Hexed

“It’s a nekomata,” I said. “A yōkai.”

Jim gave me a blank look.

“The yōkai are Japanese demons.” I rubbed my face. “Legends say that if a cat’s tail isn’t cropped and some other conditions are met, it has a chance to become a bakeneko, a demon ghost cat. Bakeneko cats grow to a huge size and get supernatural powers. Sometimes their tails fork and they become nekomata, demon monster cats. They have the power to control the dead, take on human form, and can do some nasty things.”

“Do they have the power to put people to sleep?”

I knew he’d get around to that sooner or later. “No. It’s possible that the woman you saw was a nekomata in disguise, but it’s not likely. She had you and she let you go. The nekomata is a cat, Jim. It’s cruel and mean, and it likes to play games, but you know yourself, the prey never gets away. This”—I waved my arms around—“is complicated. Too complicated for a demon cat. They mostly set fires, steal corpses, and walk around in human clothes, pretending to be your elderly mother so they can get free grub. There is magic here, really bad magic. It kind of scares me. The nekomata is dead, but the magic is still here. Something else is going on. This isn’t over.”

Jim tapped one of the paper strips with his knife. The strip didn’t give. “And this?”

“This is the curse of twenty-seven binding scrolls.”

Jim slashed at the paper strip. The paper held. Jim scowled. “How the hell . . .”

Kate, one of my friends, always said that the best defense is a good offense. “Before you say anything, yes, I know that the curse didn’t function as expected and I know that it would’ve been better to have the nekomata restrained so we could question it, and I was trying to do that, but it’s not like it’s an exact science, and how was I supposed to know that the binding scrolls would choke the stupid demon to death? So you don’t have to tell me—I know! You try guessing some weird creature’s identity and writing calligraphy while it’s trying to bite your nose off and then don’t come crying to me.”

And that didn’t make even a tiny bit of sense. I was an exceptionally smart woman. Why did Jim always reduce me to some sort of ditzy bimbo idiot?

“I was going to say, how the hell did you pull that off,” Jim said. “You made paper with the tensile strength of steel out of nothing. The physics of this makes my brain hurt.”

“Oh.”

“And I would’ve said it and some other nice things, except that you jumped in my face and started sputtering and waving your tiny fists around.”

“Tiny fists?”

“That’s the root of your problem right there. You always rush into things looking for a fight. You’re like one of those First Responder magic cops: Ride in, kill everything, and then sort bodies into two piles: criminals and civilians.”

My face turned hot. My body was pumping out all sorts of angry, upset hormones. He was chewing me out like I was a child. I was this close to going furry, except it wouldn’t do me any good.

“If you take a tenth of a second to check if the fight you’re charging into isn’t there, it would save you a lot of grief.”

He didn’t get it and he would never get it. “Are you finished?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” I turned away from him and crouched by Roger’s body. Roger’s head hung in a weird angle, and both of his arms bent in places where no joints existed. Jim had broken him like a twig.

“What is it?”

You’re so special, why don’t you tell me, Mister Always Look Before You Leap. I dragged my finger against Roger’s skin. It came away with a powdery gray residue. I showed my finger to Jim. “I’m pretty sure normal corpses don’t do that.”

“I saw that,” Jim said. “Michelle was slippery, too.”

I rose. “We need to search the house.”

We combed the house. We found no sign of the two other shapeshifters: Neither Mina nor August had been in the house for at least thirty-six hours. Their scents were old. I swiped the log from the front office and we escaped.

Outside the cold night air swept along my skin, washing away the nasty magic. I headed straight for Pooki and opened the log on the hood. Four different types of handwriting filled the pages. The last entry was three days old. I flipped back a month and scanned the entries.

“Are you actually reading this or just flipping pages?”

“Jim? Shush. I need to concentrate.” Shift changes, notes on shapeshifters caught in the city for one reason or another crashing at the house, routine, routine, routine . . . Mina’s entries identified different types of herbal tea she drank during her shift. Roger documented the patrol routes of three neighborhood cats, complete with battles for territory and places where they chose to mark it.

I kept turning the pages, and when I finally saw it, I almost didn’t realize it. Thursday before last, August failed to come in for the shift change. The log showed him signing in fourteen hours later. His ps, gs, and ys showed longer vertical strokes than usual. I ran my fingers on the other side of the page and felt the outlines of the letters. August had pressed too hard on the paper. He was excited when he signed in, confident, angry, maybe determined. His reason for the failure to show up read “overslept,” which made no sense considering the amount of pressure he put on the page. There was something grim about the way he wrote, as if he’d etched each letter into the paper.

I tapped the page, thinking. A nekomata was a Japanese monster. August was half Japanese, half white by birth, but American culturally. He couldn’t read kanji, and his Japanese was terrible. Atlanta had a large Japanese population, with its own school and stores, a place where American customs didn’t apply. August visited his family there, but he never quite got the Us and Them mentality, and being a halfer, he was looked down on. A few months ago he told me that one of his cousins was gay. August had gone to pick up the thirteen-year-old kid at Japanese school to take him to a family gathering and he’d seen the boy sit on his friend’s lap after recess. I had to explain that it was a cultural thing that didn’t indicate anything about his cousin’s sexuality, but it just didn’t compute from his Southern guy point of view. He didn’t completely believe me either and told me that if anyone ever picked on his cousin, he’d break their legs.

Magic tended to stick to nationality and region. People generated magic, and their superstitions and beliefs channeled it. If enough people believed that a certain creature existed and, worse, took precautions against it, eventually the magic birthed it into being. If you had an area densely settled by Irish, you got banshees. If you had Vietnamese settlers, sooner or later ma doi, the hungry spirits, would be haunting the streets. And if you had a Japanese community, you would get yōkai, demonic creatures.

The residue on Roger’s skin really bothered me. Either the top layer of his skin had turned to dust, or he’d been liberally powdered with something. No creature I could think of could do that to a body.

Of the four people in the office, August would be the most likely to come into contact with a Japanese legend. We had to retrace his steps.

I flipped the pages. The entries were becoming shorter, more erratic. On Saturday some of them looked unfinished, as if the writer had simply stopped in the middle of a sentence. Sunday had no entries. There should’ve been some. On Monday, a single entry written in Michelle’s neat handwriting read, Can’t stay awake. Help. m.

Oh shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

“We need to go to August’s place. We need to figure out why he was out on Thursday.” I looked up.

Jim was asleep leaning against the car.

“Jim!”

No response. I grabbed him and shook his shoulder. “Wake up! Wake up!” He slid to the ground, still asleep. I slapped his face. He didn’t move.

I pulled Pooki’s door open, popped the trunk, jerked the extra gallon can of enchanted water out, and dumped