A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series) (4 page)

She walked across the quad to
the dormitory, noting the cars in the lot to the right of the building. Some
parents were only just now dropping their children off, and several students
were walking up from the parking lot. A guy she vaguely recognized used his key
to unlock the dorm's front door and Kara picked up her pace to catch it before
it closed again.

Hachiro's parents couldn't
possibly still be here. He hadn't brought anything but a suitcase home, so
dropping him off should only have taken a few minutes. But he hadn't called
yet. She told herself he was just putting his things away, but a part of her
felt hurt by this. Miho and Sakura had rushed over to see her first thing, not
bothering even to unpack, but Hachiro seemed in no rush. Had he had second
thoughts during the holidays? Had he met someone in those two short weeks?

She told herself she was being
foolish, but still quickened her pace up the stairs and down the hall to his
room. After hours, girls weren't allowed in the boys' halls, but for now the
corridors were busy with friends getting reacquainted, laughing and gossiping
and trading small New Year's gifts. She and Hachiro had agreed on no gifts at
the holidays. People tended to put too much weight on such things, interpreting
any gift as if it defined the relationship, and she didn't want that kind of
pressure for either of them. Now she regretted it a little. A sign of his
affection would be nice.

Oh, great. Doubting him already.
He just got back
. She rolled her eyes at her own insecurity, even as she
realized that she had never cared so much about what anyone else felt about
her, except for her parents.

Amused at her own nervousness,
she rapped on his door. She waited eight or ten seconds before knocking again,
bouncing impatiently. Kara glanced up and down the hallway, wondering if he
might be visiting Ren or one of his other friends. That wouldn't bode well,
either, priority-wise, though he had texted her, so that counted for something.

As she debated whether to knock
again, the door opened.

In his Boston Red Sox cap and a
rumpled sweatshirt, he looked very cute. She had often told Hachiro he was her
own giant Teddy bear, which always got a shy smile from him. But for a moment,
as he pulled the door open, she caught sight of a look on his face that was
anything but a smile. He seemed sad and tired.

And then he saw her, and his
face lit up in a grin, and she knew that all of her angsting had been
pointless.

Without a word he pulled her
into his arms, crushing him in his massive embrace, and she squeezed back for
all she was worth. Hachiro kissed the top of her head — receiving
whistles and hoots from other boys in the corridor for the effort — and
then took a step back, holding her hands in his as he looked down at her.

"Hello," he said.

Kara exhaled contentedly. "Hey."

Hachiro lifted her chin and gave
her a gentle kiss. She pulled off his Red Sox cap, revealing his unruly mess of
hair, and donned the hat herself, setting it backward on her head.

"You gonna let me in?"
she asked.

"Of course," he said,
standing a bit straighter.

Hachiro had been raised to be a
proper Japanese boy, with all the courtesies and formalities that implied. Kara
had broken him of some of those manners, but he still treated her as a guest
whenever she visited his room. Now he stepped back to let her in, and she went
to his desk and slid herself up to sit on top of it.

He left the door open. The
school had rules governing all areas of conduct, and were very strict about the
interaction between male and female students, but Kara thought he would have
left the door open anyway so that no one would get the wrong idea about what
was or wasn't going on behind closed doors.

Not that she would have minded a
little time behind closed doors. But that was what late night walks were for.

"Happy New Year," she
said.

Hachiro gave her a very formal
bow, but she knew that now he was overdoing it for effect. "Happy New
Year," he said in English.

"I'm sorry I didn't wait
for you to call, but I have news and I really wanted to share."

Hachiro sat on his bed, looking
more than ever like a giant bear. The bed was too small for him. "What
news?"

"Well, there's a little
bad, but also some good. Which do you want first?"

His smile faded and she saw a
trace of that uneasiness and exhaustion again. "Bad first, please."

"Don't worry, it's not that
bad," she said, swinging her legs where they hung over the edge of the
desk. "At the end of this term, my father and I are going home —"

Hachiro glanced downward,
disappointment etched into his face.

" — for two weeks. And
then we'll be back for senior year."

He laughed out loud. "You're
staying?"

Kara nodded. "Staying."

Hachiro got up and went to her,
picked her up off the desk and swung her around. When he set her down, she felt
like she was still flying. He brushed a lock of her blond hair away from her
face and traced his fingers along the cheek and the curve of her jaw. Kara
swallowed hard, staring into his eyes, and for several long seconds she was
speechless, despite a thousand unsaid things that blossomed in her heart.

He kissed her again, not nearly
as gentle as before, and they only stopped to breathe.

With a quick knock on the open
door, Ren stepped into the room. "Hachiro, can I borrow —" he
began, halting abruptly when he saw them and covering his eyes. "Ahhh, I'm
blind."

Kara and Hachiro both laughed.

"What do you need?"
Hachiro asked.

Ren shook his head, long
bronze-dyed hair falling across his eyes. "Nothing. Go back to what you
were doing. I'll come back later."

Before either of them could
argue or ask him to say, he darted off down the hall. Kara hugged Hachiro
again, but as she did she found herself looking around the room, realizing that
something was out of place. Or, rather, not at all out of place. Hachiro's
suitcase had already been stowed away, whatever clothes he had brought home
already integrated back into his school wardrobe. Even his books for the new
term were organized on his desk.

A little tremor of
disappointment went through her as she stepped back from him.

"You've been home for
hours."

Hachiro's happiness fell away
like a mask and she saw again the sadness that weighed on him. He seemed
exhausted by it.

"Since last night,
actually," he confessed.

Her heart sank. Part of her mind
immediately started making excuses for him, mostly to make herself feel better,
but the hurt was too much.

"What? You didn't . . . why
didn't you tell me? Or come see me?"

"I meant to," he said.
"I came back on the train. I wanted to surprise you, but something
happened on the train and I've been trying to make sense of it, trying to
figure out if I really saw what I think I saw."

Kara felt a chill dance along
her spine. "What do you think you saw?"

Hachiro looked away from her,
out at the darkness beyond his window. When he looked back, his face had gone
pale.

"Jiro's ghost."

Her breath caught in her throat.
Jiro's ghost. Oh, my God.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm not sure of anything,"
he said. "Once I would have said it was impossible, but —"

"But 'impossible' doesn't
mean much anymore," Kara finished for him.

"What do you think it
means?" Hachiro asked. "Do you think it's just . . . I don't know,
symptoms of the curse? That we've brushed up against so much of the
supernatural that we're more aware of it now? Or do you think it's something
else, that something else has come to try to finish what Kyuketsuki and the
Hannya started?"

Kara shook her head. "I don't
know. But we've got to keep our eyes open. We have to be on guard."

"I'm always on guard these
days."

He took her hand, then, and she
stepped into his embrace, relishing his warmth and strength and how safe she
felt in his arms. But she knew it was an illusion.

As long as the curse remained in
place, they were never really safe.

By Saturday morning, Kara's
schoolwork was already suffering. She sat in the back of 2-C while her homeroom
teacher, the gray-eyed Mr. Sato, droned on about the drop-off in attentiveness —
and thus test scores — that many students showed during winter term. She
knew she ought to be paying attention, since he might as well have been talking
specifically about her, but his voice was such a monotone that it lulled her
into a stupor.

For the past few days, she had
been able to think of nothing but Jiro's ghost, and what it might mean. She
felt uneasy most of the time, an awful paranoia creeping up on her in quiet
moments. Hachiro had been unnerved at first, but with every hour that passed he
seemed less and less sure of what he had really seen, and now he acted almost
embarrassed by his ghost sighting. Kara had not witnessed it herself, so there
was no way she could know for certain what he had seen, but she had a hard time
thinking the apparition had been nothing but Hachiro's imagination, and he
couldn't claim that it had been some other boy who looked like Jiro, since the
kid had been barefoot . . . on a train . . . in the middle of winter.

So either Hachiro had
hallucinated, or he had seen a ghost. And after what they had all experienced
over the course of the school year, the supernatural explanation seemed more
than likely.

Though Hachiro had been
reluctant to talk about it any further, Kara had insisted they tell Miho,
Sakura, and Ren. If this were indeed a sign of new supernatural activity, they
had a right to know. They had discussed whether to mention it to Kara's father
and Miss Aritomo — and by extension, to Principal Yamato and the police —
but decided against it for the moment. If anything else happened, they would
report it right away, but Hachiro had sensed no menace in the apparition. He
had thought it seemed sad, but not evil, and in the days that had followed none
of them had seen anything remotely out of the ordinary. In the past few days,
the strangest thing any of them had seen was the bright orange tie that Mr.
Sato had worn on Wednesday. Kara took some comfort in that, but still, the idea
that ghosts were wandering around Miyazu City disturbed her.

People were always reporting
ghost sightings. All over the world there were places that were believed to be
haunted. Japanese folklore was rife with ghost stories. And despite what Kara
felt, they could not deny the possibility that Hachiro really
had
been
dreaming or half-awake and imagining things. It might not have anything to do
with Kyuketsuki's curse.

Still, much of the excitement
and enthusiasm they had all had about the new year had vanished. Kara knew that
she had not been alone in thinking of the new term and the change in the
calendar as a fresh start, but they would not escape the curse so easily. Such
thoughts troubled her so much that she had been finding it very difficult to
pay attention in class, so much so that even her father had noticed. Her
homework had been rife with errors and she had started having difficulty
retaining what she had read. All of that, and they had only been in school for
a few days.

She wished she hadn't had to
come into school today. It had been hard for her to get used to having classes
on Saturday mornings. This weekend she really needed a break, and something fun
to distract her. But at least she would have this afternoon and all of Sunday
off. Maybe she could talk her friends into going to a movie tonight. She had
already decided to try to persuade them to go tubing. She doubted her father
would have time to take them up to one of the mountains tomorrow, but the
weather reports had been hinting at a potential snowstorm. If it arrived
quickly enough, they could go someplace nearby. She knew a hill not far from
the school that seemed promising.

Mr. Sato finished his lecture
and glanced at the clock. Soon the bell would ring to signal the end of
homeroom period and the teachers would all move to their first classes of the
day. That was one thing Kara loved about school in Japan. It made so much more
sense for the teachers to be nomads, roving from room to room for each class,
instead of sending hundreds of students herding into the halls between each
period.

"Miho," Sato-sensei
said. "I believe you have responsibility for the
toban
today."

Hearing her friend's name, Kara
perked up for the first time this morning. Miho's shyness had lessened over the
course of the school year, but as she stood up and went to the front of the
classroom she looked like she wanted to crawl out of her skin. No matter how
much she might come out of her shell, Miho did not like to be in the spotlight.

She took a clipboard from Mr.
Sato and turned to face the class, adjusting her glasses. Her long hair fell in
a curtain across her face and she did not push it away, choosing instead to
hide behind it as if it were a veil. Toban was a rotating duty schedule for the
homeroom. Every day a different student took attendance and made announcements
and every time it was Miho's turn, she got stage fright, which was funny
because she loved Noh theatre so much. If she had the opportunity to be on an
actual stage, portraying someone else, she would probably be fine. It was only
being herself that made her self-conscious.

One by one, she called the names
of their classmates. When she got to Kara, she glanced up and Kara gave her a
little wave, which made Miho smile.

After attendance, she flipped a
page to announcements and immediately her eyes lit up. Then Miho grinned.

"This year's
ensoku
will be on Monday," she announced. "The entire school will be visiting
Takigami Mountain Observatory. Appropriate footwear and winter clothing are
recommended."