A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series) (8 page)

Ren nodded. "I heard it. I
don't know what I heard, but something. Someone."

"Who else would it be?"
Hachiro snapped, but he understood. The cry he had heard might have belonged to
an animal. He'd been unable to make out any words, only a voice, calling out.

He stepped off the trail,
glancing back at Ren, who swore and set off after him. The two boys crashed
through the trees, snapping branches and tramping in snow that seemed somehow
deeper. The pines brushed against them as though attempting to hold them back
and Hachiro tore his coat on the sharp hook of a thin, bare branch, but they
rushed onward, shouting Sora's name.

That cry came twice more, still
wordless, and Hachiro faltered slightly at the realization that it sounded more
like pain than panic. But further shouts received no reply and soon they began
to slow and finally came to a halt.

"Sora!" Hachiro roared
one last time in frustration.

Regret filled him, weighing him
down, and he turned to Ren, whose eyes revealed that he had come to the same
decision that Hachiro had.

"We have to go back,"
Hachiro said.

Ren nodded. "I agree. That
might've been him, or it could've been a bird. Sora might have gone back to
that cliff and used the right path. He might already be with the others in the
clearing. We have no way of knowing."

Hachiro felt sick, but he knew
it was the truth. Sora might have made it back to the group already, but if
not, Mr. Yamato would tell the authorities and they would get a search party
onto the mountain. He and Ren had done all they could do.

"Sora!" he shouted
one, final time. Then, hating the feeling of helplessness that filled him, he
turned to Ren. "Let's go."

Together they made their way
back the way they had come, retracing their steps in the snow, snapping off
more branches, the storm raging even there amongst the trees. Hachiro had taken
half a dozen steps when he looked up and saw a figure standing between twin
pines off to his left.

"Ren, look."

"Sora?" Ren said,
quietly at first, and then louder. "Sora!"

The boys barreled through the
snow, running toward those twin black pines, but when they reached the
snow-dusted figure they were brought up short. Hachiro tried to halt but his
left boot slid out from under him and he fell, tumbling in several inches of
fresh snow.

Ren had started to pray.

Hachiro rolled to his knees,
staring up in disbelief at the statue, there in the midst of the woods and the
storm. Only it wasn't a statue. Somehow, in the short span of time since they
had seen him last, Sora had frozen to death, his entire body covered in a coat
of glistening ice and frosted with snow.

"How is this possible?"
Hachiro whispered, though the wind stole his voice so that even he could not
hear his own words.

And yet he received an answer.

"All things,"
said a voice in his ear, a cold breeze that carried words, as though the wind
itself were speaking to him.
"All things are possible."

Ren spun around in terror, back
to one of the pine trees, gazing about wide-eyed for the source of the whispery,
insinuating voice. Hachiro watched him with a fresh jolt of fear. Ren had heard
it, too. It had not been his imagination, nor was it the voice of some ghost. Something
was here with them.

"Show yourself!" he
cried.

And it did. Gusts of wind came
together, spinning the snow into a white, swirling vortex. Hachiro and Ren
stared as the snow began to sculpt itself into a figure, and when at last the
wind subsided for a moment, the snow drifting lazily in the lull, neither of
them could speak.

She floated atop the snow,
leaving no impression. Hachiro could barely breathe. In all of his life he had
never seen a woman so beautiful. She wore a white kimono, her long hair
matching its color, as though both were made of the snow itself.

"I know this story,"
Ren whispered, stepping up beside him. "Hachiro, run!"

They turned to bolt but the wind
blew up so hard that it knocked them both off of their feet, tossing them into
the snow. Hachiro struck the trunk of a bare, skeletal tree. He started to
rise, saw Ren doing the same, and then they both glanced up at the Woman in
White.

Hachiro stared into her eyes,
inhumanly black and bottomless, like holes torn in the fabric of the world. His
heart filled with such terror that he could not move. Her gaze alone had frozen
him with fear.

And then she smiled, her teeth
sharpened pearls.

By the time they had reached the
observatory and started down the long trail to where the bus waited in Takigami
Park below, the intensity of the storm had begun to wane. The snow slowed and
the wind began to relent at last. By the time they were halfway down, the
mountainside and the park below had been transformed into an idyllic winter
scene. Any other day it would have been beautiful. The heart of the storm had
come and gone, and the aftermath was white silence. But until she knew Hachiro
and the others were safe, Kara could see only menace in the snow.

Her father walked beside her,
grabbing her arm when she stumbled but otherwise not trying to hard to protect
her. He didn't baby her, and Kara felt grateful for that. She wondered about
frostbite, but until they reached the heated bus there was nothing any of them
could do for themselves or for each other. They were in this together and her
father knew that.

Miho and Sakura walked ahead of
them, accompanied by Miss Aritomo and two other teachers who had been
chaperoning the ensoku. The roommates huddled together, trying to share a
modicum of body heat as they hurried down the mountain. From time to time Miss
Aritomo glanced back at Kara and her father, worry etched into her face.

They talked very little, focused
on their descent and conserving energy. Kara's legs had started to feel like
lead weights. She felt strangely sleepy, and soon the white silence around her
became a kind of dreamlike blur.

She trudged downward, one foot
in front of the other, and the veil of snow thinned even more, so that soon she
could make out the bus waiting below. The others had already departed, heading
back to Monju-no-Chie school. Yet now she slowed a little, staggering to a
stop, seeing the bus as the enemy.

"Kara, what's wrong?"
her father asked.

In his eyes she saw all of the
fear for her that he had been keeping bottled up during their trek. He must
have been half-frozen himself, but he took her arm to steady her and seemed
about to pick her up into his arms, as though to carry her the rest of the way
down the mountain. Love for him filled her up, but it could not drive away the
terrible, icy certainty that had spread through her.

"I can't leave without
Hachiro," she said.

Miss Aritomo and the others had
halted as well and Kara saw Miho and Sakura staring back at her in concern,
though their teeth chattered and their lips had turned blue.

"Go on, Yuuka!" Kara's
father called. "We'll be right there."

Miss Aritomo nodded and
reluctantly got the rest of them moving again. Kara's father held on to her,
forced her to meet his gaze.

"What are you doing, honey?
The exposure you've already suffered could be dangerous. We've got to get —"

Kara searched his eyes, frantic
and filled with growing desperation. "Dad, I can't. I just . . . I can't
leave without him. I look down at that bus and all I can think — I can't
get it out of my mind — is that if I get on board, if I let them close
the doors behind me, then I'll never see him again. He's going to die up there."

Her father held her face in his
hands, his gloves rimed with half-melted snow. "No, he's not. They're
going to find him, Kara. And it will do him no good if you end up losing
fingers or toes from frostbite. The storm is already starting to slow and there'll
be a couple of hours of daylight left for people to search . . . people who are
better equipped and prepared for the elements than we are."

She took a deep breath, taking
that in, and stared at the bus waiting ominously below before meeting her
father's gaze once again.

"How does something like
this happen?" she asked. "What Mr. Yamato said about the forecast . .
. I mean, it was nothing, not much more than flurries at first, and then . .
."

Overwhelmed, Kara could not
finish the sentence.

"A squall," her father
said. He took her by the arm and guided her down the trail, getting her walking
again. "I've read about freak weather before. It happens. Like 'thunder
snow' and things like that. When weather fronts collide the weather is always
wild."

As he spoke, police cars began
to pull into the parking lot of Takigami Park below, their lights spinning,
reflecting off of the snow. They were followed by an ambulance and two SUVs. When
Kara saw police officers and other people start to pile out of the vehicles,
relief swept over her. The snow
was
subsiding. Mr. Sato and Mr. Yamato
were still up there, and soon the search would expand. There might not be more
than a couple of hours before dark, but maybe that would be enough. It was
possible that they had already found Hachiro and the other boys and that none
of this would turn out to be necessary.

She turned to say as much to her
father, and saw Sora standing beyond him, perhaps fifty feet from the path. He
stood amidst a copse of cherry trees, their bare branches interwoven like a
spider's web. His red jacket had turned pale, bleached of color the same way
the winter storm had turned the whole world gray, but Kara could see him
clearly enough.

"Oh, my God," she
said, a laugh bubbling out of her.

"What is it?" her
father asked.

But Kara started running, boots
sinking into four inches of fresh snow. A grin spread across her face and she
glanced past Sora, searching for Hachiro and Ren, putting it all together in an
instant — they must have found some other path that led them to a place
where they could see the bus waiting in Takigami Park and started down toward
it.

"Sora!"

"Kara, wait!" her
father called.

She glanced back at him for only
an instant, but when she looked toward the cherry grove again, Sora had
vanished. There were only the bare trees and contorted interweaving of
branches.

All of the air went out of her
in a single breath and she faltered, staggering to a stop. Suddenly she felt
more exhausted than ever. Falling to her knees in the snow, she felt all of her
fear and worry overflowing, rushing out of her. Somehow it became a laugh, even
as tears began to spill down her cheeks.

She heard footsteps crunching in
the snow and a gentle hand on her shoulder.

"Kara?" her father
ventured, so softly.

She wiped at her eyes and looked
up at him. "I saw Sora. He was right over there."

But there was nowhere around
those bare trees where anyone could have hidden themselves — even if Sora
had some reason to do so — and they were close enough now to see one
additional detail that filled the hollow place inside Kara with dread and
grief. There were no footprints in the snow beneath the cherry trees.

"Did you see him?" she
asked.

"I was watching you,"
her father said. "I'm sorry."

Kara turned to see Sakura and
Miho approaching them. Miss Aritomo and the other teachers waited back on the
path, watching curiously.

"You saw Sora?"

Kara couldn't answer. She
swallowed hard. All she could think of in that moment was the story Hachiro had
told her about seeing Jiro's barefoot ghost on the train into Miyazu Station.

"Hey," Miho whispered,
kneeling beside her in the snow, neither of them paying any attention to the
dampness soaking through the knees of their pants — they couldn't feel it
anymore.

"I think I saw him, too. Just
for a second," Miho went on.

Kara stared up at her, then
glanced at Sakura and her father. "He's dead."

"You don't know that,"
her father said quickly, brows sternly knitted.

But she did. What she had seen
could only have been a ghost. She bit her lip, took Miho's hand, and the two of
them stood. They exchanged silent glances with Sakura and then, as one, the
three girls started back toward the path.

"Come on, Dad. I'm
freezing."

Her father followed, but she saw
him glancing back at the cherry grove, although there was no longer anything
there to see.

All through the rest of the walk
down to Takigami Park, where they boarded the bus, Kara felt torn by warring
emotions. She grieved for Sora, whom she'd liked very much, but she also
nurtured a flickering, guilty hope that Hachiro and Ren would be all right. She
had not seen their ghosts, after all, only Sora's.

On the bus, she sat with her
father. Miho and Sakura had each other, so Kara did not feel like she was abandoning
them. Miss Aritomo busied herself with the grim business of making sure there
weren't any other students unaccounted for and then got off the bus to talk
quietly with a police officer for several minutes. When she boarded again, she
sat behind the driver and told him to take them home.

Kara turned to look up at her
father. "We can't leave them up there."

"We aren't. I promise you,
honey. The police are heading up onto the mountain now with a bunch of
volunteers, and more on the way. But my first responsibility is to you. Let's
get you into something warm and dry, and by then, the boys will be down off
that mountain."

Not
all
, she
thought.

As the bus rattled out of the
parking lot and back toward school, feeling began to return to her feet and her
body started to warm up at last, but inside she felt more numb than ever. She
huddled against her father, taking comfort from the solidity of his presence. He
spoke to her with quiet strength that soothed her far more than the words he
chose. Any other day she would have been embarrassed at such a display, a girl
her age being so dependent upon her father, especially in Japan. But she could
not bring herself to care.