Eight Million Gods-eARC (15 page)

Chevalier tucked the wallet into the breast pocket of his suit. “I’ll have our people pull surveillance camera footage, starting with this station.”

Normally he would have already made the call himself.
Kami
couldn’t be photographed, though, not even when they were housed within a human. If the god enshrined in the
katana
was possessing the girl, then not a single security camera in the city would pick her up.

Sato placed his hand on the folding door. The cut fabric melded together, returning to whole. The patina of wear vanished from the door, and the smell of newness flooded the apartment. “It will take me hours to erase all this.”

That was his cue to leave. Sato would remove all evidence that a fight had taken place: the broken door, the pool of blood, and the dead body. He would leave the bric-a-brac of Nikki Delany’s life for the police to puzzle over, trying to understand why the American girl had suddenly gone missing.

Annoyingly, Chevalier chose to follow, carrying his stolen Coke. “What’s in the bag?”

The top layer were flyers, so he took one out and handed it to the man. “They’re tour books and flyers from places she’s been. She’s either going to head for friends or go someplace she’s been to before.”

It was a flyer for the Gion Matsuri, the month-long festival in Kyoto. Pictures dominated the glossy advertisement but the information was all in Japanese. How fluent was she? It could be a factor in where she might hide. Her elegant cursive handwriting flowed around a picture of the float procession.

Chevalier read the English words aloud. “In 869, the entire country was struck by a plague. Emperor Seiwa sent an envoy to the Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto to pray to the god Susanoo to end the country’s suffering. He ordered the creation of sixty-six halberds, one for each province, to be erected at the palace’s garden and then had the portable shrines carried by strong young men from the temple to the palace garden. For more than a thousand years, Kyoto has celebrated Gion Matsuri. It is one of the three largest festivals in all of Japan. It infuriates Kenichi’s princess. Why?”

Chevalier raised an eyebrow in question. “Who is Kenichi?”

“I don’t know,” he said truthfully enough.

Down on the street, with Chevalier’s smoke dulling his senses, there was no trace of Nikki’s scent. He wanted away from the man so he could examine in peace the flash drive he had found. He unlocked his car with his remote and slid in behind the wheel.

Chevalier climbed in the passenger side without asking permission.

He gripped the steering wheel tight, trying to hold in his anger. “Aren’t you supposed to be watching Sato?”

“He doesn’t like me crowding him while he works. He’s a good little monster; he’ll stay put.”

The steering wheel was starting to bend, so he eased back on his grip. “You do know that he can make you vanish with a touch of his hand?”

Chevalier laughed. “No, no, he can’t hurt me. That is why I’m his babysitter. I’m impenetrable to such things that go bump in the night. The monsters, they cannot touch me.”

“I can touch you.”

Chevalier laughed. “Ah, yes,
Monsieur Minou,
I am not bulletproof, and you are heavily armed. But you also know that if you go rogue, all the monster hunters will come crashing down on your head. Then who would be left to find Simon,
mon ami?
”

He hated that the answer was no one.

“I am worried—What the hell? Do you have something living in your—” Chevalier suddenly yelped as Misa’s kitten latched all four sets of claws into his ankle. Swearing, Chevalier stomped down hard, and there was a cry of pain.

His gun was out and at Chevalier’s head before the man could stomp a second time. “Hurt it again, and I’ll kill you.”

“Are you fucking insane?”

“Get out.”

After the Frenchman scrambled out of the car, he pulled away quickly. He wanted to put distance between him and the desire to put a bullet into Chevalier’s brain. At the first light, he reached down and fished the kitten out of the passenger leg well.

It gave a piteous cry as he ran fingertips over it, searching out where it was hurt. Luckily, Chevalier’s aim was off as always. He’d only gotten the kitten’s tail.

“Let this be a lesson. Don’t jump something that is bigger than you.”

His phone rang. That would be Ananth whipping him back into line.

He answered his phone with, “He left Sato unguarded, pushed into my space and, kicked my cat. I didn’t shoot him. I could have shot him, dumped his body, and let everyone think Sato had slipped his leash.”

“I’m giving you a chance. Stop pulling guns on people or I’ll have you put down.”

He clenched down on a growl. The kitten climbed up to his shoulder to rumble counterpoint in his other ear.

“You find anything at the girl’s apartment which could tell us where she’s taking the
katana
?” Ananth asked.

“No.” He had the feeling that it was the other way around. The
katana
was taking Nikki Delany someplace. If the
kami
possessed her too long, though, it would kill her. If all the abandoned pieces of her life told a true story, her death would be sad. “I’ll call you if I find her.”

Nikki sat back in the seat, biting down on a groan. If she was writing the truth, then Scary Cat Dude had her wallet and passport. If.

She still needed to go to her apartment. She needed to see for herself what the truth really was.

12

Erased

She got through Umeda in record time as Atsumori guided her. “How do you know your way around better than me?”

“I am a god and you are not.” Atsumori used her mouth to speak. It was a weirdly uncomfortable feeling, and she decided not to ask any more questions.

She dithered on the corner across from her building, pretending to study the selection of drinks in the vending machine. It was a Coke machine with all the familiar soda logos sporting
kanji
lettering. Her focus, though, was on her balcony. The light was off in her apartment—the last she could clearly remember, it had been on. She didn’t have her keys. If whoever turned off the light also locked the door—Atsumori, the Scary Cat Dude, the police—then she had no way to get in without talking to the landlord. If the landlord wanted to unlock the door herself, there be no way the woman would miss the dead body on the floor.

If it was still on the floor.

Maybe the light bulb had burned out.

She wasn’t accomplishing anything out on the corner. This was the first real concrete proof that what she wrote wasn’t a forgotten news report wrapped in insanity. She had to go and see the truth for herself. The bloody insanity or the clean impossibility. She steeled herself to walk across the street and into her building.

The lobby was empty. A security camera on the elevator fed video to a monitor opposite the elevator’s door. Nikki glanced at the screen as she pushed the call button. The elevator car was up on the ninth floor. Its doors were closing, whoever had gotten off already out of sight.

There was a long pause as the electronics considered possible directions, and then slowly the car started down to the lobby.

“Come on, come on.” Nikki whispered to it, trying to watch both the monitor and the lobby door at the same time.

She was aware of a tension shimmering through her body; Atsumori was readying for a fight. The ritual at Inari’s shrine had apparently eliminated all barriers between them. She felt him merging, with her and she no longer blacked out. It was weirdly uncomfortable—like she suddenly had been made a glove—but she preferred it to losing consciousness.

She wanted to tell him to stay out of her, but she was afraid that she might need him.

The elevator doors opened. A mirror hung on the back wall of the car, probably in an attempt to make the tiny space seem bigger. Her reflection had Atsumori’s fierce brown eyes. She stepped onto the elevator and turned around so she wasn’t facing the mirror. For some odd reason, the security camera hadn’t caught her entering. According to the video monitor, the elevator was empty.

Keeping an eye on the monitor, she stepped closer to the camera and then raised her hand up to cover its lens. The monitor still showed an empty car with the doors standing open.

She smacked the camera lens. “I’m here! Show me!”

The monitor continued to deny her existence as it showed the doors closing.

Had someone looped the video feed? She hit the “Open” button, and the screen showed the doors reopening. No. She just wasn’t
there
according to the monitor or maybe just her perception of the monitor. Which had gone crazy:
her
or the universe?

The frightening truth was that it made more sense for it to be her.

She punched the “6” button and rode up to her floor. The dead body of a man she had killed shouldn’t be comforting, but part of her really hoped that was what she would find in her apartment. It would be there, real and undeniable. If it was gone she would be faced with two possibilities: that there had never been a dead man, or that she had written a true account of some secret organization quietly covering up a murder. The first was so much more logical and reasonable than the second.

She felt like she was racing around and around the question of whether she was crazy. It had always been comforting to run through the symptoms of schizophrenia and not find any of them in herself. The last few days had rattled her confidence. Delusions of being possessed, hearing voices, and believing in secret conspiracies were classic symptoms. She knew that schizophrenic patients could weave a tight fabric of delusions that even a sane person couldn’t unravel because of the interdependent logic. “Invisible aliens controlled people via messages hidden in cellphone signals” was impossible to disprove, since the aliens were invisible and the messages concealed. “Japanese spirits living in swords” wasn’t that far removed from invisible aliens.

Was her very attempt to cling to the claim of sanity proof that she was insane?

The elevator dinged as it stopped on the sixth floor. After a pause, the door rolled open. She stepped out, her footsteps loud in the bare concrete hallway.

At her door, she hesitated. Which did she really want? Dead body or clean room? Proof that she’d been attacked or complete lack of evidence?

Taking a deep breath, she opened the door.

The room held the new
tatami
smell of freshly cut hay. The bathroom door was closed; there was no hole cut through the fabric. The room was cleaner than when she even moved in and certainly the neatest it had ever been while she was living there. Everything was carefully put into place. Her Post-it Notes were all missing, and the wall looked newly painted.

“Damn you,” she whispered.

Fighting to control her anger, she stepped into her apartment and closed the door.

“What is wrong?” Atsumori asked.

“I almost died here. I killed a man. And they erased it all until only the absence of dirt stands as evidence.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know.”

Her keys sat on her table, in full view of the door, beside her purse. Anyone else would have thought she had just stepped out for some harmless errand—like taking out the trash—and just never came back. Whispering curses, she snatched up her purse and rooted through it. The useful clutter of her life—her iPod, packs of tissues, and city maps—was all there. Her passport, driver’s license, and credit cards were all gone.

The Scary Cat Dude had taken them. Somehow, she had to get them back.

13

The Castle

Still shaking with anger, Nikki stripped off her borrowed
yukata
, pulled on underwear, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, quickly packed her suitcase with the rest of her clothes, and then fled. She had planned to go straight to the train station and go to Nara, where Pixii lived. She couldn’t leave, though, until she managed to get back her passport and wallet.

Osaka Castle sat in the heart of the city, a pocket left over from the past, surrounded by a nearly half-square-mile park. Around it was a deep moat filled with jade-green water. Wide stone ramps led up to great iron-clad wood gates looking big enough for elephants to pass through. A cobblestone road wound uphill, between walls of massive stones fitted together like the building blocks of a giant child. Beyond a second gate were a dojo and a Shinto shrine and yet a third gate leading to a courtyard at the foot of the towering castle. Dusk was racing toward night. She’d been to the castle enough times to know that the little gift shops and food stands in the stone courtyard were still open but the entire park area would be practically deserted. She hit the stand selling fried octopus dumplings,
takoyaki,
and retreated to the shrine to think.

Who were these bastards? What right did they have to come into her apartment and erase all evidence that she had fought for her life against a supernatural monster? Okay, maybe it was a good thing that they’d taken away the body. A dead raccoon dog in a business suit would have been hard to explain to the landlord.

Why did the
tanuki
attack her?

In her novel, Harada worked for a
yakuza
crime boss. Harada had heard about the shrine fire, gone to Gregory Winston’s apartment to collect the
katana
, and lost his temper when Gregory told him that he didn’t currently have the sword. How did Harada end up at her apartment? Had he followed her from the train station? No, he’d come disguised as Tanaka, so he must have known the detective had questioned her. It suggested that the
yakuza
had access the police records but not necessarily cooperation, or Tanaka would have come himself.

When had Harada taken over Tanaka’s identity?

It was possible that the person that arrested her had been Harada all along. Once she considered the possibility, though, it seemed more likely that she had been questioned originally by the real Tanaka. Harada would never have taken her to the police station in the first place.

“What’s wrong?” Atsumori interrupted her thoughts.

She blinked, and realized she was sitting with a
takoyaki
halfway to her mouth. “Huh?”