Tears and Shadow (kitsune series) Read online

  I nodded, waiting as the guys filed through the front door. I knew I really ought to spare myself this, but I seemed to be developing a work ethic. Besides, a sort of perverse curiosity was egging me on.

  “Are you really a ninja?” he asked.

  I crossed over, vanishing from sight, and took a few steps around him where I reappeared, tapping him in the back.

  Clutching his rifle tightly, he wheeled around and barely stopped himself from feeding me its butt. I went weak at the knees as he stared down at me. This was not the boyish hunk I’d been hanging with, but a stone-cold killer, a heartbeat away from violence. Playing games with him had been stupid. “Sorry,” I said.

  Like a mask, his jovial, all-American boy facade returned. “You got moves all right. Sometime, you’ll have to show me how you do that.” He paused, listening to his head set. “C’mon, Virgil wants us ASAP.”

  Mentally braced, I followed him in. Under the blood, nastier odors attacked. I wrinkled my nose. The smell had gone up a few notches inside. I closed my eyes and gagged, breathing shallowly through my mouth. I spotted part of a woman in a house coat, crumpled in the living room corner. After that, I kept my gaze on Kendall.

  Across the room, Sanchez commented, “When people die their bowels cut loose. Oh, careful where you step, there’s liver, spleen, and intestines, and other gunk laying all about.” It was more information than I needed, but she couldn’t appear to stop herself. “The parents were pulled apart.”

  At each mention of an organ, my eidetic memory whipped out an Encyclopedia Britannica entry on the body part and its function, complete with colored medical illustrations. I seriously considered bolting as my stomach churned queasily. Weirdly, I also felt hunger stir at the smell, freaking me out; my kitsune blood maybe. This crime scene was something I needed to forget—and never would. Sure, I’d seen carnage before, but this was a normal family in the real world, a family like mine, before it started to come apart.

  Kendall spoke softly, “Here.” I opened my eyes. He held out a bandana. “Breathe through this.”

  “Thanks.” I took the cloth and held it against my face.

  Virgil came and dragged me from room to room. I made a point of not looking too closely at the dark smears on the floor and walls. Going into the kitchen, I stepped over a severed arm. Broken glass crunched underfoot. Someone’s torn-out lung lay clumped in a cold, iron skillet on the stove. Other body parts graced the table and sink.

  I closed my eyes again, swallowing as burning acid shot up my esophagus. I will not throw up. I will not throw up. I will not...

  I did. Hacking and spewing and gagging into a trash can someone provided. I wiped my mouth, grimacing at the aftertaste. No one said anything about my reaction. Virgil just waited until I was listening again and continued. “The worst part is the kids upstairs. I can’t spare you that. I need you to see if their ghosts are still around, and what they have to say.”

  I glowered at him, dropping the cloth a moment to speak. “Like me, they probably just want to be left alone.”

  “I think all these dead people wanted that rather badly, especially when they were being turned on each other, ripping one another apart. A good day is when we get somewhere in time to keep things like this from happening. At one point or another, all of us are called to battlefields we’d rather avoid.”

  “So I’m just here for a recruiting pitch? I could strangle you slowly with that bit of intestine over there.”

  “No,” Virgil leaned into me, his face near mine as he latched onto my arms. “That intestine isn’t strong enough. Always stick to piano wire.” He let me go, pulling away.

  “Don’t you already know what’s behind this attack?”

  “I leave nothing to ambiguity. It’s how I’ve survived so long.”

  “Crossing over could be dangerous. The evil spirits might still be here,” I pointed out.

  Virgil shrugged. “That’s a risk you’ll just have to take.”

  Damn, just throw me to the sharks.

  TWELVE

  FULLER: a shallow channel to lighten and strengthen

  some blades. This has nothing to do with blood flow,

  sticking, or cutting power. Fullers are mistakenly

  called “blood grooves”.

  “I need everyone cleared out,” I said.

  Virgil arched an eyebrow, a silent question.

  “I don’t want people’s auras getting in my way,” I said.

  His eyes lit up with interest. “So, while you’re intangible and invisible, we can still touch you, in a way. I wonder why Cassie never mentioned that to me.”

  I shrugged, and made a mental note that Cassie didn’t completely trust the people she worked for. Well, that made sense; the PRT was all about protecting and serving, but they did answer to politicians.

  Virgil spoke into his headset, “Okay, gang, everyone clear out.” Having given the order, he removed his headset, handing it to me. “If this works across the veil, keep me apprised of events.”

  I nodded, putting the headset on. HPI had run countless experiments on me, but not this one. They’d been more interested in me than the ghost realm. With the PRT, the opposite was true.

  Everyone trooped out past us. Some of the guys carried camcorders, a laptop, and other electronics. Once they were out, Virgil sauntered to the door way, pausing. “Good luck.”

  “Not likely.” I concentrated, feeling the weave of space around me, and fanned my kitsune aura into a blaze. Orange wisps of flame hazed across my white skin, turning it yellow, seeping up through my clothes, enveloping all of me. I held my torch-like hands in front of me, rolling fingers into tight fists. I’d never tied crossing over using cold fire as armor, ready to sling fireballs. If this worked, I wouldn’t be at the total mercy of the unknown.

  Virgil backed away from the doorway, turned on the porch, and ran out into the yard. I started to mentally count to give him time to get to the trucks. By eight, there was a crackle in my ear, followed by a small voice, “Virgil here, you’ve got a green light.”

  “Here goes.” I pulled the folds of space and felt the familiar electric prickle, even though my body was coated in foxfire. The room around me went gray. My body lightened. Best of all, blood splatters turned to black ink. Body parts and scattered internal organs lost definition. I could pretend they were all something else than what I knew. I spun to take in the area, looking for ghost both old and new.

  Nothing. But I knew better than to relax. In the ghost realm, ghosts didn’t have to be condensed to be present, and often weren’t—until they attacked.

  “Virgil, are you there?” I listened intently. Not even a crackle of static. I took the headset off and tossed it out the door for the guys to find. Once out of my hand and away from my aura, it fell back across the veil, into the human realm.

  I froze, feeling a wall of cold swing through me. A chill of apprehension followed as a thin, windy sound undulated into the room from the upper floor, some kind of flute. It was accompanied by the thudding of a drum. The ceiling creaked as if someone was stomping around upstairs.

  I jumped to the stairs, bounced up them, catching myself at the upper landing. A narrow hall stretched away from me. The passage was oddly free of blood, guts, and dismembered body parts. Whatever had happened up here had been confined to the bedrooms. I took a cautious step, then another. The right hand side was windowed with a view of the front yard. I saw the guys out there, massed up, bristling with weapons. Help was a scream away—not that I should count on anyone but myself.

  The flute was louder, a mournful dirge full of tears. The thumping was like a giant heart that wouldn’t die.

  The bedrooms were on the left. I approached the first one. Its door was open. I could have just ghosted through the wall, but I didn’t know what I’d be stepping into. Taliesina’s yellow eyes blazed in my inner darkness as she roused herself. Her thoughts blended into mine, Slow and easy, that’s the way. Check behind the door as you go in, and do
n’t forget to see if anything’s hiding up against the ceiling.

  I nodded. Yeah, not my first rodeo, girlfriend.

  Crouching in the doorway, a swirling ball of foxfire in my right hand, I scanned a little boy’s bedroom. Toy trucks and wrestling action figures were scattered on an oval throw rug by a single bed. The bed was made, but rumpled; the blanket displayed an animated race car with a smiling face. Dark streaks of blood were on that face, as well as a child’s heart. And it was thumping, the source of the beating I heard. It pulsed, clenching and unclenching, shooting spurts of blood from ragged arteries. But maybe not real blood. The stuff thinned in the air, fading like an ectoplasmic illusion.

  I averted my eyes, checking the ceiling and the other side of the room, as I slammed the door back against the wall, making sure nothing lurked behind it. The wood became ember orange to my touch, than cooled to gray as I pulled my hand away.

  I stepped into the room. The flute’s riffs and trills filled the space evenly, having no real direction. I considered the closet, and a steamer trunk with metal corners over by the bed. Both were a likely source. The carpet at the edge of the closet was black with blood. Probably the rest of the kid was in there. I’d try the trunk first. It sat a few feet away with open latches and a big floppy lock hanging down like a panting tongue. A smear of blood was just above the lock.

  A small, lunar-style bounce landed me by the trunk. Nerving myself, I reached down, gripped the lid, and flung it back, every muscle in my body tight with tension. No boogie man popped out. No cloudy swirl of solidifying phantom. With the lid thrown back, the music was louder.

  I peered into a bedding of toy soldiers, trucks, games, and stuffed animals. A blood smeared head sat in the middle of the clutter, braced against a plastic dinosaur. The boy’s hair was pale and short-cropped. The eyes startled wide. A deer bone flute had been left in the child’s mouth. Small, dismembered hands gripped the flute as if playing it. In one corner of the truck, a stuffed giraffe craned its head toward the flute in rapturous absorption.

  I swallowed forcefully, feeling a heaving in my empty stomach that I fought down. The flute music sped up in a rapid-fire crescendo as I advanced on the closet. I reached out and touched the door knob, hesitating. Did I want what I’d see inside the closet stuck for all time in my memory? No. But this was something I had to do.

  Taliesina had been quiet in the back of my mind for a while. She spoke up now, If you want to go away for a while, and let me do this for you…

  No. What doesn’t dismember us makes us stronger, right?

  If you say so.

  I turned the knob and yanked the door open with a step back, my other hand full of cold fire. I instantly gagged, assailed by the odor of urine, crap, and even more blood. I saw the boy ghost first, cloudy, translucent, his edges dissolving as he screamed silently, his ghost fire draining like a jade serpent into the larger ghost that held him.

  The second spirit was dressed in moccasins with ankle flaps, buckskin chaps on his legs, a loin cloth. What I could see of his bare chest was partly covered by beaded necklaces. His ears were pierced, the holes holding large seashells. His hair was tied up like a fountain on top of his skull where a red-painted hawk feather fluttered.

  The boy’s ghost burst into fading embers, and I knew he was gone forever, eaten by one of his own.

  The child’s tormentor regarded me with old black eyes, and smiled like he’d just played the best prank in the world.

  Something in me snapped. Boiling rage surged up my gullet. I trembled with fury, slamming my hand forward, dousing him with the flames of my aura.

  But he vanished. The drum and flute sounds stopped as well.

  My fire churned uselessly in the confined space, writhing, thinning away as the ghost had. My hand fell to my side. I looked down at the closet floor where a tiny body curled in a fetal position, hands and head missing. The limbs were broken with splinters of bone protruding. I stared a very long time, unable to look away.

  Someone was screaming like a maniac.

  That would be you, Taliesina said.

  Oh. I stopped, turning away.

  I had other rooms to check, but I was done skulking about. I leaped at the far wall, ghosting through it in a heartbeat, blind for a second. I landed in a little girl’s room, braking with a soft skid. The curtains were frilly on the window and on the canopy bed. A little table was set up with a plastic tea set. Blood filled the little cups. A doll’s playhouse had been trampled to pieces. Ripped pages from a coloring book were everywhere. Stepped on crayons were strewn across a throw rug that hid half of the wooden floor. A black-felt picture on the wall featured a sad clown with ball nose and cheek stubble. A black line scored one cheek, an eternal tear. Headless dolls were everywhere. The heads were on the bookcase, guarding fairy tale volumes where people lived happy ever after.

  Not here, of course.

  I turned to see the wall I’d just come through. The little girl hung there, pinned in place with ripped out lengths of her own small bones. Her head lolled to the side, eyes closed. She wore blood-soaked jeans and a pink tee with a blonde cartoon fairy that wore an upside-down pink rose for a dress. The fairy smiled at me as if to say, Aren’t I cute?

  I scanned the room again, calling out, “Hello, anyone here?”

  I stopped. There was a face in the gloom just under the edge of the bed; a small face with pink-fire eyes. I went over and knelt, dropping my face low to the floor. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”

  A soft whisper answered me. “You’re not my mommy.”

  “No, I’m not.” I beckoned, waving with just my fingers the way you’d summon a cat. “My name’s Grace. Why don’t you come out?”

  “You’re not my mommy.” The ghost had little facial animation. Her words were slow, without inflection. I didn’t think she was really listening to me.

  I tried again, “What’s your name?”

  “I want my mommy.”

  For a moment, brimming tears blurred my vision, then they crept down my face. “I’m sorry, she’s not here.”

  The little face twisted with sorrow. She began to cry, then thinned to nothing, going wherever ghosts go when they don’t want to be seen.

  Slowly, I stood and went forward, pulling in my aura so the bed parted for me like water in a wading pool. Beyond it, I passed through another wall, entering what I thought was probably the last upstairs room, a master bedroom where heavy drapes blocked the windows, keeping it dark.

  Something small sat up on the queen-sized bed. Eyes like ghostly coins reflected the orange of my flaming body. My heart hammered. I braced myself as it leaped … landing to the side of the bed, going into hiding under it—a cat. I searched but nothing else turned up. Virgil wasn’t going to be happy; I’d drawn a blank. All signs said this was just as it seemed, with no other lurking evil besides the warrior in the boy’s closet.

  I let myself sink through the floor.

  Well, we can always try another time when the girl’s recovered from her death trauma a little more, Taliesina said.

  We’re not coming back, I said. I want to be able to sleep at night.

  You have a point.

  I settled to the lower floor and kicked off from there. As I shot through the front door, I pushed through the veil, flushing with an electric tingle that changed my weight, bringing color into the outdoors. Muzzles centered on me. I held up my hands. “Don’t shoot, it’s me.”

  Virgil ran up, and pulled me toward one of his trucks. He called out to the others. “Okay, pull back. We’re about to have an accidental fire.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  We stopped at the fold-out steps in the side of a truck. A red light poured into the yard from it. Virgil looked like someone bathed in the light of flames though they hadn’t started yet. “The locals will be told not to look too closely at this place, but we don’t need to get sloppy, now do we? We try never to leave trace of things that go bump in the night.”

  “
Hey, wait, there’s a cat in there. You have to get it out first.”

  It will probably see the fire and run away on its own,” he said. “Cats are smart. You know why it survived this carnage?”

  I looked at him blankly.

  He said, “When ghosts pop up, people question their senses. Animals haul ass, run, and hide. Keep it in mind.”

  I stabbed him with a cold stare. “I want the cat brought out.”

  “We don’t have time,” Virgil said. “Calls have gone in from neighbors. The police know not to come out until we’re gone, but this isn’t the first relics-related murder scene we’ve had in the past week. There are media types around. Some of them are headed this way.”

  One of the guys in fatigues approached the house with a flame thrower on his back. He went up the porch and called out, “Fire in the hole.” A torrent of flames streamed inside.

  Sparing half a second, I glared in wrathful fury, then broke away, running toward the house.

  THIRTEEN

  WAGER OF BATTLE: a Germanic method of settling

  disputes; parties fight in single combat. The winner is

  proclaimed to be right, a judicially sanctioned duel.

  I got five steps toward the burning house and Kendall before skidding to a stop. A great black coil of mist thickened out of empty air like the shadow of a dragon, cutting me off. The fluid barrier segmented, molding itself into shadow men. Torrent stood before me, his iron staff between us. “No,” he said. “It’s not safe.”

  “Get out of my way.” My tone said or else.

  “I’m sorry,” he sounded like he meant it, “but I can’t do that.”