A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series) (9 page)

Kara opened her eyes, jostled as
the bus went over a pothole, and was surprised to see the outline of
Monju-no-Chie school through the window. The snow had stopped falling and the
sky had lightened somewhat, though cloud cover still blotted out the sun. Moments
later, they turned into the drive that ran alongside the school and led to the
dormitory beyond.

"Did I fall asleep?"
she asked.

"Maybe for a minute or two,"
her father said.

Fresh anguish filled her. "How
could I do that? Hachiro and Ren are —"

"Kara," he replied,
taking her hand and squeezing it. "Rest is good. You're not going to be
any help to your friends if you're falling apart."

She took a long, shuddery breath
and then nodded. "Okay. You're right."

"Honey . . ."

If any sleep lingered in her,
his tentative, almost secretive tone banished it. "What?"

He glanced around as though to
see who might be listening and when he spoke again, he had lowered his voice. For
a moment she thought he would speak in English, but then she realized that
doing so might draw more attention rather than less.

"What did you see while we
were coming down the mountain?"

Kara understood what her father
was asking her. Once upon a time, she had been afraid to talk to him about the
supernatural things she had encountered since they had moved to Japan, fearful
that he would think she was losing her mind. And for a time, after she had told
him, he had believed she was making up stories as a way to interfere with his
relationship with Miss Aritomo. It had put a wedge between them.

But all that was in the past,
now. Rob Harper had seen things that he could not deny, and nearly paid the
price for that epiphany with his life. Any tension between them had been burned
away by the danger they'd faced together. They were a team now.

None of which meant that he
really wanted to know the answer to the question he'd just asked.

"You know what I saw,"
she whispered.

Something flickered in his eyes,
and then he nodded. "I guess I do."

The bus's brakes screeched to a
halt. When the doors opened, Kara stood up first, stepping into the aisle. Miho
and Sakura had been sitting right behind her and both of them looked as drained
as she felt. Behind her glasses, Miho's eyes were red from crying.

They filed off one by one, the
students gathering in small clusters in the parking lot. All but one of the
other buses had already departed, the last one standing empty just a few yards
away, the driver talking on his cell phone outside the door. He seemed agitated
and Kara noticed that he kept looking at a paint-scraped dent on the side of
the bus, which she assumed was new. The parking lot had not been cleared of
snow, and her feet grew cold again immediately.

"Kara," her father
said. As she turned to him, he pulled her into a tight hug. "We're going
to need to talk about this later, and what it might mean. But right now —"

"I know. You have to help get
everyone situated."

"And then I want to find
out what's going on back at the mountain. If I can't reach Mr. Yamato, I'm sure
someone will know. Hopefully they've found the boys already, but if not, I'm
going to go back there."

Kara looked at the dimming sky.
"Dad, by the time you get there, you might have an hour of daylight left."

The rest of the conversation
went unspoken, and Kara was glad. She did not want to think about the chances
of anyone surviving the night on the mountain.

"Can you stay with Sakura
and Miho for now?" he asked. "I'm sure they have something warm you
could put on. And when the teachers are free to go, Yuuka will come get you and
take you back to the house."

Kara glanced around, surprised
that he was talking about his relationship with Miss Aritomo so openly. "Are
you sure that's —"

"It'll be fine," he
promised. "Go ahead. And make sure your phone is on. If I learn anything
at all, I'll call."

Students had been shuffling past
them, streaming from the parking lot to the dorm. Kara thanked her father, told
him she loved him, and then hurried over to join Sakura and Miho, who had been
waiting for her. Miho's eyes had lost some of their redness and both girls
looked more awake than they had while getting off the bus. Sakura stamped her feet
and Kara looked at them, noticing for the first time that the girl's boots were
soaked through.

"Oh, no. Are you okay?"
she asked.

Sakura glanced down as though
she'd forgotten her feet were even there. "I can't feel them, but I'm
still standing up, so I know they still work."

"Can I stay with you guys
for a while?" Kara asked.

Miho nodded. "Of course. Besides,
I think we all need to talk, don't you?"

Kara swallowed the emotion that
threatened to well up inside of her. She nodded. "Yeah. We do."

The three girls turned and
started up toward the dormitory together. As they approached, Kara noticed that
Mai and Wakana had not entered the dorm but were waiting outside, watching them
approach. Mai wore an expectant look, but Wakana had the most awful haunted
expression in her eyes.

"Someone wants to talk,"
Sakura sniffed. Her tough-girl mask had slipped during the blizzard, but now it
returned.

Kara pushed aside her sour
feelings toward the girls and left the path, trudging through the snow to join
them. Miho and Sakura followed and the five of them faced one another beneath
the tall windows of the dormitory.

"You saw something,"
Kara said, fixing Wakana with a hard look.

Wakana flinched, frowning.
"How did you know? Did you see him too?"

Kara glanced at Mai, whose
arrogance had completely vanished. She looked frightened, just as she had when
they had all faced the Hannya together, and that was good. They might not be
friends, but in sharing the secrets they did, they had become allies, and Mai
tended to be far more ordinary and human when something had scared her.

"Him?" Miho replied.
"You mean Sora?"

Mai frowned. "Sora? No. She
. . ." and then she let the words trail off, glancing at her roommate.
"They didn't see it."

"'It' or 'him?'"
Sakura asked. "Make up your mind."

"See what?" Kara
prodded, her frustration growing. She wanted to be inside, to put on warm, dry
clothes, to find out what had become of Hachiro and Ren. "If you're
talking about ghosts —"

"You did see him!"
Wakana said.

Sakura and Miho started talking
at the same time, still trying to make sense of what Wakana was telling them. Mai
had just said they hadn't seen Sora, and if they had encountered his ghost,
their reaction would have been entirely different. So if not Sora . . .

"Jiro?" she asked,
thinking again of Hachiro's experience on the train.

"Are you just being cruel?"
Mai snapped.

Wakana seemed to wonder the same
thing. She wore a hurt expression as she replied. "Not Jiro. Daisuke. I
saw Daisuke."

Kara stared around at the
others, mind whirling. Jiro, Daisuke, and then Sora. The ghosts of dead boys.

"What the hell is going on
around here?" she asked.

But nobody had an answer.

Kara followed Miho and Sakura
into their dorm room, grateful to be alone with her friends. Mai and Wakana
might be linked to them because of the unnatural events that had unfolded at
Monju-no-Chie School over the past few seasons, but none of them were willing
to pretend that their connection to each other was anything like friendship. Kara
had no interest in joining forces with them to try to figure out what was going
on, and she knew the feeling was mutual.

When she and Miho and Sakura
reached the dorm, the foyer had been full of students who were awaiting pickup
by their parents, most of them discussing the missing boys. Those who knew Kara
and Hachiro were dating had fallen silent and watched her curiously as she
passed, as though they expected her to break down or something. She had
expected the stairs and corridors to be quieter, with most of the boarding
students resting or getting warm, but instead they had walked through a
gauntlet similar to what they had faced downstairs. They were all buzzing with
nervous energy and needed to talk.

When Miho closed the door,
shutting the rest of the world out, Kara let out a long sigh. She knew that she
and her friends needed to talk, but she had no interest in discussing the day —
or the fate of Hachiro and the other boys — with the girls talking behind
their hands in the common area down the hall.

Once they'd all hung their jackets,
Sakura stepped out of her sodden boots and stripped off her pants. Her legs
were pale and dappled with white and red splotches and she rubbed them
vigorously before peeling off the rest of her clothes. In seconds she stood in
only her underpants, entirely unself-conscious about her body.

"I am going directly to
pajamas," she said.

"What about dinner?"
Miho asked, trying not to look at her.

"I can have dinner in my
pajamas."

Miho gave the tiniest shake of
her head to show that she didn't approve. Sakura ignored her, pulling on a
long-sleeved t-shirt and a pair of pajama bottoms covered with some kind of
school symbol that Kara thought came from one of the manga that Sakura loved to
read. She tugged a sweatshirt on over that comfortable ensemble and then turned
to Kara.

"What do you want to wear?"

"Anything soft and dry."

Sakura started tossing clothes
at her — t-shirt, sweatshirt, pajama pants — and she laughed as she
snatched them out of the air. It was good to laugh, but immediately she felt
guilty, knowing the guys were still out there on the mountain.

"Pajamas," Sakura
said, arching an eyebrow at her roommate.

Miho rolled her eyes and turned
away from them. She had been working on her shyness for months, but some things
she could not change. Modest to a fault, she kept her back turned as she
disrobed and quickly pulled on dark green pants and a beige sweater. Her hair
had been made wild by the storm but she brushed it out and put a clip into it.

"You look ready to go on a
date," Sakura said.

"And we look ready for a
nap," Kara added, as she tugged on the borrowed pajama pants.

Sakura flopped onto her bed.
"I would love a nap, almost as much as I would a cigarette."

The dorm rooms were all small. Two
beds, tatami mats, two tiny desks, a small futon, built in closets and a
mirror. Kara folded up her cold, damp clothes and put them in a pile under
Sakura's desk and then settled onto the futon.

Miho slid into the chair at her
desk. "So, are we going to talk about this?"

Sakura lay on her side, legs
pulled up beneath her. "Nap first, talk later?"

Kara frowned at her. "Sakura,
how can you joke? They're still up there! Sora is —"

"You don't know that."

Miho crossed her arms, almost
hugging herself. "What else are we supposed to think? Hachiro saw Jiro's
ghost, Wakana saw Daisuke, and on the mountain, Kara and I both saw . . . we
saw him, but he wasn't there."

A knock came at the door and
they all looked up, but for several seconds, no one made a move to answer it. When
the visitor knocked again and they heard a girl call "hello" from the
other side of the door, Miho rose and opened it to find Reiko, from the
calligraphy club, standing in the hall.

"What's wrong?" Miho
asked.

"Nothing," Reiko said.
"Miss Kaneda asked me to let all of the third floor residents know that
dinner is going to be served an hour early tonight. They want to get something
hot into us, she said."

Kara had thought she wouldn't be
hungry at all — a cup of tea to warm her, perhaps — but at the
prospect of imminent dinner her stomach started to growl.

"Excellent," Miho
replied. "I'm sure a meal will do us all good."

"Thank you," Kara
said.

"Some people are already
downstairs," Reiko added. "I'll see you all down there."

When she left, Miho closed the
door and leaned against it, looking at Kara and Sakura. "Don't think we're
hurrying down to the cafeteria. We need to talk about this."

"I agree," Kara said.

Sakura had not moved from her
fetal position on the bed. She lay there with her eyes open, but did not look
at them when she spoke.

"What are we supposed to
talk about?" she asked. "Okay, there are ghosts in Miyazu City. Maybe
it has something to do with Kyuketsuki's curse and maybe it doesn't. How does
that help the boys?"

A note of despair filled Sakura's
words. Emotion she had been holding back spilled forth and she sat up, looking
from Miho to Kara and back again, eyes pleading. "How do we help them?"

There came yet another knock on
the door.

Sakura glared at it. "Go
away!"

"Sakura? Miho? It's Miss
Aritomo. Is Kara there with you?"

All three girls froze. Kara felt
all of the blood draining from her face and the winter chill that she thought
she had dispelled returned. Her pulse quickened and she jumped up from the
futon and went to open the door.

One look in Miss Aritomo's eyes
and she knew that the teacher brought only pain.

"Yuuka?" Kara
whispered.

Miss Aritomo glanced over her
shoulder and stepped into the room, closing the door behind her. Then she faced
the girls.

"The search has been called
off until morning," Miss Aritomo said. "It is too dark in the woods,
now. If the boys are not conscious, the searchers could walk right by them and
not know. At first light, they will begin again, with as many as four hundred
people combing the mountain for any sign of Hachiro and Ren."

Kara noticed immediately what
the woman had
not
said.

"And Sora?"

Miss Aritomo lowered her gaze a
moment, then looked back up at them, eyes damp. "They found Sora a short
time ago. It seems he wandered off the path and deeper into the woods during
the height of the storm."