A Mortal Song (19 page)

“Sora.” He pulled himself to his feet. His gaze darted to his brother’s last location once more, and then he shook himself. “I... You’re obviously not okay. What can I do?”

I turned away from him to the table, the anger I’d squashed down while I fought flaring up in a white-hot flame. There was the key I’d done all this for. I stuffed it into my pocket. Then I knelt to pick up Takeo’s short sword and pushed it through the belt loop by my hip. The motion was less agonizing than the idea of looking at Keiji. My satchel felt far too light as I lifted it. Empty after all. I spotted Haru’s katana where it had fallen and collected that too, my fingers curling around the leather bindings on its grip. At least Tomoya hadn’t wrecked my stronger arm. I should count my blessings.

“Stay here,” I said to Keiji. It wasn’t worth the time trying to restrain him somehow. I doubted he could stop me even with my injuries.

I headed for the doorway, testing my legs, and found that other than a pang in my right ankle, they were functioning pretty much normally. Another blessing.

Keiji trailed after me into the hall, dabbing at the dribble of blood along his jaw with the collar of his shirt.

“I’m sorry,” he said as I reached the door to the stairwell. “I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to— Tomoya said he needed me to tell him what we were doing so he could try to help us. I had no idea he was already working for Omori. He’s been into some messed up things, but he never— I never thought he would—”

So much fury blazed through me that suddenly I wasn’t afraid of looking at him anymore. Let him see what I felt.

“You
knew
,” I bit out. “Even if it’s true that you didn’t know he was with Omori from the start, he said things that upset you, didn’t he? You knew he was asking about our plans, and as soon as you told him, our enemies knew them too. Maybe you didn’t want to think it, but you
had
to put that together. And you kept telling him everything anyway. You kept—”

You kept pretending you cared about me
.

Keiji’s expression was as wretched as if he’d swallowed a mouthful of pine needles and they were stabbing their way into his gut, but he didn’t look away from my glare. And I still, I
still
wanted to touch his cheek, to make that awful expression leave his beautiful coppery eyes. To believe he hadn’t ruined everything on purpose.

I clamped down on the feeling, burying it under my anger.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I did wonder for a second, when we found Rin’s house, and after... But he’s my brother. You can understand, can’t you, why I didn’t want to believe it could be him? There was always some other explanation. If I’d realized... I’m
so
sorry.”

“I don’t care,” I said. I pushed open the door and headed into the darkness cloaking the stairs.

On the first floor landing, I placed my back against the wall and edged to the door to peer through its wire-laced window into the hallway.

A dim glow streaked the darkness there—the light of a hundred ghosts or more, drifting around each other in a steady stream. The katana wobbled in my hand.

“Are we still in the keep where they attacked us?” I asked as Keiji crept up alongside me. “Are Chiyo and Takeo here?”

“Yes,” he said. “They’re still shut in that room, as far as I know. This woman ghost, Tomoya called her his lieutenant, he told her to keep the other ghosts guarding the hall.”

“What happened to the kami who were in here with us?”

“I couldn’t see a lot of the fighting,” he said. “And I was... I was trying to keep the ghosts off of you. Some of them were carrying these buckets—they splashed stuff on the floor and the walls, and it seemed like the fighting stopped after that.” He swallowed audibly. “I think they were using blood.”

I grimaced. Like the ropes, like their weapons. They must have splattered the hall with gore so the kami would either sicken or flee.

Blood couldn’t stop me, but a hundred ghosts could. A human girl with a fractured wrist and no protective amulet—even with Keiji’s ofuda, I couldn’t fight them all. Charging out there would be suicide.

So if I was going to save Chiyo and Takeo, I had to make the ghosts leave. I had a feeling asking nicely wasn’t going to work.

At least, not for me.

I glanced back at Keiji where I could sense him in the darkness. “That ‘lieutenant,’ she knows you’re Tomoya’s brother?”

“Tomoya made a pretty big deal about it,” he said, “to make sure they left me alone.”

His voice was still rough, an echo of his repeated apology running through it. Why shouldn’t I use his guilty conscience? However little I trusted him now, he obviously didn’t want to be responsible for my death. He’d fought his brother to keep me alive. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t turn back on that decision and offer me up to the figures out there.

And I didn’t exactly have a multitude of options.

“All right,” I said. “Then I need you to go get rid of them.”

“What?”

“Go find the lieutenant,” I said. “Give her a story—that Tomoya had to run off without consulting with her first, that he asked you to tell all the ghosts here to follow him. Say there was a surprise counterattack on the ghosts at Mt. Fuji. Or that Omori called some urgent meeting. Just convince them to leave.”

There was a rustle of fabric as Keiji shifted his weight. “They’re not going to believe it,” he said. “Tomoya going off and leaving
me
in charge? They’ll never listen to me.”

The composure I’d been holding on to so desperately started to crack.

“Maybe not,” I said, “but if you’re really so sorry, why don’t you at least
try
to fix this mess you got us into?”

There was silence beside me, and then an exhaled breath. “Okay,” Keiji said. “Okay.”

I flattened myself against the wall as he stepped past me into the hallway. The ghostlights clustered around him as he walked through them, giving his skin and clothes an eerie sheen. He stopped several paces into their midst.

After a moment, one of the ghosts solidified in front of him. Her sleek, shoulder-length bob obscured her face from where I stood.

Keiji launched into his story with a flurry of impatient gestures and worried expressions. The woman tapped her pointed shoe on the floor. I could only tell when she spoke because those were the few moments Keiji stilled.

All at once, she spun around and marched toward the stairwell. I flinched away from the door and sucked in a hiss of pain as my broken wrist bumped the wall. Ducking low, I darted through the darkness, up the stairs toward the second floor. The door sighed open below just as I scooted out of sight around the bend.

The woman ghost strode into the stairwell. “I
told
him he should talk to you himself,” Keiji was saying, hurrying after her. “But he wanted to make sure he got to Omori as soon as possible.”

The woman made a dismissive sound. Her faint light faded away as she tapped down the steps. I held myself perfectly still. The ofuda left no sign of the ghost it had banished. There was no way she could know what had happened.

Unless she decided to check the room where I was supposed to be and discovered one of the “human prisoners” was missing.

Finally, the door swung open again. The hard soles of the woman’s shoes clattered back up the stairs. She pushed into the hall. I waited five seconds, ten, and when she didn’t return, crept back down and peered through the window.

The ghostlights had stopped meandering about and were flowing toward the opposite end of the hall. They looked like a cloud of hazy fireflies gusting away in a sudden breeze. As they vanished through the front entrance, I tipped my forehead against the wall and sighed.

Hinges squeaked below me. Tentative footsteps padded up.

“It worked,” I said. “They’re gone.”

“Really? She didn’t seem very impressed.” Keiji came up beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his presence even though we weren’t touching. My skin prickled.

I edged to the side and peered through the window. My hand tightened around the katana.

“Mostly gone,” I amended.

Five ghostlights still floated around a spot I judged to be more than halfway down the hall. By the room where they were holding Chiyo and Takeo, no doubt. Tomoya’s lieutenant had believed Keiji enough to take the majority of her force with her, but not to leave their valuable captives unguarded.

I weighed the sword in my hand. It wasn’t going to do me any good, not against a bunch of ethereal ghosts. I set it on the floor.

“How many ofuda do you have?” I asked.

Paper crinkled as Keiji dug them out of his pockets. “I’m not sure. Twenty-ish?”

“Give me half.”

He held them out, the edges of the scraps of paper tickling my arm. I shoved a few into my own pocket and palmed the rest.

Compared to what I’d already faced in the last few days, five ghosts was hardly anything. But my mouth had gone dry.

“What now?” Keiji said.

I studied the hall. “Go out ahead of me,” I said, “and see if you can get them to turn corporeal to talk to you. It’ll be easier if I can see them properly.”

Without any argument this time, he nudged open the door and headed down the hall alone. The darkness was even thicker now that the main hoard of ghosts had left. After just a few seconds, I couldn’t make out more than the edges of Keiji’s body.

As he approached the ghostly guards, two of them flickered, taking on solid forms. Two was as much as I could hope for. I slipped into the hall.

I meant to approach the ghosts quietly to give them as little warning as possible. But after a couple of steps, my heel hit a thick, tacky patch on the floor. It made a little sucking sound when I raised my foot.

The blood the ghosts had splashed here. I’d been breathing through my parted lips, but even so, a rancid metallic smell started to fill my nose. Fighting the urge to gag, I hurried on. If I didn’t have the element of surprise, I’d have to rely on speed.

“Who’s that?” one of the corporeal ghosts said to Keiji, and Keiji shrugged and said, “Oh, just a friend.” Before any of them had time to wonder where his “friend” had come from, I was smacking ofuda into their midst.

Two of the ghostlights blinked out in an instant. Keiji whipped out his own charms, banishing the last ethereal ghost and slapping the closest solid ghost’s face while her attention was on me. I was raising another ofuda when the final ghost grabbed my elbow. His other hand wavered translucent and dipped into my chest.

My lungs seized as he caught the thin thread of ki inside me. He squeezed, and my fingers spasmed, the ofuda slipping from my grasp. The rest of the ghost’s body started to fade. He grinned at me, twisting the core of my spirit so my pulse wobbled and my legs sagged. An icy haze washed over me. I shook my head against it. If I let fear overwhelm me this time, I really would die.

As I wrenched against his grasp, the ghost’s head snapped forward. He winked out of the world of the living, revealing Keiji behind him lowering the hand he’d thrust an ofuda with before the hall went fully dark.

I stumbled against the wall. In an instant, Keiji was at my side. “Sora?”

“I’m all right,” I rasped. Or at least I hoped I would be soon. Pain was searing through me as if my internal organs had been scraped raw. I fumbled for the key. “Let’s get them out. Is there a light around here somewhere? I can’t see a thing now.”

Sticky footsteps pattered down the hall. I traced the wall to the edge of the doorframe, a handle, a narrow hole beneath it. Keiji made a triumphant sound, and electric lights hummed on overhead. I pushed the key into the lock. For a second it jarred, and my heart stuttered. Then the deadbolt slid over. I shoved the door open.

The smell hit me first: a rotting stench that made my stomach lurch. Chiyo and Takeo were huddled together a few feet from the door, surrounded by a cracked red paste that coated every inch of the walls, floor, and ceiling: layers of blood and gristle and I didn’t want to know what else. Chiyo was shivering, Takeo wheezing, their faces wan and shining with sweat.

Dropping the key, I held my breath and rushed inside. As I took Chiyo’s arm to help her to her feet, Keiji burst in. He jerked to a halt and stumbled out again. Through the doorway, I heard him heave and a splatter of vomit hitting the floor.

“Sora,” Chiyo murmured. She clung to my shoulder, swaying as she stood. She was still clutching the sacred sword in her other hand, as if she didn’t dare let go of it. “Where’s—where’s Haru?”

“Downstairs,” I said, trying not to remember how he’d looked when I left him. “Don’t worry about him yet. You have to—”

A tremor passed through her as I helped her to a patch of untainted floor in the hallway. “I’m fine,” she said, her voice faint but brighter. “He needs me.”

She nudged past me and started to shuffle down the hall. I glanced between her and the door, judged that it would be a while before she made it there, and ducked back into their prison room to assist Takeo.

He was even weaker than Chiyo had been. My knees jarred when I tried to support the weight of his much taller and bulkier body. Keiji slunk back in, his face pinched, and leapt to help. Together, we hauled Takeo out of the room and set him on the same clear patch I’d brought Chiyo to. He coughed, slouching over.

Chiyo had made it partway down the hall, quivering as she darted around the splashes of gore. What was she going to do when she saw Haru? She wasn’t in any condition to heal him.

“Walk Takeo outside,” I said to Keiji, and he nodded.

“Chiyo!” I called, running after her. I caught up with her just as she reached the stairwell. She paused, wiping her damp bangs from her forehead. Her eyes were slightly glazed, but no less determined.

“He’s down here?” she said.

“You have to rest before you can do anything for him,” I said.

“I can handle this,” she insisted. She shoved aside the door and trudged across the landing. The walls and floor were unbloodied there. As she headed down the stairs, her posture drew straighter, but she still had to push three times to open the door to the basement.

While the bloody prison had sapped her ki, I was battered and aching from head to toe. I was afraid if I tried to hold her back, she’d use up even more of her energy fighting me, and then still keep going. So I just followed.