The Shinigami in White now wears three deep scratches on one cheek. They ooze droplets of black-red blood, each making a little rosette on the shoulder of her white kimono. “You little beasts have caused more trouble than you’re worth,” she says, narrowing her eyes. She brings her blade level to my chest. “Stand still, now, if you want to die without pain. Even my precision has its limits . . . as does my patience.”
She tenses for an attack, but just before she springs, her eyes grow wide. The reflection of a massive cat ripples across the train’s tinted windows.
Even I flinch when Oni-chan roars, the sound exploding through the car as if it were a drum struck by one of the gods. The Shinigami in White takes a step back.
It’s just the distraction I need.
Memory surges through me. Dropping down to one knee, I tut the symbol for Rin. All my pent-up fear roils, bubbling over into my heart and making my fingertips tingle. I shove my hands forward. Fire explodes off my palms, tearing through the air in the form of crimson flames. Heat billows against my face. The moths burn, and if I weren’t so shocked, I’d marvel at them twirling through the air on cinder-edged wings. The flames chew through the cocoons that hold Shiro, Goro, and Ronin.
Gray ash and black smoke linger in the flames’ wake.
“Whoa,” I say, turning my palm over, marveling at my unblemished, unbroken flesh. My hand pulses with heat, several degrees hotter than the rest of my body, as if my blood’s turned to napalm. That was . . . that was so . . . whoa.
The Shinigami in White straightens. Smoke stains her kimono. “They said you are a clever girl,” she says, lifting her blade. “But not clever enough—”
Shiro grips the Shinigami in White’s throat with clawed fingertips. Rubies of blood appear at each pressure point. “Drop it,” he growls. “Or we’ll see how much blood I can get on your kimono.”
The Shinigami in White sneers. “As if you could ever best me, boy.”
She hisses a spell and bursts into a cloud of moths, disappearing through the train’s broken window.
“Dammit!” Shiro says, turning to slash a nearby headrest with his claws. Stuffing leaks out of the tears in the fabric. His chest heaves with each wave of his fury.
“Well, everyone’s alive,” Goro says with a sigh, picking moth silk off his clothing. Oni-chan, now back to his regular size, leaps up onto the back of one of the seats. He begins washing his face with a paw. “I suppose we’ll call that a victory for now.”
“But what about the train?” I ask, gathering Oni-chan into my arms. He turns into putty, but still twitches his tail as if annoyed. Everything is charred, blackened, burned; my allies, at least, look only a little singed.
“We’ll blame the damage to the train on a gas leak,” Ronin says. “Or some equally dull mortal fear.”
I shake my head, incredulous. “But there aren’t any gas lines aboard this train—”
“It won’t matter,” Ronin says, sliding his katana back into its sheath. “Mortals will believe anything I wish them to believe.”
Oni-chan hisses at me as I ease him back into his crate. After everything I’ve done for you? he seems to say.
It’s going to be a long ride to Kyoto.
Fourteen
Kyoto Train Station
Kyoto, Japan
I step off the shinkansen train in Kyoto, anxiety rising. I have faced demons, death gods, and more danger than I ever could have dreamed of surviving—but none of it terrifies me as much as the prospect of my parents’ wrath.
“On a scale of one to ten,” Shiro says, hopping onto the platform after me, “how pissed are your parents going to be today?”
I doubt numbers could describe my parents’ ire. Their fury won’t be like a firework, but more like an asteroid plummeting to Earth, one that slams into the surface and chokes the atmosphere with dust. Their anger will linger long after the brightest parts of it have burned out, as will their shame. It couldn’t have been comfortable for them to explain my disappearance to the authorities, my teachers, their friends, or the rest of our family. And while Goro’s intervention may have bought me some time, it did not buy me their forgiveness.
“My parents are very traditional, and very conservative,” I say, setting Oni-chan’s crate down on the ground as we wait for Goro and Ronin to disembark. “From their perspective, it looks like their daughter ran off to Tokyo with a boy.”
“I’m not a boy. I’m a kitsune shrine guardian,” Shiro says with a sniff.
“They don’t know that,” I say.
Ronin steps off the train with a short laugh. “And can you really call yourself a kitsune, brother, when you’ve yet to earn your first tail?”
“I’d rather be tailless than dead,” Shiro fires back, snatching Oni-chan’s crate off the ground.
As Goro joins us on the platform, he sighs. “You are both fools, hmm? What is done is done, and arguing about it won’t help matters.”
Ronin turns away from us. “I’ve made reservations at the Nishiyama Ryokan. Have my things delivered there, won’t you?”
With that, he disappears into the crowds on the platform.
“By the gods, I hate him sometimes,” Shiro says. Oni-chan growls in his crate. I’m not sure if the little demon agrees with Shiro or if he’s just hungry. I’m betting on the latter. It’s always the latter with him.
As we exit the terminal, my nerves balloon. A thousand different conversations cascade through my head, each one of them ending in embarrassment and humiliation for me. And the look on my mother’s face does nothing to help my confidence.
“That’s them right there,” Shiro says, recognizing my parents from across the station. He waves, then falters. “Your mom looks, er . . . happy to see you.”
My parents wait in the station’s entryway, backlit by the chilly sunlight outside. Mother’s lips move, but the space between us swallows up the sound. Now Father turns his head and spots me. He looks even less pleased. Both are dressed for a government function—Father in a conservative black suit and Mother in a gray kimono with a pale pink obi. Mother’s formal manner of dress tells me exactly what kind of government function it was—important. Which means I’m interrupting something. Perhaps there were memorials held in Grandfather’s honor today, many of which I will have missed.
Great.
My parents take me straight home, where I endure their interrogations first, then the police’s. I doubt I helped the case much: like Ami, I told the police that Grandfather hid my sister and me in the small shrine’s cellar. We saw nothing and heard only screaming. Like Ami, I lied.
But what am I supposed to say? That my family’s shrine was desecrated by demons hell-bent on obtaining the last shard of a legendary sword? That my grandfather was murdered by a demon lieutenant of Shuten-doji? That I’m currently recruiting death gods to try to save my family’s shrine? No. Even after everything I’ve endured, those answers sound improbable even to me.
Once the police are gone, Mother’s mood teeter-totters. She’s usually so reserved with me—she only hugs Ami and keeps her kind words for Ichigo—but twice now, she’s reached for my hand, seemed to remember herself then and withdrawn it. Nothing hurts worse than the promise of love, retracted. My mother has never loved me the way she loves her other children.