Eight Million Gods-eARC (22 page)

“It’s me,” he said. “How’d it go?”

His son’s voice was like a summer thunderstorm, rumbling in the distance, promising violence on the landscape. “It went.”

He relaxed slightly. If the job was over, then his son was home. “Are you okay?”

The reply came too fast, too angry. “I’m fine!”

He waited, scanning the valley below him where bulldozers crawled over freshly torn earth. It would be better if his son confessed freely rather than be forced to report what had happened to make him so angry.

For several minutes there was only the low growl of anger, and then a snarl of “The density estimate was bullshit. One or two? My ass! There were over twenty. I needed to do a lot of scrambling to stay in the clear. I missed a jump.”

His heart stumbled slightly at the news.
The job is over
, he reminded himself,
and he’s home safe
. “Did you report the discrepancy?” What he really wanted to add was “Or did you just chib the blighter who set the density?” He had to stop being the over protective father and let his son stand on his own.

“Yes. Written down and cc’d all the heads.”

“Good boy.”

“What about you?”

“Just got here.” He knew that his son was trying to distract him from asking more questions, which meant he would probably not be happy with the news. “How bad?”

There was a long, unhappy silence and finally, “They’ll let me out of this bed by the end of the week.” And then an unhappier, “Doctor is here. I’ve got to go.”

The conversation with Leo was much more understandable now. The vagueness of the discussion was because Shiva had sent Leo off to kill monsters. Not something you would discuss over a cell phone. The information Leo had been given about the number of monsters had been wrong. He’d barely gotten out alive. Worse, he was in a hospital when his father disappeared, unable to come searching for a week or more.

After the phone call, Simon had gone down into the valley to talk with the construction supervisor. The man had been uncooperative and brushed Simon off first chance he’d gotten. Leo’s father had drifted through the work site, trying to ignore the fact that his son was in a hospital, half a world away. He inspected equipment, made it a point to talk to every worker, and then climbed over the broken landscape.

Like the conversation, everything seemed to be in code. She couldn’t figure out what exactly Simon had been looking for. Since his mind was on Leo, his point of view didn’t include information on why he was there and what he wanted. Nikki had assumed that she could fill in the details later.

What hadn’t she written? There were so many details that would have been clear moments after writing them that she’d probably forgotten now.

There was a slight knock, a female voice murmured something in Japanese, and then the door to the room slid open while Nikki was still trying to come up with some kind of reply. One of the hotel staff members knelt in the doorway and murmured again in fast Japanese.

“
Na—nani
?” Nikki managed to stammer out.

The girl made a cute face as she thought deeply and then said something slowly. Nikki wasn’t sure if she was still speaking Japanese or very mangled and thus unrecognizable English.

Then Atsumori’s presence flowed through her, and her mouth opened and she heard herself say, “Yes, please, put out the futons, thank you.”

At least, that’s what Nikki heard. The girl looked startled and laughed.

“
Katajikenai
,” the girl said in a deep male voice and laughed again. “You sound like a samurai. You must have learnt Japanese from historical movies.” The girl moved to the closet and slid open the door. Inside were two futons and Atsumori’s
katana.

Nikki was beside the girl before she realized that she was moving, and snatched up the
katana
. “Please, do not touch that.”

She retreated out onto the porch, and then, stepping into the wooden sandals, fled into the garden.

She found a gate on the other side of the garden, and without meaning to, she was out into the town. She wasn’t sure if she or Atsumori was running. After the third turn, she was fairly certain it wasn’t her.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” she cried.

They took six more steps and stopped just beyond the
torii
marking the entrance to a small shrine.

“What are you doing?” She caught hold of the base of a
foo
lion statue just beyond the
torii,
trying to anchor herself so he couldn’t drag her away.

“Talking.” Atsumori appeared beside her. “There are things we need to discuss. I am not sure we can trust this half-breed, and certainly it seems as if we’ve been detoured to his needs, not ours.”

“Ours? There are no ‘our’ needs.”

He looked a little stunned and hurt. “We need to find out who ordered my
shintai
stolen.”

“That is your need,” Nikki said.

“Have you forgotten the
tanuki
in your home?”

She was really starting to hate how she’d lost control of her life days ago. “They are after you, not me. If I didn’t have your
shintai,
no one would be trying to kill me.”

“You have been caught up in the flood waters. I wish it were otherwise, but that is how it is. Even if we parted, those seeking me would still hunt you down to discover where you had hidden me. I must stay with you to protect you.”

She swallowed down on “Leo will protect me.” Atsumori was right that she had been trusting Leo more than she should simply because he was one of her characters. She had crawled into his head and read his thoughts. He was the Scary Cat Dude who rescued kittens. He was the poor misunderstood and abused little boy, saved only by the kindness of his now-missing foster father. He was the man who didn’t want to burden his father with how truly wounded he was.

Assuming—dangerously so—that every word she wrote was the truth.

“I do not think we should trust this male of yours,” Atsumori said.

She laughed at the idea that Leo belonged to her. “Noted. But I think finding his father will help you and me.”

“You only have his word that the man who came to this town is the same that saved him from the cage. He has your writings; he can use your truth against you.”

She frowned as she searched her memory. No, not once did the man tied up think of his son as “Leo.” It brought her back to the fact that she knew so little about Leo. “What is an . . .” She struggled with the word that Simon had used. “
Obakemono
?”

Atsumori relaxed slightly, nodding as if he had won some point. “An
obakemono
indicates
yokai
that can shapeshift. There are any number of them. I believe his mother must have been a
bakeneko
.”

“And a
bakeneko
is . . .?”

“If a cat’s tail grows too long, its tail will split in two and the cat will become a
bakeneko
.”

She nearly said “Oh, that’s so stupid” but then remembered whom she was talking to. Silly as it sounded, it probably was true. She took a deep breath as the understanding canted her entire belief system on its side. She was never sure if she believed in God, but somehow confirmation (and long-delayed realization) that there were countless “gods” dancing about Japan and all the attached spiritual system was true . . .

Why was it less intimidating to think she might be insane than maybe every part of the Japan mythology was true? Was insanity more sane than
tanuki
and
bakeneko
?

“Nikki-chan?”

She waved aside his concern. “I’m just coping. Give me a moment.” She took a couple more deep breaths. Maybe it wouldn’t be so overwhelming if she weren’t running from murderous
tanuki
in the company of a god . . . and Leo.

“His mother was a monster? How does that work? I mean—why didn’t she kill and eat his father?”

“
Yokai
can be both good and compassionate or malicious and evil. It has been my experience that
yokai
are drawn to humans that can sense them. It is quite possible this half-breed’s father was what he refers to as a Sensitive. It is not uncommon for a
bakeneko
to take the place of a loved one that has died. They can mate with humans, but their children are
yokai
.”

The scene with Leo in a cage suddenly made more sense. “Oh.” And the one with Miriam. “Oh.”

The girl from the hotel staff had taken the futon mattresses out of the closet and unrolled them so they lay side by side, making one big bed on the
tatami
mat-covered floor. The implied intimacy set Nikki’s heart beating faster.

“No, no, not going to happen.” Nikki grabbed the edge of the right-most futon and dragged it to the corner. Really, what was she thinking, sharing a room with a total stranger? She remembered how Leo’s hand had felt as it brushed over hers during the drive—large, strong, and oh so male—and dragged Leo’s futon to the farthest point away from hers that she could get it.

She stared at the mattresses for several minutes, chewing on her bottom lip. That she didn’t want Leo sleeping near her was entirely too obvious by the futons’ new positions. Should she go with something less blatant? Maybe she should move Leo’s to in front of the door, so it seemed more like she was worried about someone coming into the room undetected. That would appeal to a hero-like guy—right? The porch, though, was more open to attack.

Once she had Leo’s futon out on the porch, it occurred to her that he might not even come back to the room: he knew he had until dawn to find his father still alive. If he’d spent six weeks of fruitless searching, he’d only return to see if she knew anything new about his father. If that was the case, she might be pissing him off by moving his bed for no reason.

She dragged both futons back to the center of the room, inches apart instead of touching, sheets and duvet smoothed back into place. After a minute of staring down at the futons, she laid the
katana
between the two mattresses.

“Okay, find Simon and everything will be good.”

Simon dreamed that he was buried, pinned under rocks and earth, massive and unyielding as a mountain. Water dripped down his checks like cold tears—spilled down his breast like raindrops sliding down glass. He strained to dig himself free, but he was bound tight. He burned with anger toward those who had thrown him down and buried him. He’d get free and show his righteous anger—but no matter how hard he pushed and wriggled, he couldn’t free himself.

Nikki frowned at the page. “Really? That’s it?”

She had written several chapters on one character buried underground before—poor Mary Southland. This was clearly just a nightmare. The dream world was always blurred at the edges, details lost in darkness. She had no smell of earth or feel of the crumbling dirt. She tore the page out and laid it on Leo’s futon. Tucking away the rest of the incriminating notebook, she thought about the scene. Had there been anything that didn’t make the page? No, there was nothing.

She lay in the dark, listening to the night noises. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself to sleep. The last thing she needed was to push herself into exhaustion on top of everything else. The day’s events jumbled through her head. She rolled onto her side and pressed fingertips to the
katana
. “Atsumori?”

“Sleep, Nikki-chan.” For a moment, she felt his fingers twine with hers. “I will watch over you and keep you safe.”

She understood then the comfort of belief. Calm swept over her and carried her off to sleep.

18

Stalking on Paper

Japan had been the land of mini cars, mini fire trucks, mini ambulances, and even mini tractor-trailer trucks, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the bulldozers were half-sized. They did some mysterious shuffling of dirt around a large rip in the steep river valley.

Nikki trailed after Leo as they moved through the construction site, drowning in the smell of mud and diesel and the roar of heavy equipment clanking and beeping loudly. What great fodder for her book, but she wasn’t sure now if she could bear finishing her book for publication. How could she let people enjoy the death of Misa? Besides, there was the small problem that she might not be alive to finish the novel, as her characters usually died.

Leo had returned after dawn, full of angry silence. She got the distinct impression that he was furious at someone, perhaps everyone, maybe just her.

He hadn’t wanted to come to the construction site. It might have been the last place anyone could place his father, but she had written him alive, in a hotel room. She didn’t try to explain her artistic process, mostly because she was no longer sure of anything except for the fact there was very little “artistic” to it. She’d only recently discovered that she could “tweak” a scene by visiting where the story was set. A character walking through a familiar place, mind on some problem (or pursuing a monster) ignored the world around them. During a tweaking session, she could take her time and her own eyes to everything, and yet keep in the character’s mindset.

Between Leo’s furious silence and the roar of the heavy machinery, though, she was starting to get a headache. She was going to have to tune out if she wanted to get in touch with Simon’s thoughts. When they stopped for Leo to talk rapid fire Japanese to yet another yellow helmeted man, Nikki dug through her purse to find her iPod. Earbuds in, volume up high, she retreated into soothing music.

Simon had floundered through the mud—it had been even thicker that day because of a downpour the night before. Simon, though, had left the mud behind as he thought about his angry son, who cared so deeply and yet shielded his heart with fierce defenses. There had been a shift in his attention, away from the treacherous footing.

Swaying in time with the music, Nikki considered the possible directions that Simon could have gone. There were the remains of a road, cut short by the construction’s sprawl, that led upriver, away from the dam site. It matched with Simon’s easy, mindless walking.

Nikki picked her way through the mud to the road. There she took out her notebook and pen.