of you ever seen a vampire movie?”
In the silence that followed those words, Kara felt her face flushing with heat and knew how pink her cheeks must be. If she’d been in a joking mood, she’d have made a little cricket noise. But she had run out of jokes.
Miho spoke first.
“You’re serious,” she said, as though suggesting the impossible.
“Totally!” Kara replied. She hated the way they were looking at her, but she wasn’t about to back down. “You didn’t see the bites all over her body. Fine. But what’s happening here is… it’s not natural. You can’t deny that. The dreams alone are proof of that. All of us having these dreams, not being able to sleep, the terrible things in our nightmares? That crap is just not normal.”
“We’re not all having the nightmares,” Miho said quietly.
Kara snapped, “Yes, I know. You don’t have them. Good for you!”
The girl blinked, obviously stung, and Kara felt guilty-but not so much that she was prepared to drop it.
“Miho, you saw the cat last night. You admitted it to me.”
“What cat?” Sakura asked.
Kara and Miho studied each other, each waiting for the other to explain.
“There’s no such thing as vampires,” Sakura said.
Kara shot her a dark look. “Are you serious? In this country, people still believe in everything. There are ancient prayer shrines all over the place. People still respect the old gods, even if they don’t pray to them anymore. The Japanese take their legends very seriously.”
“There are no vampires in Japanese legend,” Miho said. “Not in myth, not in Kabuki, not in Noh theater.”
Kara sighed and turned toward the window. The ambulance siren had ceased, which meant the EMTs would be in the building by now, on their way up to Chouku’s room.
“Fine,” she said with a shake of her head. “Then you tell me what’s going on.”
“I’ve told you both,” Sakura said, her voice even and emotionless. It scared Kara how detached she’d grown. Grief had forced her to shut down.
“It’s Akane,” she went on. “The police never did anything to punish her killers. They could never prove anything. She’s come back to make them pay.”
Kara studied her eyes. “You can’t really believe that. I’m sorry, Sakura-really sorry-but Akane is dead.”
“I never said she wasn’t,” Sakura said. Then she stood and went to the door. Miho moved out of the way. Sakura looked back at them. “I’ve been studying them, trying to figure out who else was involved. I think the ones who are crying the most are probably the other killers, or at least they were there. Chouku’s friends. Ume’s friends. I’m going to go and watch them, to see if I can narrow it down.”
With that, she went out into the hall and left the two of them standing there, staring at the open door.
Miho closed it quietly and turned to look at Kara with frightened eyes.
“She’s really scaring me,” Miho said.
Kara nodded. “Me too.”
Miho took a deep breath and let it out. She bit her lip, shook her head, clearly struggling to make sense of her thoughts.
“What?” Kara urged.
“I said there were no vampire legends. But there are stories about other things… things that are like vampires,” Miho said. “One of them, the ketsuki, appears in the form of a cat.”
11
I don’t know the whole legend of the ketsuki,” Miho went on. “It’s some kind of demon spirit, I think. There’s an old Noh play about it. But from what I remember, it takes the form of a cat and it drinks blood.”
Kara couldn’t breathe, staring at her. The memory of the bite marks all over Chouku’s naked body remained vivid in her mind, but somehow even worse was the memory of the cat standing in the open third-story window the night before. Her skin prickled.
“You saw it last night,” Kara said. “Where could it have gone? The door was locked.”
Miho rubbed the back of her neck, head bowed, hair spilling around her face like she wanted to hide but had nowhere to run. “The window was open, though.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Kara whispered, walking over to the window. She searched the sill for any sign that what they’d seen had been real-a few shed hairs, some paw prints-but found nothing. Still, they had both seen it. “If you saw it, too, then it couldn’t be a dream.”
A long silence ensued, the girls lost in their thoughts, until their reverie was broken by a knock on the door.
Miho shot a quick, frightened look at Kara. But it was morning, and there were so many people around-if all of this wasn’t their imaginations running wild, some kind of evil cat spirit wasn’t about to come knocking on the door.
Kara nodded to her. Miho took a breath and opened the door.
Rob Harper stood on the other side, worry lining his face. When he spotted Kara, he let out a relieved breath and walked in, snatching her up in his arms. She hadn’t been picked up in a long time and it felt simultaneously wonderful and humiliating.
“Dad, I’m okay,” she said.
He gave a soft chuckle and put her down, the relief draining from his face, replaced by a deep frown.
“When Miss Aritomo called, I had all kinds of awful thoughts,” he said in English. “But then she said she’d seen you. I came right away.”
“So it was you she was talking to before?”
Her father nodded. “When you came into the… into the dead girl’s room? Yes. I wish you hadn’t seen that.”
Kara sighed. “Me too.”
They’d been speaking English, but now her father looked over at Miho. “I’m sorry,” he said in Japanese. “I didn’t mean to ignore you. I was just-”
“I understand, sensei,” Miho said, executing a polite bow.
Kara’s father had completely forgotten such formalities, but now he returned the bow. Then he looked at his daughter.
“The police are here. They want to talk to everyone-”
“They can’t claim this one is a suicide,” Kara said, also in Japanese, not wanting to be rude to Miho, though a flash of anger sparked in her.
“No, they can’t,” Rob Harper agreed. “I spoke to them, gave them our information, so if they want to talk to you later, they can come find you at home. Right now, I’m taking you out of here.”
Kara hesitated, glancing at Miho.
“I’ll be fine,” Miho said. “Sakura will be back soon.”
But Kara wasn’t worried about Miho talking to police. She was worried about later, when night fell again. Sakura had gone over the edge with her obsession and her grief, and she had been having the nightmares, just like all of the dead kids. Maybe Miho was safe because she hadn’t had the dreams, but maybe not. What the hell did any of them really know about the demon that preyed on Monju-no-Chie School?
Demon? Kara thought. Seriously?
But she found that she was serious. The word had sounded faintly ridiculous when Miho had spoken it out loud, but in Kara’s head it sounded all too real and plausible. Her nightmares had leaked out into reality, or at least that was how it felt. The cat had been real. It had been there, looking at them, perhaps trying to choose its next victim. For some reason it had moved on to another room, another girl.
How close did we come to dying? Kara pictured Sakura’s body sprawled facedown with all of those bite marks on her flesh and felt panic rising. She thought of claws in her own skin, teeth puncturing her.
“Stay at our house tonight,” she said to Miho.
Her father shot her a curious, confused look. But Kara pressed on.
