Storm (6 page)

“I had to stop him, before he destroyed everything the August Ones had made.”

“The August Ones?”

“And now he’s dead. But he lives in the shards of his soul that carry on.” She motioned at the ground, and I saw shattered pieces of glass in every color.

“Like Tomo,” I said.

“Taira no Kiyomori, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Yuu Tomohiro, all of them magatama of one soul,” she said.

I tilted my head. “Magatama?”

She motioned again to the broken glass. “Susanou shattered it,” she said. “Only the sword remains.” I looked to Jun and the stained sword at his side.

“Listen to me, child,” Amaterasu said to me. “Green means an eternal circle. You will betray Yuu Tomohiro, just as I have betrayed Tsukiyomi.”

The heat rose up in my cheeks. “I would never hurt him.”

She leaned back, the golden beads jingling on her headdress.

“You will kill him, before the end.”

My mind reeled. I wanted to retch. Kill him? Me?

I fell to my knees. “No,” I said. “This is just a stupid dream. I don’t have to do what you tell me. We make our own fates.”

“There is only one fate,” she said.

I looked down, my clothes soaked in ink.

I woke to my own screaming, to the sound of Diane thumping across the floor to hold me tightly in her arms.

* * *

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Tomo said, his eyes wide and filled with concern. We were hiding inside one of the Yayoi huts at Toro Iseki. His dad was asleep at home, after stumbling in from overtime work sometime in the middle of the night. Considering the whole separating-us-for-a-month business, this had seemed the best place to meet without anyone knowing.

“I didn’t want to worry you,” I said. “Anyway, I was pretty sure these were just typical nightmares. I mean, they don’t mean anything, right?”

Tomo pulled me toward him, wrapping me in the warmth and smell of him as we held each other. “They don’t,” he said gently, his voice against my ear. “I’ve been fighting them my whole life. Don’t listen to what they tell you. I never have.” But that was only half-true. He fought against it, sure, but he believed it, didn’t he? He believed he was a monster, that he only had a short time left, that in the end, there was only death.

I hadn’t told him everything about the dreams. It sounded stupid, but I was scared that if I said it out loud, that Tomo had died, that it would come true. I didn’t want to tell him Amaterasu had said I was the one who would betray him. Maybe she’d only meant the stupid mistake I’d made kissing Jun? But Tomo had forgiven me, and, anyway, Amaterasu’s face had looked like the topic was a whole lot more serious than a kiss.

Instead, I’d told Tomo about the castle and the dead samurai, about Tsukiyomi dead beside Amaterasu. “What did she mean by the Magatama?” I said as Tomo and I sat on the packed dirt floor, our backs pressed against the wall of the straw hut. “What is that?”

“It’s a curved jewel,” Tomo said. He lifted his hand palm-up, and I could see the ribbons of scars peeking out from under his soft wristband. “I’ve seen it before in my nightmares, too. Like glass in my hand...” He closed his hand slowly, remembering. “It shatters, and the shards dig into my skin.
Kuse
, they burn like fire.”

“It was broken in my dream, too,” I said. “There were sharp pieces all over the floor.”

“The Magatama is one of the Imperial Treasures,” Tomo said. “But I don’t get what it means. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it’s just
kami
memories, from when they ruled Japan.”

“Imperial Treasures?” I wrapped my arms around my knees. “Like mythical, or real?”

“Real,” he said. “Well, sort of. They’re called the
Sanshu no Jingi
. They’re real, but I don’t know if the myths surrounding them are. There are three of them—the mirror, the sword and the jewel. I think they’re kept in the palace in Tokyo. The mirror is linked to Amaterasu. Not sure about the sword and Magatama.”

The large brass mirror, the one the paper Amaterasu had held in front of Jun in Nihondaira—it had revealed the truth about all of us, that we were tied to some kind of awful tragedy that kept repeating itself with the
kami’s
descendants. Jun and Tomo would always be enemies, because Susanou and Tsukiyomi were. And Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi, in love until...until what, exactly?

I shivered in the morning cold. “What happened between Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi?”

Tomo pulled the top of his knit hat until it snapped off his head, his copper spikes flopping around his ears. I felt the warmth from the hat as he gently pressed it onto my head, smoothing it over my hair and pulling it down over my ears. “Better?” he said. I nodded, and he grinned. “I don’t know what happened, Katie, but it doesn’t matter. They aren’t us. They’re long gone.”

“You’re right,” I said. “But we still have to deal with their drama.” The mirror, the sword and the jewel. The sword...was it the one I had seen beside Jun? How did these treasures tie into all this? Were they really just fragments of
kami
memories?

Tomo took my hand in his and pulled me up from the ground. “We’ll beat this,” he said, his deep eyes searching mine. “You’ll be just fine.”

“So will you,” I said, and he smiled, but I saw the sadness in his eyes, the disbelief. Amaterasu’s threat echoed in my thoughts.

I will never hurt him again
, I thought as I pulled him toward me, as I pressed my lips against his.
We will make our own future.

* * *

I grabbed Yuki’s arm right when the bell rang. “Yuki-chan, I need a favor.” She looked at me, surprised.

“Everything okay?” she said.

I nodded. “I just... I was wondering if Niichan is still in town.”

She raised an eyebrow, puzzled. Behind her, Tanaka started fake laughing, flipping his chair on top of his desk before walking over to us. “Hu-hu-hu,” he said in an over-the-top voice that the drama club could probably hear from here. “Does Tomohiro have a rival?”

“Ew,” Yuki said, smacking Tanaka in the arm. “My brother? He’s, like, six years older than us.”

“Maybe she’s seen enough of Tomo-kun’s immature side,” Tanaka grinned slyly. “She wants an older man.”

I flushed with awkwardness.
“Chigau yo”
, I stammered. “Not even close.”

Yuki put a finger to her lips and blinked slowly, looking thoughtful. “He has a point, though. Boys our age are totally immature.”

Tanaka’s face drained of color. “
O...oi!
That’s not...” His shoulders slumped and he headed toward the blackboard, grabbing a cloth and starting to clean. Poor guy. He’d been asking for it, though.

“Niichan’s back in Miyajima,” Yuki said, “but I can give you his number. Everything all right?”

“I just wanted to ask him something about my history assignment,” I lied. “He knows a lot about
kami
myths.”

“Oh, yeah, he knows all that stuff. Here.” She took out her
keitai
and sent the number to me.

“Thanks.”

She grinned. “No problem.” I helped her push the desks out of the way while our classmates mopped the floor, and then I dashed to kendo practice. I’d call Niichan as soon as I had a chance, I thought. He’d be able to help me understand how the Imperial Treasures were caught up in this mess.

“
Oi
, Greene!” Ishikawa drawled from across the gym as I opened the change room door. He wore his gray
hakama
skirt, the
dou
chest plate already tied overtop. The colorful swirls of his tattoo slipped from sight as he slid on his
kote
glove. “Still taking kendo when Yuuto isn’t here?”

I reached for his other
kote
, still on the floor, and smacked his arm with it before passing it to him. “I don’t take kendo for Tomo,
baka
.” Maybe at first I had, to spy on him, but the sport of Japanese fencing had given me an outlet to deal with my grief over losing Mom. I loved the way I felt when I held the shinai, when the world was silent except for the shouts of opponents and the shuffling of feet. There wasn’t room to think about anything else.

“You’re tougher than I thought.” Ishikawa grinned. A lick of white hair pressed against his forehead, and he tucked it under the cloth
tenugui
wrapped around his head. Our club’s headbands were stamped with the black kanji that made up our motto: The Twofold Path of the Pen and the Sword. The last time I’d looked at the motto, it had been covered in Tomo’s blood as he’d pressed the
tenugui
against a bite from the dragon he’d sketched. My stomach twisted at the memory of the blood in the rain, the limbs dropping from the dragon as it tried to lift into the sky.

“Greene,” Ishikawa said, and I snapped out of it. “Man, you phase out a lot now. You okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “Thanks for staying with Tomo the other night.”

“You’re all right, for a
kouhai
,” Ishikawa said, ruffling my hair with a strong hand before getting into line for push-ups. “Juniors,” he mumbled.

“Hey!” I called out, but he didn’t look back. I grinned and dropped to the floor, ready to sweat and spar my troubles away, to escape just for an hour.

The dial tone sounded tinny and strange in my ear. I couldn’t call Niichan long-distance on my
keitai
, so I was using the house phone. Diane wasn’t home yet, but as long as I kept it short, she probably wouldn’t mind me calling. I was allowed to call Nan and Gramps anytime—that was different, but still.

I punched in Niichan’s number and waited, my thoughts drifting to his small place on Miyajima Island in Hiroshima. I remembered how Yuki and I had slept in his one-room apartment on the tatami floor, how we’d whispered and chatted in our soft futons while the ocean outside lapped against the beach. It had only been a few months ago, but it felt like ages.

The ringing sound cut out, and a woman’s voice recited ultra-politely that the customer was unavailable. I left a short, awkward message, and then hung up. Guess my questions would have to wait.

I opened the lid of my laptop, putting it on the low table by my bed, and sat down on my
zabuton
cushion beside it. Might as well find out what I could about the Imperial Treasures.

It turned out they were just about as mysterious to the rest of Japan as they were to me. They were called the Sanshu no Jingi, the Three Sacred Treasures. Only the emperor and his close aides had ever seen them, and even then only for special occasions. No one was even sure what they looked like, or if the treasures kept by the royal family were the originals.

They had really long, fancy names. The Yata no Kagami, for one, was Amaterasu’s mirror, the same one that had haunted Tomo’s nightmares and sketches. The one I had seen for the first time in my dreams a few nights ago.

Tomo had been wrong about their location, too. Only the
Yasakani no Magatama
jewel was kept in the palace in Tokyo. The sword,
Kusanagi no Tsurugi
, was in Nagoya, about two hours west of Shizuoka by bullet train. They were thought to be replicas, but Amaterasu’s mirror was supposedly the real one, and they kept it in a shrine in Ise, Mie Prefecture. I pulled up a map to see where Mie was. Southwest from here, past Nagoya and curved around a bay of water.

Outside the rain began to fall, tapping against the sliding door to our tiny balcony. I hoped Diane would be home soon, or at least that she wasn’t caught out in this. It was getting heavier by the second.

The breath caught in my throat as I looked at the search page. The real mirror of Amaterasu. Was it really the real one? I knew the Kami were real—I knew the ink lived in me and in Tomo—but it was still a scary thing to think about, that someone as powerful as Amaterasu had really existed. The paper copy of the goddess, the one whose name I had written with Ikeda in the sketchbook, had already been strong enough to send both Tomo and Jun reeling in the sky. After learning they were descended from Susanou and Tsukiyomi, Tomo and Jun had grown ink wings and fought high above the trees. It was only with Ikeda’s help that we’d summoned Amaterasu’s power to blast them apart and stop them from killing each other.

And that was only the Amaterasu that Tomo had drawn. What about the real one? For anyone to have that amount of power was terrifying. And like Ikeda and Niichan had told me,
kami
didn’t play by our modern rules of morality. They had their own code entirely of what was right and wrong.

I shut down the search tab and reached for the lid of my laptop, but the news column on my home page made me hesitate. The kanji for death,
, stared up at me from the headline. I clicked the article, my hand rising to my mouth.

Two more Yakuza found dead in Shizuoka. They showed old photos of them, smiling.

I knew that one. The Korean guy with the Mohawk who’d brought the bottle of green tea over when Hanchi was forcing Tomo to draw. His photo smiled back at me, completely unaware of what awaited him in his future.

I scrolled down the news article, much of it still illegible to me with my current kanji-reading abilities. The page showed a photo of the crime scene, a dark graffiti image painted across the rice paper door in the room where they’d died.

A black viper, tall as a person, with ink dripping down his painted fangs.

Oh god.

I grabbed my
keitai
, my thoughts whirling. I pressed it to my ear, listening to the ring as I held back tears.

His voice was steady, emotionless. “Katie.”

“Jun, please,” I said, holding the phone with shaking hands. “Please stop.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You can. You have to.” The rain swelled, beating against my window as the wind whipped the storm around.

“Katie, these aren’t innocent people, you know. We’ve talked about this. The world is better off without them.”

“That’s what courts are for,” I said, the tears streaming down my face. “I should call the police.”

His voice softened, warmth seeping in. “They won’t believe you.”

“That’s why I’m asking you to stop. Please.”

A pause. “It’s not in my hands anymore.”

“I don’t get it.” And then it dawned on me. His followers. “Wait...is your Kami cult helping you?”

“Katie, I...”

The rain pummeled my window as I jumped to my feet. “I thought you said most of them weren’t strong enough for their sketches to lift off the page!”

“They’re not, but...when Amaterasu showed me the mirror, the truth about who I really was, I felt the shift. I felt the power of Susanou awaken in me. It’s affecting them, too. They grow stronger being near me, the way Yuu and I were affected by you.”

Ishikawa was right. It was war, and Jun had his own army. Could you fight death sketched on a page? How do you catch the murderer? How do you protect the victim? My mind raced.

Jun’s voice turned gentle and patient. “Katie, the Kami are rising. It’s a new world now, and we don’t need these scum polluting it. Listen...almost every religion in the world talks of a final judgment, right?” He laughed, the sound of it jarring in my ears. How the hell could he laugh at a time like this? “I’m the heir of Susanou. This is my fate. It’s always been my fate.” I collapsed onto my bed, the rain outside nearly overcoming the sound of Jun’s voice. “I’m the heir to the ruler of Yomi, the World of Darkness. The Judge. I will fulfill my purpose until the end.”

“Not like this,” I pleaded. “That can’t be what it means. You don’t have to do this. You can choose your own fate.”

His calm voice cracked open, his voice tinged with panic. “It’s not like I want to do this, okay? Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do.”

This was the real Jun, now. This was the guy who’d rescued me in Oguro, the one who’d asked me out for coffee. But then I realized, fear creeping up my spine—the other side of him was just as real, wasn’t it? They were both him.

“But Tomo is fighting his fate.”

“Tomo is the descendent of Tsukiyomi. Don’t you get it? Tsukiyomi lost his mind and murdered the other
kami
. What do you think is going to happen with Yuu?” My heart froze; I collapsed onto my knees, the hard tatami pressing lines into my skin. Murdered the
kami
? Is that what had happened to Tsukiyomi? Is that what would happen to Tomo? “It can’t go on forever like this. You always knew it would end. He’s a monster that should never have existed. A monster who wished to be human.
Sore dake.
That’s all.”

I clutched the phone as the rain poured. Everything was changing. Everything was ending.

There is only death.

I took a deep breath. “You’re a monster, too, Jun.”

“Gomen,”
Jun said, his voice a whisper lost in the rain. “I’m sorry it has to be this way.” And then he was gone, and there was nothing but the sound of the rain washing away the only world I’d ever known.