Switchblade Goddess (11 page)

Her fingers tightened over her wound. “I further swear on my own soul that I will in no way hinder Jessie Shimmer while she is in my domain. Nor will I attempt to harm her, her companion Pal, or anyone else of concern to her when we return to the living world.”

She stopped for a moment, staring at me. “However, I do
not
promise I will not harm her or her friends should the opportunity arise after this cursed day is over.”

Well, I sure as hell wasn’t expecting her to declare us BFFs after everything that had happened. This was probably the best I was going to get out of her. I took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s do this.”

A
fter I gathered up the spilled traumas and sealed them back in their jars, I armed myself with my sword and shield and faced Miko, who was still on her knees in the grass.

“Okay, so … how do I enter your domain from here?” I asked.

“Easily enough.”

She put her hands at the base of her neck, right over the indentation where her sternum met her collarbone, and dug her fingers in. Blood spilled as her skin tore, and she quickly worked her nails across her clavicle, then down her sternum, down between her breasts, down her taut belly. As she tore herself open and pulled her skin away, she revealed not red muscle and bone but that utter blackness I’d seen before with my stone eye.

“Step inside.” She held her flayed skin wide as if it were merely a coat, and a gust of bitter wind blew from her core. It seemed to lead to some ancient, frozen depth on a planet so far away from any sun that not so much as a rumor of light ever reached it. The blood dripping down the ragged edges of her skin steamed, froze.

I stared at the icy void within her, feeling my
stomach churn. But this was nothing more than what I’d bargained for. There was no turning back now, no way out but to keep going through with the plan.

“All right.” I took a deep breath, held my sword and shield close, and jumped down inside Miko’s hell.

At first came the spinning disorientation and blindness I’d come to expect, but it was cold, so cold, and my eyes and lungs were burning as if I were floating unprotected in deep space, and I felt as though I might be torn apart, when—

—a sensation like falling onto rotten pond ice, plunging down into dark frigid water. I gripped my sword and shield tightly, couldn’t lose my hold on my only protection here—

I lay in the slagged wreckage, small and weak, my infant voice wailing in pain for the mother who’d expelled me from her dead womb and abandoned me. The metal and brick and charred bones around me were hot with radiation, my flesh burning and healing over and over, the hunger in me far brighter than the sun trying to force its rays through the smoke-dark sky—

No, no, that wasn’t me, that wasn’t my memory. I reached to wipe silver trauma from my face with my shield hand, but I felt no liquid metal, just the dark water I was drowning in. Thrashing for air, I found the cold jagged edge of the ice above me. I swung my sword hand skyward, my weapon still clenched in my shivering fist, and hauled myself up into harsh air. Both my eyes froze shut. Gasping from the cold, I started to crawl across the rough ice toward what I
hoped was shore when I felt the surface give way beneath me—

I could smell the little boy in the crib crammed next to mine. The wet nurse had given me a bottle of watered-down milk, but it soured in my stomach and I spit it all up. I felt so hungry and empty, but none of the exhausted orphanage staff paid any attention to our wails after the lights were out
.

I didn’t know what I yearned for, except that I wanted to be near that little boy who was so warm and smelled so good. My infant bones were still rubbery, my muscles weak, but after a few tries I managed to stand, grasp the wooden crib rail, and pull myself up and over into his bed—

No. Not that. I didn’t want to feel what was coming next. I shook myself out of Miko’s memory and fought back onto the ice. My hot tears melted the frost over my flesh eye, and I caught a glimpse of something like a rock dam or mostly submerged wall a few feet away, but the ice was cracking again and I reached desperately for the stones but that just made me plunge into the deepest memories when I fell …

T
he stranger talking to the orphanage director in the reception area was a tall man in a gray hat and suit like some of the Americans wore. But even at a distance, I could tell he wasn’t like any of the other adults I’d ever seen. His skin was like the belly of a fish, his hair yellow like straw, and his eyes so pale a blue they looked almost white. The nurses who thought they were outside his earshot whisperingly called him
gaijin
, but some of them called me
gaijin
, too.

The director, a balding man with thick black-framed glasses who was normally quite stern with everyone, even the soldiers, gave the stranger a nervous smile and several short bows. And then he led the gray man through the maze of cribs toward the back wall where I sat watching through the wooden bars. The staff had moved my crib well away from the others after the second baby mysteriously died in the night beside me. They suspected a contagious disease, and had the army doctor examine me three times, but he could find no evidence of fever or cough or any other sign that I was worthy of quarantine.

The whispering nurses had then thought of smothering me, but none were brave enough to try. Next
they plotted to take me away and leave me on the hillside, but the director overheard them and shouted at them for being heartless and superstitious. He threatened to dock everyone’s pay if anything happened to me.

Still, he hadn’t objected when they moved my crib. And I couldn’t quite make the climb down to the floor, so my body was grudgingly learning how to digest milk and gruel.

“Here she is.” The orphanage director swept his hand expansively toward my crib, as if I were some kind of precious jewel instead of a half-breed baby. “Perfectly healthy, as you can see.”

“Oh, thank the good Lord, my little niece is safe,” the stranger said, smiling down at me. His teeth were deeply red and very, very sharp, not at all like the teeth of any of the adults I had ever seen. He pushed his gray fedora back on his head, and I saw two shiny, curved black horns poking from his thick yellow hair. But the orphanage director did not seem to see them.

“My church took up a collection back home when we got word from the other missionaries that my sister’s baby miraculously survived.” The stranger reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out a fat roll of green American money. This the director certainly did notice, and his eyes went wide behind his glasses.

“This is just a token of our appreciation,” the stranger said, offering the cash to the orphanage director. “Poor Maggie may have gravely sinned in conceiving this child, and surely the Lord struck her down for her harlotry, but He also showed His mercy in letting my only niece live so she can grow up in a righteous Christian house and witness to His glory.”

His words sounded heartfelt and I could tell the director was convinced, but I knew every one of them was a lie as big as the battleships in the harbor.

“Oh, Reverend Jones, you and your church are most generous,” the director exclaimed, breaking into another series of excited bows as he took the roll from the stranger’s pale fingers. The man’s thoughts were so loud I couldn’t help but hear them. He was imagining all the fish and rice he could buy for the children, and better medicines for the
hibakusha
babies who still suffered from their burns. There would be new diaper cloth, and maybe even a couple of new cribs, too.

Entranced with his charmed windfall, the director was gradually forgetting I’d ever existed as the stranger wrapped me in my thin blanket and carried me away in his wiry arms.

Once we were out in the bright sunlight of the busy town street, the stranger grinned down at me.

“You can see me for what I really am, can’t you?” He sounded like he was sharing a mischievous joke.

I hadn’t learned to talk yet, so I nodded.

He laughed. “I knew your mother wouldn’t have spawned a fool! Well. Maybe she would, but she certainly wouldn’t have bothered to bring me here if she had, eh?”

His thoughts were closed to me, and I couldn’t guess what he meant. I must have looked confused, and he laughed again.

“I’m your very own Mary Poppins!” he said. “Though I don’t suppose they read that story to the kids on this side of the pond much, do they? Well, your mother is dreadfully preoccupied with that unfortunate
war with your brother, Kagu-tsuchi. She’s far too busy to raise a half-mortal demon child. But she needs you brought up right, and she knows I’m just the one for the job.”

I still didn’t know exactly what he meant, but I was glad to be outside where there were so many interesting things to see and new people to smell. I’d been carried down this road a few times before when the director had ordered the nurses to take me along for walks in the fresh air with the other babies; we were heading down to the docks. One nurse had thought of casting me down into the water and pretending it was an accident, but I grabbed her blouse and refused to let go until we were back in the orphanage.

“Just so you know, I’m not really a minister,” the stranger confided. “I do have that Master of Divinity from Yale, but I’m afraid it’s forged. If you ring up the school, they’ll have me in their files, though, and that’s the important thing, yes? It’s handy enough to be a pastor when it suits, and a murderer when it doesn’t, because both are fine ways of parting men from their money. You and I, we can go a lot longer between meals than humans can, but it’s much more pleasant to have food in your belly at the end of the day.”

The stranger, apparently hungered by his own patter, stopped at a street vendor’s cart to buy a skewer of teriyaki chicken.

“It’s all about money and work, sad to say,” he said between mouthfuls of char-grilled bird as he strode on toward the ships. “We’re all born for a reason, and it’s usually to serve someone else. Sure, in these modern times, people talk of having children for the
sake of love—ah, love, sweet love!—but that’s horse apples to feed the middle class. A dirt farmer raises a dozen brats because he needs extra hands come harvest time; a banking baron grooms an heir to secure the family fortune. And your mother spawned you to wreak her vengeance on America, but that’s a chat for another day.”

He had eaten almost all the chicken. I whined, reaching for the bamboo skewer. The stranger briefly looked annoyed, but then he smiled indulgently and tore the last chunk off for me.

“I suppose I should give you a name. Your mother didn’t bother to give you a familiar alias, I’m afraid, and she certainly won’t share your true name with me. She probably won’t reveal it to you, either. Goddesses of her stature don’t maintain their positions by giving up their leverage.” He stopped to toss the stick into the bushes. “But since she’s Izanami, and you’re a little adorable version of her, that might make you … Izanamiko?”

The stranger frowned, pondering. “My Japanese may be off. And that name’s much too long for everyday, don’t you think? How about … Miko. Yes, that’s much better. And fits; your body will be her temple, and you its sole priestess.”

He looked down at me thoughtfully as I gummed his chicken. “Men will look askance at me if I say I’m your nanny, or even your father, because there’s precious little resemblance here. Even if I claimed the prettiest whore on the whole island, I doubt that our ruttings could produce anything half as fetching as you. I can work up enough magic to cover my mother’s lamentable contribution to my physiognomy,
but I can’t make myself into Errol Flynn. So, the avuncular fabrication must remain, and you and the rest of the world shall know me as your dear uncle Roy.”

I gazed up at his teeth and horns and frosty eyes. I wasn’t really sure what an uncle was; I had only a vague sense of what parents were. Mothers and fathers were people who claimed children from the orphanage, that much I did know, but there had to be something else special about them. I wondered who his parents must have been.

He heard my thoughts and laughed.

“My mother is a goddess among whores, which doesn’t make her much of a goddess at all, but she has her charms. At least I’m aging well, thanks to her. My father was a man known to most as Jack; he tried to steal her heart, but she took his, instead … I believe she still has it in a jar in her wardrobe. Anyhow, his sauciness impressed her, and she kept the best of him to create me. Apparently just so she’d have someone around to fetch towels and pisspots for her, although she did introduce me to the fine art of assassination. Which is what I’m going to be teaching you, once you’re strong enough to hold a weapon. No guns, alas, since firepower is your brother’s specialty. Anyone you kill even indirectly with flame might be claimed by him.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pretty folding knife the length of his hand; the upper and lower bolsters were sterling silver, and the handle was made of polished bone. He pressed a round nub on the upper bolster and the stiletto blade sprang open, gleaming in the sun, far more tantalizing than any
brightly colored toy or lollipop. I cooed and grabbed for it, but he held it well out of my reach.

“Ooh, yes, it’s shiny, isn’t it?” he said. “I had this special made in Frosolone a few years ago … lost my old blade in a fight in Naples. But this one’s much better, surgical steel, holds a fine edge and never rusts. Don’t fear, you’ll learn to use a knife like this soon enough …”

   Miko’s old memory lost its grip on me and I came back into myself, felt the pressure of the water against my eardrums and the muddy bottom sucking at my boots, and I pushed up, trying to reach the surface, but another current caught me and pulled me sideways, farther under the ice—

   —I dropped the bloody butcher knife on the stained garage floor and stumbled backward, my head buzzing with the old man’s memories. So much pain in his soul: his only son’s slow, wrenching death from childhood cancer, his wife’s suicide, and endless loneliness and regret afterward. Uncle Roy said I had to learn to savor these moments, but this was
horrible
.