Eight Million Gods-eARC (18 page)

“That’s just you right now, isn’t it?” Leo asked.

“Huh?” She blinked at him.

“I’m talking to Nikki Delany, right?” Leo said. “Not the
kami
who tried to behead me. “

“Oh! Yeah, I’m just me now. Sorry about the whole head-whacking thing.”

He looked surprised at her word choice, and a slight smile flashed across his face. “It’s—It’s fine. What matters is that you trusted me.” He hesitated before adding in his low, rumbling voice. “I—I need your help.”

A surprisingly Japanese “Eh?” slipped out, one she would have been more pleased with if she wasn’t so confounded. “Me? You’re the one with a gun and can speak Japanese.”

“I’m looking for this man.” Leo took a stack of Post-it Notes out of his breast pocket. The top one was turquoise and read “Shiva? Vishnu? Kali?” She remembered then that he had fixated on that particular plot thread in her apartment. Of course that was back when she thought he was just a character in her novel.

“Do you know where he is?” Leo asked.

There was something very surreal about sitting in room without a single modern fixture in sight, the cicadas drowning out all traffic noise, and considering the whereabouts of a man she hadn’t thought was real.

“The Brit? No,” she said. “I don’t know what happened to him. His storyline just came to a dead end.”

“He was killed?” Grief filled Leo’s dark eyes.

“No. No. His part of the story just—stopped. He was in Izushi and in the middle of a sentence, his scene ended. I’ve never had that happened before.”

“But you don’t think he was killed?”

“Usually if a character is killed or dies, I write it out.”
In full gory detail and then occasionally post it to the Internet.
“I write in third person with occatioal shifts to omniscient, so even after a character dies, the scene can continue. Usually I—I show what the killer does to the body afterwards.”

It was really quite morbid now that she knew they were real people, real deaths, and real bodies.

Leo produced a Campus notebook and a pen, exactly like the ones she bought for herself. He held them out to her. “Can you write more about him? Where he is now? Why he hasn’t called?”

She eyed the paper and pen. It had been unsettling to write about Leo as he searched for her. She didn’t want to write about a real person who was possibly dead. She knew that she wasn’t really responsible for her characters deaths; she fought too many times trying to keep them alive to know that it wasn’t in her control. She didn’t want to write out the words that confirmed the Brit’s death, knowing that he was real. “I—I don’t know.”

He pressed the notebook into her hands and laid the pen on top of it. She stared at it with dismay. There was a little whispering of longing to open up the tablet to the crisp blank paper, click the pen down, smell the ink, and lose herself in writing. The most horrifying part was that she knew sooner or later she would cave in to the desire. It was what kept her from being able to totally convince every doctor who ever treated her that she was sane. She couldn’t stop writing.

But twenty years had given her some control over the need. “I’m not sure if he’s still part of the story. It could have been he was just a witness.”

“What do you mean?”

“Witnesses aren’t fully fleshed characters, because they interact with only a small part of the story. They just observe a plot point that none of the main characters experiences. A witness is an old woman whose goats have been stolen for a ritual sacrifice. A cemetery caretaker that notices a grave has been dug up. A child that was in the graveyard on the wrong night and is killed. They—“She closed her mouth on the words “don’t matter,” because these were real people. Of course they mattered, just not to the story.

“So, sometimes witnesses live and sometimes they die?” He collected all the Post-it Notes with her coded death masks together. He ruffled the stack like a little flipbook, and the expressions stuttered past, making a film of character deaths. Some slow, some sudden, some unexpected, some not. The last face was that of “the Brit.” Like Leo, he been hiding his true identity, and she hadn’t been able to assign him a name. She clipped the pen to the notebook and carefully put them down.

“I can’t just write about any old thing. I’ve tried that for school.” And for her mother and for many, many doctors. “I can’t get much past ‘See Dick and Jane run’ when I’m not focused on a horror story.”

He flinched slightly at the word “horror.”

She dropped her gaze to focus on the pale blue futon cover. The print had small dragonflies scattered few and far apart. She traced one with a finger. “It’s just how I work. When I start a novel, all the characters, no matter how random and scattered they seem, they always connect together to one common story. A horror story, filled with death and monsters and magic.”

“But not all your characters die,” he growled.

She nearly said, “Most of them do,” before she realized both of them were now characters in her story. She clenched the cover tight. “Some of them get out alive.”

Not the ones that stayed and fought to the gory end. The ones that stopped the monster never got out without taking a deadly wound. The characters that survived were usually the ones that never even realized they were in danger. They waltzed into the story, sidestepped danger, and left well before the final fight.

“So Simon might still be alive,” Leo stated.

“Who?”

He gave the Post-it Notes a slight wave to draw her attention back to the square of turquoise-colored paper. “Simon Fowler. He’s the man you were tracking with these.”

“I was?” She still couldn’t quite wrap her brain around the idea that all her characters were real.

“He arrived in Japan two months ago and disappeared. I’ve been looking for him for six weeks. This note is the only clue I’ve found so far that indicates that something happened to him.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to be found.”

Leo shook his head. “He wouldn’t have done that to me. Even if he wanted to vanish, he would have left me some kind of sign.”

“He’s your friend?” she asked cautiously, thinking of the friends she had left clueless in her wake.

“He’s my father.” Then, seeing her confusion, he added reluctantly, “I’m adopted.”

Children fleeing from parents she could fully understand, but would a father hide from his son? Leo was some sort of an assassin and certainly the type of kid you might want to hide from. It reminded her that when she was young, she’d mistaken the word “estranged” as another form of “strangled.”

“Please try,” Leo said.

“If he’s not part of the story anymore, I won’t be able to write anything,” she warned him against disappointment.

“I understand, but I don’t have any thing else to go on.”

She sighed and picked up the pad, opened it, and clicked the pen. With the point hovering over the pristine paper, she considered her character: the Brit. She had written his scene on her flight to Japan in May.

Her hypergraphia had been at full throttle. For once in her life, she had welcomed her disorder because it meant the start of the novel with the tight deadline. Nearly fifteen hours in the air, the flight seemed perfect to wallow in the writing. Somehow she decided that her first character would be on the same plane as her, heading into danger, and thus “the Brit” came into being. She’d written out dozens of pages of handwritten story before it suddenly came to a stop in midsentence. She tried several times during the flight to finish the scene but couldn’t. It literally felt like he’d fallen off the face of the planet.

There had been no indication that the Brit—Simon Fowler—had planned on disappearing. Had she written anything about Leo from his father’s viewpoint? There had been something about an angry storm on the other end of the phone, a person rumbling like thunder over something mildly amusing to Simon. Yes, there had been warm affection mixed with mild exasperation for Leo, but no fear. Simon would have left Leo some sign if something had unexpectedly sent him fleeing.

So where was he now? What was he doing?

The pen dipped, touched the paper, dotting it with black ink. After a minute she raised the pen and lowered it again. A second dot joined the first.

It wasn’t going to work. Simon vanishing had been an inciting incident, pulling Leo to Japan so he could be part of the story that Nikki had entangled herself with when she was arrested for Gregory Winston’s murder. There was no real indication that Simon had anything to do with Nikki’s horror story.

She raised her pen again. A third dot. She needed some way to tie Fowler mentally to her story so whatever weird juju that fueled her ability could trigger. If Leo had come looking for Simon, then surely as the hero, his goal was to find his father. It was important to the plot, she told herself, to know if Simon was alive or not.

* * *

. . . fragile pale dawn shone through an open window. Like always, he was bound and gagged, but this was yet another strange bedroom. He had lost count of the beds and the mornings. Behind him was the odd omnipresent sound that had been in every hotel room: the rattle of stone against wood. As he listened intently, trying yet again to identify the mysterious noise, he heard the mechanical tones of “Toryanse” playing at some distant crosswalk. He was still in Japan but impossible to tell where. He felt impossibly tired and hollow and light. When was the last time he had eaten? He lay helpless, unable to move, as the lyrics played in his head.

Let me pass, let me pass

What is this narrow pathway here?

It’s the narrow pathway of the Tenjin shrine

Please allow me to pass through

Those without good reason shall not pass

To celebrate this child’s seventh birthday

I’ve come to dedicate my offering

Going in may be fine, fine, but returning would be scary

It’s scary but

Let me pass, let me pass

Seventh birthday made him think of his son. Leo had to be going mad with worry. Knowing his boy, he was burning bridges to find him. He wasn’t sure if he wanted him tangling with this crowd. His boy was deadly but he would be getting in over his head.

Simon tested his bindings. Someone knew their knots. He couldn’t move an inch; still, he spent several minutes trying. The distant crosswalk started playing “Toryanse” again, and he found himself thinking of the more sinister second verses.

Let me pass, let me pass

Here is the underworld’s narrow pathway

It’s the narrow pathway of the demon’s shrine

Please allow me to pass through

Those without sacrifice shall not pass

To bury this child at age seven

I’ve come to offer my services

Living may be fine, fine, but going back would be scary

It’s scary but

Let me pass, let me pass
.

He had to get out of this nightmare, but he wasn’t sure how. Every morning had been the same: trussed up like a suckling pig waiting to be roasted and served. The mystery rattle grew louder and faster. There was a small muffled explosion. Sharp stone fragments rained down on the bed, and a sudden cloud of dust drifted through the room. He had run out of . . .

Nikki blinked at the page. It had stopped in midsentence again. Why?

She clicked the pen to retract the point and realized that Leo was leaning against her back so he could read over her shoulder. His body was a strong, solid wall wrapped around hers, filling her awareness with his warm strength. His scent was like expensive musk cologne on the summer wind, light to the point of elusive.

He growled softly in anger as he pressed fingers to the paper. “This tells us nothing.”

“He’s alive.”

“This could have been weeks ago.”

She considered the scene. There was no real time marker, but she had started out wanting to know Simon’s condition now. Currently it was nearly noon, judging by play of the light and shadows. “This takes place tomorrow morning.”

He sighed with relief, his breath warm across the bare skin of her neck. “What else did you not write?”

She chewed on the pen, thinking back over the impressions that hadn’t made it onto paper. “It’s a hotel room with two Western-style beds, not futons on the floor like it would be for a Japanese-style room. The duvet is pulled back so he’s lying on sheets. The curtain wasn’t drawn, but there’s nothing to be seen from the bed, just open sky, not other buildings or mountains.”

“So, on the coast or on the plains.”

She laughed at the kernel of information. “Most of Japan.” She frowned as she searched for more information that she knew but hadn’t included. “He was tied in the traditional bondage method. You know. The jute rope with all the knots. The ones they use for sex?”

“
Kinbaku-bi?
” he rumbled softly into her ear, reminding her how close he was. Then, as if he wasn’t sure he understood her, he translated it. “The beauty of tight binding?”

She blushed and nodded. She saw nothing sexy about being tied up, but she knew it was her own personal demon. She still had nightmares of being “restrained” in hospital beds. She focused on the scene, trying to ignore Leo. The only other impressions she could glean were of the man himself. Simon was frustrated by his helplessness, angry with himself for not being able to escape, and afraid mostly for the son that he knew would come charging after him. She wouldn’t be so brave in his place.

Leo stood, taking his warmth with him. She felt suddenly horribly alone, as if Simon’s desperate isolation had seeped into her. “What else?”

She stared at the paper, trying to glean more. “I can’t tell anything else. Usually the only way I can tell more is to see a photograph of the setting or visit it.”

Leo growled. “If we knew which hotel he was in, we wouldn’t need you to write more.”

“There is that.”

“What about the scene he disappeared in? Could you find out more if you visited Izushi?”

“Maybe,” she said slowly. “I don’t know.”

“Come with me to Izushi. Help me save my father.”