The teakettle shrieks, startling me.
Goro grins. “We should probably call your mother.”
Twelve
Shibuya District
Tokyo, Japan
Two nights later, our luck hasn’t managed to grow good fruit. No matter how hard we try, Shiro and I haven’t managed to recruit a single shinigami. We have no problem finding them, of course. Death gods stalk every neighborhood in the city. We see them in train stations, cafés, parks, street corners, and shops. They haunt the hallways in hospitals and follow elderly couples onto buses. But none of them are willing to help us.
Goro hasn’t fared better. No one in Tokyo has seen the shinigami he remembers so fondly, nor does any clan have a record of him.
“You weren’t kidding when you said this was going to be impossible,” I say to Shiro, pulling my coat tight against an icy evening breeze. Shiro and I are waiting for a bus back to Shibuya—after being attacked by yokai in Yoyogi Park, Shiro and I try to limit our searches to the daylight hours. It’s difficult to waste time at the ryokan when each sunset brings us closer to the blood moon . . . but like Goro always says, You can’t save the world if you’re dead.
The bus stop itself provides no shelter from the weather, and the snowflakes tumble down in clumps. It’s so cold, I’m starting to consider taking shelter in the laundromat behind us. The yellow light streaming from its windows looks cheerful and warm.
I shift my weight to the other foot, shivering. “How many times were we rejected today? Eight? Ten?”
“Thirteen,” Shiro says, blowing into his cupped hands to keep his fingers warm.
“Let’s hope we can find shinigami in Kyoto, then,” I say. With Goro’s help, I talked Mother into allowing me to stay in Tokyo for a few days. Goro told her I should recover in Tokyo, under the watchful eyes of the priests at the Meiji Shrine. Mother believed him and gave me till Wednesday to return home. That’s the day after tomorrow, so we’re running out of time. “I’ll have less time to look in Kyoto, though—school will take up a lot of my day.”
“Kira, Kira, always with her head in a book,” Shiro says, teasing me lightly.
I wrinkle my nose. “I don’t have a choice. If my grades drop, I’ll lose my place at Kōgakkon and my parents will be really upset with me.” Though I admit, my time at Kōgakkon hasn’t been everything I’d wished it to be. My last high school wasn’t as prestigious, but I hadn’t been bullied there. Plus I had a few friends. Sort of.
A bus pulls up to the stop. It almost seems to exhale as its doors open. Shiro and I move aside for the passengers trying to board. “On top of that, Goro says I need to start learning onmyōdō.”
“I thought you wanted to learn onmyōdō?” Shiro says.
“I do, but a month isn’t enough time,” I say, kicking the snow piling up near my feet. It wouldn’t be this cold back in Kyoto, at least not yet. I don’t like the feeling of winter nipping at my nose, reminding me that our time is drawing shorter with alarming speed. We have less than four weeks till the blood moon rises. It isn’t enough time—not to find shinigami for O-bei, nor to pack a lifetime’s worth of magical training into my skull. I won’t be enough against Shuten-doji, not alone. With shinigami at my back and Shiro at my side, perhaps we’ll stand a fighting chance. Maybe.
I don’t like living with so many maybes. In everything else I’ve done in life, good preparation has assured success. But in this case, I can prepare all I want and still lose the whole world.
The snow falls harder. Flakes get stuck in my lashes. I shelter my forehead with my hand, my fingertips naked and tender from the unexpected cold snap. Clouds overhead suck the remaining light from the sky. The snow blurs the glow from the lampposts. It’s close to seven o’clock, and several businessmen wait at the bus stop with us, along with an elderly shopper or two. Nobody has properly dressed for a snowstorm; nobody was expecting it—especially not the weathermen.
“Do you know any shinigami in Kyoto?” I ask Shiro, peering at the oncoming traffic, hoping to see a bus on its way. I stamp my feet to get my blood pumping through my toes, which are barely more than tiny blocks of ice stuffed into my shoes.
“Not any we’d want to work with,” Shiro says.
“We’re sort of desperate,” I say. “Aren’t we?”
“Not that desperate,” Shiro says, narrowing his eyes by a sliver. “Not yet.”
“Even if we could just convince one, I’d have hope that this crazy plan might work—”
A horn screams, startling Shiro and me. My gaze snaps to the center of the road, where a bullet-gray van skids sideways across the icy asphalt. The driver behind the wheel struggles to regain control of the vehicle. The tires turn helplessly against the physics of ice and snow.
The van careens straight for the bus stop.
Before I can scramble out of the van’s path, Shiro yanks me backward. I stumble and slip. We become a tangle of arms and legs on the slick pavement, until the world tilts at ninety degrees and I slide backward. Horns blare. Metal shrieks. Glass shatters. People scream.
I tumble and slide till I collide with something solid, straight, and cold. The impact claps the breath from my lungs. Pain sparks hot, like a poker being jammed into my shoulder.
The street falls silent.
When I open my eyes, I’m smashed up against the laundromat’s glass windows. Inside, several middle-aged women point to something outside; I think they might be laughing at me. But then my head begins to clear, and I realize the emotion on their faces isn’t humor.
It’s horror.
I sit up. Shiro’s propped up on one arm, cradling his forehead with his free hand. It takes my eyes a few seconds to focus. The twisted metal and broken glass don’t compute. A vehicle has lodged itself between the awning and the metal bus route map. Tongues of orange fire lick the busted-up hood of a van. One yellow blinker still signals psychotically, throwing its yellow light over the chaos on the sidewalk. Behind the spiderwebbed windshield, the driver of the van slumps over the wheel. He’s not moving.
I see the blood next. The stuff splatters across the sidewalk, as if someone took a giant bottle of sumi-e ink and smashed it against the ground. It fans out from the epicenter of the crash, where—
No, I think, my mind unable to accept the scene in front of me. My blood chills. Every hair on my body stiffens.
A man is wound up in all that glass and metal and oil—a man who wasn’t lucky enough to scramble away in time. He now lies crushed between the bus stop and the van. Several of his bones are broken into wrong angles. Glass protrudes from between several of his ribs, and his blood drips from his body, its heat hissing against the snow. His silver hair glints in the low light, and his round-rimmed bifocal glasses lies several steps away. A smudge of blood stains the cracked left lens.
His primal cry tears into the air. The sound seems to have claws sharp enough to rend my heart in two. I scramble back until my back hits the laundromat’s windows again. Tears spring to my eyes. Everything inside me screams to look away, you baka! But I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I should help him, somehow—but what am I supposed to do?
Shiro kneels in front of me, blocking the horrific scene with his body. As he whispers something, my gaze wanders out into the street, where three cars have piled up near the center median. An injured woman screams for help, clutching an unconscious child in her arms, her crushed passenger-side door hanging horribly ajar. Traffic has come to standstill, save for the blaring horns and the distant, high-pitched ambulance wails.