A Mortal Song (18 page)

With another bout of squirming, I hauled myself onto my knees. My arms were no help behind me, so I nuzzled at the flaps of one of the lower boxes with my chin. A whiff of dust made me cough. I worked open the flaps, but inside there was only a heap of fabric that looked like some sort of costume.

As I turned to the next box, a movement by the window caught my eye. I froze, peering toward it as surreptitiously as I could.

A small brown shape swooped from the window ledge down to the floor beside me. A sparrow. I sank back against the boxes.

“You,” I said. “I’m not sure you should have joined me in here.”

The sparrow cocked its head at me as if it understood. I paused. I’d assumed because I could tell the bird wasn’t kami that it was just a bird. But I knew by now there were many other forces in the world, and I wouldn’t necessarily have recognized all of them. No ordinary bird would have followed us this long, this far.

“What are you?” I asked, leaning closer. “You’re more than a sparrow, aren’t you?”

The air around the sparrow sparked. I flinched backward as a shimmering figure formed in the air over the feathered body.

It was a middle-aged woman, her hair pulled back into a braid that looped at the back of her head, what had once been smile lines around her mouth now tight with worry. She wore a rose-pink dress that ended just below her hips... where all of her ended.

My sparrow friend had been home to a ghost.

The edges of the woman’s body wavered. She must have had just enough energy to make herself visible to me, but not enough to become completely corporeal. She dipped down until her moist eyes were level with mine.

I stared back at her. I’d seen her face before—I was sure of it. Had she been one of the Nagamotos’ friends, or another woman I’d observed in town? Maybe a traveler who’d visited Mt. Fuji? Whoever she was, some kami had guided her spirit into the sparrow when she’d died, through the same process I’d wanted to use with Mr. Nagamoto.

“How do I know you?” I said. The woman motioned with her graceful hands, but I couldn’t follow what she was trying to convey.

If she was a ghost, then she could have been acting as a spy for the others all along. She could be the one who’d told them about Chiyo, about Rin, about the prophecy.

But then, if she was loyal to them, why was she here now, revealing herself to me?

“The ghosts,” I said. “The ones who attacked the mountain. Are you—”

She seemed to realize what I meant before I finished the question. Distress flickered across her face, and she shook her head so vehemently I believed her. Her hands fluttered again, sketching in the air.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Can you speak?”

She opened her mouth. A little cry jolted out of me.

There was nothing left of her tongue but a ragged stump.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

Strangely, the woman smiled, a little wistfully. She held out her arms as if to say,
Does it matter now?
Then she brushed the top of the sparrow’s head with her fingers. The outline of her body faded until it was nothing more than a ghostlight, which glided down into the bird. It stirred and glanced up at me. Leaping onto the edge of the nearest box, it let out a burst of song.

“That’s why the kami gave you a bird,” I said. “So you could sing again.”

Maybe that was why she’d sided with us: gratitude. A kami had been kind to her, and now she was repaying us. How much had she observed of our enemies?

“Have you seen Omori?” I asked. “Do you know what he’s planning?”

The sparrow let out a distressed-sounding squawk and ruffled its feathers. I guessed that was the best answer I was going to get. But my friend might be able to help me in other ways.

“I need to find something to get me out of these ropes,” I said.

As I leaned over another box, the sparrow alighted on one higher up. It levered the flaps open with its body and dove inside, fabric rustling as it poked around. The one I pushed open held only a stack of file folders. I craned my neck, checking for writing on any of the boxes that might identify their contents, and noticed a metallic glint on the other side of the stack.

“Over there,” I said to the sparrow with a jerk of my head. “Can you bring that thing on the floor to me?”

The sparrow fluttered down. It leapt up a moment later and dropped the object on the floor beside me: a small box cutter someone had left behind. Rust spotted the blade, but I wasn’t about to be picky.

“Thank you,” I said. The sparrow darted back to its window ledge perch with a chirp.

I managed to maneuver the box cutter between my hands until I could extend the blade. Then I twisted my fingers to rest it against the ropes. I sawed at them tentatively, and then pressed harder when the blade held. Relief bloomed inside me at the feel of the first strands parting.

My forehead was damp when I finally broke through the first layer of rope. I wriggled my arms until the cord began to unwind, and pulled my hands free. Then I sawed through the cord around my ankles and kicked that away too.

I hurried to Haru, kneeling by him to touch his arm. His skin felt warm, but the air around us was warm too. Blood stained the front of his shirt and was pooled on the floor beneath him. His eyes stayed closed. Only the threadiest of pulses, if it was a pulse, pattered through his wrist against my probing fingers.

I hated to step away from him, but without the ki to heal him, I’d do us both more good out there than in here.

The door opened when I tried it. The hallway beyond was lit with only a faint haze that emanated from behind a door standing slightly ajar near the opposite end. Given the height of the window in the room I’d just left, I guessed I was in a basement. If the ghosts hadn’t moved us from the keep, then Chiyo and Takeo might still be trapped right upstairs.

I crept toward the light, squinting at the shadowy walls, goose bumps crawling over my skin. Could the ghosts make themselves so dim that human eyes couldn’t catch even a hint of their glow? I checked my pockets, but they held only the folded printout of the Kenta Omori article I’d stuffed deep inside. Someone had taken my ofuda, my protective amulet, and the satchel with my bag of salt. Takeo’s short sword was gone too.

If there
were
ghosts in the hall, they made no move to stop me. A dull clanging sound rang out as I neared the ajar door, like metal striking wood. I could see now that the stairwell lay just past it. As I hurried toward that, voices slipped from the lit room, one of which I recognized.

“Would you stop that?”

Keiji
. I halted, my heart thudding.

The clanging stilled, and then started again in slower, more even strokes. “It’s not a bad sword,” a deeper voice said casually. “Not bad at all. Interesting friends you’ve made. You didn’t tell me about this one earlier.”

“I don’t know if Haru Esumi would call me his ‘friend,’ exactly,” Keiji replied. “Anyway, it didn’t seem important.”

He sounded tired and tense, though not as scared as I’d have expected while he was being interrogated by a ghost. I peeked through the gap between the door and its frame.

A fixture on the ceiling flooded the room with artificial light. In the sliver of space I could see, an arm was swinging Haru’s katana against the side of a wooden table. The blade left a nick with each impact. On the table itself lay a single key on a ring. Keiji was out of my view.

The key—was that the one they’d used to lock up Chiyo?

As I eyed it, the figure with the sword shifted in front of the gap. I stiffened.

The skinny young man in his sharp gray suit, collar flipped high under an equally sharp grin, was holding himself completely corporeal. But I knew he was a ghost, because I’d seen that sharp grin and that crimson-streaked hair before. I’d seen him in Mother and Father’s chambers, legless and translucent, directing the charge against the guard who’d fallen while Takeo and I had escaped the palace.

He glanced toward the other end of the room. “It’s my job to decide what’s important, little brother.”

I
clamped
my teeth together to trap my expression of shock. I must have heard wrong. Or the red-haired ghost was only calling Keiji “little brother” to tease him. It wasn’t as if Keiji could have failed to notice his brother was dead.

“Fine,” Keiji said. “But I think we’ve gone over everything now. You could have been clearer about what you were planning before.”

“It still worked out well for us,” the ghost said. “Omori has been impressed by all my inside info—it got me made captain—and what we’ve done here is going to blow him away. I had to keep it under wraps in case things fell through, but a couple of my guys are heading to the mountain to tell him about it now. I just want to make sure I have all the loose ends tied up when we get his instructions for next steps.” He cocked his head, and his smile turned even sharper. “What’s the glum look for, Kei? Haven’t I thanked you enough?”

“I just wish you’d told me what was really going on from the beginning,” Keiji said quietly.

I choked on my breath. I hadn’t misheard. This
was
Keiji’s brother. The brother he looked up to so much, the only person he’d bothered to contact since he’d left home. The one he wanted more than anything to help...

Fragments of our past conversations surfaced in my memory.
A couple years ago he had this, ah, accident. It’s because of you I’m going to get my chance to fix things for him.
And what the ghost had said, just now:
All my inside info. Haven’t I thanked you enough?

I leaned my shoulder against the wall, my legs suddenly weak. We’d assumed a kami trapped on Mt. Fuji had given away the fact that I’d escaped, that the ghosts had learned about Sage Rin and the prophecy from spying on Chiyo’s parents. But the Ikedas hadn’t known we’d be coming to the Imperial Palace instead of Ise. No one had known that except for the handful of kami with us, me, Haru... and Keiji.

The way he’d insisted on joining our group. All those prying questions he’d asked. It seemed so obvious now. He’d been trying to help his brother, yes—help his brother defeat us.

And I’d fallen for his act. I’d let him win me over with his grins, his flattering words. How much had he learned from
me
?

Even as I wondered, my thoughts tripped back to last night at the shrine near Nagoya, to the look on his face when he’d told me I was the most amazing girl he’d ever met, and my heart skipped despite my queasiness. My stupid, fickle human heart.

The voices warbling on in the room before me brought me back to the present. I couldn’t do anything about my past mistakes. All that mattered was how I reacted now. I made myself edge closer to the door.

“There’s nothing special about this Haru?” Keiji’s brother said. “He’s just a regular human kid?”

“As far as I know,” Keiji replied.

My gaze dropped to a pale lump on the floor behind the table. My breath caught. My satchel—and Haru’s too, alongside Takeo’s short sword. Someone had tossed them in a corner. Had the ghosts dared to open the satchels with all that salt inside? I’d stashed extra ofuda in mine. The charms might still be there.

All I needed was one. One, and I could banish Keiji’s brother back to the afterworld while there were no other ghosts around to interfere. Then I could make Keiji tell me where Chiyo and Takeo were. I’d have the key. I could free them.

My mind was still whirling. I pressed my hand to my jaw. If I was going to get across the room in time, I had to think like a kami, act like a kami. Not let my human nature get in the way.

But a kami would have had the power to blast right through, to fend off the ghost while she grabbed the satchel. I wasn’t sure I could even reach the table before Keiji’s brother was on me, and I wouldn’t be able to accomplish much then. I didn’t even know if there
were
ofuda still in my satchel. Doubt melded my feet to the floor.

“And they haven’t said anything else about the powers in this jewel?” Keiji’s brother was saying now.

“No,” Keiji said. “What does it matter?”

“Well, it would have been nice to know sooner about the magic sword—we didn’t expect to be losing people, not for good.”

Losing people for good—what did he mean by that? They’d lost plenty to our ofuda too.

“Still, you’ve done well, Kei,” the young man went on. “Don’t doubt that.”

Keiji’s voice was so low I couldn’t decipher his tone. “Thank you, brother.”

“Why are we back to formalities?” the ghost said. “You know you can call me by my name, conventions be damned. We’re equals.”

“Sorry, Tomoya.”

“Do you remember the first time Uncle heard you calling me ‘Tomo’? That was some epic rage. The man has no sense of priorities. But we never let him stop us.”

He set down the katana on the table. Beside the key. My hands clenched. One way or another, I
had
to get it, to make this right—to make up for believing in Keiji, for losing Chiyo this morning, for all my weaknesses.

I couldn’t get to the key without the ghost interfering. So I needed to get rid of the ghost. So I needed an ofuda.

I could make a new one. Back in the room where I’d woken up—I could tear a few strips off the cardboard boxes. There might be a pen or a pencil lying around, or... or if there wasn’t, I’d prick my finger with the box cutter and write the characters with my own blood.

Before I could move, the ghost spoke again. “I think I’d better see what I can get out of our captives. They might know more they didn’t tell you.”

Chiyo and Takeo—so they
were
still here? I hesitated.

“I’m sure they didn’t know anything I don’t,” Keiji said. “We talked about everything.”

“You shouldn’t assume that,” his brother said. “We can’t trust anyone outside the two of us, Kei. Remember that.”

“But—”

“Come on. It shouldn’t be too difficult to ‘convince’ our human prisoners to talk now.”

My pulse stuttered.
Human
prisoners meant Haru and me. They’d see I’d escaped. Steps were approaching the door in a smooth steady rhythm: the ghost’s feet, still corporeal against the floor.

I didn’t have time to run down the hall. The stairwell was closer—but that would only serve me until they reached the room and saw the scraps of rope I’d left behind.

If I didn’t want them to catch me, I had to use my only advantage: surprise.

I braced myself, my gaze fixed on that satchel beyond the table. I didn’t know if I could do this, but I had to try. As the ghost’s footsteps sounded just behind the door, I threw all my weight against it.

The door slammed into his corporeal form. As he grunted in shock, I was already bolting across the room.

I was less than a stride from the table when a swift kick knocked my legs out from under me.

My elbows jarred against the tabletop as I caught my balance. That minor pain was nothing compared to the sense of failure that pierced through me. But the katana was right there. I wasn’t going down without a fight.

I snatched up the sword and spun around. Keiji’s brother leapt back, just out of reach. Then he pulled a sleek black pistol out of his jacket pocket and aimed it at my face.

I hesitated, my palm sweating against the sword’s grip. He stood between me and the door. There was still the entire table separating me from my satchel. I suspected he could pull the trigger faster than I could lunge—and even if I lunged
at
him, Haru’s katana couldn’t truly hurt someone who was already dead.

Keiji’s shoes scraped the floor somewhere to my left, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off his brother. “Tomo,” he said, his voice strained. Ignoring him, the ghost dipped his head to me in a mockery of a bow.

“Tomoya Mitsuoka at your service,” he said. “So I finally get to meet Miss Sora in the flesh. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

From Keiji. My jaw tightened. Up close, the family resemblance was noticeable. They had the same wide-set eyes and rounded chin. But Tomoya’s face was narrower, his cheekbones more prominent, giving him a slightly malnourished look. A thin scar sliced across the bridge of his nose just below the jagged sweep of his red-streaked hair.

When I didn’t answer, he made a tiny gesture with the gun. “You’ll probably feel more comfortable if I stop pointing this at you. And I’ll stop pointing it at you if you put down the sword.”

“How about you go first?” I suggested. Tomoya’s smile returned.

“Sora,” Keiji tried, closer now. I could almost see him from the corner of my eye. My hand tensed around the sword grip.

“Back off,” I said. “I can use this on a human even more easily than a ghost.”

“You should be nicer to him,” Tomoya said. “If it weren’t for Keiji, you’d be dead, you know.”

The muscles in my hand were aching from the effort to hold the sword steady. “I should appreciate being tricked into walking into a trap, tied up, and thrown in a storage room while my friends are dead or dying?” I said.

“Well, if you don’t want to be here, we could arrange something else.” His eyes skimmed my body. “Omori would definitely approve of you as a specimen.”

Specimen
? “For what?” I asked.

“Oh, you’ll find out. It’s just a few more days until Obon.”

He was smirking at me now, as if there were something funny about the rain ceasing to fall, Mt. Fuji threatening to erupt. I still didn’t understand. He didn’t have to fight us any more than the woman in the sparrow had needed to help me.

“Why are you doing this?” I said. “Why are you helping him? Why hurt the kami at all?”

“Why not?” he said. “What have the kami done for any of us? All those souls they’ve left to the darkness of the afterworld—we’ve got no reason for loyalty. Omori’s already saved more of us than they ever did.”

“Saved you how?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

I didn’t understand, but he didn’t seem interested in explaining. “What about everyone else who’s going to be hurt?” I asked. “You have family, friends, people who are still living. Doesn’t it matter to you what happens to them?”

“That’s exactly why I’m doing this,” Tomoya said, his cocky expression darkening. “For my family.”

“Tomo—” Keiji started again, but I wasn’t interested in what he had to say.

“Doing
what
?” I interrupted. “What’s going to happen during Obon?”

Tomoya shook his head. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”

“And you trust a demon to keep his word?”

“A demon?” he repeated. His eyebrows rose. “Is that what you’re calling Omori? He’s as human as the rest of us.”

In his amusement, his gun hand dipped, just an inch. A slim chance, but better than none at all.

I ducked and thrust out with the katana. The tip of the blade missed Tomoya’s chest as he jerked back. In desperation, I wrenched it to the side with all the strength I had. The back of the blade slammed into his wrist. His hand twitched, and the pistol fell.

As I lashed out with my foot to shove it away, Tomoya came at me, sliding a knife from a sheath hidden in his sleeve. I dodged and kicked at his knee. He followed me, his blade whipping back and forth, his heel ramming into my ankle. Losing my balance, I smacked against the edge of the table. I needed to be around it. I had to get enough of an opening to go for the satchel.

But unlike the ghosts I’d fought before, Tomoya obviously had both training and practice. I barely flinched out of the way of his descending knife. When I struck out with the sword, he deflected the blow with a chuckle. He started backing me away from the table, into the opposite corner. Farther from my goal.

“If I really wanted to hurt you,” he said. “I could wisp away like the ghost I am, where you can’t touch me. But this is more fun.”

I made to dash around him, back toward the table, but he was too fast. He snatched at my forearm and yanked me backward with a
crack
. Pain exploded in my wrist and spiraled up my arm. A voice shouted something, but my heart was pounding too hard for me to process the words. I swung around, tears blurring my vision. My blade clattered against Tomoya’s knife.

I jabbed out with the katana again, and he caught it. His fingers glowing with ki, he clutched the blade and heaved it out of my hand. As I groped after it, he smashed his elbow into the back of my ribs, forcing a gasp from my lungs and knocking me to the floor.

“All right,” he said, lowering his knife to my neck. “That’s enough playing. Now
you
need to answer some questions.”

He’d only just finished speaking when a figure crashed into him, throwing him to the side. I scrambled away, disoriented. A yelp rang out behind me, and a hand grabbed my bad arm with a tug that sent another jolt of pain searing up it. As I swiveled around, Tomoya twisted my broken wrist. A whimper broke from my throat.

But he couldn’t do anything more to me. In a glance, I made out Keiji crouched on the floor beside his brother, his fingers clamped around Tomoya’s knife hand. Blood was seeping down his chin from a nick at the corner of his jaw.

The edges of Tomoya’s body shimmered. He jerked his arm free and shoved Keiji into my way. And I saw the one thing that could save me.

Keiji still had his ofuda. The end of one was poking from his pants pocket. He might not be willing to use it on his brother, but I had no qualms at all.

As Keiji stumbled toward me, I braced myself against the pain in my arm, dodged around him, and snatched the slip of paper. A flash of recognition passed through Tomoya’s fading eyes a moment before I slapped the ofuda against his nearly translucent forehead. He opened his mouth as if to protest, and then his ghostly body vanished. Keiji gave a startled cry.

I bent over, holding the side of the table as the effort of my final offensive caught up with me. My left arm hung limp by my side, my wrist twinging just from the pressure of brushing against my hip. I hadn’t registered the place where Tomoya had hit my ribs before, but now a stinging pain radiated through my abdomen with every breath. The longing rose up inside me to curl up into a ball and rock until my body felt right again.

But I couldn’t.

Keiji had dropped back onto the floor. He reached out, staring at the spot where his brother had been, as if he might feel Tomoya there. “He’s gone,” he started, his voice raw. “You...” Then he glanced at me, and his face went even grayer.