A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series) (20 page)

As it subsided, she saw
Yuki-Onna drop her father's still body to the snowy floor. Trickles of blood
ran from the dozen small punctures on his throat.
Breathe
, she thought,
staring at his chest.
Breathe, Daddy
!

She saw his chest rise and fall
and would have screamed in relief and gratitude, except that Yuki-Onna was
there now, bending over her, the black pits that were the witch's eyes staring
down at her, blind and unseeing.

"What are you?" the
Woman in White said, her voice like the crack of brittle ice about to give way
underfoot.

Kubo had said the wards would
blind the demon, but Yuki-Onna saw her. The witch didn't know what to make of
Kara, but she saw her. Or did she?

Yuki-Onna frowned. The
hideousness hidden inside of her beauty subsided, the teeth hidden behind
demure, if bloody, lips. The Woman in White glanced around.

"Where are you?" she
asked.

Hope flickered in Kara's heart.

But then Yuki-Onna turned toward
the shattered door, and even at this angle, Kara saw the evil of her smile
return. Sakura and Miho stood there with Ren, and they had nowhere to run.

"You broke your promise,
beautiful one," the witch whispered.

Ren did not even try to flee.

"Hide him!" Kara said,
her voice quavering. Her whole body twitched as she began to rise.

Miho gave a cry of anguish as
she stepped in front of Ren. "How?"

Kara staggered to her feet. As
Yuki-Onna glided toward her friends, she edged around the witch, keeping pace. Yuki-Onna
reached a hand out toward Ren, but Kara stepped in the way.

The demon froze, a troubled
expression on her face. Yuki-Onna frowned and moved her head to one side, her
smile returning.

"Surround him," Sakura
whispered, grabbing Kara's hand.

The warmth of the contact with
her friend sent pain shooting through her. Her skin was so cold, now, that any
movement, any warmth, hurt her.

"Don't do this —"
Ren began.

"Quiet!" Miho snapped.
"Crouch down."

The three girls surrounded him
as best they could. Teeth chattering, they blocked Yuki-Onna's view.
No, not
her view
, Kara thought.
Demons see the essence of someone, right? So we're
hiding him behind whatever nothing she sees when she looks at us.

If only they'd had Hachiro's
ward.

Hachiro
. Thoughts tumbled
into place inside Kara's head, making a terrible kind of sense. If killing
satiated the witch's hunger, then she wouldn't be hungry right now. Even though
she would want to fulfill the curse of Kyuketsuki, Yuki-Onna might not kill her
right away. She might take her to wherever Hachiro was now. If Kara could keep
Ren safe, he might be able to lead them all up to the mountain and save them.

Numb hands shaking, fingers
little more than useless stumps, she pulled away from her friends and reached
up to remove her ward. She could give it to Ren. Save him, and then he could
save both her and Hachiro in return. Insane, but the only option she could see.

"Kara, no!" Sakura
shouted.

Sakura batted at her hand. Kara
glanced at her, saw tiny icicles hanging from the jagged cut of her hair, saw
Sakura reaching up to untie the thong from her own neck.

Sakura took off Kubo's ward,
eyes alight with fear and purpose. She turned, reaching out for Ren with both
hands to put the thong around his neck. Miho and Ren were shouting at her,
telling her to stop, to put it back on, but Kara barely heard their voices.

She felt the winter's breath on
the back of her neck, and heard the perverse pleasure in Yuki-Onna's voice.

"One of the cursed, right
here in front of me. Delicious," the Winter Witch said.

"No!" Ren shouted,
trying to get the ward back around Sakura's neck.

Yuki-Onna contorted her fingers
and the snow and wind lifted Sakura from the ground and twisted her around so
that she faced the witch.

"Leave her alone!"
Kara screamed.

She and Miho and Ren attacked,
but they might as well have been tearing at the wind, their frozen hands
useless, passing through Yuki-Onna as though the witch were a ghost made of
snow, made of storm.

"My sister will be grateful
when I steal your life, cursed girl," Yuki-Onna said, studying Sakura's
face with her black eyes. "But my vengeance comes before hers. Tonight I
take the pretty one, but I shall come for you and yours soon enough."

And with a gust of wind she
hurled Sakura across the cafeteria. Sakura flailed like a broken doll, struck
the wall, then fell onto a side table before rolling onto the floor and
beginning to bleed into the snow.

Miho screamed.

Yuki-Onna grabbed Ren and he
cried out, frost forming on his face and hair. Kara caught his wrist, trying to
pull him back, but as the icy wind carried him into the air she was lifted as
well. The storm embraced her. If she had thought she was cold before, that had
been nothing in comparison to the pain that screamed through her now, slowing
her blood and dulling her thoughts.

Her hand could not grip. Her
fingers would not close.

Kara fell, slumping to the snowy
floor. As her consciousness began to retreat, she saw the cafeteria windows
shatter and the storm flowed out into the darkness, carrying Ren with it.

The shadows coalesced at the
corners of her eyes, and then swallowed her, and her mind went dark.

Even in her dreams, Kara couldn't
get warm. Her unconscious mind was filled with the sound of shattering glass
and the high, keening wail of the wind. It sounded so much like a scream of
anguish.

From time to time her eyes would
flutter blearily open and she would see the hospital room around her — the
white curtain, the metal piping on the guardrail of the bed, the dark
silhouette of someone passing by in the brightly lit corridor — and then
she would surrender to the cold dreams again. Voices reached her, even
unconscious, but the words were impossible to decipher. She recognized them as
Japanese, but her brain was too tired to translate.

Sometime during the night she
woke more fully, aware of a terrible weight on her, and she looked down to see
the heavy blanket over her. She still felt cold, but her skin was clammy and it
panicked her a little to be constricted like that. Still, she moved the parts
of her body slowly, testing out her feet and ankles, her hands and wrists, her
neck and even her spine. She ached all over and there were apparently stitches
in her arm where flying glass had cut her, but otherwise she seemed all right,
certainly well enough to move.

As she sat up, turning the
blanket down, a slender figure blocked much of the light from the hallway.

"Oh," the nurse said
in a small voice. She hurried into the room, which was lit with a gloomy yellow
that Kara understood was some kind of hospital nightlight. In the semi-dark,
Kara could barely make out a stream of blue in the woman's shoulder-length
hair, and still half-asleep she let out a small laugh.

"You are awake and
laughing?" the nurse said. "The doctor will be very happy."

Kara couldn't say anything. If
she did, she feared she would blurt out the source of her amusement, which was
the streak of blue in the attractive young woman's hair. It had made her think
of Nurse Joy on all of the old Pokemon episodes she and her friends had watched
when they were little. Or was it Officer Jenny with the blue hair? Not that it
mattered.

"I'm cold," she told
the nurse.

Immediately the woman nodded and
tried to pull the blanket back up, but Kara shook her head.

"Not that, please? I'm cold
inside more than out. Is there any way I could have some tea?"

The nurse looked doubtful. She
glanced at the clock and only now did Kara see that it was almost two o'clock
in the morning.

"Maybe something from the
nurses' station?" Kara asked. "Anything hot, really."

The blue-streaked nurse picked
up her chart from the end of the bed and cocked it so that she could read it in
the light coming in from the hall. Apparently satisfied, she set it back down.

"I will see if there is
anything that the doctor would not object to."

Kara gave a nod of her head, a
tiny bow, and the nurse retreated from the room. Only after she left did Kara
remember the hundred questions she should have asked upon waking. Where were
her father and her friends? Were they all okay? How many people had died at the
school? She needed to see someone, talk to someone who could tell her what had
happened.

But with the nurse gone, she lay
on her side and brought her knees up beneath her, trying to warm herself. Bits
and pieces of memory began to surface. The image seared across her mind was of
those shark teeth plunged into her father's throat, but others warred for space
in her mind. Yuki-Onna's bottomless black eclipse eyes. Sakura hitting the
wall, then slamming down on top of a cafeteria table. Ren being sucked out the
shattered caf windows.

Kara shuddered, alone in the
dark. She had to know they were all right. If she'd had some kind of telepathic
powers she could have reached out for them, found them with her thoughts and
her worries.

Be all right, Dad. Be all
right, Sakura
, she thought. And then,
Hachiro, are you out there?

But of course she received no
answer. She was no telepath, just an ordinary girl dragged through a hell of
extraordinary circumstances. Still she kept reaching out for them with her
thoughts, and it occurred to her that she was praying.

By the time the nurse returned,
she had slipped back into dreams.

. . . Wake up . . .

Something jostled her. Kara came
awake slowly, her eyes not quite open but still aware of activity in the room
around her. Daylight filtered through her slitted eyelids and she heard
familiar voices.

" . . . would want to be
woken," Miho was saying. "The doctor said she'd be okay."

"But he did not say we
should wake her," Miss Aritomo replied. "We have all been through a
terrible ordeal. We are fortunate to be alive. You and I might be just fine,
but the doctor said that Kara needs her rest."

"Aritomo-sensei, please
listen," Miho said, her patience obviously wearing thin. "Kara is one
of my best friends. I know her. Decisions are going to be made this morning
that concern her, and she would not want to sleep through them. She would want
a voice."

A flicker of a smile touched
Kara's lips as she finally shed the groggy remnants of sleep. Both Yuuka and
Miho were so concerned about her, she could not help but appreciate their
concern. But Miho's pleas had her worried.

Miss Aritomo was not
surrendering. "Miho, Kara's father has made his wishes clear. She needs
sleep."

Kara tried to speak but her
voice came out in a rasp. As she cleared her throat, they both turned to look
at her, first in surprise and then delight.

"You're awake!" Miho
said hopefully.

Miss Aritomo shot her a
frustrated look, obviously blaming Miho for waking Kara, but then her
expression changed. Yuuka shifted from art teacher to her father's girlfriend,
just happy to see Kara awake and apparently well.

"I think I've slept enough,"
Kara said, sitting up and reaching for a pitcher of water on the tray table beside
the bed. She fumbled a moment before realizing that the fingers of her right
hand were bandaged.

"I'll get that," Miho
said, hurrying around the bed to pour her a glass of water.

They both studied her curiously,
even eagerly, as she drank. When she had put the glass down and cleared her
throat again, she threw back the covers and looked down at her body.

"I'm all in one piece,
right?" she asked.

Miss Aritomo nodded. "You
have —" and she said a word Kara didn't know.

"What's that?" Kara
interrupted.

Miho and Miss Aritomo looked at
one another.

"When your skin or the
flesh is frozen and dies?" Miho ventured.

Kara shivered, a wave of nausea
passing through her. "Frostbite?" she said in English. Then she
repeated the word Miss Aritomo had used for it in Japanese. "Frostbite. I
have frostbite?"

"Just in your right hand,"
Miho said quickly. "And the doctor says it isn't bad. They got the blood
moving again. You're going to be all right."

A darkness closed around Kara's
heart as she flexed the fingers of her right hand and remembered holding on to
Ren's wrist, trying to keep Yuki-Onna from taking him away. She could still see
the fear in his eyes as the witch flew out into the snowy night, carrying him
along in the embrace of the storm.

"But Ren's gone," Kara
said.

"Yes," Miss Aritomo
agreed. "Ren's gone."

"And without him we can't
find Hachiro, or break the curse, and . . . poor Ren."

"You don't know any of that
for certain," Miho said.

Kara frowned. "Don't I?"
She shook her head and then, remembering the melee in the dormitory, looked up
at Miss Aritomo. "What about everyone else? Is my father all right? And
Sakura? Are they all right?"

Ever since she had woken in the
middle of the night, a grim suspicion had weighed upon her but she had barely
recognized its presence. The tone in Miss Aritomo's and Miho's voices during
their conversation had been full of dreadful acceptance, the tone of people who
had already suffered tragedy and simply did not want any more of it. All of
this occurred to her only now, as they both hesitated to answer the question.

"Tell me," Kara said,
crossing her hands over her chest and laying her head back on the pillow.
"Don't do this to me, Miho. Yuuka. Don't do this. Just tell me. Is my
father dead?"

The shock and alarm in Miss
Aritomo's eyes made Kara sigh in relief even before the woman spoke.