A Mortal Song

  “That name came up in one of the articles,” I said to Chiyo. “Omori’s housekeeper, I think. It’s a common name, but why else would his wife have brought us here?”

  “Not quite as exciting as a gangster,” Chiyo said.

  She pushed the button beside the name. After a moment, a slightly hollow voice came through the speaker. “Yes?”

  “We’re here to see Mrs. Kobayashi,” Chiyo said.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’ll be easier to explain in person,” Chiyo replied.

  Her upbeat tone must have eased the woman’s concerns, because the inner door buzzed. The sparrow didn’t follow as we headed across the gleaming floor of the lobby to the elevator.

  When we emerged into a hallway, I could see the door of one apartment standing ajar. A wiry middle-aged woman with brown-tinted hair peered around it.

  “Are you the ones who buzzed?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Chiyo said with that brilliant smile of hers. “We need your help.”

  “My help?”

  Chiyo nodded. “We’d really like to speak with you.”

  The hallway was empty, but there was no telling who was home behind the other doors. “The subject is a little private,” I said. “Could we talk inside?”

  Mrs. Kobayashi looked from one of us to the other and seemed to evaluate us as nonthreatening enough. “Well, I won’t make you stand out here,” she said. “Come in.”

  Though the building’s lobby and halls had been elegantly decorated, the living room Mrs. Kobayashi led us into was plain, furnished with only a tan rug, a cushioned bench, and two wooden chairs. Chiyo and I sat down on the bench. “So,” the woman said as she sank onto one of the chairs, “what is this about?”

  “We need to know about Kenta Omori,” Chiyo said. “You were his housekeeper, right?”

  The woman’s hands twisted together in her lap. “Kenta Omori?” she said. “I don’t believe I know that name.”

  “I’m pretty sure you do,” Chiyo said. “It would be hard to explain how we ended up here, but you don’t need to worry—we aren’t yakuza or anything. We just want to know a little more about him.”

  She was smiling away, as if we weren’t asking about a criminal’s murder. “Chiyo,” I said, and she blinked at me, oblivious.

  Mrs. Kobayashi was getting up, her lips pressed flat. In a second, she’d tell us to leave. Maybe she thought we were thrill-seekers or gossipmongers, or worse, that we really were associated with Omori’s former gang. She had no reason to trust Chiyo, especially when Chiyo was treating the whole situation so casually. Why couldn’t Chiyo see that?

  Because she was kami. She didn’t know any approach other than her constant cheerful confidence. Eager as I was to find out what this woman could tell us, I was human enough to be able to hide it.

  “Now, I think you should—” Mrs. Kobayashi started.

  I stood up quickly, pulling Chiyo with me. “Excuse my friend,” I said, bowing. “I didn’t explain to her just how serious this matter is. She means no disrespect.”

  “Of course I don’t want to be disrespectful,” Chiyo said. “I was only—”

  I caught her gaze. “I think it’d be better if just one of us talked. Could you wait for me in the lobby?”

  She hesitated, her brow knitting, but her good-naturedness overrode her confusion. “Well, this was your idea. Don’t take too long!”

  When the door had closed behind her, I turned back to Mrs. Kobayashi. She was braced in front of her chair, her expression uncertain.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know this must be difficult to talk about. We didn’t mean to scare you. She... she doesn’t think sometimes.”

  Well, she did. She just thought like a kami.

  “I don’t believe I can help you,” Mrs. Kobayashi said stiffly, but she didn’t move.

  If it were me, asked by a stranger to bring up horrible memories, what would convince me to agree? Unbidden, my mind slipped back to the slash of the ogre’s claw across my throat. A shiver ran through me. But despite that fear, I was still fighting. Because I’d known I could make a difference between so many other people living or dying.

  “Mrs. Kobayashi,” I said, “I am very, very sorry to ask you to remember what must have been a deeply disturbing time. But it’s important for me to know everything I can about Kenta Omori and his death. His spirit... It hasn’t settled. He’s already hurt people I care about. You’ve felt the tremors, noticed the heat, the lack of rain? It’s all because of him and what he’s been doing. I need your help to make sure he doesn’t cause an even worse disaster.”

  I kept my eyes fixed on hers, hoping she would accept my explanation. Praying she had enough belief in the spirit world to think it was possible.

  “Causing a disaster?” she said, her forehead furrowing. “That doesn’t sound like Mr. Omori.”

  “I came here with the guidance of other spirits who want to stop him,” I said. What else could I use to convince her? I paused. She’d been the one to find the bodies. We both knew things that hadn’t been reported in the newspapers. “It was Mrs. Omori’s spirit, actually, who brought me. I’ve seen her. I know what they did to her tongue.”

  Mrs. Kobayashi flinched. She stared at me, speechless.

  “Please,” I said. “Anything you can tell me.”

  She drew in a breath and exhaled in a rush. “All right,” she said. She lowered herself into her chair. Her hair shadowed her face. “I worked for the Omoris for seven years. There are many things I could say that I can’t imagine would be relevant. What do you want to know exactly?”

  “What was important to him?” I said. “What did he want to accomplish? What did he care about the most?”

  “Well, that... I assume from your friend’s comments that you know the sort of connections he had?”

  “Yakuza,” I murmured.

  “Yes,” she said. “But he kept that part of his life out of the house, never spoke of it in front of me. He did talk about the legitimate side of his business, developing real estate properties. He took a lot of pride in his ability to land any deal he was pursuing with favorable terms. When he wanted a building or a piece of land and the current owners were resisting, he was always able to determine one key person he had to sway and direct all his attention there. By focusing so effectively, he liked to say, he got results much faster than those who tried to cater to everyone.”

  So business success had motivated Omori. How far had he gone to achieve it? “Did he hurt people to encourage the sales?” I said.

  Her lips pursed. “I’m sure as much as possible he persuaded them simply using words—he knew how to talk to people so well. And he wasn’t a cruel person. He liked to talk about fairness and justice, and it wasn’t just talk. There was a time when my husband lost his job because the manager wanted to promote a nephew, and when Mr. Omori heard about it, he didn’t just demand they take my husband back, he arranged that they had to change the wording of their corporate directive so that no one would think of doing that again. I don’t know how he managed it—I didn’t want to know—but he did it even though it didn’t benefit him at all.”

  I hesitated. This man was now a demon holding all of Mt. Fuji’s kami hostage while risking the lives of people across the world. What sort of justice did he see in that?

  “And his family, of course, was very important to him,” Mrs. Kobayashi went on at my silence. “Mrs. Omori liked to tell the story of how he courted her. He was sure he wanted to marry her after they’d dated each other for six months, but she wasn’t ready to settle down. She even broke up with him for being too serious! So he waited. He told her he couldn’t imagine being as sure about any other woman, so he would give her whatever time she needed to be ready. He didn’t go out with anyone else. They would see each other socially every few months, and he would be kind and courteous but not pushy. And after a couple of years, she realized she was ready for that sort of commitment, and that she had always liked e
verything about him except for that. Even ten years after they married, the way they looked at each other...” She laughed faintly. “I’ll admit sometimes I was a little envious.”

  And yet now his wife seemed afraid of him. My stomach had knotted. “What about right before he was murdered?” I said. “Had he changed at all? Started to act differently than usual?”

  Mrs. Kobayashi frowned. “I wouldn’t say so. In the last month before it happened, I heard him arguing on the phone more than once—with a colleague, I think, because he was talking about a decision they’d made about his current building project. Something he felt was to save money at the expense of people’s safety. He kept saying it wasn’t right and he would find a better way. The project was the biggest one he’d ever worked on. I... I think maybe the trouble he was stirring up over it might have been why they came for him. It sounded as if he’d taken matters into his own hands, made arrangements he knew his superiors hadn’t approved of.”

  “It was his own gang that killed them?” I said, remembering what the article had suggested.

  “He knew the men who came,” she said. “He sounded so horrified...” Her voice trembled.

  My heart stuttered. “You were there,” I said. “We thought you only found them, after.”

  She lowered her head. “I was in the kitchen preparing the children’s lunch boxes for school,” she said, “and the family was having breakfast together. They always did, you know, no matter how busy he was. And then I heard a crash. The men broke the door down—as if they had no fear of being seen! I didn’t know what to do, I was so frightened, so I squeezed into the closet and hid there.”

  She stopped, her hands clenching. I hated to ask her to go any farther, but Omori’s last moments might hold the answer we needed. “And then...?” I said softly.

  “I could hear everything,” she whispered. “Mr. Omori telling them to be reasonable, saying his boss couldn’t really want this. The men saying he’d stepped too far out of line. And then they shot him. Not to kill him, only to hurt him and make it impossible for him to fight back. He yelled until his voice got hoarse as they did all those unspeakable things to Mrs. Omori and the children, but they wouldn’t stop...”

  She paused again, blinking hard. My own eyes had gone hot. How awful for Mrs. Kobayashi to have witnessed that scene. And how awful for Omori, no matter what he’d become, to lie there helpless, watching his family tortured. To know it was happening because of him.

  “I suppose his superiors wanted to punish him in every way they could,” Mrs. Kobayashi murmured after a moment. “It was a mercy when the men finally shot Mrs. Omori and the children. Then they must have turned the gun on Mr. Omori again. But even then, he didn’t sound frightened, only angry, and so sure... I can still hear the way he said his last words. As if they were a threat. As if he’d have the chance to follow through.”

  I straightened up. “What did he say?”

  She wiped her eyes and looked up at me. “I will never be this powerless again.”

  The words rang through me in a cold peal. So that was what Omori had been thinking about as he died: power. Was that what he got out of controlling Mt. Fuji—knowing he held so many lives in the palm of his hand?

  But maybe there was a way we could use what Mrs. Kobayashi had told us to our advantage, even if he was so far gone from the man she claimed he’d once been. I just wasn’t sure I knew enough yet.

  “Thank you for sharing that with me,” I said. “I hope it will help us. I don’t suppose you have anything of Mr. Omori’s from back then? Letters, business documents... anything, really.” Anything that might show the connections he’d been making just before his death.

  “I have a few things.” A faint flush colored the woman’s cheeks. “I don’t know if they’ll be of any use. Just a moment.”

  She disappeared into one of the other rooms and returned with a small leather box that she handed to me. I opened it to find a simple gold ring set with a modest but brilliant emerald, a bulky pen with gold detailing, and a sheet of lined paper that appeared to be a shopping list: screws, sandpaper, wood stain.

  “I was supposed to pick up some items so Mr. Omori could fix the leg of one of the side tables,” Mrs. Kobayashi jumped in to explain. “He liked to take care of those sorts of concerns himself. But I didn’t know if it might turn out to be meaningful to the investigation somehow... The pen was his favorite, given to him by a professor in university, and he used it to sign all his business documents. I thought he would hate the idea of his enemies having it. And the ring was Mrs. Omori’s. The first birthday present he ever gave her. It’d been at the cleaners—I had the receipt to pick it up. To be honest, I had been thinking of selling it, but then I found out Mr. Omori had been very generous to me in his will.” She rubbed the knee of her linen pants, and suddenly I understood the fancy building and the apartment’s understated interior. She didn’t feel entirely comfortable with that generosity.

  I didn’t see how any of these could offer us much, but the more I learned about Omori, the more obvious it became that he was too complicated to assume anything for sure.

  “Could I borrow these?” I asked tentatively. “I would bring them back, once his spirit is settled again. We’re willing to try anything to accomplish that.”

  “I— All right,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “I suppose they aren’t truly mine as it is. And if it might help Mr. Omori, I’d be glad of it. He’s a better man than you think, I promise you.”

  I reported to Chiyo everything Mrs. Kobayashi had said as we rode back to the shrine on the train. “Wow,” she said when I was done. “What a story. What do you think it means as far as fighting him?”

  I’d been mulling that over since I’d left the apartment. “There might be some way we can exploit his obsession with power. And... the thing she said about him picking a key person to target when he wanted a deal done—he has been focused on capturing you from the beginning. I’m sure even more so once he found out about the prophecy. You’re the one person who can stop him, after all. His ghosts didn’t even try to restrain the other kami after you were captured with Takeo in the keep, just let them escape.”

  Chiyo hummed to herself. “It did seem like, when we were going for the sacred sword, most of the ghosts only bothered with the others when they were in the way of getting at me. But it was hard to tell when we were all so packed together. And then there were the jerks who decided to go after Haru.” She bared her teeth.

  “So it won’t be a perfect strategy,” I said, considering. “But... maybe if we could somehow trick him into thinking you were captured when you really weren’t, he’d let down his guard?”

  “Oooh, that sounds like fun,” Chiyo said. “How would we do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. I was hoping inspiration would hit me before we left for Ise tomorrow morning—or maybe Takeo would have an idea.

  Evening was falling when we walked back through the shrine gate. Chiyo seemed to have continued to recover during our foray into the city—she bounded toward the sanctuary building on steady legs. I ducked around it into the back yard and found Haru waiting for me with a yellow amulet in hand. An identical silk pouch hung from a cord around his neck.

  “Mitsuoka and I picked up new ones for the three of us,” he said. “And some backups. They came in handy before.”

  I couldn’t stop my gaze from seeking out Keiji. He was meandering along the pond in the glow of the sanctuary’s lanterns, his own pouch bright against his blue T-shirt.

  “Thank you,” I said, dragging my eyes back to Haru and accepting the amulet. “We’re going to need them.”

  “You think it’s going to be brutal at Ise,” Haru said, his flat inflection making the words a statement rather than a question.

  “I don’t see how it couldn’t be,” I said. Even if we came up with a strategy that exploited Omori’s weaknesses, we had an entire army of ghosts to contend with, almost certainly more than we’d ever faced before.


  I had to remember what I’d learned at the Imperial Palace—to pay attention to my human instincts, not just blunder along thinking of being strong. Maybe if I could figure out a way to judge which instincts were right, I’d be able to do more than banish a few ghosts, even if I’d never be half as capable as the kami warriors.

  I ran my thumb over the soft fabric of the pouch, the one thing that would stand between my life and a ghostly death grip. Haru was wearing a new collared shirt, a pale gray one someone had brought him, but I could still picture the dark splotch of blood that had stretched across his abdomen this morning.

  “Does it bother you?” I found myself asking. “That, I mean, Chiyo can take down ten ghosts with one swing of that sword and heal her own wounds, but all it takes is one knife and you—or me—we’re done?”

  His mouth curled into a wry smile. “All we can do is our best. It’s not our fault her best is a thousand times better.”

  He’d put it even more baldly than I’d dared to. “You almost died,” I pointed out.

  “True.” He sat down on the edge of the platform, stretching his lanky legs over the lawn. His head turned toward the forest. Chiyo was standing at its edge with Takeo, probably telling him what we’d found out. Haru ran his hand over his hair, making it stand up even straighter than usual.

  “I’m not going to say the idea of taking another knife in the gut doesn’t scare me,” he said in a low voice. “I do wish she didn’t have to worry about me. But at the same time, this feels... right. When I met her, I could tell she was a girl worth fighting for. My friends, my sisters, they’ve hassled me about being too hung up on her, and I’d ask myself if they had a point, but I’m okay with it now. The folk tales are full of guys who devoted their lives to protecting amazing women. Nobody makes fun of them. I’m glad to fill that role. As long as she wants me here...”

  I laughed. “I think you can be pretty sure of that.”

  His smile turned sheepish. “I was nervous when I got to Nagoya that she’d be upset I’d thrown myself in there, tell me she had no use for me anymore. But she didn’t. And now I can really fight for her. So I know this is where I have to be.”