Yokai (15 page)

“
I have heard this before,”
Yumiko told him. “It’s not an uncommon legend.”

“
No, it’s not,” Mr. Itou
agreed. “But you do not know the entire story.” He gazed down upon
the scroll and unrolled more brittle paper carefully, revealing
more kanji.

Yumiko, startled, glanced at Brian,
who didn’t seem surprised at all. Frowning, she turned to Mr. Itou
as he continued:

“
Fueled by rage,
Shuten-Doji earned the reputation of the monster he had become,
rampaging and destroying villages, and devouring people as he came
across them. His appetite, and his fury, knew no bounds. Soon,
other blood-thirsty oni followed him, and the terrible army shook
the earth where they marched, foretelling massacres across Japan.
Shuten-Doji was so frightening that one glimpse of his reflection
in a mirror startled the mirror into breathing life into his
reflection. It became a yokai itself, and would never willingly
gaze on Shuten-Doji again. Meanwhile, Shuten-Doji led his troop of
oni to Mt. Ooe, where he plotted his next move, to take over the
human world, and punish them for his ill treatment.”

“
And what of the
reflection?” Yumiko asked, eyes wide.

“
That’s one of the reasons
I wanted to come here today,” Brian said, meeting her eyes. “It
seems that this is how Kagami was created. A mirror image of
Shuten-Doji, because the oni king was so terrifying.”

“
That’s…” Yumiko shook her
head as her voice trailed off. “I never even considered how he came
to be. A reflection of one of the three great evil yokai.” She
watched Mr. Itou roll up his scroll carefully, before gesturing
toward the book he’d brought out. “And what is this?”

Mr. Itou licked his lips and handed it
to her. “Allegedly, it is a book for yokai.”

Yumiko arched a brow. “A
book
for
yokai?”

He nodded. “A book written by yokai,
for yokai. The pages are blank, but supposedly, it holds legends
sacred to their kind. Legends not meant for human eyes.”

Yumiko ran her fingers over the blank
spine, then over the edges of the pages, which were cut roughly.
She took a deep breath before she opened it.

A great gust of wind blew open a
window at the back of the room, and papers flew around the room,
causing chaos.

Mr. Itou hurried over to the window to
secure it, just before the lights winked out.

Yumiko blinked in the darkness. A crop
of trees beyond the window, thick with foliage, blocked most of the
sunlight from illuminating the room, allowing for only a soft cold
luminescence to filter in through the small pane of glass. It
wasn’t much to see by, and she let her eyes adjust to the sudden
dark as Mr. Itou scrambled for a flashlight.

She hadn’t had the chance to look at
the pages of the book before the power had gone out, but she felt
something from the book. Some sort of power. She was almost sure
that by being touched by a yokai before, she would be able to read
it, just as she was able to see their kind. It was her curse as
well as a blessing.

The hum of metal caught Yumiko’s
attention and she turned back toward the door that led to the
bookstore. The door stood open, a black mouth yawning wide, as if
swallowing what little light surrounded it.

She stood slowly, and unsheathed her
mirror sword, a sound uncannily similar to the hum of metal that
had just come from the doorway. Someone was there. And that someone
was holding a sword as well.

“
Come out,” Yumiko
commanded, voice strong as she faced the unknown. She fell into a
defensive stance, shoulders tense as she waited for a flash of
blade from the intruder.

She heard a tearing sound behind her
and swiveled around to see Mr. Itou gasping, his back arched as a
sword thrust out from the center of his chest, splattering blood
across the papers and books audibly. The sword was quickly
withdrawn, and Mr. Itou tumbled to the floor, dead, blood oozing
across the floor quickly, emptying his body of life.

She looked up from the body into the
face of a monster. A red-faced ogre, with swollen lips and cheeks,
wild, unkempt dark hair, and black eyes with red pupils. It was
nine feet tall, dressed in samurai armor and holding its sword
steady, eyeing Yumiko with interest. Samurai used to wear masks
depicting oni, much like the creature that stood before her. But
this monster wore no mask. The corners of its mouth lifted into a
smile, revealing rows of yellow, elongated teeth, and a chuckle
welled up from deep in its chest.

“
Yumiko,” Brian
breathed.

“
Get behind me,” she
ordered. And then she heard a shuffling from the door at her back.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw another oni standing in the
doorway, its bulk nearly filling the space. This one had blue skin,
but was equally as terrifying. Many yokai were ghost-like or
impish. These were demonic and truly monstrous. And Yumiko knew
that they were strong and brutal in their attacks. She could
perhaps beat one of them, if she was on her A-game, but she would
never be able to best two of them. While she had speed and agility
on her side, they were rock-hard and durable.

“
I’m going to attack the
one in the doorway,” Yumiko said softly, low enough for the oni not
to hear, but loud enough for Brian. “You run like hell when I
engage him, and don’t look back.”

“
You can’t beat them by
yourself,” he said, as if reading her mind.

“
No, I can’t,” she agreed.
“Which is why I’m planning on striking the one and running after
you.”

Brian considered. “I can
fight.”

“
No, you can’t.”

“
We have to. We can’t let
them escape.”

“
What?” Yumiko looked over
at him, confused, but saw that he’d armed himself with a skillet.
“Brian, you can’t-“

“
Behind you!” he
cried.

Yumiko had just enough time to lift
her sword to ward off a blow from the blue oni. She grunted at the
force of the blow, then pushed him back and quickly sliced at his
torso, a blow that nearly landed, but was blocked just in the nick
of time by the oni.

The oni’s eyes burned with hate as he
swung his blade at her several times, with no break. Yumiko met his
steel with hers every time, then showered him with several blows in
quick succession herself, forcing him to step back. She smiled at
the little give, but in the back of her mind, she was imagining
Brian being torn in two, so she needed to end this match quickly,
so that she could come to his aid. All she needed was one slice of
her mirror sword against his flesh, and he would be imprisoned in
the mirror world. But she was finding that it was increasingly
difficult to even block his blows.

Then she remembered the mirror over
the door.

Without betraying a glance in its
direction, Yumiko feigned an attack to the oni’s left, but leapt up
into the air, swinging her sword wide, easily over the beast’s
head. In mid-air, she caught half of the mirror in her free hand,
which she’d split in two with her sword, and, blocking a blow of
the oni’s sword with her own, she shoved the mirror into the oni’s
cheek with a grunt. And it disappeared.

Yumiko rolled as she tumbled to the
ground, then sprang up quickly, sword at the ready, as she assessed
Brian’s battle with his enemy. But the oni was on the floor, its
own sword embedded in its stomach, loosing black blood over the
floor to mingle with Mr. Itou’s. She looked up at Brian, who gazed
down at the oni with a troubled expression on his face, the skillet
still held loosely in one hand.

“
How did you do that?” she
asked.

Brian looked up and tossed the skillet
aside casually. “Beginner’s luck, I guess.”

“
Beginner’s luck?” Yumiko
echoed, incredulous. “Are you kidding me?”

He shrugged. “What do you want me to
say? I got a lucky hit in. He fell on his own sword.”

Yumiko couldn’t decide if she believed
him or not, but she was interrupted from having to come to a
conclusion. A sword thrust through a paper sliding door and cut
sharply downward.

Without waiting for another oni to
appear, Yumiko grabbed Brian by the hand and yanked him into a run.
She hesitated at the doorway to the bookstore, and looked
back.

“
What is it?” Brian asked,
his voice high.

Yumiko leapt back into the room to
grab the yokai book, looking up as three more oni clambered into
the room, swords drawn. They stopped when they caught sight of
Yumiko and Brian.

“
We have to kill them,”
Brian insisted, stepping forward.

“
No, we don’t,” Yumiko
said. She pulled him out of the room and, stumbling into
bookshelves along the way, sprinted toward the exit and burst out
into the sunshine. With birds and cicadas making their music around
them, it was hard to believe that they’d left such a nightmare
behind. It seemed like a bad dream in the stark light of day, where
shadows were confined to dark-paned windows and alleyways. But the
oni had been as real as the sunlit streets and tourists taking
pictures of samurai houses, happily ignorant of monsters in
claustrophobic bookstores. Yumiko felt Brian’s solid arm in her
grasp, heard his heavy breathing as he kept pace with her and they
avoided the carefree bystanders. And she didn’t stop or look back
once until they reached the train station.

They didn’t have to wait long before
the bullet train, bound for Tokyo, arrived, and they boarded
silently, each lost in their own thoughts.

Yumiko stroked the cover of the book
she’d procured, and wondered if it was worth the life of the man
who’d given it to her.

Chapter
Twelve

“
Why aren’t you in any
afterschool activities?” Emiko asked Yumiko when she was just
nine.

Yumiko looked up from the homework she
was working on during lunch, and blinked at the girl. Beyond Emiko,
three other girls watched the interaction with interest. “I’m busy.
I take a martial arts class.”

“
Why?” Emiko demanded. “You
don’t like the people here?” She gestured back at the girls behind
her, who snickered.

“
I like you just fine,”
Yumiko told her, trying to smile. “Maybe you’d like to come over
some night and have dinner?”

Emiko laughed, and looked back at her
friends. “Yeah, right.” She walked away, as the other girls
snickered. “Like I’d want to hang out with a freak like
you.”

“
She’s so weird,” Yumiko
heard another girl say as she pretended to be intent on her
homework. She blinked back the tears that gathered behind her eyes,
not willing to let them see that they affected her so. The math
problems before her swam in her vision, her hand gripping her
pencil so tightly that it nearly snapped in half.

She knew that she could
wipe the smile off of Emiko’s face with one kick, but that wasn’t
going to solve things. And Madame Mori would be very disappointed.
If she was going to have a life, she would have to forego the
frivolous parts of childhood. She couldn’t afford to waste time
building relationships with her peers. They weren’t going to help
her ward off Kagami when he came for her. She could only look to
herself for the strength she needed. And
she
was all that she
needed.

Yumiko blinked as she awoke on the
bullet train. She was disoriented for a moment as she sat up, dark
scenery passing in a blur of black and brown outside of her window.
She turned her head to find Brian asleep, his head on her shoulder,
mouth open as he breathed deeply.

She watched him for a moment, his eyes
flickering in sleep, and wondered what he dreamed about. Probably
not being bullied by children, she decided bitterly. Not with a
face like that. He stirred and leaned deeper into Yumiko’s
shoulder, causing her to blush. She didn’t dare move, for fear of
waking him.

Brian was an enigma, she
decided. She wondered: if pressed, would he tell her about himself?
He seemed to genuinely care about her, but it was almost like he
was completely comfortable with her, and knew what to expect from
her, like they’d grown up in the same neighborhood. But she knew
nothing about him, couldn’t even fathom the mystery of the man. He
was kind and handsome. He seemed to know the right things to say
around her. But who
was
he? A spoiled trust fund baby? A frat boy who’d inadvertently
been cursed by a kitsune? A brilliant folklore student who’d been
at the wrong place at the wrong time? She couldn’t imagine him as
any one of those things. She couldn’t picture him without her.
Which was…troubling. Why had she attached herself to his life? The
moment Madame Mori found a cure for him, he would be gone. And
where would she be then? Heartbroken. She shook her head. Why
should she be left heartbroken when they weren’t even together?
What was she thinking, fawning over this guy? Just because he took
her on a walk through a boulevard of cherry blossoms, and made her
smile, and made her feel happy…

I am
so
in trouble
,
she decided, hanging her head. Why did he have to be so damn nice
to her? And why had he shared such a beautiful day with her? A day
that could stand out as the single happiest moment of her short,
doomed life.