A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series) (17 page)

The Unsui shrugged. "If I
am correct, yes. Without Kyuketsuki's curse to help anchor her, she will not be
strong enough to remain in our world."

"Can you do it?" Kara
asked. "I mean, can you do it now? They haven't found Hachiro and all I
can think is that she's hiding him somehow, and if you could break the curse
and send her away —"

Again, the old monk raised both
hands and they all fell silent.

Sakura felt her heart pounding
in her chest. Was it possible this could all really be over?

"I believe I can perform
the ritual needed to break Kyuketsuki's curse. But there is one element that is
out of my control, and which you must arrange before it can be done."

"What is it?" Miho
asked eagerly.

"If your friend Hachiro is
alive, she has kept him so because she something about certain handsome boys
intrigues her, as though she seeks some young man to be her eternal companion. But
the stories that speak of this also say that when she tires of these boys, she
destroys them. Hachiro must be retrieved from the mountain. But not only for
his own sake. You must all be there when I conduct the ritual, including
Hachiro, because you were there when Kyuketsuki was defeated and driven from
the world. It will not work unless each of those who were present take part in
the ritual."

Sakura felt her face flush with
horror and her breath caught in her throat.

"But that means . . ."
she began.

"Yes," Kubo said, and
in his eyes she saw that he knew precisely what he was asking of her, and how
much it would hurt. "You must find Ume, the girl who murdered your sister,
and ask for her help.

"Without her, you will
carry this curse with you forever."

Boredom was bad for Mai. Over
the past year, whenever she had grown restless or distracted, she had tended to
get herself into trouble. One of the favorite punishments meted out by the
teachers at Monju-no-Chie school was to make the offender sit on her knees in
the hall for long stretches of time. Not only did it hurt after a while but it
was probably the most interminably boring thing Mai had ever experienced. So
she tried to control herself in school even though the temptation to talk or
write notes to friends or draw horribly insulting sketches of teachers in her
notebooks was often too much to resist.

It was a vicious circle, really.
Boredom led to misbehavior, which led to punishment, which led back to boredom.

Outside of school, it wasn't so
bad. The teachers gave plenty of homework, which kept her mind busy. Mai had
always managed good grades — she was smart and happy to work and study
hard — and when she wasn't doing homework she could always go shopping in
the city or play soccer with her friends.

Winter created problems for her.
The soccer club could still play in the school gym, but they never felt like
real games to her. Snow was the hated enemy of soccer players everywhere. And
though most days the weather wasn't so cold or stormy that she would be
prevented from going into Miyazu City to go shopping, the gray skies weren't
exactly inviting. They didn't make a girl want to link arms with her best
friend and wander from shop to shop trying on new outfits.

Which probably explained why she
was dancing to awful J-pop in the middle of her dorm room in short-shorts and a
tiny tank top, filming herself on her laptop's webcam. She tried to sing along
to the song — some silliness about boys on motorcycles by a girl group
called Kuza — but kept laughing at her own ridiculousness instead. She'd
put her hair up in pigtails and wore bright, sparkly red lipstick, and the
entire effect was to make her look like the happiest prostitute on Earth, but
looking at herself in the mirror had made her giggle at her own ridiculousness.

Boredom.

From the other side of the small
dormitory room, Wakana shouted at her. Mai glanced at her. The words had been
drowned out by the music, but she got the gist. Wakana was working on the
research paper that Harper-sensei had assigned for his American Studies class,
which seemed entirely pointless to Mai, considering that classes were currently
suspended.

Wakana shouted again.

Grinning, Mai broke off from her
hip gyrating dance to race over to the bed and grab Wakana by the wrists.

"Stop it!" Wakana
said, brow furrowed in a deep frown. "No, Mai. I'm trying to —"

Mai hauled her off the bed and
pulled her into view of the webcam. Wakana wore pajama pants and a faded pink
t-shirt that she often slept in, a clip holding her hair out of her face. She
looked very cute, but Mai knew it was the last outfit in the world she would
want anyone to see her in. Soon enough they would have to go downstairs for
dinner and they would both get changed, but Wakana's eyes flared with alarm at
the thought of being on camera. She tried to pull away but Mai gave her a pouty
look and tugged her back, raising her arms and dancing like she was in a
nightclub in some sexy movie scene.

Then she made silly faces and
Wakana laughed.

"Come on!" Mai
pleaded.

Wakana thrust out a hip,
shifting into a dance pose. Mai clapped her hands in glee, and seconds later,
they were dancing side by side. Wakana strung a few moves together by sheer
instinct — for a shy girl, she knew how to move — and Mai mimicked
her. They shimmied up and down against each other in mockery of boys' obsession
with girls who kissed other girls — though none of the boys they knew
would likely have noticed the irony — and then collapsed together in fits
of embarrassed giggles. Mai pulled Wakana out of view of the camera just as the
song came to a close.

They fell onto their beds, flush
with exertion, and only then did they hear the banging on the door.

The two girls cast anxious
glances at each other.

"Who is it?" Mai
called, as the next song began.

Wakana jumped up and spun the
volume down as Mai closed the laptop and started for the door. As she reached
for the knob she remembered what she looked like. It would take too long to do
anything about her hair, but she darted back across the room and grabbed a pink
robe, tugging it on even as Wakana handed her a tissue, with which she wiped
her lips.

There was another round of banging
on the door, but now Mai had grown irritated. She stormed to the door and
unlocked it.

"What is the crisis?"
she demanded as she pulled it open.

The sight of the school
principal standing grim-faced in the corridor actually made her flinch and back
up a step.

"Yamato-sensei?" she
asked. "What are you . . . what's wrong?"

Mai had barely taken note of the
presence of Miss Aritomo and Mr. Harper, but now she noticed the two teachers
in the corridor behind the principal. Despite the tight, angry expression on
Mr. Yamato's face, she knew that he had not come to discipline her. She and
Wakana were not in trouble. This combination of Monju-no-Chie's teachers could
have only one purpose for visiting them.

Mr. Yamato arched a disapproving
eyebrow at her pigtails and what she could only assume was a smear of sparkly
lipstick left on her mouth.

"Your music was very loud,"
he said.

Mai gave him a tiny nod of
apology. "I am sorry. I did not realize —"

"May we come in?" Miss
Aritomo interrupted.

Mai stepped back to clear the
way, thinking that it would be cramped with all five of them in the small room,
and wondering what could be so important as to prompt them to visit her and
Wakana here in the middle of a snowy afternoon. With the loud banging on the
door, the other girls at this end of the hall would already be gossiping about
how much trouble she must be in; they'd never assume Wakana was the one in
trouble. The rest of the students would assume that Mr. Yamato had brought the
other teachers as witnesses or something.

As Mr. Yamato and Mr. Harper
entered the room, Miss Aritomo hung back in the hall a moment. She shot a
sidelong glance at someone else, one of Mai and Wakana's nosy neighbors
presumably.

"Go back into your room. This
doesn't concern you," the art teacher said, as sharply as Mai had ever
heard her speak to anyone.

Then Miss Aritomo entered and
closed the door behind them.

Wakana looked like she wished
she could climb under her bedsheets and hide.

"This will take only a
moment," Mr. Yamato said, shifting his gaze from Mai to Wakana and back
again. He lowered his voice before continuing. "There may be a way to
break the curse of Kyuketsuki."

"Why would we —"
Mai began, then cut herself off. "My apologies again, Yamato-sensei."

"You can ask the question,"
Mr. Harper said. "Why would you care? Is that what you were going to say? You
don't like my daughter and her friends, Maiko. I understand that —"

"Harper-san." Mr.
Yamato gave the American teacher a grave look.

"Mai," Miss Aritomo
said, "many people have died because of the curse of Kyuketsuki, some of
them your friends." She glanced meaningfully at Wakana and then looked at
Mai again. "Do you mean to tell us that you are not willing to help
prevent more of your friends from dying?"

Mai swallowed. Her embarrassment
and discomfort at their sudden arrival fled. She had carefully crafted a
persona of arrogance and confidence around other students, and she had great
ambitions for her future that she thought that persona would serve. But when
she was alone with Wakana, she always let that mask slip to reveal her true
self. Now she discarded it willingly.

"Of course not," she
said. "If there's a way that I can help you break the curse —"

"We," Wakana said.
"If we can help."

Mai nodded. "We'll do
whatever you need."

Mr. Yamato nodded with
satisfaction and approval. "Excellent. You are still in contact with Ume
Chosokabe?"

An icy knot formed in the pit of
her stomach. "Yes."

"Can you reach her by
telephone?"

"I'm not sure," Mai
said. "If not, she is usually online at night. I could e-mail her, or
instant message her later. But Ume's been gone since last spring. What could
any of this have to do with her?"

The moment she asked the
question, she felt like a fool. She knew the answer. Everything that had
happened — the curse, all of it — stemmed from the murder of Akane
Murakami.

But Miss Aritomo surprised her.

"The ritual that could
break the curse requires the participation of all of those present at the time
of Kyuketsuki's defeat," the art teacher said.

"You've got to get Ume to
come back to Miyazu City immediately," Mr. Yamato said.

Wakana shook her head. "With
respect, sir, wasn't she expelled?"

"She could come to visit
the friends she left behind," Mr. Harper said.

"But she's in school,"
Mai argued. "Wouldn't it be better to contact her parents? She would need
their permission."

Mr. Yamato sighed, shaking his
head. "Mai, listen to me. I cannot contact her parents. How would I
explain a request for Ume to return to Monju-no-Chie school, and in such a
hurry? Tell her that she is needed here, that she must come immediately."

"But how will
she
explain, sensei?" Wakana asked.

Miss Aritomo knitted her brows. Pretty
as she was, the expression made her look anything but. "Ume has already
proven her cunning by managing to get away with murder. She'll have to figure
something out."

Mai blinked in astonishment at
the teacher's uncharacteristic directness. Adults so often talked around things
that were awkward or unpleasant that the words had shocked her.

"What if she doesn't want
to come?"

"If she doesn't want to
prevent people from dying?" Mr. Yamato said. "Then tell her a member
of the Miyazu City police will be happy to go and retrieve her, and she can
explain
that
to her parents."

The dormitory at Monju-no-Chie
school was separated by a wide stairwell that divided it evenly into two sides,
with the girls on one side and the boys on the other. Each floor had a common
area near the stairs, but the one on the first floor was the largest, with the
exception of the cafeteria. All of that common space was meant as consolation
to the students for the strict rules governing gender relations in their
dormitory rooms. Boys were not allowed in girls' rooms with the door closed,
and vice versa. After nine p.m., they weren't even allowed in the opposite
wings.

As Kara strode along the second
floor corridor toward Ren's room with Miho and Sakura in tow, she thought about
the absurdity of the rule, especially when it came to Ren. He was gay. Though
he claimed not to be interested in any of the boys on his floor — most of
them didn't know about his sexual orientation — she was still sure he was
more than content to be trapped after dark with a few dozen other guys.

Or not. That's a pretty
ignorant thought
, she realized. As long as she'd known him, Ren had always
seemed to get along much better with girls than other guys, Hachiro being the
lone exception.

A sickly feeling rippled through
her gut as she passed the door to Hachiro's room. No light shone beneath the
door. It felt still and empty, as though it had been abandoned and waited for a
new resident to give it life again. Even just a quick glance at the door made
her want to shout with frustration and anticipatory grief. But she refused to
give up on Hachiro yet.

Ren's room was three doors down
on the left. She rapped several times in quick succession, her knuckles
stinging.

"What if his parents are
still here?" Miho whispered.

"Then we tell them,"
Sakura said. "We're running out of time to do this quietly."

"Hachiro's running out of
time," Kara corrected.