Eight Million Gods-eARC (39 page)

There was a flash of lightning outside, lighting the night. She looked out the rain-smeared window. Leo was safe for now. A few hours rest and then what? She needed to fix this somehow. If she didn’t upset Iwanaga and Sato’s plans, her novel would barrel on, taking out every single person she had written about and thousands, if not millions, of others. Finding the spear first might derail Iwanaga, but she didn’t know what she would do with the spear if they found it.

Proving that her friends truly knew her, Pixii returned with ten Campus notebooks, two pens of every color, Post-in Notes in a dozen different colors, four Cokes, and a fistfull of Snickers bars. Nikki woke to find them spread across the foot of her bed like Christmas presents. She fingered the trappings of her hypergraphia with mixed emotions. A divine gift, Atsumori called her ability. It seemed to imply that she was channeling the power of the gods. It felt good to know she wasn’t insane. That she wasn’t helpless.

Yet she wasn’t even sure where to start.

“Okay, it’s a novel. I’ve been doing this all my life. Writer’s Block 101: re-visualize the storyline. Post-it notes or colored pens?” Taking a long swig of Coke, she considered her weapons. “Post-it notes!” She tore open a Snickers and bit savagely down on the candy bar. “Plain yellow only!” She drained the first Coke and picked up a red pen. “Time to channel the divine!”

She quickly wrote a name of a character on the top sheet of the pad, pulled it free, and stuck it to the wall. Gregory—dead. Misa—dead. Harada—dead. Kenichi—fleeing to Tokyo, hopefully—no, he
was
safely in Tokyo. Simon—safe but exhausted. Dozens of names—most of them wrong, but all of them representing real people.

When she was done, she studied the wall, looking for some hidden connections, some clue where the story was going, how to change it, how to stop it.

It still didn’t help.

She paced back and forth, glaring the pieces of paper. She had forgotten Leo. Reluctantly she added him, and then herself, and then even more reluctantly Miriam.

“And me.” Atsumori’s voice made her jump.

She swore softly and added him to the wall. “Wait,” she whispered. She was missing a lot of characters.

Pixii. Chevalier. Sato. Ananth. Williams. Umeko.

She went to add Yamauchi and realized she was running low on plain yellow and used dark blue and black pen for the mountain god. And then she swapped Atsumori to blue too. Inari. Iwanaga. Konohana Sukuya—mistress of the doomed shrine maidens. He that couldn’t be mentioned.

She paused a moment and started to re-sort the yellow notes around the blues. She was with Atsumori. Pixii with Yamauchi. Simon? With Yamauchi. Sato with Iwanaga. Umeko joining together the two goddess sisters.

The twins with Susanoo . . .

She stopped and then slowly backed away from the wall.

She’d put the twins and Susanoo at the center of a hurricane. Everything spiraled in toward the two little boys.

“Oh shit.”

She supposed it could only be expected; the twins had both been in the running to be chosen as the celestial child. In a few hours Haru would cut a rope that stretched across Shijo-dori to start the parade and then ride in the Naginata Hoko. The thousand-year-old float was the center of the entire celebration, and it was believed that it would cleanse the country of evil spirits. The
tanuki
had already checked it out at least once. The girls had narrowly missed being seen by the pack that obviously crawled all over the float looking for . . .

Narrowly missed.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” She dived at the stuff from her wet purse laid out to dry.

“Is that a good
oh
or a bad
oh?
” Pixii mumbled from the bed.

“It’s a bad
oh!”
She had brought Simon’s passport and wallet with her to Kyoto on some off chance that she had to prove to someone in Shiva that she knew what had happened to him. “Possibly a very bad
oh.
”

There was a grunt from the lump that was Miriam.

Nikki had discovered that people were like dominos. If they were too far apart when they fell, then they didn’t influence the path of characters you expected them to impact. If a body were dumped in the woods, it could be months before someone found it. A husband on a business trip wouldn’t realize his wife and children had been butchered until he gots home. A serial killer could choose a victim and stalk her, but a grandmother’s death on the other side of the country could yank her out of danger.

It was one thing for characters to meet if only one of them was in motion; if both were moving, it was like trying figure out when subatomic particles collided.

Simon was very well traveled; there were dozens of stamps showing him entering and leaving countries around the world. At the end was the stamp that showed him entering Japan. Leo said that Simon had disappeared two months ago . . .

Miriam and Pixii came to eye the wall.

“What did you find?” Pixii said.

“Simon landed on June first late in the day.” Nikki waved his passport as proof. “According to the scene I wrote, he waited until the next day to go to Izushi by train, and he didn’t get there until nearly dark. The next morning was when he called Leo from the construction site. It means that he was taken by Iwanaga on June third.”

She took out purple post-it notes and started to number them. “Three.” She slapped it onto the wall slightly above her head. “Iwanaga’s at Izushi’s at dusk.”

“Four.” She put the next one at shoulder level. “She’s in Osaka with Kenichi.”

“Five.” Nikki stuck the note nearly at floor level. “She and Kenichi go to visit her sister in Kirishima Shrine—which is at the foot of Mount Kirishima on the island of Kyushu. Kirishima, which I only know since the silly thing erupted a few years ago, is one of the farthest points south you can get short of Okinawa. It takes her the whole day to get down there by train. I don’t have a scene of this, but Kenichi bitched about it later because she used his money to get them there and back.”

“Six.” It, too, went near floor level. “Her sister gathers together her shrine maidens and tells them that they’re going to Osaka. She gives them a day to get ready. Seven. The shrine maidens head north, taking all day to return to Osaka. Proof: the Shikansen ticket that was in Umeko’s student ID holder.”

Nikki put the purple seven at waist level to indicate travel. She took out one of the orange Post-it Notes and wrote seven on it and put it at eye level. “Also on the seventh is the first event of Gion Matsuri in Kyoto.”

Miriam shook her head. “I still don’t get the—Oh! Oh holy shit!”

“The light goes on,” Pixii said. “But I’m still in the dark.”

“After the seventh, Iwanaga sends out all but one of her shrine maidens to every shrine that she thinks has a remote chance of holding the spear. They’ve had over a month to cross off hundreds of possibilities. They would have started with his shrines and worked down through his kids and anyone with half a chance of maybe holding onto it for him as a favor. But they didn’t find shit.”

Nikki tapped the orange Post-it Note. “Haru is picked to be Chigo, the celestial child for the Naginata Hoko on the seventh. It starts a five-week-long ordeal for him and his twin brother, Nobu. Haru is fitted for clothes and taught what to do in half a dozen ceremonies. He goes through multiple purification rituals. He’s isolated from their mother and sisters. At a certain point he’s not even allowed to touch the ground—he’s carried like a god.”

“The thing is—they’re always in motion. A moving target is difficult to hit. The shrine maidens search all the Kyoto shrines, but they don’t find anything.”

Pixii nodded, seeing her point. “Because the boys are never in the same place they are.”

“Inari probably made sure of it,” Nikki said, remembering how Inari practically flung her at Umeko. He’d dragged Nikki out of the shrine and pointed across the street at the store where Umeko was shopping. How many other times had he influenced her prior to that moment? Was their first meeting really at Inari’s shrine or had the god been manipulating her life longer than that? The biggest weird coincidence had been Officer Yoshida sitting down beside her after being at Gregory’s murder scene and overhearing her talk of George’s murder. Had Inari engineered that collision point?

“We know that the spear isn’t on the Naginata Hoko,” Nikki said. “But the legend says that the float defeats evil spirits as it is paraded through Kyoto. Not before the procession. Not after the procession. During. Assuming that the spear in question is the heavenly bejeweled spear, one has to reason that it will be on that float.”

Miriam gasped. “Haru is the only thing that isn’t on the Naginata Hoko tonight that would be on it tomorrow!”

“Right.”

“Couldn’t it be just the clothes?” Pixii said. “They dress him up like one of those dolls. There’s the gold phoenix crown and the makeup and the entire ceremonial Shinto robes.”

“Or he who can’t be mentioned might have just replaced Haru,” Miriam said. “He had this contest of power with his sister. Each took an item belonging to the other and ‘birthed’ people out of them. She created three women out of his sword, and he formed five men out of her necklace. If that wasn’t freaky weird enough, one of the men was the grandfather of the first emperor.”

Nikki winced and tried to not let that little data point distract her. “I would know if he had replaced one of the boys. Something would have changed in my book. Either I wouldn’t have been able to write Nobu’s point of view or there would be all sorts of foreshadowing that something really weird was going on with Haru.”

“Okay, that’s spooky weird,” Miriam said. “But yeah, Nobu didn’t read any different, and he didn’t notice any change in Haru.”

“And it’s not the clothes,” Nikki said. “If was just the clothes, they’d put them in a box and parade them around.”

“Yes, that’s the Japanese for you,” Pixii said.

Nikki tapped Haru’s name on the wall. “For a thousand years, they’ve gone through the bother of picking a child from some of the oldest and most powerful families in Kyoto. And then they treat them like gods for a month.”

“So—what—he who won’t be mentioned hides it on him?” Pixii guessed. “Where? Why?”

Miriam picked up a pen and notebook. “Couldn’t—couldn’t you just write and find out?”

Nikki considered the pen and paper. “I guess I could.”

Haru’s stomach was full of crazy looping butterflies of fear. It was dawn on a weekday, and the Yasaka Shrine had been completely empty when they entered. The trees had screened off the streets and muffled the noise of the traffic. He found the silence unnerving, like the god had gathered them close and now held them lightly in the palm of his hand. He tried not to be scared when the priest told him to go into the
haiden
and wait alone.

Haru pressed his hands together as if he were holding his cell phone and was texting his twin. He did it in class sometimes, since this year they weren’t in the same room and they weren’t allowed to use their phones in school.

Wish you were born first
, Haru pretended to text his brother.
It’s silly that I get everything because of five minutes. You’re much braver than me. Why was I picked for this? You would have been better at it.

Of course, his brother would text back a collection of
kanji
that was nonsense but made a funny face. Nobu didn’t like to admit that he didn’t know something, so it was the only answer he could give.

Haru moved his fingers on the phantom keypad.
I’m scared.

“There is no reason to be scared,” a man said.

Haru looked up. He hadn’t heard the man enter the worship hall. He was a tall young man in a regal kimono. He settled in front of Haru with the rough ease of a farmer. He had big strong hands and wide shoulders, but his face was as handsome as a model’s. Maybe he was an actor.

“I’m not,” Haru lied.

The man smiled. “That’s good. Tell me, do you know the story of the eight-headed serpent?”

Haru nodded. He’d been carefully coached on how to answer these questions since his name went into the pool of possible celestial children from his neighborhood. “Susanoo was in Izumo when he came across an old man and woman crying over their daughter. When he asked, they told him that they had eight daughters, but all but the youngest had been eaten. Soon a great serpent would come and eat her, too, and there was nothing they could do.”

“Nothing that they could do,” the man whispered. “What an awful thing, to be so helpless. Do you not think?”

Haru had not considered it before. He slowly nodded.

“To lose all your siblings that way. To know that your death is approaching. To hear it move in the darkness. To know it’s coming for you. My beloved still has nightmares of it.”

Haru wasn’t sure what they were talking about anymore. The man had the blackest eyes he’d ever seen. “Eh?”

“When you save someone, you don’t really fully save them. They stay afraid because they were helpless before you arrived, they were helpless while you saved them, and they were helpless after you killed the beast. The only way you can truly save someone is to let them save themselves.”

Somehow this seemed to suggest something awful for him. “What exactly am I saving myself from?”

“Monsters,” the man whispered. “I know that you can see them. Some of them act like people. Wear clothes. Buy smokes. Walk the streets at night. You know they’re real.”

Haru froze.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” the man said gently. “The festival is so all the monsters that cause earthquakes, tsunamis, flood and famine and diseases can be quelled. They want me to do it.”

Haru realized in the depths of those dark eyes, lightning flickered. He looked down and struggled to breathe. This was Susanoo himself right here beside him. Talking to him.

“If I do it,” Susanoo said, “it will solve nothing.”

Haru forgot his fear. “You’re not going to do it? You have to! They say that the

Great East Japan Earthquake and the tsunami were because the festival went wrong that year.”

Susanoo grinned and reached out to tap him on the nose. “You are going to do it.”