“Do you see the butterflies around him?” Shiro asks under his breath. “Those are the souls of the dead.”
Before the attack on the Fujikawa Shrine, I doubt I would have paid any attention to this man. Today, I can see him for what he is: shinigami. Death incarnate.
He’s exactly what we’re looking for.
The shinigami watches a small boy playing by the riverbank. The park’s river moves swiftly past its shores, deep enough to drown someone so small. The intensity of the shinigami’s gaze, the sheer focus of it, makes my fear roil. I’ve already seen the terrifying truth behind the human facade, but I refuse to be cowed.
“Let’s talk to him,” I say, walking toward the bridge without a plan.
“Wait, Kira!” Shiro says, grabbing for my wrist. He misses. I step onto the bridge, and its wooden planks shiver beneath my feet. The shinigami lifts his hands. The boy wobbles, stumbling closer to the water’s edge. He’s so small, no more than three or four years old.
“Excuse me?” I ask the shinigami. “Sir?”
The shinigami’s gaze snaps to me.
He drops his hands.
I release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.
The boy’s mother calls his name, and he toddles away from the river’s flank. My relief slips out of me on a sigh. The shinigami’s lip curls.
“How are you able to see me, girl?” He spits the word girl as if it’s made of poison.
I bow deeply. “My name is Kira Fujikawa. This is the kitsune guardian of the Fujikawa Shrine, Shiro Okamoto,” I say, gesturing at Shiro, who has managed to catch up to me. “We’re on an errand from Lady Katayama—”
“Ha, as if I’d help Lady Katayama in her foolish quest to become queen of Yomi,” he says, turning away. His butterflies swirl around him in a tornado of silver. “Get out of my sight.”
O-bei wants to be queen of Yomi? I pause for a second, exchanging a glance with Shiro. This wasn’t information O-bei had offered to me herself; and it makes me wonder how much of a pawn I’ve become in this game of yokai.
Either way, someone still needs to stop Shuten-doji. I can’t do it alone.
“Please, sir,” I say, starting after him. “My family’s shrine was attacked two nights ago. If we can’t find help from a few shinigami, we will not be able to defeat Shuten-doji, and the world will—”
He whirls on me, murder in his slate-gray eyes. “Do you think I would stoop to help a human?” He spits on the ground. “Betray my own people to serve a mortal’s interests? Leave, before I decide you’d look better as a butterfly.”
Both Shiro and I bow again. When I rise, I watch him walk away, his patent-leather shoes striking the bridge’s planks like gunshots. Oni-chan jumps up onto the bridge bannister, twitching his tails and shooting a judgmental glare at the shinigami’s back.
“Did you know your mother wants to be queen of Yomi?” I ask Shiro without looking at him.
Shiro sighs.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” I say, watching the little boy skip across the grass with his mother. Oni-chan begins washing his face, apparently unconcerned with our failure. “Will O-bei be a better queen than Shuten-doji is king?”
“I suppose she might be.” Shiro’s ears slant at forty-five-degree angles.
I’m not comfortable with the question mark in his tone, but addressing it now will only distract us from our goal—recruiting shinigami. I don’t know enough about the politics of Yomi to know whether helping O-bei is a mistake; for now, I file the information away to ask Shiro about later.
“Fine,” I say to him, knowing our situation is anything but fine.
We make our way to the Meiji Shrine slowly, searching the entirety of Yoyogi Park. By the time the sun touches the horizon, we’ve been rejected by three more shinigami: an old woman carrying butterflies on her parasol, a fashionable girl who wears her souls strung in a necklace, their wings struggling for purchase against her silken blouse; and a round-bellied, red-faced man whose brown moths tremble as he shouts at us. For every thousand human souls I see, at least one shinigami hovers on the edge of our spaces, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. But none of the shinigami want anything to do with humans, outside killing them. And nobody wants to work with O-bei Katayama.
Nobody.
The shadows stick to our shoes as we stroll into the park’s dense forests, headed for the shrine. Darkness falls over the forest floor. The treetops make black blots against the sky. Every few yards, I spot another massive spiderweb hanging between the trees, each spun by a jorō spider the size of my thumb. The last of the light limns the delicate fibers of their webs, making them glitter like gold. I’m not certain whether the phenomenon is natural or supernatural.
“We need to hurry,” Shiro says, looking at the spiderwebs. The tone of his voice tells me he’s trying to sound casual and failing. “Something’s not quite right about this place—”
A song curls under the park’s ambient noise, one I hear with my soul, not with my ears.
“Kagome, Kagome . . .”
The small hairs at the back of my neck rile. Shiro lifts his head and scents the air, cursing under his breath. I scan the area, looking to see if any yokai lurk in the shadows of the park’s massive trees. I see nothing. No one. Even the pedestrians on the path have disappeared. My bracelet remains cold against my wrist, the one consolation.
“Shuten-doji’s spies must have followed us,” I whisper.
Shiro puts a hand on my lower back. “Word gets around fast in Tokyo.”
“Where’s Oni-chan?” I whisper, looking around. The little demon cat appears to have faded into the shadows, for he’s no longer at my feet. “Oni-chan?” I whisper. “Oni-chan!”
Shiro growls. “Of course he wanders off the minute we need him—”
The song lifts again, closer now. “Circle you, circle you . . .” The tune crushes salt into the wounds in my heart, and I shudder at the fiery sensation that sears through my chest.
“Do you know where the Meiji Shrine is from here?” I whisper to Shiro.
“No, but I think I can sense where it lies,” he says, pushing his bangs out of his face. “C’mon!”
We run. The asphalt path stretches and ducks through the shadowy forest, with no end in sight. We run till my heart burns and my lungs feel like they’re going to pop like balloons. We run till the shadows fill in the spaces between the trees. Till my legs feel like they can’t take another step. Till the soles of my feet ache.
A torii gate comes into view, standing like a sentinel against the growing darkness. It towers over the path, and the golden medallions on its lintel glow like cats’ eyes.
Shadows congregate beneath the gate, swirling around a young woman in a crimson furisode. Her footsteps make no sound, and while everything about her appears human, there’s a certain sort of wrongness about her that sets my teeth on edge. Maybe it’s the infant wail carried on the wind, or maybe it’s the strange way the lower half of her kimono moves, almost as if something beats the fabric’s insides with tiny fists. Her face seems to be almost . . . fluted.
No, not fluted. The creases running up and down her flat, ovular face aren’t slits at all, but eyes. Eight of them, all shaped like pea pods and glowing like tiny stoplights in the dark.