Eight Million Gods-eARC (21 page)

With that in mind, she counted her cash in hand. She had fifty-two thousand yen, or in the neighborhood of six hundred dollars. She could get to Tokyo, but the combined train tickets would probably eat half her money. She should hit an ATM just before she left Osaka. Every yen she could pull out meant a longer time she could go without setting off signal flares.

She wasn’t sure what to do about the
katana
. If she gave the sword to Leo, Shiva would stop looking for her. The
yakuza
wouldn’t, unless Shiva killed them all.

Of course there would still be her mother to worry about. It was sad that of all the scary people chasing after her, her mother frightened her the most.

When Leo searched her apartment, he had suggested that
kami
couldn’t be filmed. The security system at her apartment building hadn’t shown her while Atsumori was merged with her. It seemed to indicate that if she kept the
katana
, she could move invisibly through Japan. Shiva would still be chasing after her, but it might be safer not to give up the sword.

Until they found Simon, though, it was a moot point. As far as anyone could tell, she’d vanished off the face of the Earth.

She was running out of time before Leo returned, and a bath actually seemed like a good idea. Hoping for some privacy, she stuck the
katana
in the closet, behind a set of rolled-up futons. Not that it actually meant that Atsumori couldn’t spy on her, but it made her feel better.

There wasn’t a Western-style shower. The “private” bathing area was an open-air hot tub for five. Like all Japanese baths, there was an area where one sat on a stool and washed using a hand-held shower and bucket. Only after you were clean did you step into the tub. It felt dangerous to be sitting naked among rocks out in the garden, washing her hair. Logically she knew that the garden was constructed so no one could spy on her, but she felt like someone might walk up the garden path at any minute.

Had all the unaccountable bruises faded since they left Osaka? She peered at them, unsure. Under the bandage, the thumb-wide scar was still angry red but looked weeks old. It cut a groove along her rib cage just beneath her breast. The bullet had come frighteningly close to hitting in the heart, but luckily it’d hit bone and deflected.

The water in the grotto was deliciously hot. She had to slowly ease into it, but once immersed, she felt like she was melting in the heat. Despite doing nothing but sit in a car all day, she was exhausted. It was tempting just to nod off in the baking water.

“If you stay in too long, you will faint,” Atsumori murmured in her ear.

She yelped and scrambled out of the grotto, cursing, to pull on the hotel’s
yukata
. “Don’t do that!”

“You looked as if you were going to fall asleep.”

“I would have gotten out before I did.” She pulled the thin cotton tight around her. Apparently tucking his
katana
into the closet wasn’t far enough to give her privacy from the god.

There didn’t seem to be a point to hiding in the bathroom to get dressed. She pulled on clean clothes as quickly as she could. Once she felt decent, she considered her dirty underclothes. Blood stained the left side of her bra and the band of her panties. She considered just throwing them out, but they were her favorite matched set. She realized that her biggest reason for not simply washing them was because Leo would see them drying.

“Oh, grow up,” she muttered as she ran cold water into the sink. “So a boy will see your undies. Big deal. I’m sure he’s seen lots of girls’ undies.”

She added shampoo to the cold water and scrubbed at the bloodstains. Considering she had woken up in the
yukata
from the Inari Shrine and not the shirt and jeans she’d been wearing at the castle, Leo had already seen her undies.

She caught a glimpse of Atsumori out of the corner of her eye as she hung up her panties. He was smirking at her underwear.

“What?” she snapped, embarrassed.

“Why do you have her on your underthings?”

“Her” was Hello Kitty. The bra and panty were a matched set with the iconic cat on them.

“Because I can.” She eyed the underwire for blood. “I never got to pick out my own clothes when I was growing up. I know my mother has excellent taste in clothes, but she only seemed to buy me ugly things. They made me feel worse about myself. It wasn’t until I saw this television show about models to realize why I felt so ugly all the time. These girls would be sitting around in pajamas and their hair up and no make up and they were as ugly as me. The only difference was that they got to put on pretty things and makeup and be beautiful.”

“But why her? Why not beautiful underthings?”

She was slightly surprised by the question until she remembered that Misa had a slight fetish for lacy underwear. The shrine maiden probably unknowingly gave the boy god an education on such things. “Hello Kitty is beautiful by always being herself.” She hung up the bra beside the matching panties. “She is not skinny, does not dye her hair, or wear fancy clothes. All she needs is to be clean, clothes that fit her well, a cute hair bow, and she’s set.”

She suddenly realized that it wasn’t Atsumori that she was seeing out the corner of her eye but Leo. She flinched in surprise and then cursed. “Will you two stop doing that?”

Leo gazed down at his feet in silence for a minute before saying, “The hotel appears safe.” He retreated into the bedroom to pace with grace. He’d brought the kitten in, and it chased him as he strode back and forth. “One of the girls is a minor Sensitive; I’m the only guest that has scared her in the last few weeks. I didn’t find any signs of
tanuki
or other
yokai
.”

“That’s good.” She turned off the bathroom light, cloaking her underwear in darkness.

“Can you try to write more?”

“I tried already.” She remembered then what was in her notebook. With heart thumping hard, she dropped a towel onto the tablet to hide it. She didn’t want him to see it, pick it up, flip through it, and find the scenes with him as a child. She scrambled for another distraction away from the notebook. What were some of her tricks against writer’s block that might work? “Do have all my Post-it Notes?”

“What do you need those for?” He rumbled.

“Being able to see all the elements of my story sometimes helps me see places where I need witnesses.” She held out her hand and twiddled her fingers in what she’d been discovering was a universal “give me” sign.

He huffed but pulled the stack of Post-it Notes from his coat’s breast pocket. He passed all but Simon’s to her. He stood a moment, fingering the turquoise paper like it was a lifeline to his father. And then, reluctantly, added it to the pile in her hand.

She sorted through the scraps of paper and started to stick them to largest blank wall. The hotel room was larger than her tiny studio apartment, so she could spread out her plot tree. The wider separation between the characters made the interconnections more obvious. “These are all my characters. They’re in the story for a reason—I just don’t know why. Your father is part of my story, and I think more than just so I can meet you.”

“Pardon?”

She blushed furiously and focused on sticking up the notes. “I need to find other characters that interact on the same plot thread as your father so I can use them as a witnesses.”

“What do you mean?”

“See this cluster of characters? This is the
katana
branch.” She had up three of the six colors that she knew were definitely linked to the
katana
. “Gregory—who I was calling George—killed Misa in Kyoto to steal the
katana
. Harada killed Gregory in Umeda trying to take the
katana
from him.” She found Natasha’s white notes and added them to the wall. “I find the
katana
and kill Harada in Otemea. If most of those people weren’t dead, I could use one of them to find out about the others. Like I could use Harada to witness Gregory—only they’re both dead, and my writing doesn’t work on dead people.”

She hadn’t completely intertwined the branches in her apartment, so Leo hadn’t grouped the rest of the Osaka characters with the first four. She still wasn’t sure how the next few Post-it Notes were related.

“The thing is, this branch isn’t the whole story, it’s just one little piece of it. All these other characters aren’t tied into the
katana
.” She named the people as their Post-it Notes went up onto the wall, spread far apart to emphasis the lack of connections. “There’s Haru and Nobu, who are eight-year-old twins that live in the Shimogyo Ward of Kyoto. Haru has been picked to be the
Chigo
or celestial child for the Gion Matsuri this year. It means he supposed to ride in the
Naginata-hoko
in the parade, but he’s scared of heights and the float is three stories tall.” She understood his fear completely. “Nobu is going to take his place and has been learning the dance Haru is supposed to do on the float.”

She’d picked yellow for the twins. She put them close to Misa’s pink since they lived in Kyoto, too. She wasn’t sure, though, if they were related in any way. Misa had been excited about the Gion Matsuri, as the month-long festival meant an increase of tourists visiting all the shrines of Kyoto. Misa hadn’t been involved in the parade and the twins hadn’t visited Atsumori’s shrine. With the fire and Misa’s death, the possibility of their stories intertwining was even more remote.

“There’s Chitose; he’s team captain and starting pitcher for Tohoku High School baseball team. They’re going through the regional tournament, trying to get to the National High School Baseball Championship.” Chitose’s color was teal. She put him close to the Osaka branch because the playoffs were held in nearby Kobe.

“And the real crazy outlier, Kayo. She’s a war widow in Hiroshima with her two children and elderly father who repairs watches.” Nikki stuck the pale green at the far edge of the wall. “Her scenes are all in August of 1945, a few days before the atomic bomb is dropped. She lived about a half mile from the Aioi Bridge, which was the allied aiming point. Talk about ‘this will not end well’ written all over a character.”

She waved the remaining Post-it Notes at him. “I’ve got over three dozen characters in all, and so far only me, Greg, Misa, and Harada have intersected.” She shuffled the papers to Simon’s turquoise Post-it Note.

“Here’s your father, in Izushi, and he’s here because . . .?”

She turned to Leo for the answer.

“The Japanese government is building a hydroelectric dam to replace the nuclear power plants damaged in the 2012 tsunami,” he explained. The area is supposed to be geologically stable—well—as stable you get for Japan—but there were several odd landslides that stopped work. They asked Shiva if they could find the underlying problem. Ananth felt that the Japanese were merely covering all the bases. They tend to be much more superstitious than, say, the Germans or the French. Then again, they have good reason. The Inquisition and other witch hunts stamped out much of the abnormal in Europe. Places like the United Kingdoms logged their virgin forests and fought the things that like to live in those dark places long ago. Japanese supported the more Buddhist and Shinto idea of living in harmony. Live and let live.”

Ananth had been the name of Leo’s phone contact. Far as she could tell, he wasn’t a character, but so far she’d gotten all the names wrong. “Who is Ananth?”

“The old man? He’s the Director of Shiva. A bastard of a Hindu with ice water for blood.”

She didn’t have any non-Japanese character beyond herself, Simon and Gregory. Nikki nodded, tucking away the information, as she tried to mesh the real reason for Simon’s visit into what she remembered of her scene. She was going to have to read it again since it had been months since she’d written it. “Shiva didn’t think the threat was real, so they sent your father alone?”

“He’s a Sensitive, not a Talent, and he’s worked with them for nearly two decades, so he’s trusted to travel alone. But yes, normally I work with him as his bodyguard. Simon thought it was a good chance to show that I could work alone and talked Ananth into letting me go solo in Nova Scotia.”

It meant that Leo and Simon were half a world apart when Simon had disappeared. If there was any logic to her ability, then Leo hadn’t started to affect “the story” until he started to investigate the
katana
. Whatever Leo was doing in Nova Scotia had nothing to do with Simon’s disappearance except for the fact he wasn’t guarding over his father. Was Simon’s section simply a way to show Leo’s reason for being in Japan?

Like Leo, Simon had refused to be named. Miriam nicknamed him “the Brit” due to the fact that occasional British phrases would slip into his narrative. Nikki knew that he worked for an international agency named after a Hindu god. The phrase describing Shiva as “the one who kills the forces of darkness” resonated with her. She’d even taken “ThirdEye” as her handle after fleeing New York City—an attribute often associated with Shiva.

She continued to stick Post-it-Notes on the wall, tracking the progress of her characters through their fairly normal lives. Compared to the confusion of the
katana
’s branch, Simon’s was so bare that only three notes marked his arrival and departure from the story. Still, the fact that she had mapped his movements from New York to Osaka to Izushi was more than she would do for a simple witness. He had to be important to the overall story somehow.

What was the common thread?

“This is probably going to take a while,” she told Leo.

17

To Sleep,
Perhaps to Dream

Leo left her considering her colorful plot tree, trying to sketch out a story framework around Simon so she could pinpoint him. She took out her laptop and reread his only scene. Simon’s attention had been on his phone call to Leo as he arrived at the construction site. The twelve-hour time difference, the fifteen hours on the airplane, followed by a night’s sleep and a morning riding on a Japanese train—which banned talking on cell phones—meant that they had been out of contact for days. Leo was “out on a job,” and Simon had been worried about his safety. Knowing now that Leo was a “tame monster” for Shiva, she could understand why. Simon started the conversation speaking in code.