A cat’s eyes stared out from the darkness of the woods. She flinched, let out a tiny gasp, and stepped back.
“What is it?” Hachiro said, and he turned to look.
She counted seven pairs of gleaming yellow and green eyes, not moving, only watching. Not the ketsuki, then, but its friends, its creatures, its familiars.
“We need to go,” she said, tugging Hachiro away.
They ran for the road, crossing the grassy slope that separated the school from the bay, glancing back to be sure nothing followed.
“It’s true,” Hachiro said, more to himself than to her. “God, it’s really true.”
But the fear of those words only lasted a moment. He shook himself, clutched her hand tighter, and looked around with grim, dark eyes, determined to keep his word, to protect her.
Kara wished Hachiro could have made her feel safe. But the night had just begun.
14
T he windows were closed and locked and the air in Kara’s bedroom felt stale and close. Glass would not keep the ketsuki out if it tried to come for her, but the sound of it shattering would wake her father. The demon might be pure emotion, rage and grief and dark hatred, but it had been clever thus far as well. She banked on it not coming after her first, prayed it would not. In the Noh play, the ketsuki killed the summoner last, after it had sated its lust for vengeance.
Which meant Ume would die next.
But the ketsuki had drawn Kara out of her house last night, so all bets were off. The Noh play existed only as a story, and the thing that stalked her now was real.
So she lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling, ready to scream for her father if there came so much as a scratch on the window.
Back home in Massachusetts, Kara had friends who were party girls, but she’d never been the rebellious type. When her mother was still alive, both of her parents had been open and honest with her, and after her death, Kara and her father had survived their grief by joining forces, making decisions together, and maintaining that honesty. One girl she had grown up with, Paige Traficante, had first been grounded for sneaking out of the house after hours at the age of twelve. Time hadn’t tamed her. If there was a party, Paige would be there. The previous summer, she had stayed out all night several times, making sure her parents knew she could not be controlled.
Kara could never do that to her father.
But now she lay on her bed, fully dressed under the covers. When her father had gone to sleep, she had tugged on jeans and a sweatshirt and slipped into sneakers. In her right hand she held her cell phone, which was set to vibrate.
Waiting…
Every minute that passed, she felt more awake. Her eyes still burned with that constant sandpaper feeling and her bones felt too heavy for her flesh. She felt as though she had deteriorated into a kind of empty, brittle shell of Kara, as if her real body had been swapped for some slow, aching, papiermache sculpture.
Part of her hoped the phone would never vibrate, that she would still by lying there come sunrise. But mostly she just wanted it to be over, so she wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore.
She lay there, heart thrumming in her chest, imagination painting shadow-puppet shows on the ceiling, too keyed up to even consider the possibility of sleep. Yet her eyelids began to droop and she blinked in surprise, glancing down at her cell phone before once more staring at the ceiling, not daring to look at the windows, fearful of what might be outside.
And then she drifted, eddying down into a dreamless sleep. At the edges of her unconscious mind, something crept on cat feet, nightmares lying in wait, preparing for the moment when she would begin to dream.
Her brow creased and she murmured softly in her sleep. Troubled, she turned over and settled more deeply into her pillow, drawing her knees up into a fetal position.
Girlish laughter, almost a purr, infiltrated her subconscious. The flicker of a nightmare began…
Kara frowned and snapped her eyes open. Moonlight cast a gauzy glow over her bedroom, every detail of that space sharply outlined. Panic rippled through her as she feared what might have happened while she slept.
But then she felt the vibration against her ribs. With a blink, she realized the purr she thought she’d heard had been the vibrating of her cell phone. She’d rolled over on top of it while she’d slept; otherwise it would never have woken her.
She sat up in bed, flipping the phone open as she whipped the covers back. Her eyes darted around the room. She could feel her heart beat on every inch of her skin.
“What’s happening?” she whispered.
The light from the display on her cell seemed weirdly bright. The sound of her own breathing echoed back to her from the corners of the room and she wondered if her father could hear it, if he’d heard the vibrating of the phone, if the creak of her bed had disturbed him.
“She went out, Kara,” Miho said, her voice a tiny, frantic rasp over the phone. “Oh, God, she went out.”
Kara tried to picture where Miho might be now, crouched in the hall or at the top of the stairs. Hachiro would be waiting on the second floor, watching for Ume to pass by.
“You got out without waking Sakura?” she asked as she unlocked her window. With the phone clapped to her ear, she managed to ease the window up a few inches with one hand.
“What? No. I’m talking about Sakura. She got up. She left the room.”
Kara froze. “When? Just now? What about Ume?”
“I have no idea.”
“What are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Miho whispered. “I’m following Sakura.”
Kara shot a glance at her bedroom door, mind racing, fearful that she’d been too loud, made some noise that would bring her father at a run. He’d be sleeping lightly tonight, worried for her, and if she woke him, he’d come running into her room and there would be no way she could get out past him, and then Miho and Hachiro would be on their own.
“I’m coming,” she whispered.
“Don’t hang up,” Miho said. “Stay on the phone with me.”
“Hang on.”
Silently sliding the window as wide as it would open, Kara slipped one leg out. The neighborhood seemed abandoned save for the occasional light in some of the houses further down the street. In the other direction, the school loomed darkly atop the slope of its grounds. Between houses across the street, she could see the dark expanse of Miyazu Bay. It did not look beautiful tonight, but vast and forbidding.
Sitting on the windowsill, she swung her other leg out, then dropped the few inches remaining to the ground.
Then she ran, rubber soles padding on the soft earth as she fled the safety of home. She risked a glance back and only then realized that she’d neglected to lower the window. An image of her father’s face sprang into her mind, of the terror that would strike him when he saw her window open and feared the worst, that someone had stolen her from her bed.
Her heart faltered, but her feet did not. Her sneakers touched pavement and she plummeted forward, toward Monju-no-Chie School and the cruel, vengeful secrets that had been born there.
“Kara?”
“I’m here,” she said into the phone. “I didn’t want to talk until I was away from the house. Tell me what’s going on. Where are you?”
“The third floor of the dorm,” came Miho’s whispered reply. “There are still a few other girls here. I don’t want to… wait, I hear music.”
Kara ran past the corner where some of the girls at Monju-no-Chie School congregated in the morning before classes began.
