“Do you have it?” the boy looked uncomfortable to be around me and the Other’s inhabiting the dark space under the bleachers.
“Of course,” I produced the answer key with a flourish. I might not be supernatural, but a little slight-of-hand could impress little old humans as well as Kami.
Kami were creatures of legend in their native land of Japan. They were considered spirits, phenomena, or even holy powers that could be anything from a specific landscape, forces of nature, or even spirits of the dead. Unlike a lot of other cultures, they were worships by the still-popular Shinto religion.
What that produced was a spoiled brat who was used to people literally bowing, scraping, and attending to his every need because they thought he was divine. It didn’t matter that the legends weren’t entirely correct. It didn’t stop the guy in front of me from having a literal god complex.
In reality, Kami were in the shifter family of supernatural creatures, but with specific differences. They were extremely long lived; more like a vamp’s lifespan than a wolf or bears. Many thought that was because their particular brand of shifting wasn’t to transform into a hulking, hybrid, human-animal beast. They were able to shift to anything with the same amount of mass as them. The unique brand of shifting more than made up for their human-normal strength and speed. It was hard to fight something that could literally turn into fog before you punched it. They could shift their features to whatever struck their fancy, or even look like other people, which was where the whole dead-ancestor legend came from. They could even be trees, rocks, animals, or whatever else they wanted to be. As far as shifting went, Kami were the most versatile.
By nature, they were a tricky people, secretive, and like everyone else, desperate to retain their grip on power since the Revelation. As it turned out, the Imperial Family of Japan were Kami, and enjoyed being revered as gods. Even more worrisome for humans, it was impossible to tell a shifted Kami from the real thing, which made security professionals next-level paranoid.
I’d experienced it firsthand. It wasn’t the same as having an imposter President of the United States, but I knew for a fact Eiko had impersonated a teacher on more than one occasion. Usually, to screw with the syllabus or get people out of class.
He was also one of my sources. We had a quid-pro-quo going on. He scratched my back and I scratched his; which was why he paid nearly nothing for test answers despite having the funds to purchase his own private island. He might only be the nephew of the son of a bastard cousin to the royal family, but that still meant he had royal blood. As such, his father was chief of staff to the Japanese Ambassador to the United States. All that meant was he was right at home at St. Vincent’s.
I handed over the answer key, and he waved for one of his flunkies to hand me twenty bucks. He reviewed the questions and answers quickly. Kami had eidetic memories, so he handed the sheet of paper back to me after a minute. It didn’t matter if the teacher changed the order of the questions, or had multiple versions of the same test. Eiko was set.
“I hope you don’t have any contraband stashed in your room,” he suddenly added. “I passed Mr. Miller and Butch on my way here. They looked like they were heading that way.”
I wasn’t stupid enough to have anything incriminating in my room, but that didn’t mean there was nothing embarrassing. I ground my teeth and purposefully didn’t snap at the Kami. He was supposed to give me a heads up about this type of thing. He’d given me his word and sworn on it, which was much more binding for creatures of magical origin than humans. There were ways around that, case in point; he’d held to the letter of our agreement and told me about Miller, but not the spirit of giving me time to hide anything I needed to.
“Thank you, Eiko-san,” I bowed as he left, and waited until he was far enough away before sprinting back toward my room.
St. Vincent’s was a private school, and while some teachers and students lived in the nearby small town, most lived on campus in dorms. It was a lot like college, expect I was pretty sure college didn’t have you check in and out whenever you wanted to leave campus. Thankfully, my dorm was right next to the football stadium. It was a pain on Friday nights when the football team played and I wanted to get some sleep, but it was a stone’s throw from where I did business.
I swiped my card in the reader at the door and sprinted up the steps. The dorm was four stories with a dozen rooms per floor; two people to a room. Freshman weren’t allowed because they had their own specific dorms, but sophomores to seniors made up the ninety-six students who called Gates Hall home. A teacher acted as a resident advisor on each floor – for more pay I assumed – and lived in an apartment at the end of the hall. I lived on the fourth floor and had Frau Brunner as my live-in monitor. Since I was good at languages, and got straight A’s in her class, she liked me. That sentiment was not shared by the majority of the teachers. In fact, most had an inkling that I was stealing answers and cheating on tests. They couldn’t prove it, and aside from language and history, I was a B minus student at best; not exactly the grades of a career cheater. Still, there
