With a cry of fear, Hachiro swung again, but too late. The ketsuki lashed out, talons raking his chest. If Hachiro hadn’t pitched himself backward, attempting to escape the attack, the ketsuki’s claws would have flayed him open to the bone.
Swiftly, it stalked after him, picked him up, and flung him toward the trees. Branches snapped and leaves shook as Hachiro fell among them.
A dozen sleek, stealthy cats darted from the woods, scattered by the intrusion. They kept a distance from the ketsuki, prowling at the edges of the unfolding scene like vultures waiting for a meal.
Miho and Kara moved as quickly as they could, scattering bits of the shrine far from the spot where Akane had died. Kara picked up a small poster of some J-pop band and began to shred it in her hands, then scattered the pieces on the light breeze, making sure they were strewn across the grass away from the memorial. Once again the shrine was ruined, but they continued to drag their feet through the debris, kicking and spreading the pieces.
The ketsuki seemed smaller as it turned to them. In the woods, Hachiro did not stir, and so step-by-step, almost wary, it started toward Miho and Kara. It picked up speed, beginning to lope.
“Miho!” Kara shouted.
Both girls screamed. But Kara knew who it came for. She had been here to see it born. Her dreams had been poisoned by it, tainted by its hideous intentions.
When it lunged, she tried to move, to hide behind a tree, but was too late. It snatched her, claws puncturing her clothes and flesh, drawing blood and screams. Terror ripped through her like nothing a nightmare could inspire. Every breath came out a scream and she wailed, blind with fear, and beat at its arms as it lifted her toward its face. Those slit cat eyes gleamed with pure hatred and anguish, and it opened its jaws wide, breath stinking of rot and death.
Kara heard the laughter of faceless girls.
The ketsuki let out that bestial, primal cry of pain and rage it had yowled before, and there among the trees it drove her to the ground so hard that her screams went silent. The breath went out of her. Sakura had summoned it unknowingly, and the ketsuki had made Kara its witness. Now she couldn’t even speak. She tried to breathe, tried to scream, and as it pressed its weight on her chest she knew she was going to die.
The baseball bat smashed into its feline snout. Someone screamed. The ketsuki whipped its head around to see its attacker when the bat struck again, crashing down on its neck.
Hachiro! Kara thought.
But as the vampire-thing shifted atop her, she saw Miho holding the bat, terror contorting her features but determination in her eyes.
A nighttime shadow moved in the darkness of the trees, and Hachiro appeared. With a strength driven by fear, he thrust forward a thick, splintered branch, jabbing it into the ketsuki’s chest like a spear.
The ketsuki shrieked, faltered, staggering away from them. It shook itself and stood up on two legs. Its cat eyes locked on Kara, and for a moment she sensed the presence she had seen before, the rotted, voracious aura of evil that lingered behind it.
Then it took one hate-filled step toward her.
“Akane, stop!”
It whipped its head around. When it saw Sakura coming toward it-and two steps behind, a limping, wounded Ume following her-it lay back its head and let out the most hideous, sorrowful wail yet.
Kara studied it, waiting for another glimpse of the demon that had created the vampire-thing, that had let it insinuate itself into dreams. But of Kyuketsuki, there was no sign.
“Why would you hurt them?” Sakura asked, shaking her head. Her tears glistened in the moonlight. She held something in her hand, some scrap that had blown away from the ruined shrine. “I don’t understand.”
In her uniform, with her jacket reversed and badges showing and with her edgy, jagged haircut, she didn’t look like a rebel anymore. She looked like a little girl playing dress-up in her sister’s clothes.
The ketsuki started toward Sakura and Ume.
“Sakura!” Kara yelled. “You’ve got to let it go. Ume murdered Akane, but your hate’s going to kill us all.”
Ume fell to her knees and hung her head. “Please, no. I hated her so much. Nobody meant for her to… I did not come out here to kill her. Things just got out of hand.”
Her wet, matted hair hung in curtains that blocked the moonlight, so it almost seemed that Ume had no face. The illusion made Kara shiver.
“I’m sorry!” Ume wailed, lowering her head further as though waiting for the executioner. “Please, I’m so sorry.”
Miho and Kara’s destruction of the shrine had scattered scraps of letters and photos all over the place, and the breeze had blown them across the slope, down toward the water. The ketsuki stalked toward Sakura and Ume, carefully choosing its path so that it did not step on a single scrap.
“Sakura, please!” Miho cried.
Kara and Hachiro and Miho all fell silent then, staring as Sakura stood defiantly in the path of her own heart’s vengeance.
Sakura closed her eyes and raised up the scrap she had been holding. Its glimmer revealed it as a photograph, but they were too far away to see the image.
“I can’t forgive Ume,” Sakura said. “I never will. I do wish she would die, and if you were Akane, I would not stand in your way.” She sobbed and her hand shook, but she did not lower the picture. “But my sister would never hurt the people who care about me. I knew the truth when Jiro died. She didn’t want to be his girlfriend, but he meant so much to her. She would never have hurt him. But I didn’t want to know it. I wanted so badly for you to be her.”
The ketsuki took another step toward her but then only crouched, watching her, shivering. It seemed much smaller than before.
Kara thought Sakura would destroy the photo, tear it in half and cast the pieces to the wind again. Instead, she turned and walked the few steps back to Ume. Sakura reached down and picked up Ume’s hand, forced the girl to take the photo from her.
“You gave me this pain, Ume. Now I give it back to you, and you can live with it. I’ll go on, for my sister, and I’ll have her with me always. And you go on with your guilt, and I hope it’s with you always. I pity you.”
The ketsuki screamed and collapsed. It struggled to stand, limping back toward the place where the shrine had been but was no longer. It fell in the spot where Akane had died, mewling and writhing.
When at last it went still, all that remained of it was the cold, dead body of the red and copper cat that Kara had watched die there weeks before-Kyuketsuki’s first victim at Monju-no-Chie School, and its last.
Hachiro limped up beside Kara, blood weeping from a scratch on his face, one hand clutched against the slashes on his chest, and put an arm around her.
“You all right?” he asked.
She nodded, amazed by this guy who’d been brutalized but who seemed concerned only about her own welfare. Kara stood on her tiptoes and gave him a quick, soft kiss. The punctures in her side and back bled, but she’d live.
Miho went to Sakura. They’d been best friends, but just watching them now, Kara could see the distance all of this had put between them. And yet, with just a few steps and open arms, Miho closed that distance. She put her arms around Sakura-the shy girl now strong, the rebel now tender and broken-and hugged her close.
Just a few feet away, Ume still knelt on the ground, sobbing quietly. She had her arms wrapped around her knees and her face buried there, hidden. In one hand she still clutched the photograph that Sakura had given her, tilted in the moonlight so that at last, Kara could make out the image. The picture was a shot of Akane and Sakura in their school uniforms, arms around each other, heads leaning together. The sisters had the same smile.
“Is it over?” Sakura asked, hopeful.
“Yes. It’s over,” Miho said.
As one, Miho and Sakura, and Kara and Hachiro, turned their backs on Ume and started to walk toward the school and the dormitory beyond. The police would drive by soon. Twice an hour, they’d said. They would notice the open door of the dormitory and find Mr. Matsui’s body. Eventually they would find Ume, crying, and the girl would confess.. . or Kara and her friends would tell them of her confession.
What would happen then, she had no idea. But for the moment, Miho was right. It was over.
Yet even as the thought entered Kara’s mind, the wind picked up.
