadn’t been able to identify what name she’d given Simon.

“We think that Miss Delany might be in danger,” he said truthfully. “Do you know where she is?”

The next station was announced, and she relaxed slightly with the promise of escape. “She’s probably doing research for her book. During the week, she visits locations she’s using for her novel. She goes out to Kobe, Kyoto, and such by train.”

In other words, she could be anywhere. “Is she fluent in Japanese?”

“No, but you really don’t need to be to get around.”

The train was slowing down as it entered the next station. All around them, people shifted, readying themselves for the doors to open. Miriam’s relief grew more profound on her face.

“Ms. Frydman, we believe Ms. Delany is in danger.” All evidence of the struggle in the apartment had been erased, so he stayed vague about the location. “She was attacked by a man armed with a knife last night in Otamae.”

“What? Was she hurt?”

“We don’t know. We found her phone. We know you’ve been calling her.”

Miriam whispered a curse. “I’m going to her place now.”

“I would advise against that. She’s not at her apartment. You might make yourself a target if you go looking for her.”

“I don’t fucking care! She’s my best friend. She’s in this mess because I talked her into moving to Japan!”

“You can help her by telling me where she might go to be safe. Does she know anyone else in Japan?”

There was someone else; he saw the thought flash across her face and then be hidden away. The girl, however, only shook her head.

He put his hand on the door behind her and leaned over her. He hated having to terrorize her, but better him than someone who would actually hurt her. “We think that Gregory Winston might be related to a murder in Kyoto. A sixteen-year-old girl was killed and then raped.”

Miriam went pale at the news. “Was—was she a shrine maiden?”

He nodded. Nikki must have shared her writing with Miriam.

“And someone set fire to her family shrine?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh God!” Miriam gasped. The level of her shock was measured by the fact that the train pulled into the station and the door opened without her seeming to notice. She flinched hard as he caught her arm and pulled her onto the platform. “This isn’t the right stop.”

“You’re not to go to her apartment. She’s not there, but he might be.”

She frowned up at him, nearly vibrating with fear and anger. “Let me see your ID again.”

He gave it to her, and she studied it closely.

“What is it with government employees?” she grumbled. “Every one I’ve ever met has never told the whole and honest truth.”

“People don’t want the truth. It’s big and scary. It has sharp teeth, and it’s hiding under the bed, just waiting for the lights to go out.”

She jerked her gaze up from his badge to glare at him. “Lying doesn’t make the monsters go away.”

Had she spent her childhood terrorized by things no one else could see? The boarding school made more sense now; her parents must have given up and written her off as impossible to deal with. Let someone else deal with the child who insisted that monsters were real.

“No, it doesn’t make them go away.” He sighed. He’d had this argument countless times with Simon; the irony was that he normally took Miriam’s side. “Just—just sometimes it’s easy to be wrong.” He couldn’t tell her about the
tanuki
and
kami,
if for no other reason than that he wasn’t sure what had happened in Nikki Delany’s apartment on Sunday night. He was fairly sure, though, that Nikki was in over her head. “Ms. Delany might have been taken by force. There’s no way I can know for sure without checking in the places where she might hide. If she was taken, I need to find her—quickly.”

She sensed he was telling the truth, but she still didn’t trust him. She hunched her shoulders against the burden of protecting her friend in the face of danger and stared down at his ID. She traced her fingertips over his badge as if she could sense the twofold truth and lie held within it.

“We’ve been friends since high school,” she said softly. “Her mother is a control freak. Nikki just wanted to get away from her. Coming to Japan was my idea. We had this plan—we go to Princeton and come here at the same time—but everything kept going wrong. We were supposed to have an apartment together. We were supposed to watch out for each other.”

“Please . . .” Asking her to trust him was impossible; all her senses had to be telling her that he was dangerous. “I can protect her. I promise you.”

She flinched slightly as if he had hit her. “I don’t know where she is. Her mother made it impossible for her to make friends. I’m the only person that she
knows
here in Japan.”

The joy of working with Sensitives was that they were so used to being able to tell when someone was lying that they operated on the assumption that everyone had the same ability. They told shades of truths. The key word obviously was “know.” There was someone that they both considered trustworthy and yet Nikki didn’t know. A friend of Miriam’s that Nikki had never met? An estranged family member? Whoever it was, Miriam wasn’t going to tell him.

But the moment he was out of sight, she’d contact whoever it was and see if Nikki was safe. All he needed to do was give her a chance to make the call.

He pulled out the card that said, Tobias Gregson, Special Agent, and listed his cell phone number as 06-4397-2948. “Call me if you hear from her.” With that, he let her flee.

Nikki frowned at the page. She could tell that the card was a lie. His name wasn’t Tobias Gregson; that was a name she would pick out for some obscure literary in-joke. Gregson was a police officer in Doyles’ Sherlock Holmes mysteries; Holmes thought the policeman had promise. She sensed too that Scary Cat Dude wasn’t an FBI agent, but if someone called the FBI, they would unhappily vouch for him. He worked for someone that moved in shadows. Maybe the CIA. It still felt more like British Secret Service, although she wasn’t sure why. The phone number on the card didn’t connect directly to his cell phone; he wouldn’t give out his real cell phone number. Someone could track him via his phone. The number on the card, though, somehow reached him. A whole web of lies surrounded him, and yet, for some reason, he felt trustworthy.