She bathed as quickly as she could. I didn’t lie, she thought as guilt squirmed around in her stomach. I don’t know when my next shower will be. The god isn’t going to hurt Simon—he’s too important to her.
The need to write was so strong that Nikki was shaking as she pulled on the last of her clean clothes. Oh God, don’t let Leo come in and find me like this, shaking like a junkie needing a fix. Kneeling over her open suitcase, she flipped open her notebook and flicked the ballpoint pen. She breathed out in relief as the point touched paper and bled out ink.
She’d just write a little bit, enough to take the edge off her need. One scene and she’d be sane enough to deal with rampaging gods, tattooed yakuza, and her controlling mother. She still had her normal resources plus her freaky new power, a boy god, and Leo. Of course, she didn’t know how Leo felt about her. Sometimes she thought that he liked her, but other times it was like he couldn’t stand to be around her. Not that she wasn’t used to it; every guy she ever liked would get all interested until they got to know her, read something that she wrote. She started not showing her writing to her boyfriends, and finally not even telling them that she wrote at all. It was like being a drug addict, constantly trying to hide how addicted they were. Leo would just be the latest guy that would be totally creeped out by what she wrote. Hell, he had more cause than any of the others, because he knew it was real.
She had her eyes closed, her headphones on, and was dancing to something on her iPod, and he was trying not to watch. Her shirt had ridden up as she slowly swayed her hips, showing the softness of her stomach.
She opened her eyes and caught him watching and blushed with embarrassment. “I love this song,” she said shyly.
“What is it?” he asked.
She surprised him by taking one of the buds from her ear and stepping close. She brushed back his hair and put the bud into his ear. It was a slow love ballad about golden fields of barley. She stood so close he could feel the warmth of her body nearly touching his. Every breath, he drew in her scent. She closed her eyes again, swaying to the slow beat.
“Will you stay with me, will you be my love, among the fields of barley,” She sang, eyes closed, oblivious of him. “We’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky, as we lie in fields of gold.”
He could imagine her lying in golden barley, her hair fanned out, her stomach bared to his kisses. He wanted to touch her. Hold her. She trusted him, though, and he would do nothing to endanger that fragile state.
Far too soon, the song was over, and he reluctantly handed back her earphone.
“Did you like it?” She was blushing again.
“Yes.”
She smiled shyly and moved away, taking his heart with her.
“Wow.” Nikki stared at the notebook. She had played him the song that morning, and he’d been all still and quiet, like he hadn’t liked the song. Afterwards he had gotten all weird, but he was majorly digging on her. “Oh, wow.”
She closed up the notebook, feeling all fluttery and warm inside. She had written love scenes countless times before, but it was the first time that she was the focus. It was like a rush of a very good drug. It scared her slightly.
When she was younger, before the doctors had started prescribing drugs that she avoided taking, and the hospitals, where she had to be oh so tricky to keep from being medicated, she had written about a character addicted to heroin. It was slowly killing the woman, and she knew it, but she’d been helpless to stop. Everything paled to the wonderful bloom of euphoria as the drug kicked in. The sense of helplessness had etched so deep into Nikki’s psyche that when she first felt that same warm rush, she had done everything humanly possible to flee it.
Surely love wasn’t the same.
Dusk was gathering in the shadows as the color bled from the sky.
Leo was sitting on the stone wall, stray cats arrayed around him like a bored harem. The kitten played with his boot laces.
He’s into you, she thought for courage. She walked down to the wall. The stray cats watched her coming as if she were enemy aircraft. He knows all about how freaky you are, and still he’s interested.
He glanced back at her, his face poker calm as always, and she faltered.
Maybe he just wants sex. Men are like that. They see a girl that’s not too fat and with a cute smile and blond hair and they think with their dicks. God knows, she’d written one or two like that.
“Hey,” he rumbled in his deliciously deep voice.
She gave him a little wave and felt all of twelve. “Hi.” She sat down beside him, deliberately getting as close as her courage allowed. At that moment, it translated to a six-inch space between them.
As usual he had nothing immediately to say to her. She always took that to mean he didn’t like her enough to talk to her. As they sat in silence, she wished she had the scene in her hands, so she could read the words again, and know for sure. He hadn’t used the “love” word, but surely he’d meant it by saying she that she’d taken his heart.
She didn’t want to consider that he was the type that confused lust with love. But once she let the thought in, it took root. What if he just found her sexy and mistook that interest for love? Could she live with that? She peeked at his rugged profile. There was an old scar on his jawbone, near his right ear. It served to remind her that she barely knew him.
Did she love him? In all that warm fluttering rush, she hadn’t stopped to think about that. If they were about to start throwing the L-word around, shouldn’t she start with herself? Oh, the found-money feeling of unexpected love was great and wonderful until she realized she had to dig into her wallet and fork over a matching amount.
She dropped her gaze to his strong hand just inches from hers. It would be easy to cast caution aside and take his hand. There weren’t any fields of barley handy. There was the onsen room, already paid for, and Atsumori. And no birth control to speak of.
And no, she really didn’t want to just have sex after feeling the rush of knowing he might love her. She wanted it to be real. For both of them.
“We should get going,” he said.
She nodded. “Yes, we should.”
21
War Preparations
With her laptop, all her notebooks, a fistfull of colored pens, a bottle of Coke, a box of Meiji chocolate-covered almonds, a brand-new multicolor pad of Post-it Notes, and a kitten chewing on her shoelaces, Nikki was going to war. She wanted Leo to have all the data she could write down in the three hours it took to get to Osaka. With notebooks and laptop balanced on her lap, it was easy to use it as an excuse to keep her arm near the stick shift so that Leo brushed her hand every time he shifted.
Unfortunately, it was distracting as hell. She struggled to keep her mind on the problem at hand. “I believe that this god is the main storyline of my novel. When I write a novel, there’s all these characters scattered about, sometimes never intersecting, with the exception of the one event that touches all of them. One disaster—actually.”
She had been through the cycle countless times. It had taken her a lifetime to learn what little control that she had. Except when she was heavily medicated, she hadn’t stopped writing since she learned how to read. Before then, she could remember telling stories as her toys met violent ends. Her mother had trouble keeping nannies for more than a few weeks; her first written attempts were merely a last straw.
“I couldn’t figure out what the connecting thread for this novel was. It’s one of the reasons I created my Post-in-Note tree. Sometimes with it, the invisible thread shows up. Since I didn’t connect your father to Kenichi, he seemed like an outlier, but he’s tied back into what I think of as ‘the Osaka’ branch, but now I think that’s the trunk of the structure, not a branch.”
“You can use this to locate the god, then?”
“I’m—I’m not sure. As far as I can tell, Kenichi is my only character still alive who has interacted with her besides Simon, but I think there might be others.”
“Her?”
“I think the god is a she—as in goddess.” She scrolled down through Kenichi’s section. “In the second scene, he keeps thinking of the visitor as ‘the stranger’ and ‘this person’ as if what he sensed about the visitor’s gender was conflicting with what he was seeing. After this, he just refers to her as the princess.” Nikki flipped through her recent notebook. “In this passage where your father is dreaming of being trapped. I thought it reflected the fact that he was stuck, but there was a sense of being outside with dirt and water dripping. The wording leans toward female. I think he’s picked up on her memories.”
Leo growled dangerously, reminding Nikki that his mother was bakeneko, and she wasn’t sure what that meant for Leo. One point in his favor: her mother would certainly hate him for his mixed heritage. Of course, she’d think he was Hawaiian Japanese and not part monster.
“The damn bitch is burning herself into my father,” Leo snarled. “Do you have any sign that she hasn’t burnt him out?”
She flipped to a blank page and attempted to lock in on Simon. It produced nothing but the familiar string of dots. “At this moment, the goddess is with your father. I can’t get a bead on him.”
“What about Kenichi? Is he with my father?”
She flipped the page and started a scene with the pretty host boy. “Oh!”
“What is it?” Leo slung them around a tight mountain curve, brushing his knuckles against her skin as he downshifted.
She blushed at Leo’s touch. “I wrote Kenichi inviting Hitomi to his apartment weeks ago, but apparently that happened fairly recently. He’s on the last girl, the American heiress. I think he’s seeing her tonight.”
Leo’s eyes narrowed. “At his apartment?”
“No, at the club.”
Leo shifted back to fourth gear to take a straightway fast. “Is my father there?”
Nikki leaned back in her seat and considered the question. At one time she had thought she’d built an elaborate imaginary stage in her head to push uncooperative actors across. When she was younger, her stories had been a deluge of information about the stage and actors, losing “the plot” under a flood of miscellaneous details. She had trained herself to stay focused on weaving a good story, but in doing so stopped paying attention to all the other information that she could glean from the setting and people.
She had only written a handful of words, but it was like she’d opened a window to the distant nightclub. The doors hadn’t officially opened for the night, and only the employees moved through the narrow, long maze of rooms. Kenichi paced in the large mirrored main lounge, for once not checking his reflection to see if his hair was styled to anime-perfection. He wore a perfectly tailored white Armani suit with elegant touches of gold jewelry. There were three yakuza drifting through the club, dark, menacing shadows.
She tried to focus on the yakuza. They refused to come into focus, staying blurs of darkness in the glitter of the nightclub. She could sense that they carried many hidden weapons: sharp knives and cold lumps of guns. Like an illusionist’s tricks, she imagined that Kenichi occasionally caught sight of inhuman eyes, sharp teeth, and clawed hands in the mirror as he paced.
At the moment, though, Simon didn’t seem to be in the nightclub.
“I don’t think so. There are three yakuza. I don’t think they’re human; they might be tanuki. Kenichi thinks of them as “the new ones,” and they terrify him. They seem to be waiting for the girl to arrive. Kenichi is acting like he doesn’t notice that they’re listening to his phone call, but he’s very aware that the yakuza can overhear what the girl is saying to Kenichi. She has been blowing Kenichi off the last few days. On one hand, he’s happy about it because it’s delaying the goddess getting her hands on the girl. On the other hand, he’s starting to think that his girlfriend is seeing someone else, and he’s jealous.”
Leo made a sound of disgust.
“Yeah, I know.”
The kitten pounced on her shoe, distracting her for a second.
“Maru!” Nikki wiggled her foot, trying to get kitten to stop, but it only encouraged him. She liked the fact that they hadn’t abandoned Maru in Izushi; it made it easier to pretend that they weren’t racing toward disaster. Three hours trapped in a car with a bored kitten, though, had its drawbacks.
Leo chuckled, deep and full, and the sound made delicious things happen inside of her.
I love him, don’t I? More and more, she was feeling sure that she did. If nothing else convinced her, the rising panic over him walking out of her life and never coming back did.
She focused on writing. She needed to find everything she could about Kenichi, the yakuza, Simon, and the goddess. In the scene, the conversation between Kenichi and the girl continued. “The heiress has been telling Kenichi that she’s helping a friend of hers. She says it’s a girlfriend, but he’s suspecting that it’s a boy, possibly another host at a different club. Oh, oh, oh!”
“What now?”
“He’s trying to make her too mad to come see him. He’s afraid to start a fight with her with the new yakuza listening to his side of the conversation, but he’s pushing her buttons on purpose.”
“He should just tell her outright. If you love someone, you protect them.”
She wanted to protect Leo. She didn’t want him walking into this nightclub and facing the inhuman yakuza. Kenichi knew with certainty he loved his girlfriend because of how scared he felt for her. Nikki realized that she had the same fear echoing through her. I love Leo, but I don’t know how to protect him.
Leo shifted, brushing her hand again, making all sorts of emotions shift and squirm inside her. This being in love was an uncomfortable thing.
She finished the scene and sighed. “She’s angry, but she’s still coming to see him.”
“Once she’s at the club, the yakuza will take her to see the god?”
“That’s the plan.”
“That’s how I’ll find my father.”
Leo was missing the big picture. He was seeing only his lost father, not the wave of destruction about to crash down all around his father.
“I have forty main characters.” She scrambled to explain. “Well, thirty-five. Five have died so far. Gregory Winston. Misa. Three others were killed by Harada. Oh, wait, make that thirty-four. I forgot about Harada.”
“Who?”
“Harada was the tanuki at my apartment. At least, that’s what I called him. Not sure what name he really used—I haven’t got anyone’s real name yet.” Thirty-two if they didn’t count her and Leo, but she didn’t want to tell him that he was one of her characters.
Leo’s confusion was clear in his voice. “And?”
“So far this is fairly typical story. People are living their ordinary life when something ugly brushes up against them and kills them.” She winced as she realized what it meant for Simon. “I’m sorry.”
He gave her a worried glance, and she realized that he was counting her as a possible victim, too.
“Teach me to write myself into a story.” She focused on the notebook and the finished scene. “Kenichi is the only Osaka viewpoint character—other than me. The rest are scattered all over Japan. I don’t know how they all play into this. When the goddess was talking to Kenichi, though, she mentioned something.” Nikki scrolled down through her files on her laptop, found Kenichi’s section, and read the line. “I want to drink deep, eat my fill, and then destroy my enemies. If this turns into one of my usual novels, every one of my characters is a likely target for her revenge.” A connection was made in her mind. “Oh!”
“Hmm?”
“Oh, it just fully clicked that Harada was employed by the goddess. I wish now we didn’t kill him. “
“If you had not killed him, he would have killed you.”
There was that small problem. She shivered, remembering the warm trickle of his blood running down her face. “Once a character is dead, I can’t write any more about them.”
“We’ll find my father
without Harada.”
“Yes, we will, but I’m worried about the big picture. The thing is, normally, by the end of the book, all the characters are usually dead. Even if they do get out alive, every character has interacted with the main story line. Half my characters have had only their set up scenes—the goddess hasn’t interacted with them yet.”
“We’re going to stop her before she can hurt them.”
She hoped he was right, but it had been her experience that nothing she ever did stopped people from dying.
22
Love Hotel
It was nearly ten at night when they hit Osaka. Leo grew quiet and tense as they roared along the highways that bisected the city.
“I’m taking you to Umeda,” he said. “There are hotels there where you won’t need to hand over your passport. I’ll get you into a room under my credit card, and then I’ll go after my father. If something happens and I don’t come back, then . . . it might be safer if you leave the country.”
Hopscotch the world, one step in front of her mother. “I don’t really have the money to run.”
He gripped the wheel tight and took them down off the highway onto the busy streets of Umeda. “Write down this number. 19.43.47 north by 155.5.24 west.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a house in Hawaii. On the big island. Out in the middle of nowhere. You’ll need a GPS and four-wheel drive to find it. It’s off the grid, with solar power and catchment water. It’s yours for as long as you want it.”
Tears filled her eyes, burning like acid. This thing called love was stupid. He found a parking space and tucked the sports car neatly into the space.
Around the corner, the street was lined with neon bright hotels. The first was Hotel American and was fairly nondescript. The second was Casa Swan, with silver swans in midflight gleaming on a brilliant red corner sign. Beyond it, she could see Cupids flying down the center of Hotel Francisca’s facade.