Storm (21 page)

“Yeah,” I said, my shoulder throbbing like fire where it had hit the ground. “Although I’m pretty sure I’ll have a huge bruise on my arm tomorrow. And I skinned my knee.”

He grabbed my hand and pulled me up.

We’d made it—the inner shrine of Naiku. Dull orange floodlights lit up the two shrines inside the fence, the larger one just in front of us, the other next to a large empty square of dirt. “They rebuild the shrine every twenty years,” Tomo murmured as we moved forward. “Right now it’s on the left. Then they’ll build on the right and destroy the left one.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “It’s Amaterasu’s shrine. They want to keep it new and clean. Or maybe the power builds up after a while.”

Behind us, the kirin nuzzled at the grass. If you didn’t know it was there, you could barely see it, black on black. Even the faint blue glow of the jewels swinging looked like tiny fireflies flitting around.

The shrines looked like tiny Yayoi huts, raised on stilts and built from unpainted wood. Tomo grabbed the railing of the shrine and hoisted himself up over the side. He reached down for me and pulled me up with more strength than I’d expected.

I knew what was happening. It was the power in him growing—the mirror was close.

Tomo gently slid the door of the shrine open. There wasn’t any security or locks to worry about here—the fence was meant to keep everyone out. No one could scale it, they thought. No one except a desperate Kami.

A large relic took up the center of the altar, the object covered by a dark cloth and surrounded by a variety of offerings. A bowl of rice, a silvery baked fish and a small black bowl of sand with two long wands of incense smoldering into the air. It smelled like the incense at Toshogu Shrine in Shizuoka, a mix of strong perfumes and bitter herbs.

“The mirror?” I asked. Tomo’s fingers trembled as he ran them over the black cloth.

“The Yata no Kagami,” he breathed, closing his hand around the softness of the fabric. He pulled it slowly and it slipped from the surface of the mirror, fluttering to the floor.

The back of the Kagami was like the one in my dream, like a large brass shield embossed with strange geometric designs.

Tomo’s eyes widened, his face one of pained shock. I moved around the altar, to see what it was he saw.

I hesitated, unsure what to do.

The mirror’s surface was cracked, a handful of glass shards reflecting a broken Tomo back to him.

“It’s...it’s shattered,” he whispered.

The room flooded with heat and light, and I raised my arm to cover my eyes.

“You shattered it many eons ago,” a voice said. Amaterasu stood at the shrine door, her kimono shining with gold and silver embroidery.

“Okami,” Tomo said, but the figure shook her head.

“Amaterasu is long gone,” she said. “I’m only what’s left of the memory, trapped in the mirror.”

“We came to...to learn the truth,” I said. “The mirror shows the truth, right?”

She smiled sadly. “This is not the Yata no Kagami.”

Tomo breathed in sharply, the air choking in his throat with a strange noise. “I don’t understand.”

“The mirror melted in a fire over a thousand years ago,” she said. “But they reshaped it anew. It holds the same spirit.”

“Is that why it’s broken?” I asked.

Amaterasu raised her hand slowly, pointing toward Tomohiro. “Don’t you remember?” she asked.

He looked pale, his breathing shallow. “I broke it.”

She lowered her arm, her hand disappearing in the folds of her kimono sleeves.

I tilted my head—this was totally confusing. “What?”

“When I was Taira no Kiyomori,” Tomo said. “In my dream. I must have shattered this mirror a hundred times.”

I scrunched up my nose. “But...that was a dream.”

“It was a memory,” Amaterasu said. “The ink that slumbers in him is from Tsukiyomi and from me, the descendent of my son. The memory has descended with him.”

Tomo fell to his knees, pressed down by the weight of the truth. “Then, the reason I dreamed of Taira and Tokugawa...”

“They, too, shared the blood of two
kami
.” She nodded. “The kin of Tsukiyomi and Amaterasu are drawn to each other, generation after generation. The union brings only destruction, and the cycle continues.”

“How do we stop it?” I said.

She looked at me, her gaze as cool as porcelain. “It cannot be stopped.”

But it could. She’d told me in the last dream that it could, if Tomo faced the whole truth of himself.

“Is this everything?” I said. “Is this the complete truth of Tsukiyomi?”

“Isn’t it enough?” she said.

Tomo was on the ground, trembling. All those nightmares he’d had...they were all rooted in truths he’d forgotten, the whispers of “murderer” and “demon” his heritage. Taira had killed countless soldiers in his siege against the imperial throne, as had Tokugawa. Tomo’s history was one written in blood.

But it couldn’t continue. That wasn’t who Tomo was. I wouldn’t let him follow that path.

I shook my head. “It’s not enough,” I said. “It’s just a reflection of the past.”

Amaterasu smiled, her eyes lighting up.

“You have noticed,” she said. “The missing shards.”

“Tell us,” I said. “Please.”

She looked from me to Tomo, and then rested her hand on the top of the mirror.

“You know of the jewel, forged by Tsukiyomi’s tears and shattered by Susanou’s cruelty,” she said. “Made anew by bitter rage. Tsukiyomi saw the world through this warped lens. He thought the world a place of rot and corruption, of filth and putrid distortion. He festered in this belief until his heart became black and twisted.”

“Amaterasu asked Ukemochi to prepare a banquet to change his mind,” I said, remembering. “And instead he killed the host.”

The memory nodded. “When Amaterasu heard what he had done, she knew she must stop him. She longed to protect what the August Ones had made. But she is a being of light—she hated the darkness it brought upon her soul to plot against him.”

Tomo cried out, the sound jolting me out of the story.

I stumbled around the altar to his side. “Tomo?”

“The memory sears his heart,” Amaterasu said.

Tomo hunched over on the floor as he gasped for breath.

Amaterasu clasped her hands in front of her. “The truth is so sharp it cuts. Is it better to stop?”

But we had to know the whole truth to save him. We had to know how to stop Jun.

“Tomo,” I said, wrapping my arms around him. “You’re still you, okay? You’re not Tsukiyomi. You can still fight.”

He nodded with effort, gritting his teeth. “Continue,” he panted. “Please.”

Amaterasu slid her hand along the side of the mirror. “From Tsukiyomi’s tears the Magatama was forged. From his hatred...something else.”

The light in the shrine dimmed, the incense flooding my nose with too strong a smell. The world felt oily; I didn’t like this at all. I didn’t want to know.

But we had to. We had to.

“What was it?” I whispered.

Amaterasu bowed her head. “Yamata no Orochi. The beast of never-ending hunger.”

Once there was a demon so hungry he devoured the world.

“Orochi was Tsukiyomi’s curse on mankind, a hatred so potent it became flesh and blood. No human could withstand it.”

Orochi. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t think why. What was it even supposed to be?

“Susanou had nowhere to dwell but this land. Thrown from the Heavenly Bridge, exiled to the lands below, if Orochi destroyed the world, he would vanish with it. And so he fought the blight of man.”

The ground began to rumble. An earthquake? No...something else. The oily feeling spread across me, like something was spilling outside the shrine. “Tomo?”

The memory of Amaterasu continued. “In the end, hatred gave way to survival. There is nothing more dangerous than a creature whose existence hangs in the balance.”

The world was shaking, black and strange. We had to get out of here. Something was wrong.

“If you want to save yourself, Yuu Tomohiro, retrieve the Kusanagi, and cleave away the loathing of Tsukiyomi.”

The cry of an eagle pierced the shrine, and Amaterasu vanished like a candle snuffed out, only the blackness of night surrounding us.

Tomo collapsed onto the floor, released from the suffering the mirror had put him through. “Tomo,” I said, panic rising in my throat. “We need to go.” I grabbed the black cloth and threw it over the mirror.

He sat up, rubbing his head. Outside, the kirin let out his strange mournful bay. I pulled Tomo toward the door of the shrine and we jumped down from the railing to the ground.

“What is it?” he asked.

The eagle cry shrieked through the air again. In the darkness, the kirin hopped nervously from hoof to hoof, the jewels on its antler gleaming brightly.

From outside the fence, we heard a loud shout.

I froze. “Ishikawa!”

There was no time. We stumbled toward the kirin, Tomo pushing me up first and then pressing his foot through the thin waterfall of ink until the toe of his shoe took hold in the metallic scales. He pulled himself up onto the creature and we were off, galloping in awkward bounds toward the fence. I was in front, but it was Tomo’s drawing, and I hoped to god he was the one steering. The world blurred in front of me, dark and terrifying. The ground rumbled, and the air filled with the sound of rushing wings. What was that noise? I didn’t want to find out.

With a strong push against the ground, the kirin was airborne, the cold night wind rushing past our faces. When it landed this time we were ready for it. I squeezed fistfuls of its mane, the hair sharp like straw between my fingers. The creature stayed upright this time and sprang between the trees, sprinting as it panted in long breaths that rattled its rib cage.

That’s when I realized. The kirin was running for its life.

I looked behind us, the shape of an eagle blotting out the moon. Only it was larger than an eagle—way larger. Its wingspan was the length of two people, its feathers black as night and its eyes gleaming white as it searched the forest for us. It had three sets of sharp talons, and they reached out to try and snare us in the forest maze.

“The Yatagarasu,” Tomo shouted into the wind. The raven of Amaterasu.

“The one you drew was a lot smaller!” I shouted back. I wished I was home with Diane, tucked into my bed.

The bird grasped at us and came away with claws full of tree branches.

“They must have a Kami at the shrine,” Tomo yelled. “A powerful one.”

I looked at the feathers as they oozed ink like blood, the soft golden dust rising from the raven’s back. It was a sketch, no doubt about it.

That’s when I remembered that Ise Jingu had been protected by a member of the imperial family for the entire course of its history. Not just to oversee rituals, I realized, but to keep the mirror safe from other Kami, from anyone who wanted to steal it.

“That’s one hell of an alarm system,” Tomo shouted as the kirin bounded through the trees.

Just as we burst from the cover of forest, the raven circled back toward the shrine. Relief surged through me as it disappeared from view. It was only a guardian, after all, designed to scare off intruding Kami.

The kirin slowed, run to exhaustion. We slid off its back as it knelt on all fours, the lights in the gems dimming. “That thing was huge,” I panted.

Tomo hunched over, his hands on his knees. “If it’s drawn by an Imperial Kami, then the artist would be a close descendant of Amaterasu,” he said between breaths. “Makes sense she’d called a Yatagarasu, but we’re just lucky that Kami has control over her powers.”

Suddenly the kirin stood, its eyes glowing too bright.

My stomach twisted. Here was Tomo’s loss of control, come at last.

The kirin darted into the forest, chasing after the raven.

Tomo’s eyes widened. “No!”

We heard the baying of the kirin as it bounded through the woods, the outraged cries of raven as it turned back.

“Sato,” Tomo said. “He’s still in there!”

Lightning flashed in the sky, and the earth rumbled. Melting feathers of ink caught on the wind, blowing past us and into the city. The raven shrieked in the distance and lifted into the sky, its feathers dripping to the earth as it struggled to fly. Tomo pulled his sketchbook from his bag, his pen in hand, and flipped to the page with the kirin on it. The creature lay on its side, its belly sliced open, metal scales scattered like slippery fish on the ground.

Tomo looked away as he swiped the pen through the drawing. The kirin let out a horrible cry in the forest as the tears gathered in my eyes. The beating of the raven’s wings got quieter as it returned to the shrine, as it, too, melted away, scratched out by its mystery Kami.

Death around every corner. I was so tired of it all.

It needed to end.

We sat in silence in the hotel room, a square paper lantern on the table flickering its light across our faces. We’d laid out the futons, but sat on top of them, thinking over what had happened. Ishikawa hadn’t returned yet, but he’d sent a text to let us know he was okay. He’d seen a couple priests entering the Naiku Shrine, but we hadn’t heard his warnings over the voice of Amaterasu’s memory. The shout we’d heard had been to draw the priests off us, and he said he’d lost them somewhere in the mountains. He’d scaled a tree to look around, and was waiting until things calmed down to make his way back to town. I’d raised my eyebrows at Tomo, who’d run a hand through his hair and grinned.

“Sato’s good at not being seen,” he said. I guess a life of petty crime was paying off in a weird way. “By the way,” he added. “Thank you.”

I stared at him. “For what?”

He pressed his hands into the tatami and shuffled toward me. “For reminding me in the shrine,” he said. “That I’m not Tsukiyomi. That I’m me.”

I tried to laugh. “Of course you’re you. Don’t be stupid.”

“Oi,”
he said, pretending to be annoyed. But we couldn’t shake the fear of what we’d gone through, the truth of what had happened long ago. Tsukiyomi had unleashed a monster into the world, and Susanou and Amaterasu had had no choice but to stop him.

“I’ve heard of Orochi before,” Tomo said.

I shuddered when he mentioned the name. “What is it, exactly? Is it real?”

“According to the mirror, it was. The Great Serpent. It had eight heads and eight tails, and it devoured humans.”

Eight heads and eight tails... I blinked. “Like a hydra?” Now Tomo was confused. “It’s a beast that had multiple heads. Every time one was cut off, two grew in its place.”

“I don’t think it’s like that with Orochi. Anyway, eight heads are enough.”

“So assuming it actually lived at some point, if it’s long dead, why tell us about it?”

“The Kusanagi,” Tomo said.

“What?”

“The last of the Imperial Treasures. The sword was cut from the tail of Orochi.”

“Then we have to go to Nagoya to find the Kusanagi and get the last of the story,” I said. “About what happened after Susanou killed the hydra.”

“It’s obvious,” Tomo said, leaning forward to run his hand along the edge of the lantern. His fingers cast shadows on the walls as he moved them across the light. “Susanou used the sword to stop Tsukiyomi. We’ve known to do that, all along. This is the way to make a Kami go dormant.”

“But it was Amaterasu who stopped Tsukiyomi, wasn’t it? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe they worked together?”

My stomach twisted. It didn’t sound right. It was bad enough to hear Amaterasu say I’d betray Tomo. There was no way I’d go to Jun’s side after all this. “How does this translate into stopping Takahashi?”

Tomo’s hand hesitated on the lamp, the shadows still for a moment. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe Takahashi really can’t take over the world without my help. That’s why he’s still pestering me, why he’s helping us get the treasures. Maybe stopping him is as simple as stopping me. What if all he knows is that Tsukiyomi was killed with the Kusanagi? He said he couldn’t kill me on paper like the others. Maybe he doesn’t know the blade can cleave Kami from human, that we could stop him with it, too.”

“Good point.” A secret like the Kusanagi would definitely have been kept close to the imperial throne. With the threat of Samurai Kami trying to take over, the ability to erase the ink from an enemy would have been the best treasure for Amaterasu to give to Emperor Jimmu.

I wished the adrenaline surge in me would quiet. I was exhausted, but my heart wouldn’t stop racing. I curled my arms around my knees, and then winced, startled by the sudden pain that spread from my right shoulder.

“Oi,”
Tomo said, his voice soft with concern. “You all right?”

“I hurt it when I fell from the kirin,” I said, reaching back to try and touch the muscle. I cringed as the motion sent pain pulsing through me.

“Here,” Tomo said, resting his hands gently on my hips to turn my back to him. I stared at the shadows the flickering lantern cast against the wall as he pressed gently on my shoulder. “The bone doesn’t feel broken,” he said, “but there’s kind of a stain on your shirt. Can I...?” He cleared his throat. “Can I lift it up to check?”

My heart stumbled against my ribs. “Okay.”

“You don’t have to,” he said, his breath a whisper against the back of my neck.

Our shadows moved against the wall. “I know.”

His fingertips pressed against my skin, each of them like a tiny candle flame at the hem of my shirt. He hesitated, then gently pulled the T-shirt up toward my shoulders. His arm held mine out, his grip delicate, like he thought I might break. “You bled,” he said as he tried to move the fabric over the wound. “Let me know if it hurts, okay?” I wanted to be brave, but it stung like crazy. He peeled it slowly, watching me for cues. I squeezed my eyes shut, but didn’t stop him. The shirt lifted away, and he threaded my arm through the sleeve, and then lifted the shirt over my head.

I stared at the shadows on the wall, my knees pulled to my chest where my heart was pounding. I didn’t know what to say, or whether to turn around.

“Wait,” Tomo said, and I stayed still as he padded across the tatami to the bathroom behind us. I heard the water rush into the sink, and then he was back again, dabbing at my shoulder with his handkerchief, damp and lukewarm.

“Is it bad?” I asked.

“Not too bad,” he said, like this didn’t even faze him. Were we all going to pretend that my shirt wasn’t off, that I wasn’t sitting there in my bra? But I was grateful he was trying not to make it a big deal. This was a medical thing, after all. But then why did I want so badly to turn around and hold him?

“It’s not a deep wound, but there are a lot of welts. It looks like you hit a bunch of gravel on the way down.” I shivered as the damp cloth lifted from my shoulder. “It’ll probably leave a huge bruise.”

I groaned. “It feels like it.”

“Just take it easy for a bit,” he said. “I’d skip kendo practice for a couple weeks or you’ll make it worse.” He traced one of the scrapes with his fingertips, and I shivered. “Now we match,” he said. “The marks of a Kami. Well, sort of.”

We sat there for a minute, neither of us talking, his fingertips pressed lightly against my skin. I could hear his breathing, could feel the heat of it against my back.

The pressure built up in my heart like a storm. I couldn’t breathe.

“Let me get you a shirt,” he said then, kindness seeping from every word. “I have an extra packed in my bag.” His fingertips trailed along my back and lifted, leaving emptiness behind.

I turned and grabbed his arm as he stood, pulling him back down toward me. I curled against his chest, wanting to hear his heart, wanting to be surrounded by the warmth of him.

His arms wrapped tightly around me, his fingers trailing carefully away from my aching shoulder. I breathed in the smell of him, the light of the lantern blotted out against his shirt. I wanted to forget the giant raven, the kirin, the Imperial Treasures. I wanted to forget the demon that slumbered inside his blood. I just wanted to be with Tomo, just him and me, to be human and normal, like he’d said to me that day when he’d showed up at school.
If my time is short, I want to spend it with you.

He loosened his grip as I leaned back, looking up toward his face. His eyes gleamed in the lantern light, his bangs fanned across them like a copper veil. “You’re beautiful,” he said, and the words shivered through me like a dream. I reached up with my fingers to push his bangs aside, feathery as a paintbrush. He closed his eyes as I grazed his skin, a response that made my heart well with confidence. I trailed my fingers down his cheek and then down his neck, his skin so warm and tan, so different from mine.

I pressed my lips against his and he stopped holding back, clutching me like he was drowning, desperate for air. His hands pushed me closer as we kissed, as we let go of the adrenaline and the tension and the unsurety that we’d locked inside ourselves.

I reached for the hem of his shirt and slid my hands under, the heat of his skin radiating in waves. He released his arms around me and helped me slide the shirt over his head, his arms stretched upward as I tossed his shirt onto the tatami floor. The lantern light danced off the multitude of scars up and down his arms, the crisscrossing of wounds from sketches gone wrong. I traced my fingers across them and he shuddered, pressing his mouth to mine again. He tasted of sweetness and fire, every touch a jolt that sent me reeling.

We fell against the futons laid out on the floor, the gap between them leaving my back and legs against the softness of the blankets, but my hip jutting against the hard texture of the tatami. It ground against my hip as we kissed each other, as we tried harder to get closer, to shut out everything that wasn’t this moment.

The storm in me rose, but I felt like rain and thunder were crashing everywhere, unpredictable and wild. I didn’t know what to do with this feeling, how far I wanted to go. My brain felt hazy, filled with touch and happiness and want. It told me to give in and let Tomo take over. He’d hold my heart gently in his hand. I trusted him with everything.

His hands twisted into the futon on either side of me as he pressed against me, as he trailed kisses down my neck. My skin flamed where it touched his, like we were one person, like we couldn’t get close enough. Even so, he waited, wanting me to show him how far he could go. It stirred a realization in me that this was real. What I had with Tomo was something worth protecting, something that mattered. But I felt awkward, too. I’d never done this before, and he was asking me to lead.

The sliver of me that was still rational tried to consider what was happening. How much did I want to happen? How far did he want to go? What I wanted had always seemed such an obvious and comfortable boundary in the quiet of my mind. But now here, in the flickering lantern light, when the future was uncertain, when the time we had together could be short—and when the heat of his skin flooded my heart with such fulfillment, with such a feeling of right and truth—now I couldn’t tell anymore. All the boundaries seemed fuzzy and optional, unimportant. Maybe you couldn’t know what was right. Maybe you just fumbled through the dark and hoped for the best.

“Tomo,” I said quietly, my lips on his ear. He made a gentle sound in his throat in response. “Are you sure?”

He lifted his head and looked at me, his eyes gleaming, his hair flopping over as it started to dampen with sweat from the heat of us. “I’m sure,” he said, his voice velvet and breathy and certain. That he wanted to give me everything flooded my heart with craving. “Are you?”

“I’m... I’m not,” I said, hating the sound of my own voice. “I mean, I want to.” God, I wanted to. “But I... It’s just that I had this plan for my life, you know? I know it’s totally stupid, but... I don’t think I’m ready. I want it to be you, but...not yet. Not like this.”

I thought he might say something, like “Plans change,” or “I don’t have much time left,” or something like that. But he didn’t. He closed his eyes, trying to get ahold of his breathing. Had I hurt his feelings? Had I destroyed what could’ve been wonderful?

He opened his eyes, and playfully beeped the end of my nose with his finger. “Sorry,” he said with a grin. “I don’t put out on the first sleepover.”

I stared at him with my mouth open.

“I know you’re disappointed,” he said.

I smacked him in the arm. “You’re such an idiot.”

He laughed, ruffling my hair as he pulled back the edge of the futon. He stumbled across the floor and reached into his bag, tossing me his extra shirt. I hadn’t realized how cold it was in the room until the warmth of his skin wasn’t pressed against mine.

I pulled the shirt on carefully, staring at the way the lantern light flickered across the contour of his chest. “Can we still make out?” I said, sliding in between the layers of futon. The comforter was already warm where we’d rolled against it.

Tomo grinned, sliding in beside me and pulling me into his arms.

The rain started to fall outside, pattering against the rooftops as the lantern on the table burned out. I lost myself in his invisible touches in the dark, in his warmth and soul and humanity.