A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series) (13 page)

Her hands yearned for the feel
of her guitar. All of the emotions bottled up inside of her needed release, and
music could do that for her. It always had. She could play a song, something
full of love and anguish. She needed to play. To sing. It was like pulling down
a wall between who she was on the outside and what she felt on the inside.

Kara and the girls had spent
hours doing research on Yuki-Onna, first online and then at the library, but
come up with very little that seemed helpful. There seemed to be dozens of
variations on the story, many of which had filtered into modern incarnations. She
appeared in films and role-playing games and in stories and plays. Various
legends portrayed her as a blood-sucking, vampiric witch or a demon, but in
others she seemed almost benevolent, or little more than a ghost herself,
appearing during the first snow of the year like Jack Frost.

Miho had taken copious notes
while Sakura had flipped through books, searching for something that would give
them some clue as to how to protect themselves. When they were sick of looking,
the found a small storybook of Japanese folktales. Cover frayed and faded,
published in 1913, it included the Yuki-Onna story that Miss Aritomo had told
them about the Woman in White inhabiting the remains of a woman who had frozen
to death in the first snow of winter, but it told them little that they did not
already know.

At half past three, with the sky
already dimming toward the early winter darkness, they had left the library and
hurried back to campus, hoping to see Ren, only to be turned away by Miss
Kaneda, who insisted that they not intrude. Ren's parents had been with him
since the early morning and they had asked not to be disturbed. As far as Miss
Kaneda knew, he had not regained any of his memory of what had transpired on
Takigami Mountain.

Walking home from the dorm, Kara
had seen Mr. Yamato exiting the school with a couple she recognized from photos
as Hachiro's parents. They looked lost, cast adrift from the moorings of their
life, and she wanted to go to them and try to lend them some comfort, to assure
them that their son would be all right — she would not allow herself to
consider another alternative. But Hachiro had told her they weren't thrilled
with the idea of him dating a gaijin girl, and she suspected that any words
from her would give them no comfort at all.

So she kept walking.

Now she lay in bed, staring at
the moonlight washing over her guitar. She could almost imagine she heard a
single chord of music resonating in the room. Her pulse throbbed in her
temples. The clock read 2:27 a.m. Kara desperately needed to sleep but she did
not want to close her eyes. It seemed to her that as long as she remained awake
and thinking of Hachiro, he was not completely alone out there on the mountain,
in the cold.

Ren survived a night on the
mountain
, she told herself.
Hachiro will be all right. They'll find him
in the morning.

Had Ren seen Yuki-Onna? Had the
winter witch done something to them?

Her thoughts raced. Hachiro was
still missing, but Mr. Yamato had ordered students to return to classes
tomorrow. How could anyone focus on learning anything? How could they act like
it was over? Yes, Sora was dead and Ren had come back, but Hachiro was still
out there on the mountain!

Kara sighed. Sleep seemed even
further away. The longer she lay in bed, the more agitated she grew, and she
had only a few hours before she would have to get up to get ready for school.

Frustrated, feeling the staccato
beat of her heart in her chest, she threw back her covers and got out of bed. She
looked in what she thought was the direction of Takigami Mountain, wishing she
could see it from here. That would make her feel closer to Hachiro, which was
all she wanted right now.

In her faded Negima t-shirt and
flannel pajama pants, she shuffled to the window and bent to look outside,
hoping to see even the mountain's peak. But the angle was all wrong. All she
could see was the houses on her street, bleached white in the moonlight, and
the tops of some of the taller buildings in the city in the distance.

She started to draw back into
the room, but froze as she caught a glimpse of motion. A pale figure passed in
front of a house diagonally across from Kara's, headed toward the train
station.

Kara's mouth went dry. She
blinked, moving to get a better look. The man had his back to her, but his
silhouette seemed to shift as though ticking in and out of focus. He turned his
head and for a moment she thought he would look back at her, but his face was
lost in shadows.

The figure flickered, nearly
transparent for a moment, then solid once again. Another ghost on the streets
of Miyazu City.

Her whole body began to tremble
and she shook her head. The height, the build, the thick, unruly hair.

Hachiro?

Forgetting the winter, Kara
rushed from her room and down the short hall, through the living room, and to
the front door. She unlocked the door and flung it open, letting in a blast of
frigid wind. The door banged against the wall but by then she was already
stepping out onto the stoop and then onto the sidewalk.

The January night embraced her
with fingers of ice, cutting deeply. Her teeth chattered and her skin prickled
with gooseflesh. Her thin t-shirt and pajama pants did nothing to protect her
from the winter. A gust of wind whispered past her and she hugged herself
against the cold. The frozen street hurt the soles of her feet.

She ignored it all.

The ghost had paused a moment,
just out of reach of the gloomy yellow light thrown by a streetlamp. It seemed
almost to be waiting for her, but did not turn to look at her. Instead it
glanced up at the night sky, head tilting as though it searched the stars for
some vital truth that had eluded it.

Then it started toward the train
station again.

"No!" Kara said,
barely hearing her own voice.

She bolted down the street, bare
feet slapping the frigid pavement, stumbling a bit when she stepped on a rock. Her
face felt flushed despite the deep chill settling into the rest of her body. Her
breath plumed from her lips, drifting away behind her as she ran, and her legs
felt like brittle sticks that might snap out from under her. Still she ran,
lungs burning with cold, heart clenched along with her fists.

Cold heart
, she thought.
Got
to keep a cold heart
.

She kept her lips pressed
together in a tight line, refusing to let herself feel, but she could not stop
her mind from rushing into dark places.
Please don't be Hachiro
. And at
the same time, her thoughts spiraled along other avenues. This was the second
ghost she had seen, but who else had seen them? Wakana, Hachiro, and Miho. All
of them people who had previously been touched by the supernatural. Not just
Kyuketsuki's curse — the curse didn't affect Wakana — but people
who'd had their eyes opened to the things lurking behind the curtain of the
world. Had that given them some kind of sight, enabled them to see things
others could not? Or was it all coincidence? Or were there people who had seen
ghosts that she just didn't know about yet?

A block from the train station,
Kara stumbled to a halt, feet painfully cold and raw. She looked around, panic
surging, but did not see the ghost. Up ahead, an old man with a white beard
rode a bicycle toward her. Truly peculiar at going on three o'clock in the morning,
but he was no ghost. Just strange.

No
, she thought. And then
she said it aloud.

"No. I can't not know,"
she whispered into the winter night, each word a wisp of icy breath. And now
her trembling had nothing to do with the cold. She'd tried to make her heart
turn to ice but her breath began to hitch and her lower lip quivered and she
hated to cry, hated how weak and foolish it made her feel.

"Kara!"

She turned.

The old man's bicycle squeaked
as it approached, but she had her back to him now, looking back the way she'd
come. Her father must have heard her, for he had come out after her. He wore
slippers, a white t-shirt, and sweatpants, and a giddy, frazzled part of her
mind realized that the two of them must seem just as peculiar to the old man on
his bicycle as he did to her, that anything might happen in the small hours of
the night, and every street, and every night, was a quietly bizarre midnight
circus.

"Kara!" her father
called again, concern in his voice. Even fear. And why not, given all they had
been through.

But she could not focus on her
father.

The ghost stood between them. Somehow
she had passed right by it without noticing. Moonlight and shadow made it seem
barely there and even as she watched it faded further, slipping into nothing,
vanishing. But she had seen its face and it was not Hachiro.

Tears did come, then, but they
were tears of exhaustion and relief in equal measure.

And then her father was there
and he pulled her into his arms.

"Sweetie, what are you
doing?" he asked. "You scared me, running out like that. Are you
okay?"

They both jumped, startled by
the sound of a bicycle bell as the old man rode by. The tension inside Kara
broke like a wave on the sand and she laughed, heart still pounding. But that
respite lasted only a moment, the presence of the ghost so fresh in her mind.

"Did you see him?" she
asked, staring into her father's eyes.

She expected a look of
confusion. Instead, his concern turned to uneasiness.

"I think I did," he
said. "Just for a second, when I was running after you, I thought you
weren't alone, that there was someone in the street with you."

He's been touched by the
supernatural, too
, she thought. The Hannya had nearly killed him.

"A ghost," she said.

"But it wasn't . . . ?"

"No," she said
quickly. "It wasn't Hachiro."

Her father took that in, then
looked at her more closely. "God, you don't even have shoes on. You're
going to get frostbite. Come on, let me carry you back."

Kara frowned. "I'll be
fine. Let's just hurry. It's freezing out here."

Knowing how cold Hachiro must be
up on that mountain, she would not let this brief exposure get to her. Or so
she thought. By the time they were halfway back to the house, her feet were so
numb that they felt like blocks of wood. Kara's father insisted that she let
him carry her, and she went along with it gladly. Thin as he was, Rob Harper
was still strong enough to lift his daughter in his arms.

For the first time in days, she
felt safe.

All through Wednesday morning,
Kara felt as though she was holding her breath. School felt surreal. Why were
they here? Books and pencils, notes and quizzes. How could they all go on with
this ridiculous pantomime of normality? Miho kept glancing back at her with sad
eyes, and Kara knew she was worried. Kara loved her for it, but Miho could not
comfort her.

Outside the windows, snowflakes
danced on gusts of January wind. She had woken this morning to a light coat of
new fallen snow across Miyazu City. The white swirl looked beautiful over the
turgid surface of the bay, but the sight of it had made her feel like throwing
up.

She should be on the mountain
with Hachiro. Searching for him. Just sitting here, all she wanted to do was
scream.

It had taken her no time at all
to get used to the Japanese system, in which the students remained in their
homerooms all day and the teachers moved from class to class. Ordinarily she
thought it a much more sensible way of doing things, but today she would have
given anything to be able to get up out of her seat. Her eyes burned from lack
of sleep and her head felt stuffed with cotton. Teacher after teacher entered
the room and droned on, but to her they sounded like the adults in old Charlie
Brown cartoons, their voices an unintelligible drone.

The seat in front of her was
empty. Sora's seat. She wondered what would happen to it. No one would want to
sit there and the empty seat seemed forbidding, a constant reminder of his
death. Hours ticked by. At lunchtime, Kara turned away so she would not even
have to look at it. She decided to talk to Mr. Sato at the end of the day and
ask if he could just have the desk removed.

The afternoon crept by even more
slowly than the morning. Several times she found herself nodding off. When her
father came in to teach his American Studies course, she tried her best to stay
alert, but kept rubbing her eyes. He couldn't help but notice. Several times it
seemed he was about to say something, but then he stopped himself. Kara knew
that he would be worried that it would be improper for him to interrupt class
just to ask her if she was all right, and she was glad. The conversation she
wanted to have with him — needed to have with him — would have to
wait until school was over.

As she drifted between sleep and
wakefulness, feeling a bit sick to her stomach from struggling to stay conscious,
she thought of ghosts. Hachiro had seen Jiro, shoeless, on the train into
Miyazu City back at the beginning of this horror. Kara studied the back of Miho's
head and from time to time she glanced over at Mai, who sat in the front of the
room by the window, and she wondered.

The ghosts had to be connected.

Her father and Miss Aritomo were
worrying like mad, trying to figure out how to hide the girls from Yuki-Onna. Yesterday
that quest had been a useful diversion, helping her keep her mind off of Hachiro
at least part of the time. But today, she couldn't care less about the curse of
Kyuketsuki. What the winter witch might do to her meant nothing — not
with Hachiro still missing.

No, she had to solve this. Figure
out the mystery. They still didn't know for sure that it was even Yuki-Onna
they were dealing with. But with the woman who'd frozen to death on the
mountain and the way her haka had been disturbed, her ashes removed, it sure
seemed to match the legend.